Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  Susan felt as if she had been physically rebuffed. “But there’s nobody else I can talk to.”

  “I’m sure there must be, Susan. A nice girl like you must have plenty of friends.” Molly adjusted the focus minutely. “We’ll talk soon, I promise. It’s just that I can’t now. This is very important. I need to concentrate, do you see?”

  “But I don’t know what to do,” Susan said, and hated her own whining voice.

  “Now I’m sure it can’t be as bad as that, Susan, can it?” Molly glanced at Susan, but frowned at what she saw. “Well, just try to bear up for a little while longer, and I’ll see what I can do just as soon as I can.”

  She jammed the binoculars against her eyes. Susan could see that she was willing her to go. “Can I get in touch with you if I need to?” she pleaded.

  “If it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t mean to put you off, it’s just that I may be difficult to find for a while.” She reached out as Susan stood up, and pushed her gently out of her field of vision. “I’ll see you again soon, I promise.”

  But she wasn’t seeing her now. She was just another grown-up. Susan trudged home, and had passed Smith’s before she remembered the pencils. If she bought them now they would be in a Smith’s bag. It didn’t matter, she didn’t care. She bought a packet and threw the bag under a dripping car, but she hadn’t reached the gate when she had to force herself to go on, for Mummy was at the window and turning grimly away as soon as she caught sight of Susan.

  Mummy met her on the landing and kept her there outside the closed door. In the dimness Susan could just make out her teeth and her furious eyes. “Do you know Eve is in there sobbing her heart out?” Mummy hissed. “That’ what you’ve done, you little wretch.”

  “I never. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Don’t you dare say that to me. Do you know what you are? You’re a liar. You don’t know what truth is.” She grabbed Susan by the shoulders and shook her until her teeth ground together. “You imagine God knows what about that poor child. If I thought your colored friends were giving you drugs, I’d have the police to you. Maybe they could show you what reality is.”

  Her face lit-up, a hateful mask; the woman with the cats had opened her door. She stared out at Susan and Mummy then she retreated into her flat, nodding to herself. “I hope she heard all that. I hope she heard how you upset Eve after all the poor child has been through,” Mummy said “It’s a pity Eve’s mother has gone wherever she’s gone Maybe she could teach you how to behave.”

  She was turning the doorknob. Through the opening crack Susan could hear Eve sobbing. She fought to suppress her thoughts. There was one other person who could deal with Eve; someone had told her who, but she mustn’t try to remember, not now. “Let’s get one thing clear, miss, and don’t you forget it,” Mummy said, low and dangerously. “Eve is here to stay. If anyone has to be sent away because you won’t be friends with her, it won’t be Eve.”

  32

  WHEN Freda had finished packing she carried the suitcase downstairs. She stopped in the hall to catch her breath and wondered how four flights could feel like such a distance. She knocked at the door of Doreen’s quarters. That was one thing she couldn’t get used to, even though she had an idea why Doreen had asked her always to knock.

  Sage opened the door. “Can we really not persuade you to stay?” he said.

  “You don’t need me now. You’ve done more for Doreen than I ever could. Is she here?”

  “Of course. Forgive my rudeness.” He stood aside, and she saw the chessboard with its new unfinished game in front of Harry’s chair. It shocked her a little to think of Sage using the chair, its arm still sagging from the weight of Harry’s elbow. “Are. you missing the sea air?” Sage said.

  “No, I just have to go back to work. I’ve taken all my leave.”

  “One tends to forget there is still that world.”

  She was beginning to find his mysticism, if that was what it was, a shade irritating. Doreen came out of her small bedroom and closed the door quickly behind her as she saw Freda. “You’re really leaving?”

  “The January sales are calling.”

  “I know. I’d no right to expect you to do all you’ve done, never mind asking for more.”

  Doreen took Freda’s hands. “You’ve been more than a friend to me. There aren’t many who would do what you’ve done for me, especially for nothing. I just hope it hasn’t tired you out. I don’t like to think of you traveling all that way.”

  Freda thought she was making rather a lot of a couple of weeks’ help around the house. “As soon as you feel you need a rest,” Doreen said, “you come straight back. There’ll always be a room for you.”

  “You must come back to us soon,” Sage said as if it were his house.

  Certainly its peace was his. Freda hadn’t fully realized how peaceful the house was now until she stepped onto the pavement. The street felt icy and unwelcoming, strangers glanced sharply at her: it was like waking in an unfamiliar place. For a moment she wanted to turn and go back inside.

  When she reached the locked gate at the end of the street, she looked back. Doreen and Sage were standing together on the steps. Sage’s smile looked patient, Doreen’s anxious but encouraging.

  Though it was only a few minutes’ walk to Euston from Kind’s Cross, she took a cab. She didn’t fancy slithering along Euston Road and getting flustered to be sure of catching her train.

