by Unknown
Your eyes snap open. You realize something is wrong. Not with the movie—the scientist fellow has just discovered the creature’s weakness but is killed and eaten before he can tell the hero about it. Good for him though, he had written it all in his diary before the thing got him and you know the hero will find the journal entry before his girl, the scientist’s daughter who was hypnotized and kidnapped by the creature, becomes the creature’s bride. No, the movie is going just as it should, but did you hear a thump upstairs—like a heavy footstep, or dropped object?
The fear takes hold as strong as before. You listen, is anything up there? It’s too hard to tell with the heroine screaming all the time. You can’t turn down the set though, because whatever might be upstairs will know that you know it’s up there. Maybe you could just pretend you were asleep and it would leave you alone. Did you just hear a creak? Your heart beats faster. You can’t pretend you’re asleep. It will know. Besides, you want to see for yourself and you feel as insane as any movie character who ventures out to investigate a noise.
You get up from the couch, quietly and slowly. You tiptoe to the stairs.
For every step you climb, there is a prayer that it won’t squeak. At the top you listen again. Why didn’t you pick up something heavy to hit it with?
You feel defenseless. The stomach flutters are back and you know you’re going to die. You begin to hyperventilate and know that whatever it is, it can hear your breathing and track you down. You swallow and try to breath slower. If it can smell you though, what’s the use? What nightstalker and sees with infrared? What then? Yep, you are gonna die.
I have to see it, you think, I can’t take the waiting. You go into the living room and turn on the light. Nothing. Nothing under the couches, or in the hall closet. Nothing in the kitchen. But whatever may be prowling around could still be on the top floor. Now, because of the light, it knows you know it’s in the house. You grab an umbrella, one with a nice sharp point at the end. You don’t feel much safer.
You go up the stairs with the umbrella in front of you, ready to impale anything that might launch itself at you. You turn on the hall light. Nothing moves. You almost expect to hear a growl or a hiss, but you don’t hear a sound. You try to keep the two bedrooms and the bathroom in view as you turn on the lights.
Nothing in the first bedroom except innocent looking stuffed animals and flowered, pastel wallpaper. The closet is empty except for frilly, little dresses on plastic, little hangers.
Nothing in the bathroom except your own scared eyes, bottles of perfume, electric razor, over-the-counter cold remedies, diaper pail … bathroom stuff.
The master bedroom. If the monster is anywhere it will be there, ready to knock your umbrella away and rip your throat out. You find yourself wondering if its breath will stink. Will it be hot and musky?
Will it have matted fur? Or will it be reptilian and very cold? Can it fly or cling to the ceiling? How do you defend yourself from something that might be anything?
You turn on the last light. No monster. Boy, do you feel stupid. You go sit on the bed and let your umbrella drop to the floor. It lands next to the baby. Must not have been dead when you turned off the light up here. Probably rolled off the bed before it croaked. That explains the thump. You pick up the stiff body and lay it next to its parents.
“Sorry to bother you again, I just thought there was a monster in here,” you say.
They don’t respond of course. They just stare at the ceiling with glassy eyes and open mouths.
You think, maybe if you hurry, you can catch the end of that movie.
A Side of the Sea
By Ramsey Campbell
One of the most respected writers of short dark fantasy fiction, Ramsey Campbell continues to create stories of profound detachment and paranoia. A past winner of both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award, he is also an accomplished novelist and anthologist. The trademark element in a Campbell tale is a character who gradually realizes he has inadvertently entered a place where things are just a bit skewed, just a little not right. And that’s when the fun begins.
I’m among the first to use the toilet, one of two wheeled sheds parked at the edge of a segment of concrete, but it takes the two coachloads of passengers so long that I need to join the queue again.
