The Nameless

by Ramsey Campbell

"There's a whole lot I wouldn't have believed until I researched `The God Trap.`" She looked belatedly reassuring. "But everything I said is hypothetical, obviously. The important thing is that you think your daughter's still ------------------------------------130

  alive, and I'm inclined to agree with you because of the drawing you saw. I mean, Margery Turner wasn't my idea of an artistic personality."

  By now her agreement was less reassuring than dismaying. "But what is this cult? Do you know where it is?"

  "No, I don't know that. I've got a lead I haven't followed up--someone who may have been one of them. And I did piece together a few things about them."

  "What things?" Barbara demanded, afraid to know.

  "Principally how secretive they are." She unlocked her desk and found a notebook. "While I was researching fringe groups I kept coming across rumors of people who had no names. The earliest rumor I can trace was current in London in the late forties. Then the rumors go Dartmoor, Manchester, Inverness, Liverpool, London again, Newcastle, Birmingham, Sheffield, and back here to London. You see, there's no geographical pattern, and as far as I can trace, the times never overlap. There are gaps I can't account for, which I take to mean they hid themselves successfully. It looks as though they have to keep moving so that nobody finds out about them."

  "Why can't it be just one rumor that's traveling? It doesn't prove that they exist."

  "There were more than rumors in some places. In London about 1970 and in Manchester in the mid-fifties, kids were lured away by other kids who said they had no names, to see their parents who didn't have names either. Luckily the kids were scared and didn't go. And in some of the other towns the Salvation Army got wind of the group. They never traced them, and couldn't find out much about them, but their general impression was that they were really bad."

  She was closing her notebook. "Is that all?" Barbara said incredulously.

  "And what Margery Turner said. Her daughter's letter ------------------------------------131

  started me fitting together some of the things I'd heard, and I did some more research. Actually, there was one thing I remembered that had already started me thinking along those lines. You remember the Manson trial, obviously. One of his women said something to the effect that maybe people thought the Family was bad, but there was a group that made them look like Disneyland. They were people with no names who were into things even Manson wouldn't touch."

  When she saw Barbara's eyes she said hastily, "I don't mean they're the same group, of course. People are freakier in California. That kind of thing doesn't travel. But all the same, the group you're looking for needs finding. You saw the letter Margery Turner had, so you know what I mean. They don't issue literature, which is suspicious in itself for a fringe group that's survived so long, and they don't even seem to need money. Anything that secret has to be pretty bad. You can find out about the Freemasons if you know how, but just you try to find out about the CIA."

  Barbara thought some of the links in her reasoning were tenuous, but she hadn't time to quibble. "You said you'd traced a member of the cult," she said.

  "That's right." Gerry unlocked a drawer of the filing cabinet and produced a clipping, girl with no name comes home to her parents, the headline said. According to the report she had escaped from an obscure religious sect. "We keep calling her Iris in the hope that she'll remember," her weeping mother said.

  "I checked with my press contact there," Gerry said. "It sounds very much like the group you're looking for."

  One thing was clear to Barbara: the girl Iris could confirm whether or not Angela was in the hands of the cult, whether she was alive at all. "Have you been to see her yet? Shall I come with you? She might be more forthcoming if I tell her about Angela." ------------------------------------132

  Gerry looked doubtful, but had no chance to reply before the editor came in. "The stuff on the travelers is good," he said, standing in front of Barbara as if she weren't there. "Now I want you to see what you can find out about those Rhodesian loans. I smell something big and shitty there. It'll need a lot of research."

  "Are you giving that to me now? I wanted to follow up that group I mentioned, the people who give up their names."

  "That's Sunday tabloid material, establishment newspaper stuff. Too minor for us. Too vague."

  "I have a lead that looks very promising."

  "Not for us. Anyway, I shouldn't think you'll have time while you're investigating these loans." When she demurred he said, "It's up to you if you want to go over to establishment journalism. Just let me know soon if you're through here."

