Silent Children

by Ramsey Campbell

  She was doing her measured best to be reasonable, and he might have been receptive if the question hadn't included Charlotte, who'd perched on Hilene's knee and was regarding him with at least a show of nervousness. "Let's keep our heads and put them together," Hilene said "and sort out the squabble I hear you had. We don't like squabbles polluting the air in our house, do we?"

  "No, mummy," Charlotte said, twisting around in her white-frilled yellow dress. "Mummy—"

  "Let Ian have his turn now. What do you say happened, Ian?"

  "She kept on at me to play when I was trying to read."

  "Did you do that, Charlotte?"

  "S'pose."

  "It's a bigger word than that, now, isn't it? Words aren't insects, so we don't squash them."

  "Suppose. But mummy—"

  "Give Ian his chance. We don't want him to think he has to be polite to a rude little girl."

  Charlotte sat resentfully straighter, looking not unlike a ventriloquist's doll. "I played with her all morning," Ian said.

  "Nearly all, would that be closer to it? A couple of hours if we're going to be absolutely fair. That was kind of Ian when he was wanting to read, wasn't it, Charlotte? I hope you said thank you. We shouldn't stop people reading, unless of course what they're reading isn't good for them."

  Charlotte glanced at her mother so as to copy the expression that went with the remark, and Ian felt outnumbered before Hilene said "All the same, Charlotte says you swore at her."

  "That's crap. I never."

  "Mummy, he did it again. Mummy—"

  "All right, Charlotte, I heard perfectly well. Even if that isn't strictly swearing, Ian, it certainly isn't a welcome guest in our house or in the garden either. We don't want to be breathing blue air, do we, Charlotte?" When the little girl had finished shaking her head so vigorously it loosened her yellow bow, Hilene said "Is there that kind of language in your book, Ian?"

  There was spectacularly worse, just one of the many things he was coming to think Americans did better than the English. "Some," he admitted.

  "May I see it?"

  He didn't know whether she meant the book or just the bits she was sure to object to, and he wasn't about to care. As he passed her Blood Count she lifted Charlotte off her knee. The eight-year-old shrank away from the cover with its reddened eyes using part of the topmost embossed silver word for sockets. "It's nasty," she complained.

  "It's not just nasty," Ian said, caring after all.

  "Go and play in your room now, Charlotte, or watch television if you must. I'll call you when we've finished discussing the book."

  "But mummy—"

  "Let's see those little feet tripping inside or they won't be going to dancing class."

  Charlotte stamped once before flouncing in slow motion into the house. Her mother gazed hard at the door until it shut reluctantly, then she lowered her attention to the book. She flicked the pages and emitted sounds, not much more than short breaths and some hardly even that, on her way to taking a few seconds over the last page. She laid the book on the threshold of the Wendy house and found Ian with her frown. "What good are books like that meant to do?"

  "What good is taking her down to the boats?"

  "That's a question, not an answer."

  "That's not a question," Ian said as Jonquil's brother in the book would have.

  "It isn't clever to be clever, Ian. Can't you say how the book affected you?"

  It had made him even happier that Jack was living in his house—even more admiring of how real a writer Jack was—but those weren't things you said. "I liked it. It was good."

  "Did it excite you? Frighten you? Improve your vocabulary? Give you ideas?"

  "Sure."

  "That's what I'd be afraid of." She picked up the book, so urgently that the breeze of it caused the Wendy house to shrink away like Charlotte. "Aren't you old enough to see it doesn't make sense?"

  "It did to Jack, and you only read the last bit."

  "Which is all I had to read. A good book ties up all the loose ends, Ian. This has a brother who isn't even there, and the father wanting to be killed one moment and the next—I'd rather forget what it says he wants to do to his daughter."

  "That's because being a vampire takes over when it gets dark. He tried not to turn her into one, but then he couldn't stop. She didn't die of it, that's why she can stand the sunlight, but she has to kill him or she'll always be a vampire. Her mother sent Jonquil's brother away to be adopted when he was little, that's why he isn't one. He came back and nailed their father down so he couldn't get away, then their father's slave, who wasn't a vampire, and the brother killed each other."

  "Can't you hear how senseless all that is?" When Ian shrugged, meaning not that it didn't matter but that her opinion didn't, she shook the paperback at him. "Is this actually yours?"

  "It's Jack's. Careful," he said, and grabbed the book.

  "I must say if I were your mother you wouldn't have access to language or violence like that. Isn't there enough nastiness already in your life?"

  He felt as though she were trying to replace on top of his mind the slab Jack's presence in his life had lifted. He repeated his shrug and met the eyes on the cover until Hilene called Charlotte, who came out of the house so promptly he would have expected her mother to be suspicious. "Correction over," Hilene said. "Now if he's kind Ian will take you down to the river."

  "Don't want to go now. The boats have gone."

  "They haven't, Charlotte. Look, you can see them," her mother said, pointing to the multicoloured sails on the glittering bend of the Thames half a mile away below the sunlit roofs of Richmond Hill.

  "They're going. They'll be gone if we go."

  "I'm sure Ian didn't mean them to be, did you, Ian?"

