Dark Screams, Volume 1

by Dark Screams- Volume 1 (v5. 0) (epub)

  The stranger’s head that appeared above the long grass took me by surprise. A young woman with blond hair crouched there. She blinked in the sunlight, like she’d just woken from a deep sleep. Around her neck, a steel collar. Ten feet of chain shackled the stranger and me together here in the forest.

  Her eyes opened wide with shock when she saw me.

  I spoke gently. “Don’t be frightened. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  The woman stood up. She wore a white coverall suit like the one worn by Goliath.

  A rattle of chain links came from behind me. A second chain led from my collar at the back. This chain was padlocked to the collar around the neck of a second stranger, who’d stepped out from behind a tree. Then I understood. Someone had shackled the three of us together, with me in the middle. My gaze fixed on the man. He was tall, muscular, and mean-looking. He, too, wore a white coverall. And when he looked at the woman they both smiled as they seemed to reach a secret understanding.

  The Watched

  Ramsey Campbell

  By the time the bird hide came in sight Jimmy’s arms were aching for a rest. The bag of potatoes his grandmother had forgotten to buy when they’d gone to the shops was too heavy to be carried in one hand. It lolled ponderously against his chest with every step he took along the canal path, and whenever he tried to put on speed its irrepressible contents dealt him a thump. In any case, he might have dodged into the hide. Watching his house and its neighbours always made him feel like a spy in a film.

  The hide was a hut composed of rounded logs, open on the side that faced away from the canal. The logs were patched with moss and scaly with small leaves. A gap low enough for Jimmy to look through and sufficiently high for a tall person not to have to crouch must have been designed to give a view of any life on the canal and across it before the houses had been built. Now the gap was full of the glare of the lamps in front of the houses, an amber light that seemed to hold the nondescript boxy buildings still and left the inside of the hut as dark as the silent stately water. Jimmy had lurched into the hut before he realised it was occupied. Somebody was skulking in the left-hand corner as if he didn’t want to be seen.

  Jimmy hugged the bag and was retreating onto the path when a low, hoarse voice followed him. “Come here, son.”

  The man hadn’t turned, and Jimmy didn’t know what he might be doing out of sight. “I’ve got to take these to my nan.”

  “She’ll wait.” Still without turning, the man said, “I know where you live.”

  What kind of threat was this meant to be? As Jimmy tried to ignore it, the man swung around. “I said come here.”

  His wide jowly mottled face looked as if it was to some extent propped up by the thin straight lips. His eyes were tired but fiercely determined to stay awake. He was brandishing a card in the dimness, and it helped Jimmy to recognise him—the community policeman who’d come to the school to lecture everyone about drugs. Some of those had killed his daughter, and he’d grown so furious about it that he might have been holding his audience responsible. “What do you want?” Jimmy said.

  “I know what’s going on over there. Better listen if you don’t want trouble.”

  Jimmy resented feeling accused, especially since this was how too many adults seemed to feel they should treat anyone like him. He slouched into the hide to be met by smells of urine and alcohol and tobacco smoke. He didn’t know how many of these belonged to the policeman, who’d grown dishevelled since visiting the school—crumpled suit, tie dangling from a collar that had lost its button, uncombed hair. As Jimmy dumped the bag of vegetables on the shelf under the gap in the wall of the hide, the policeman said, “That’s your granny you live with, is it? Where’s your parents?”

  “My dad went off and the man my mam’s with doesn’t like me.” In case this sounded like a babyish complaint, Jimmy added, “And I’m looking after my nan.”

  “Needs it, does she?” The man’s breath glimmered orange like the fumes of a fire in the November air. “Is she the helpful sort as well?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Looks out for her neighbours, eh? How much does she know about them?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “Don’t get cute with me, son. You know who we’re talking about. The lot who live next door.”

  Since his house was squashed between two more of the same, Jimmy felt he could say, “I don’t know which.”

  “I told you about being cute. The ones with all the visitors, and maybe you know why. The Dibbin mob.”