  The train gathered speed as colors began to appear here and there through the miles of snow, but she felt unable to fasten her mind on where she was. She was wondering what Doreen was doing now, in her room that she’d kept closed since the night of the seance, or whatever it had been. At first Freda had thought Doreen sensed Harry in there, that it was his presence that was comforting Doreen, but now she thought it was Sage; for not only had she heard Doreen’s loving murmurs in the night, she was sure she’d heard a voice responding. The train clattered softly through the softened landscape beyond the double glazing, and she made herself think of the sales, customers elbowing to be first at the counters, skirmishes in the aisles. She was quite looking forward to feeling less redundant than she had begun to feel at Doreen’s. She thought she might accept a lift home the next time Mr. Harvey, the assistant manager, offered one.

  She’d forgotten how cartoonish Blackpool was. The patchy snow emphasized the colors, the childish outlines of the shopping precincts, the Coral Island arcade bright as a rude postcard on Central Drive. The out-of-season street of locked gift shops was almost deserted. She let herself into her flat and put a kettle on the Belling, then went round to the landlady’s rooms.

  Grimalkin didn’t want to know her, he was so disgruntled that she had gone away and left him. He stalked haughtily around her rooms, sniffing at her workbasket full of knitting, the windup gramophone that didn’t work very well but which she kept because she had listened to crooners on it with Timothy, her sideboard full of bundles of letters and her books she’d won at school. The Flora of the British Isles, Ten Great Englishwomen. She thought suddenly how much of a spinster’s flat this was with its own front door, its collection of trivia that was meaningful only to her, the only company she had except for Grimalkin— how much lonelier it was than her room at Doreen’s. She thought before she could stop herself of Sage in Doreen’s bed, and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by that calm smooth pale face. She drank her tea while Grimalkin deigned to settle in his basket, and then she went out for a walk.

  She wasn’t sure at first that she was heading for Sage’s shop. She had only been there once. At least the posters might tell her something about him, if they were still there; she might be able to rid herself of this lingering unease about having left him with Doreen. She was almost sure that she was only jealous.

  She hurried down the street with the uneven pavement, the paving stone that had been too unstable to walk on. A few yards beyond the tilted stone was Sage’s shop. Once she passed the splintered streetlamp sh
e could see his name and the poster that said “SAGE KNOWS YOUR FUTURE.” At least, she remembered that was what it said. The faces on the posters weren’t his, they must be his clients, but why did they look so dramatic? She almost stepped on the rickety paving stone as she noticed that the houses on both sides of the shop were derelict. Now she could see that the posters weren’t about Sage at all.

  She stared at them while the wind stabbed .at her ears. She felt as if its chill had seized her mind. She’d begun to tell herself that these posters—for funfairs and stage shows-must have been put up after he’d left, but all of them were at least six months old. The poster she had thought said “SAGE KNOWS YOUR FUTURE” didn’t say that after all, it said that the future lay in Revolution Now. Not only did it look like the style of printing she remembered, she was sure it occupied exactly the same position on the window.

  She hadn’t looked closely at the posters the night she had met him. Of course he had been preparing to move on. She went quickly to the doorless doorway and stepped in. It didn’t matter that the shop immediately within the doorway was littered with fallen plaster and old newspapers, it was only the room at the end of the passage that mattered. But the walls of the passage were streaming, sodden wallpaper carpeted the floorboards, and the room at the end was in a worse state than the shop. There was no floor, just a pit of glistening earth.

  Freda stared about in the hope that she had mistaken the room. The well where a staircase had once been gaped overhead. There was no other room on this floor. Someone must have taken out the floorboards after Sage had moved on. This was the place. Sage’s name above the doorway proved it was. She stumbled out onto the pavement and stared up at his name, and then she began to shake. She wasn’t sure if she was laughing or sobbing, or both. Now she could see the letters from which the gilt had flaked on either side of his gilded name. The letters “SAGE” were simply the remnants of a newsagent’s gilded sign.

  33

  RANKIN lived in Catford, on the eleventh floor of a tower block that overlooked the South Circular Road. On Friday night he’d watched wrestling at the town hall, on Monday he’d gone up the road to a pub to play darts with friends. So much Molly knew from following him home on the train from Victoria, spying on his window with her binoculars from the car she’d hired, following him to the pub and watching him from the other bar while the barman made it clear that women weren’t encouraged to drink alone, to the town hall where the tickets were sold out. It wasn’t enough, and so she had been driving past the police station for hours, maneuvering through the streets full of parked cars behind the hotels and back to Bayswater Road, in the hope of finding a way to encounter him.

  She had to know more about him. She couldn’t just go to his flat and expect to be let in. Posing as someone official might fool many people into inviting her in, but hardly a policeman. She would have to be known to him, and before he had the chance to realize who she was. Every time she followed him put her more in danger of exposure—every time she cruised past the police station because there was nowhere she could park close enough to watch.

  The thought of the trophy on the eleventh floor, beyond the curtains that her binoculars could bring close enough to touch, made her feel angry and reckless, if she let herself be. She drove the hired Datsun through the side streets, past parked cars lined up like pegs in a memory game: red, green, red, white, yellow, silver—she knew the order without looking, except that the second red was slewing toward her on a patch of ice. She braked as the red Toyota backed toward her too fast, she drove slowly and breathed deeply when the Toyota had roared away—and almost didn’t see that the driver of the police car which was just i pulling away from the police station was Rankin.