  Ian almost let the slab on his mind keep his answer unspoken, but she raised her eyebrows a notch, and another. "Did you?" she said.

  "No," he said.

  "I really don't think you can compare reading, I suppose the gentleman who wrote it would call it schlock, compare reading an item like that with a grown-up remedying a situation."

  It wasn't just her patronising him that made him stand up, it was how reasonable she expected him to think she was being. "Okay, I'm going home," he said.

  "Charlotte won't look up to you if you go off in a sulk whenever you're criticised."

  "She can do what she likes. I want to talk to Jack about his book."

  "Your father said he'd take you and Charlotte to McDonald's when he gets back from golf. You don't want Ian to go yet, do you, Charlotte?"

  Charlotte had flung herself on the recliner, both to claim it and to remind them she'd been disappointed. "If he gives me a hundred, if he gives me two hundred pushes on the swing."

  "Half that, shall we say, Ian?"

  Ian peered at Hilene to convince himself she wasn't joking. "Tell Roger I went home," he said.

  "If you're really determined to go early I should phone first."

  "Why?" He knew at once, which was all the more reason for saying "What for?"

  "I just should." Having observed that Charlotte was listening, she pushed herself out of her chair. "I'll do it myself."

  Intrigued by the prospect of her speaking to his mother or Jack, Ian followed her through the pale pine kitchen into the hall that seemed to smell of the flowers of the wallpaper. He watched her dial and then stroke her cheek with that fingertip, and gaze roofward as though there might be something she would need to ignore, and lean her head toward the wire in case that gave the answer less of a distance to travel, and very eventually replace the receiver. Before it touched its cradle he was on his way upstairs to throw his things into his overnight bag. As he expected, Hilene waylaid him in the hall. "I really think you should wait for your father," she said.

  Ian might have retorted that his father shouldn't have gone off to play golf, though admittedly he'd invited Ian to join him in however many hours of tedium would have been involved. "I'll see him next time,"
Ian said, retreating down the cobbled path under several trellises of roses and out of the toothy white wooden gate.

  He felt as if he were leaving the slab from his mind on the hill. He was sure he would like whatever he found at home, even if it was Jack and his mother hurriedly emerging from some part of the house together or pretending not to be. He didn't want to embarrass them. What he mostly wanted was to write a story Jack would like.

  Church bells were competing across the width of the river as he caught the train to Willesden. North of the Thames the roofs of Acton swarmed by with churches sticking up among them. By the time he changed trains he'd thought up a little girl called Carlotta whose father wasn't really dead, he was a vampire that was hiding in the cellar. When her mother came home one day to their farmhouse near Los Angeles she scraped her hand on a point of the gate in the white picket fence, and when she went into the bedroom where Carlotta had been sleeping all day and her mother had gone to the chemist's, the pharmacy, the drugstore for medicine, the little girl smelled the blood and... He didn't know what happened then. Perhaps he could ask Jack's advice.

  He didn't even consider turning toward Shaun's when he emerged from the station at Stonebridge Park. He was glad not to encounter anyone he knew as he walked home, his head feeling like a writer's, full of ideas that led in all directions to ends that wouldn't come clear. Gardens whirred with mowers, cars streamed with soapy water, but all that was irrelevant to the ideas he wanted to share in case Jack could tell him where they should lead—except that Jack's car wasn't outside the house.

  Ian did his best not to feel disappointed as he let himself in. Jack might be somewhere researching his book or, since the house was empty, helping Ian's mother shop. Ian paced toward the kitchen as if he weren't certain what he would find there, and stood on the secretive concrete in case that might put him in more of a mood to write.

  It didn't, but as he lingered, trying to bring some of his thoughts to a conclusion, he knew what would. Jack surely wouldn't mind if Ian borrowed his word processor to write a story for him to read, not when the machine helped Jack work. Of course Ian would have asked permission if Jack had been there to ask. He ran upstairs and into Jack's room.

  Sunlight with a spicy tang of aftershave was reaching for the small desk Jack had bought and assembled, on which the word processor sat in the window. Ian left the door open and, having plugged in the machine, switched it on as he sat writer-like in Jack's secondhand swivel chair. The screen welcomed him and showed him its icons, from which he selected the writer's friend. The screen filled with tiny sketches of files bearing names, and he was trying to think of a title for his when the name of a file caught his eye. It was PROGRESS.

  He'd heard Jack refer to his book in progress. The notion of reading a book that was still being written seemed irresistible, and he clicked on the file, which opened in front of him. It wasn't a book, it was only the notes for one. He read the first, and didn't know what shape his mouth had taken—felt as if he had forgotten how to blink.

  HW's builder's yard on Blackbird Hill, edge of Wembley/Kingsbury. Sign says "Specialist in Property Renovation." HW uses empty buildings for burials.

  David Baxter (7) disappears March 1974 in Kingsbury. HW's first victim. Remains found under floor of house 300 yards from home.

  Julie Oakley (8), November 1976, Dollis Hill. Under new conservatory by Gladstone Park.

  Stephen Mullins (6), December 1977, Hendon. Basement of house beside M1 motorway.

  (Some victims not yet identified?)