  So he didn’t mean the men who’d married each other. Jimmy had suspected the Dibbin family for a while but hadn’t told even his grandmother. “Are they druggies?”

  “The worst kind, son. Your local dealers.” The man’s lips writhed, letting his face droop further. “Too local,” he muttered, “for anyone to bother over except me.”

  Understanding overtook Jimmy so fast that he blurted, “Are they the ones who—”

  “Killed her, the scum.” His eyes twitched so tight and narrow that Jimmy thought he saw them bulge. “And how do you know about that?” the policeman said, lower still.

  “You told us at my school.”

  The man’s stare hadn’t relented when it strayed past Jimmy. “Well, there’s someone we’re talking about.”

  Jimmy’s grandmother was at the kitchen window, pressing the edge of a hand against her forehead and peering both ways along the canal. “I’ve got to go home,” Jimmy pleaded. “She’ll be worried.”

  “She’d better be.” Jimmy’s bid for sympathy seemed to have antagonised the policeman, who said, “If you care that much about her, you’d better give me what I need.”

  Jimmy didn’t speak until his grandmother had trudged out of view. “What?”

  “Maybe you can’t see any more than me, but you can listen. Your bedroom’s next to those scum, isn’t it? Stick your head against the wall and you can tell me what you hear. I’ll let you know when to come across.”

  The game of spying had lost its appeal. Jimmy was close to refusing when the policeman said, “And you can tip me off when they’ve got customers.”

  “How?”

  “Do something at the window.” As Jimmy wondered if the man was much good at his job—he’d started to sound not much better than childish—the policeman said, “You don’t want anybody seeing what you’re up to. Here, do this.”

  Before Jimmy could draw back, the man floundered at him to plant a hand over his nose and mouth. The flabby palm was moist with sweat, and the fingers stank of nicotine. Jimmy was about to struggle free so as to breathe when the policeman let go. “Your old granny won’t know what you’re doing,” he said, less a statement than an admonition. “You don’t want anyone knowing I’m here.”

  “Suppose they find out?”

  “Then I’ll be thinking you’re responsible. If you let me down you’ll be assisting criminals.” As Jimmy opened his mouth to protest, the man’s gaze veered away from him. “She’s back,” he muttered, and Jimmy saw his grandmother leaning across the sink to peer through the kitchen window. “You didn’t see me, understand,” the policeman said. “Better trot off home before she wants to know what you’ve been up to. And just remember, if you get done as an accomplice she might be as well.”

  Jimmy thought the man was behaving as unreasonably as only adults could. All the way along the path to the footbridge he felt as if he was carrying another weight besides the bag—a lump of resentment and frustrated rebellion. His feet on the metal steps made more noise than the barge that chugged under the bridge. As the long vessel rode its luminous ripples past the houses, Jimmy saw a tiny light glare as red as a laser in the hide. It was the tip of a cigarette, but he could have taken it for a signal or a warning.

  He’d hardly knocked on the back door when his grandmother flurried into the kitchen. Some hairs had straggled loose from her greying bun, but her intensely wrinkled face looked determined to fend off anything unwelcome
, which in Jimmy’s experience covered a good deal, including most of the news. As she unlocked the door she cried, “Wherever have you been?”

  Jimmy hefted the bag of potatoes, which assailed him with an earthy smell. “These are heavy. I couldn’t walk fast.”

  “You’re a good boy and don’t let anybody tell you different. Your mother ought to be proud, but I shouldn’t ask so much of you at your age. Blame my old brain for forgetting at the shop.”

  Jimmy could have retorted that he was twelve, not to mention wondering why his father shouldn’t also be proud of him, except that he knew his grandmother had never liked the man who’d taken her daughter away. As he let the bag sprawl on the kitchen table she said, “You were such a long time. Don’t say I made you strain yourself.”

  She sounded more anxious than he could bear. “I had to stop and talk to someone.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Jimmy turned his back on the hide and lowered his voice as well. “Just a policeman.”

  “A policeman,” his grandmother cried, raising her face like a shield. “Have you been getting into trouble?”