Beyond the hedge behind the toilets, fields and a few lonely trees turn greener as the sky fills with black clouds. Lorries rush down the slope into the dip in the road and out again with a sound like waves. The plumbing sounds like waves too when at last the queue leads me back into the shed, and I’m just splashing the urinal when I seem to hear the building engulfed by the sea. People scream, but I feel safe until I venture to the exit and see it’s a cloudburst so fierce that spikes of rain are leaping off the concrete. Passengers holding coats over their heads dash to the nearest vehicle, the coach I’m supposed to be on, and I can see that long before they all finish clambering up the steps I’ll be drenched.
I sprint to the further coach and drag myself up the steps beside the driver’s seat while trying to wipe my drowned spectacles on my jacket.
“Someone took my seat,” I say for the benefit of anyone who ought to be informed.
“You weren’t on this coach,” says a blur.
“That’s what I mean. Someone from this one stole my place.”
The downpour roars on the metal roof, and I’m about to protest “You wouldn’t make me go out in that” when the blur retreats along the aisle and knocks on the rear window. Presumably it uses signs to tell someone on my coach that they’ll exchange passengers at the next stop, because it calls “Find yourself a seat” to me.
I put on my spectacles, though the lenses are still wet. Beneath the racks laden with swimming costumes wrapped in beach towels, passengers are rubbing their hair dry and turning the windows greyer with every breath. Someone near the back is trying to lead a chorus of “We’re going to the sea, sea, sea” without much success. The lenses of my spectacles are blurring, transforming the passengers into statues sitting underwater, all of them gazing blankly at me. I can’t see where I’m to sit until a hand begins to wave extravagantly halfway down the coach.
“Here,” the owner of the hand shouts. “Here, my dear.”
He’s wearing a flowery shirt and shorts which are even more florid.
His clothes are pasted to him by the rain, so that they resemble wallpaper.
He has a large round face which seems to be about to sink into its plumpness, and hands so fat they have dimples for knuckles, and a stomach which rests on the tops of his thighs. As I sit down he squeezes himself against the window to make room. I rub my spectacles to rid them of fog and spots of dried rain, and as I hook them over my ears my seat-mate cranes his head around to me. “What’s the game?” he says.
The coach lurches forward, and the person who went to the rear window—a grey-suited woman with severely restrained black hair—nods curtly at me as she returns to her seat by the driver. If she’s in charge of the day trip, surely she oughtn’t to ignore what I’ve just been asked. “What do you mean?” I say loudly, hoping that will bring her.
“Name. Name of the game. Both the same. Your name, your game.”
It takes me longer to understand than it takes my neighbor to say all this, and longer still to decide if responding is advisable. Maybe an answer is all he requires, and then he won’t bother me. “Ah, you want my name. It’s Henry.”
“Henry.” He swings his head back and forth, and I think he’s contradicting me until I realise he’s looking for something. He focuses on the befogged window across the aisle with an expression of relief. “Can’t see the scen’ry,” he crows. “Henry who? Henry what else too?”
I don’t see why he should demand my surname, and so I tell him the first I can think of which might shut him up. “Hancock.”
“Hancock goes to Bangkok,” he cries at once.
I find his triumph so annoying that although I was planning to keep quiet
in the hope that he would, I say “No, I want to see the sea.”
“See the sea,” he repeats, giving me a plump nudge as if I meant to imitate his rhyming. “Like me. You’ll be like me.”
“Hush for a bit now, Algernon,” says my neighbor across the aisle, a woman who is knitting into a large open handbag. “We don’t want you filling up Henry’s head until he’s got no room to think.”
“Shush and hush. Don’t gush. Crush your rush.” My seat- mate’s voice dwindles with each word. “Algernon. Algy. Alg,” he murmurs almost inaudibly, then he all but shouts at me “Al’s your pal.”
“Of course you are,” the woman soothes him, her knitting clicking quicker. “Give the glass a wipe now and see what you can see.”
She gazes at him until he rubs the window with his hairy forearm, then she turns to me. Her gleaming eyes are very pale. “And what do you think of all this rain?”