  "Well, I tried," Gerry said when he'd gone. "It's the same whatever the newspaper. You have to do what the proprietor says, however arseholed it is. I'm sorry I can't be more help. To be honest, I more or less gave up the story when I heard Margery Turner had died."

  Barbara stood up impulsively and closed the door. "Suppose I could sell your report to a mass circulation newspaper? If you wrote something as strong as the article I read we'd sell it with no trouble. Maybe it could be a series. I wouldn't charge you a commission," she added, and wished she hadn't, for it showed how desperate she was.

  Gerry stared for a while at her notebook. At last she looked up. "All right, I'll go with you to see this girl in Hemel Hempstead. I can probably get more out of her than you could. After that, we'll see. When do you want to go?"

  "As soon as possible. Tomorrow." ------------------------------------133

  "Well, first I have to arrange the interview. We can't just go down there, not in a case like that. I'll call you as soon as I've made contact, all right? That's a promise."

  When Barbara reached the street the pavement seemed to be quaking. As she walked down to the station, through the whitish mold of light beneath the streetlamps, she had to steady herself against garden walls, yet why should she be so unsteady? The journalist thought Margery couldn't have forged the drawing, but that was hardly conclusive. A breeze dragged shadows of foliage over houses, which went toppling downhill like dominoes. She was remembering the last words Angela had ever said to her in Otford: "Will you bring me some more books I can read?" And then, more vivid and even more painful, she saw Angela looking up from her book and wanting to be admired, saying, "Shall I read to you?" "Some other time, love," Barbara had said, busy with a manuscript, but there had been no other time. She felt trapped in a limbo between her memories and her trudging body; all of them were out of reach. Perhaps there was rain in the air, or perhaps she was weeping. ------------------------------------134 ------------------------------------135

  135

  Sixteen

  On the Edgeware Road Gerry began to talk about her editor. "He overheard me calling Hemel Hempstead and he wasn't very pleased. I'd have called back later, but I was having enough trouble persuading her to let us see her daughter." She raced a red light and veered around a turning bus. "And then he still tried to pretend he wouldn't use the story because the people with no names don't seem to rip anyone off. That isn't the reason at all."

  Barbara could only suck in her breath and wish she were driving--the Edgeware Road was mined with crossings, by no means all of which were controlled by traffic lights-- but her car was still at the garage. "What is the reason?" she said, for Gerry was glancing at her.

  "Why, that it might alienate the reader. Quite a few of them must be into the occult, mysticism, that whole trip. To criticize anything like that would be like saying that ------------------------------------136

  smoking dope gives you a hangover, though of course it does."

  She brought the car screeching to a halt as a little girl stepped onto a crossing. "Anyway, he obviously felt he'd persuaded me not to write the story, so I had to tell him you were selling it for me. You will be able to, won't you?"

  "Of course I will. A couple of papers are already interested." She'd had two days to talk them into it, and a great deal of determination. "Depending on how substantial a piece you eventually wri
te," she said, "it might be worth thinking of a book."

  Gerry drove straight onto the twin rotaries which led to the highway. In the August heat the oncoming traffic quivered like jelly; pangs of sunlight sprang from windshields. A tanker and a truck boxed in Gerry's Fiat, a giant truck lumbered overhead; Barbara felt she was about to be crushed in the thin metal shell. On the highway Gerry's driving grew wilder still. Transporters big as bungalows raced each other at speeds that Barbara found terrifying, yet Gerry dodged among them, from lane to lane. "He got quite pissed off about it," Gerry said. "He said I sounded as if I wanted to join the system we were committed to attacking, and I told him I was trying to grow out of my prejudices," but Barbara had managed to detach herself-- someone else was belted into the passenger seat, not her-- and had to make an effort to recall what Gerry meant.