  Vincent Wearing (6), June 1980, Willesden. Extension, Kensal Rise...

  At that moment Ian heard his mother's voice. Much of the rush of guilt he experienced was on Jack's behalf. The swivel chair rumbled away from him on its castors as he craned over the desk. His mother was in Janet's garden next door. Before he could move, she vanished into Janet's house.

  He was pressing one ear against the party wall, straining to hear whether she was staying at Janet's, when he heard the front door open. The footsteps it let in were Jack's. Ian might have had time to unplug the word processor and dart into his room, but he shrugged off the idea. He pulled the chair to him and sat on it, resting his folded arms on the back, and was facing the door when Jack strode whistling into the room.

  TWENTY

  "Are you lost, you poor old thing? Where are you looking for?"

  "I can't go home. They've stolen my home."

  "Try not to distress yourself. Try and think where it is."

  "I know where. Someone's living in it. My wife sold it while I was away and I don't even know where she's moved to."

  "Poor thing, have you nobody at all to care for you?"

  "My wife might if she knew I was alive, but they told her I was dead."

  "Then you must stay here till you find her. We've room. Some of our residents had to go back to hospital because they weren't up to something my husband got them involved in."

  "Did he mean to harm them?"

  "I don't know if he meant to harm anyone. It doesn't matter now. He isn't here, you are. I just need your details and then I'll show you your room and you can have a nice long peaceful bath."

  "Suppose I had to tell you something about me you mightn't like?"

  "It wouldn't matter. I'm meant to care for people, not judge them. Whatever it was, you'll get over it if you stay here."

  "Promise you won't slam the door in my face if I tell you my secret."

  "I never slam doors, it upsets my residents. You're dying to tell me. Go on."

  "It's me, Adele. I had to let everyone think I was dead. I wanted to tell you, you don't know how much I did, and now I have."

  He was nearly there. Walking from Cricklewood to Sudbury had taken a couple of hours, hardly worth mentioning compared to all the walking he'd done since his death, but he'd had enough of trudging and aching and starving with only the fruit and raw potatoes he'd snatched from outside shops to eat. He'd had to pull the potatoes to bits before his gums could deal with them, and he could still taste the soil from their skins, like the taste of a kiss he might have given children before he covered up their faces. In fact he couldn't kiss children, not since he'd been unable to kiss Biff. Just now he couldn't stand their noises either, couldn't distinguish cries of woe from those of pleasure. He hadn't managed since he'd found that his house was no longer his. Any high-pitched childish sound sent him crouching away from it for fear that he would be compelled to intervene. He didn't know how much time that had added to his journey, but now he was almost in sight of the single place where he could be himself, the solitary person who would let him. He was going to be calm, he told himself. Adele's residents wouldn't miss a little of their medication each, and he needed it as much as they did—he'd done a lot more to deserve it, after all.

  The Haven Care Home was a wide white three-storey house beyond a curve in a side road hushed by trees. Branches toyed with branches over the solid eight-foot fence. He limped alongside the fence and made to swing into the drive. Instead he continued past, his legs trembling with the effort not to run and attract attention to himself. A police car was parked on the expanse of concrete outside the house.

  It seemed more likely that one of her residents had misbehaved than that Hector was the reason the police were there. He swivelled, sending an ache up his body from his bruised feet to his gums, and crept into the drive. He assumed Adele and the police would be in the office, their discussion veiled by net curtains nervous with a breeze, and if he stood between the front door and the window he ought to be able to hear. He'd sneaked to the corner of the building so as to edge along the front when he heard the hall door squeak open.

  He darted around the corner and pressed his back against the house. The rucksack hunched him forward as if the warm bricks were fending him off. He heard the front door and a voice that had to be a policewoman's. "We may need to speak to you again, particularly if any more of your husband's victims come to light."

  "I want you to fin
d them if there are any, poor little mites, but I hope to God I can be left alone soon to try and forget about him."

  As soon as the car door slammed the front door shut too. When the police car backed into the road he felt as if it were withdrawing the house from him. Even more than her words, Adele's tone had made it clear how unwelcome he would be—so unwelcome she was bound to call the police. His aching gaze found the waste bin to the rear of the house, and he paced toward it in case it contained anything he could bear to eat. He only wished Adele could see the state to which she'd reduced him.

  He raised the plastic lid and rested it against the house. Under a newspaper he found a mushy mass of leftovers spilling out of an imperfectly sealed bin-bag. A sick bitter taste filled his mouth, and he was about to lurch away when he read two words of a headline in the paper Adele must have brought from wherever she was living now. MURDER HOUSE, they said.

  The underside of the paper was sodden with rot. He wiped his hand on the house and tore off the front page. A photograph showed a man on the stairs of the house where Hector had come closest to bringing a child peace. Above the man doors were dripping with graffiti, and perhaps he'd been chosen to point them out because he was a horror writer as well as the new lodger.

  Hector folded the page small and pressed it against his heart until he was able to fit it into the album, where it joined the other newspaper photograph. He listened to be sure there were no sounds from the front of the Haven, then he limped fast and stealthily down the drive and went in search of a phone booth.