My answer seems to be important to her. She raises her eyebrows, crinkling her papery forehead below her hair, which looks like curled shavings of tin. “It’s a bit wet,” I offer.
“That’s how God made it. It wouldn’t be rain if it was dry.”
I smile and shrug in agreement, but apparently that isn’t enough for her. “You can see that, can’t you?” she says, halting her needles.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“It isn’t a question of what I am.” Her eyebrows are starting to tremble from being held high. “It makes the sea, you might want to remember. Without the rain we’d all be living in the desert. We’d be eating dates for breakfast and wearing dish- cloths on our heads and sitting on camels instead of a coach.”
“There’s that,” I say to placate her.
She scrutinises my face before she lets her eyebrows down and recommences knitting. I’m watching the road beyond the wide sweeps of the windscreen wipers, though all I can see are lights like half-eaten strawberry sweets, when she says “Do you think it’ll still be raining when we get to the beach?”
“I don’t know.”
“But is that what you think, what you’re thinking?”
“I suppose I am.”
“I know you are,” she says in the soothing tone she used on
Algernon. “Shall we see what we can do about it?”
“About my thinking?”
She drops the shapeless knitting into her handbag and wags a finger at me. “Henry,” she rebukes me. “About the rain.”
“Not much, I should think.”
“Never let yourself despair, Henry. Just put your hands together.”
I assume that’s a generalised recommendation until she clasps her hands together and gazes unblinking at mine. “Henry, Henry, Henry,” she says.
I’m afraid that if she keeps that up she’ll provoke my seat-mate into rhyming, and so I fold my hands. Raising her gaze towards the drumming on the roof, she says “Heavenly Father…”
I glare piously at my knuckles, but that doesn’t satisfy her. “Heavenly
Father,” she repeats slowly and firmly, raising her eyebrows at me.
“Heavenly Father,” I mouth.
“Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the sun that Thou sendest after the rain.”
I’m steeling myself in case Algernon settles on a word of hers, but it’s her neighbor, a bony man with a wedge-shaped face that looks as though it was lengthened by someone tugging its knob of a chin, who responds. “Heheavenly Fahatheher,” he says, “wehe thahank Thehee fohor teehee suhun thahat Thououow sehehehendest ahafteherherher teehee raihaihain.”
He has folded his hands on his chest and rolled his eyes up so that only the whites are visible, shivering in their sockets, and the woman seems to be as unsure as I am whether he is doing his best to pray. “If it be Thy will,” she says more loudly, “let it be sunny at the beach.”
“Ihif ihit behe Thyhy wihihill, lehet ihihit be, hehe, hehe, suhuhuhunny ahat thehe be, hehe, heheach.”
His lips are twitching. He could be struggling either to pray or not to grin. At least he has drawn the woman’s attention away from me, and I no longer bother to mouth. “We ask Thee on behalf of Thy child
Henry,” she bellows, “that the weather forecasters may have read Thy signs aright.”
Her words might let me feel protected if it weren’t for the prospect of hearing her neighbor turn my name into something else. As he says
“Wehe ahahask” I flex my fingers, preparing to stick them in my ears, whatever the woman will think of me for doing so. Just then, as if I’ve inadvertently betrayed my thoughts, someone behind me touches my shoulder.
Pain flares in my skull as I twist around. The man standing in the aisle is resting his other hand on the head-rest of my seat. His fingers must have snagged my hair, though he appears not to have noticed. His ruddy big-boned mug has protruding ears for handles. “I’d like to pray if you want to change places,” he says.
I shove myself to my feet as the coach speeds downhill. The seat he has vacated is four rows further back. While I stumble towards it, clutching at head-rests, everyone in the intervening seats watches me.
Hedges stream by like smoke beyond the obscured windows, and the greyness by which the passengers are framed puts me in mind of a photograph. For some reason that idea disturbs me, but once I reach the seat I feel safer.