  Hemel Hempstead wasn't much of a relief. "She said above the canal," Gerry remembered, and sped through the town, slowing only when she reached the shops. A multistory parking lot spun a striped ball on the tip of its concrete nose. Beyond the shops was a two-way rotary, and Barbara closed her eyes. When she opened them she was by the canal: barges passed quietly as clouds, swans slept beneath their wings. She must be near her goal, and at once she felt apprehensive. ------------------------------------137

  Soon Gerry took a road which led above the canal. On the door of a dressmaker's called Sarah-Boo, a Snoopy poster declared Peace on earth, goodwill toward everyone. Gerry turned left into a street which climbed through a mound of semi-detached houses, clustering like barnacles. Rock gardens blazed purple and yellow. "It's somewhere here," she said.

  Higher up they reached a maze of anonymous streets and closes, crammed with small boxy houses. A garage door occupied a quarter of each frontage. Before each house an unfenced patch of grass twice the area of a car's floor lay stranded between concrete paths. Gerry had to slow down, scrutinizing the street names, for every time she turned a corner the street appeared to have cloned itself.

  "Here we are," she said before Barbara was ready. She slipped out from behind the wheel and smoothed her dark skirt; she had obviously dressed for the interview. Barbara felt hemmed in by the deserted streets; through a gap she could see the buttercup-yellow Hertfordshire hills beyond the Kodak building, which looked like two dozen strips of unexposed film, but otherwise there were only the houses, singing their morning song of vacuum cleaners. The cars had been let out for the day, the housewives were locked in.

  When Gerry rang the nearest doorbell a stocky man opened the door at once. His shirt was buttoned over his wrists; perhaps his face and hands were angrily pink from the sun, not from truculence. "What do you want?" he demanded.

  "I'm Gerry Martin, and this is Barbara Waugh."

  "I know who you are right enough. What do you want?"

  "Well, I explained that on the phone."

  "Not to me, you didn't." He looked ready to close the door. Barbara started forward, opening the photograph ------------------------------------138

  album she had brought--surely the photograph of Angela aged four would move him, she was less and less able to look at it herself--as a small square woman, hardly five feet tall, appeared behind him, wiping soapsuds from her hands with a souvenir of Brighton. "Don't argue on the doorstep, George," she said with an accent similar to his, on the border of North and South. "At least we can let them in."

  She led them into the front room, where the wallpaper was patterned discreetly as a civil servant's suit. Doilies were spread on a sideboard, a ballerina of lustre pottery gleamed purple on the windowsill. "You're the lady who is looking for her daughter," the woman said to Barbara.

  "This is a photograph of her."

  The woman glanced sharply at Gerry. "You said she was older than this."

  "That's the most recent photograph I have." For a nervous moment Barbara thought that the couple were going to reveal that they had read the article about her. "I haven't seen her since," she said, her eyes blurring.

  Perhaps the woman was remembering her own grief. "Oh, George, I don't think it'll do any harm if we show this to Iris."

  "Don't you be so sure, Maisie. We told the doctor we'd give her peace and quiet. That's what she needs."

  "We came down from London on the understanding that we could see her," Gerry said.

  "And I've had to take the day off from Kodak's because of it." He turned to Barbara. "Look, I'd help you if I could. I just don't see what good it will do for you to bother Iris. She couldn't tell us where the buggers were who did that to her. She must have wandered away from them one day and come back here somehow. They won't still be where they were then, will they? Call me unfeeling if you like, but I think you're wasting your time." ------------------------------------139

  "I don't expect to be led to them. I just want to be sure if they have my daughter."

  "A bit late to worry about her, isn't it?" At once he was shamefaced. "Look, that's how I feel about myself and Iris. I don't know anything about you and your daughter. I should never have let Iris leave home, she'd follow anyone and not see where they were leading." Reluctantly he glanced at the photograph. "Show her if you must," he grumbled. "Otherwise you'll go off thinking we ought to have helped you. But you'll leave when I tell you to."

  His wife led them upstairs, past a flight of plaster swans. "Don't speak suddenly," she said low. "She doesn't like noise."

  "Aye, and she won't like so many strangers, either. You stay outside," he said abruptly to Gerry. "I'll leave the door open. You'll be able to hear if there's anything to hear."