  He was using his lights and his siren to scare pedestrians off the road as he drove through the side streets into Sussex Gardens, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to keep up with him. At least he was conspicuous. The police car went screeching onto Westway, and she followed as fast as she dared. On the freeway she was able to match his speed and when he swung off Westway at White City, she followed.

  His siren died as he turned onto Du Cane Road and swung into the avenue that led to Wormwood Scrubs. She watched as he was let in through the prison gates, and then she wondered what to do.

  It must be visiting time, since there were so many parked cars. She parked in the nearest space she could find, then she walked slowly down the avenue toward the gates in the eighteen-foot walls. She stared up at the firing slits above the names of penal reformers on the towers of the entrance arch, she stared at the oak doors. She couldn’t think how to get in or what that would achieve.

  The sound of the gates took her unawares. They were letting out the visitors, mostly women, talking in hushed voices as they walked through the cloister of the forecourt. Then she saw Rankin unlocking his car, and her innards clenched. Not only had he seen her, he was locking the door again and making for her.

  She turned away quickly and mingled with the crowd. When she looked back, he’d got into his car. Perhaps he hadn’t been after her at all. But her skin began to prickle as she heard the car start up, and she was stepping out of its way before she heard the horn. That scattered the visitors to the opposite side of the avenue from Molly. She’d turned her face away, and it wasn’t until he wound the offside window down that she realized the car had boxed her in between two trees. “Why are you following me?” he said.

  Her face felt like ice cracking. She had to make something of the situation, it might be her only chance. The visiting women were glancing at her from the far side of the avenue as if she were a criminal. It was only just in time that she realized he couldn’t know what her reason was. “What do you mean?” she said, struggling to think.

  His eyes narrowed in his small sharp face. “I mean what are you doing here, that’s what I mean.”

  She could only improvise, though she didn’t know where it might lead. “Visiting.”

  “You don’t say.” His sneer made her panic until she saw that it meant he believed her. “Who?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Is that right.” He turned off the car engine. “Don’t give much away, do you? Does your just a friend have a name?”

  “Of course he does,” she said, and wondered if this were a women’s prison. No, that was Pentonville, which had somehow got into her head. Or was it Holloway, a short walk from Pentonville?

  “Going incognito then, is he? Or maybe you don’t want us to get hold of his name?”

  She needn’t conceal her anger; his treatment would make the character she was trying to play feel like that too. “His name’s Marty,” she said, and wished she’d taken time to think of some other name.

  “Not the villain I was interviewing.” It seemed typical of him, or at least of her image of him, that he would use someone’s visiting time for questioning. “And what’s yours?”

  “Nell.” She added the next name that entered her head. “Nell Swain.”

  “Swain by name, eh? Know what swaining is? They told us once at school.” His expression was more of a leer now. “So what’s your friend in for?”

  “Drugs,” she said, which seemed relatively common and harmless.

  “Fine friends you have. Coon, is he?”

  “He’s colored,” she said, trying to think how she could use all this.

  “Thought .as much. Does he start them young, your friend? Pushing outside schoolyards, is that his scene?” His sudden fury made him climb red-faced out of the car and slam the door. “I wouldn’t mind a quiet word with him.”

  He looked capable of leading her back to the prison. “He doesn’t push, he only uses. He’s been arrested sev eral times, that’s why he’s in here now,” she said, and wondered if that could be enough to get someone locked in Wormwood Scrubs.

  “You’ll be telling me next he’s never given you any.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

  “Truest thing you’ve said,” he
agreed, and for a moment she thought he was onto her. “Bet you wouldn’t like to be searched right now.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Turns you on, does it?” He strolled round the car to her. The avenue was deserted now, the oak gates were locked. “Is that why you like hanging round police? You haven’t told me yet why you were following me.”

  She had virtually forgotten that question, and wasn’t prepared for it to reappear. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something. I never forget a face.” His was inches from hers now, but still looked small and pinched. “You were in the pub last night, watching me play darts.”

  “What if I was? I live near there.”

  “Ah, now she remembers.” He was slapping the car roof lightly; it resounded like a drum. That seemed as much of a threat as the closeness of his face. “Going to apologize?”

  “For what?”

  “For acting as if you knew better than me. I know when I’m being followed even if you didn’t know you were doing it. Next time don’t act as if you’re right and I’m wrong.” He leaned his head back a little from her and laid one wiry hand on her shoulder. “I never forget a face,” he said as if he were quoting a film, “specially not one that interests me.”

  So it hadn’t been an interrogation so much as a flirtation. She suspected that he couldn’t tell the difference any more than she had been able to. “I’ll buy you a drink in the pub next time if you haven’t got yourself locked up by then,” he said, and climbed into the car. “What did you say your name was? Nelly, that’s right. I’ll remember.”

  He leaned over to wind up the window. “Just don’t try bringing any of your coon friends to the pub,” he said, his face reddening again. “I don’t know what you can see in them, a clever girl like you. Cut six of them open and I’d be surprised if you found a brain, except maybe one they’d been eating. I’ve known them mistake someone else for their son. And they get stroppy if we say they all look the same to us.”