My new neighbor is a small neat woman with cropped red hair who is hugging a large canvas tote bag. I return her glancing smile as I sink onto the seat. Through the uproar of the downpour I hear prayers like a battle of words which the knitting woman and her new ally are winning. The sound of rain begins to fade, and the praying soars triumphantly before subsiding. In the relative quiet I’m able to hear the voice of the passenger next to the window across the aisle, a moon-faced man with the left half of his scalp combed flat, the right half bristling.
“Smudge Cottages,” he’s muttering. “Blob Hill.”
His seat-mate, a squat man who is either examining his own bitten fingers or counting on them, grunts and tries to squash himself smaller.
“Blotch Woods,” the moon-faced man declares, “Fog Field, Splosh Road,” and leans forward to look at me for agreement. Just in time I realise that he’s naming everything he sees through the clouded windows, and I nod and grin until he sits back. I turn away with the grin stuck to my face, and my seat-mate assumes it’s aimed at her, because she responds with the twin of her earlier smile. “Best to keep your mind occupied on a trip like this,” she says.
“I suppose.”
“Oh, I think so.”
I take it she’s referring to the moon-faced man until she claps her hands and says “So what shall we do?”
I struggle to come up with a suggestion before she does, but my mind has grown as foggy as the windows. “I know,” she says, “we’ll show each other our things.”
“Things. Ah, well, I—”
She slaps my knee playfully and gives me the smile. “Things we take with us wherever we go, silly. What did you think I meant? Here,
I’ll show you what I have in mind.”
She lifts her bag and lowers her face, and I’m reminded of a horse feeding. She twirls the bag by its handles and cocks her head, then snatches out a photograph. “Sea,” she says.
It isn’t the sea at all. It’s a bedroom so tidy it might never have been slept in. Either a painting of blue sky or a mirror faces a window across the single bed, and a framed square of perfectly symmetrical embroidery hangs above the headboard. Of course she said “See” - she didn’t try to trick me. “Well, there you are,” I say, handing back the photograph.
“Now you have to show me one or pay a forfeit.”
Though she flashes the smile, a pain seems to tug at my skull. I don’t like the sound of the game she has started to play; I only have one photograph. I’m suddenly too nervous to be able to resist dragging my wallet from my inside pocket and taking out the photograph.
“That’s nice. Your daughter. What’s her name?”
I shake my aching head. “Not my daughter.”
“Your wife?”
Shaking makes the ache worse. “My mother.”
“That’s even nicer.” The smile must have a variety of meanings, because the woman adds through it “You should have brought her to the seaside instead of just a photograph.”
“She can’t get about any more.”
“So you look after her like a good boy, I can tell. And someone’s taken over while you give yourself a day off.”
I keep my head still in the hope that the ache will fade. “Did she use to take you to the sea?” the woman wants to know.
The questions are causing the ache; they feel like a teacher pulling my hair. “No, we never went too far,” I say, though talking has begun to hurt as well. “She used to say I didn’t need holidays when I had her.”
“And was she right?”
When I nod as hard as I dare the woman says “Shall I tell you what else I think?”
“I expect so.”
“I think going to the seaside will be even more of an adventure at your age.”
I think so too, and her saying “Look, the sun’s coming out for you” begins to make me feel safe. Then she says “I’ll just show you one more of my things and then I’ll let you off.”
She spends some time rummaging in her bag. It’s this business with photographs that has made me nervous, because I’m growing surer that I’ve seen a picture somewhere of the people on the coach. When she hands me a photograph I’m afraid this might be the one, but it’s another picture of her bedroom. Clothes—underwear and scarves and shoes—cover the bed and the floor. There’s a pair of everything, arranged so that the photograph is divided into two identical halves. Down the centre of the bed are six bras, their cups on either side of the dividing line; three pairs are face down, three face up. “What do you say to that?” the woman urges me.
I can’t seem to grasp whether the bras with their tips pointing up or those showing their insides represent more of an absence. “Very neat,”