  Barbara's first impression was that Maisie had opened the wrong door: was the woman at the bedroom window a companion or a nurse? She looked over forty, twice as old as Iris; her striped summer dress, and the pink bow in her graying hair, were too young for her. But Maisie went straight to her. "Iris, there's a lady here to see you."

  Iris turned painfully slowly. Barbara thought of a mechanical figure whose machinery was running down; the eyes and the face seemed a single unbroken surface, smooth and artificial as plastic. It might have been a life-size doll which Maisie had dressed in her daughter's frock, faded by months of sitting at the window. "The lady is looking for her little girl," Maisie said to the doll. "She wants you to tell me if you've ever seen her."

  Holding open the album, Barbara stepped forward. By the time Iris lowered her head to look--her head moved as though her eyes were fixed--Barbara's hands were shaking with the effort to hold the album still. Was there a ------------------------------------140

  glimmer of recognition in the girl's eyes? Perhaps it was only an indifferent reflection of the album, for it had faded when Iris looked up. She gazed toward Barbara as if nobody were there.

  "The little girl is older than that. Thirteen years old," Maisie said when Barbara mouthed it. "She would have been twelve last year, Iris. Did you see her last year before you came home to us?"

  Barbara shifted her grip on the album; her fingers came away from the celluloid page with a sound like the smacking of lips. "She may be very thin," she said, remembering the drawing. "Her eyes are very blue, at least they were," and found she was weeping.

  "I'm sorry," Maisie said after a static pause. "Some days she just doesn't want to talk. I'm afraid this may be one of those days."

  Suddenly Barbara realized how Maisie saw her daughter: she'd fallen into bad company and gone through a bad phase, but she was home now; all she needed was peace and her family, she would right herself in time. Barbara turned away defeated by Iris's blank stare, and dabbed at her eyes.

  "If you leave me a photograph I'll keep showing her," Maisie said. "I can let you know if she says anything."

  "Thank you," Barbara said dully, and handed her the album; she didn't feel capable of selecting one herself. She gazed about the room, at a model lighthouse which must light up with a battery, a school magazine for 1969, a mandala which was composed of tiny people and which focused on an unreadable eye, an exercise book open at a poe
m in an adolescent hand ("O let me go down in the warm wet dark"), a doll with the pupils scraped out of its eyes, which reminded her unpleasantly of the face which had stared from the sketch of the house. Presumably all this ------------------------------------141

  was meant to recall Iris to herself, but it seemed to have failed; what chance did Barbara have?

  When Maisie gave her back the album she headed for the landing. George turned gruffly toward the stairs, Gerry gave her a smile and a shrug that she must have meant to be encouraging. Maisie left the photograph in the room, and had almost reached the door when Iris said, "They made me get someone from New Street."

  At first Barbara wasn't sure that she was hearing the voice, it was so scrawny and blurred. But when she hurried into the room, Maisie stepping back reluctantly to let her in, she saw that Iris's lips were moving, though for the moment without sound. Eventually her voice caught up with them. "I had to wake him up. He went back with me, and-- After that we went to Sheffield, and--was Her voice kept fading like a worn-out radio. "I left them one day and came home," she said.

  "Was there a little girl with you while you were away?" Barbara tried not to speak too abruptly, but she had to make contact while she could. "A little girl about twelve who looked like this?"

  Perhaps Iris would have examined the photograph, except that a bird began singing outside the window. She turned to the window as if she dreaded to do so; her shoulders hunched, her head sank down like a tortoise's. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere the sunlight couldn't reach. "When I was little I found a bird in the garden. I thought it was asleep. When I turned it over it started moving, but it was things crawling inside."

  Her mother clasped her hand, but she continued tonelessly, staring. "Where I had to live with them, things kept coming alive. The bad got into things and made them move."

  "Don't go upsetting yourself, Iris. You know it's only your imagination. You're home now."

  "It got into us. It made us do things." She dragged her ------------------------------------142