  “It wasn’t me. He’s after someone else that has.”

  “I don’t want to know, Jimmy, and you mustn’t get involved, either. You don’t know what their sort could do to us.”

  Presumably she meant criminals. Mightn’t that make her their accomplice, at least in the policeman’s eyes? Jimmy heard her dismissing the issue as she said, “You start your homework while I make us a nice dinner.”

  He grabbed his rucksack from the narrow stairs and hurried to his bedroom, where he unfolded the laptop on the rudimentary desk before pressing his ear against the wall between posters for two of his favourite singers, each of them dressed in not much more than her underwear. He could hear a woman’s voice—that must be flat-faced Mrs. Dibbin, who always looked close to nodding off—and then her pudgy husband, who wore at least as much jewellery as his wife. Where was their bony bald son Dez, who seemed to consist largely of veins and sinews and restless nerves? Jimmy was trying to identify his voice when the argument grew clear enough to let him realise he was overhearing a television show.

  The muffled confrontation distracted him from working on his essay about the history of where he lived, the fields and woods that the housing estate had replaced, a past that had nothing to do with him. When his grandmother called him for dinner in the kitchen he could hear the Dibbin family through the wall, but their television was louder. He ate his burger—a stockier version of the one his grandmother had made for herself, accompanied by twice as many chips—as quickly as he could so as to listen upstairs. “You needed that, didn’t you?” his grandmother said. “Here, I’m not very hungry. Have some of mine I haven’t touched.”

  Jimmy was dismayed to think he’d put her off her dinner by making her nervous. She was already thinner than she had been when he’d come to stay, and he felt he was taking too much of her food. He went upstairs, chewing a last mouthful, to bruise his ear against the wall. The ear had begun to throb by the time he heard Dez Dibbin in the hall next door. The teenager was talking about a deal. “I’ll go and get it now,” he shouted.

  Jimmy ran to the window and covered his mouth. Did he just look shocked? Even when he remembered to cover his nose as well, he couldn’t see any movement in the hide. He jabbed a thumb at the house next door and then mimed steering with a wheel, none of which brought a response. How else could he alert the policeman? In desperation he bared his left arm and pretended to insert an object into it. He’d poked at the arm several times when a figure dashed out of the hide.

  He saw the policeman run not entirely straight to a car parked on the road that paralleled the canal. The car screeched away so hastily that it travelled several hundred yards before its lights came on. It raced past the footbridge and swerved onto the road bridge, and Jimmy couldn’t help being excited by the prospect of a car chase. He darted out of his bedroom, only to realise that his grandmother might want to know what he was doing. As he hesitated at the top of the stairs a muffled discussion came to an end, and someone slammed the front door of the Dibbin house. A car—it would be the hulking Rover that was always parked half on the pavement—sped away, followed by silence.

  Jimmy heard nothing else while he tried to concentrate on his essay, unless there was a distant splash. He’d managed to write just a few dogged sentences by the time the front door of the next house slammed again. “Here’s the pizzas,” Dez shouted. “I got the deal.”

  Jimmy covered his mouth, but he was giving nobody a sign except himself. So he’d sent the policeman in pursuit of pizza. Yet another argument had broken out next door, and he planted his ear against the wall. He caught the name Blundell and heard Dez protest, “Didn’t touch the car.” Whatever this signified, the tangle of angry voices moved out of earshot before Jimmy managed to distinguish another word.

  He made himself finish his essay, borrowing paragraphs online and changing enough words to let him hope the teacher wouldn’t notice, before he ventured to the window. As far as he could tell the hide was deserted, which left him afraid that the policeman might come to the house. Surely he wouldn’t when that would betray his presence, and eventually thinking so let Jimmy sleep.

  In the morning his grandmother presented him with the man-sized breakfast she kept telling him boys needed to help them grow. She admired him in his uniform as usual and adjusted his rucksack on his shoulders without being encouraged, let alone asked, on the way to seeing him off from the front door. His breath looked like nervousness made visible as he craned over the footbridge to see that the hide was deserted. He was sure the policeman would return, probably angrier still, not least with him.

  The thought made school come as a relief or, at any rate, a postponement—the classroom chaos that he might as well join in as long as it didn’t let him work, the schoolyard bullying he’d learned to imitate to protect himself, the teachers who were either simply boring or earnest about it as well, especially the ones who spent half the lesson waiting for everybody to behave. He only ever really learned when he could work by himself. On his way home through the dank twilight he saw that the hide was empty, but when he looked out of his bedroom window the silhouette of a head leaned around the edge of the gap in the logs, a silent greeting from the dark.

  It made him desperate to hear something to incriminate the Dibbins. He stayed at the bedroom wall until his grandmother had summoned him twice for dinner. “Do they have to give you so much homework?” she complained. “That is what you’re doing up there, isn’t it, Jimmy?”

  He was close to blurting out the truth, but more anxious to overhear. He heard nothing to compensate for last night’s mistake—not much that was comprehensible at all. If he’d seen the policeman in the morning he might have gone to speak to him, but instead his nervous recklessness drove him to approach the headmistress in the schoolyard. She was just his height, and yet she made him feel small. While her round face was placid, her grey eyes were a warning not to underestimate her. “Jimmy Cropper, isn’t it?” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  “Can I ask you something, Mrs. Briscoe?”

  “Anything you need to. If you don’t ask questions, you won’t learn.”

  “A community policeman, is he a real one?”

  “You should do what anyone in authority tells you if it’s not against the law.” This sounded like a standard answer to a question Jimmy hadn’t meant to ask, but Mrs. Briscoe added, “Did you have somebody in mind?”

  “The one who came to talk to us about drugs.”

  “Ah, that gentleman. I hope you’ve taken what he said to heart.” Once again she seemed to follow an official caution with a personal response, murmuring, “But you’re right all the same. I’m afraid Mr. Blundell isn’t real any longer.”

  “Why?” Jimmy tried to sound less rude by saying, “What happened to him?”

  “I understand he became too involved in a case.” As Jimmy grasped w
hich one she had to mean, Mrs. Briscoe said, “He’s no longer with the police, so if by any chance you should meet him, don’t let him make you think he is.”

  Jimmy thought that like any adult she knew more than she was prepared to tell him. Had Blundell tried to convince someone else he was still a policeman? Knowing that he’d lost his power was such a reassurance that Jimmy even felt emboldened to ask questions in class rather than hoping none would be addressed to him.

  The hide was empty when he passed it on his way home. Either the dusk wasn’t quite dark enough for Blundell to take up his post or he’d abandoned his vigil. Jimmy went to his room to make a start on his homework before dinner. As he shut the curtains a head loomed into the gap in the hide. The man had ceased to be a threat, and Jimmy didn’t even bother trying to overhear anything next door.

  In the morning the hide was still deserted. It glistened with mist like a lingering wintry breath. He’d forgotten about it by the time he reached the school, but Mrs. Briscoe called him over in the yard. “Will you forget what I told you about Mr. Blundell?”

  She sounded as conspiratorial as Blundell had. “Why?” Jimmy said.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. There wasn’t any need. I’m afraid the gentleman isn’t with us any more.”

  Jimmy was ashamed to feel relieved. “You mean he’s…”

  “That’s precisely what I mean.” Less brusquely, Mrs. Briscoe said, “When you’re old enough to drive, just you make sure you never drink, and don’t let anybody drive who has. Mr. Blundell drove into the canal.”

  Jimmy’s feeling of relief seemed to be in danger of deserting him. “When?”

  “Before I spoke to you about him. The previous night, I believe.”

  Jimmy was remembering not just how he’d hoped to provoke a car chase but Dez Dibbin’s protest that a car hadn’t been touched. “Thanks, Mrs. Briscoe,” he mumbled, turning away to keep his thoughts to himself. He just had to realise that he couldn’t have seen Blundell last night. Either someone else had been in the hide or Jimmy had imagined the silhouetted head.