The Pretence

by Ramsey Campbell

  The Pretence

  Ramsey Campbell

  Published in the UK in October 2013

  This ePub is version 1.0, released October 2013.

  For Steve and Melanie Laws, with love

  —we endure...

  As the taxi drew up outside the terminal the driver said "What time's your flight?"

  "In about an hour."

  "Where are you flying?"

  "To the mainland. Just to Liverpool."

  "You'll be home before tomorrow, then."

  "I expect so." Though he didn't see why this should concern her, Slater said "I'm sure I shall."

  An April breeze like a reminiscence of a summer holiday set palm leaves chattering above him while he paid the fare. As he made for the terminal the glass doors slipped apart, letting out a young woman so wide-eyed that her stare seemed to render her pale face even thinner. She thrust a glossy brochure at him, and he took it for a special offer until he glanced at it, having trundled his suitcase into the departure hall. The cover of the pamphlet showed a clock without hands and urged SEE YOUR TIME in type as thick as blackened matchsticks. It could almost have been directing his attention to the matrix sign that showed his flight was delayed. He wouldn't be home by midnight after all; he mightn't even be on land.

  Having failed to locate a handy bin, Slater crumpled the pamphlet in his fist as he led his luggage to the security gates. On the far side of the electronic barrier he retrieved his watch and cash and mobile phone from the tray that emerged from the scanner like a car at the end of a fairground ride. He was putting on his shoes when the guard beside the conveyor belt beckoned to him. "Excuse me, sir, we don't need that."

  She meant the brochure he'd left in the tray. "Can you bin it for me?"

  "I can't." Apparently he'd ceased to be a sir. "Please take it," she said.

  It was her reproachful look that made him blurt "You're a Finalist, are you?"

  "We aren't permitted to discuss our faith, sir." Though she'd reverted to professionalism, her eyes hadn't quite caught up, and she leaned across the dormant belt to murmur "If I were you I'd read what you have there."

  He already knew what they believed—he imagined nobody could avoid knowing—and he tramped away so fast that his shoelaces lashed the tiled floor. He sat down to tie them before wadding the brochure to lob it into the nearest bin. As he made for the bar through the duty-free court, sunglasses gave him a host of black looks while a multitude of watches showed him the time, the time, the time. Nobody was seated at the bar itself, though a few of the tables were occupied. Slater perched on a stool at the bar and ordered a glass of merlot. "A large one," he said.

  The barman was a broad slow fellow with a tentatively amused expression. As he brought Slater the glass he said "Another one held up."

  "Me, you mean." The barman could have been referring to the plane, but when he didn't admit to it Slater said "No point in fussing over it. I'll be home when I am."

  "You're not holding your breath for the end of the world, then."

  "I can't believe anybody is. It's not as if this is the first time that was supposed to happen. It's been meant to end a dozen times in this century alone."

  "Maybe it did."

  Presumably this was the style of joke the barman had been waiting to deliver. "I don't know why so many people have got it into their heads this time," Slater complained. "You'd think by now they would know better."

  "If you ask me it's all the computers. They're meant to be giving us more of a mind but it's got stuff like that in it."

  "The internet, you're saying. It contains everything, that's the problem."

  "So none of us know what the world's like any more."

  "I shouldn't think it's quite as bad as that. My mother has no time for computers but she knows what the Finalists are saying will happen."

  "It's like I say, they get in everybody's head."

  "She's why I was over here. She and her friends have been working themselves up so much that she had an attack."

  "Better now, is she?"

  "She is since I got her to talk about it. I did think the care home staff might have."

  "I couldn't put my folks in one of those places."

  "My parents came to live on the island," Slater said with some resentment, "and that's where she says she wants to stay."

  "What we say isn't always what we think. Won't she be fretting about not seeing you tomorrow?"

  "I'd already booked the flight. I could have stayed longer with her if I'd known it was going to be late."

  "Thought you weren't bothered about that," the barman said as if he'd been presented with a reason for amusement. "Well, it'll all be over by tomorrow."

  Slater saw people at the tables lift their heads as if they'd sensed danger. He took hold of his glass, only to find he'd drained it while talking. "Same again," he said. "I'll just find something to read."

  As he made for the bookshop, such as it was—the first items he saw in it were earplugs and blindfolds—he took out his mobile and sent Melanie a message. Plane late. Don't know how long. He leafed through the newspapers, which felt oddly out of date, containing not a single reference to the Finalists and their dogged prophecy, though of course that was hardly news any more, if it ever had been. Too many of the paperbacks on display seemed designed to resemble one another—he could almost have taken them for the products of a single mind—and in any case he didn't expect to have time to finish or even get far into one. He bought a music magazine that reviewed new releases, and was returning to the bar when his mobile emitted its version of Beethoven's pastoral hymn. "Hold on," he told Melanie and paid the barman before carrying his glass to a table. "Here I am."

  "Where's here, Paul?"

  "Still at the airport. On the island, I mean."

  "Oh dear. Well, it can't be helped." She let out a breath like a delicate sniff in reverse and said "What's the situation, do we know?"

  "Do we know what the delay is?" Slater called to the barman.

  "The way I heard it, some of the crew didn't show up for work."

  "Let's hope they're ill, then," Melanie said.

  This was a decidedly untypical wish, and then Slater understood. "Rather than nervous of flying tonight, you mean."

  "So long as there's someone who isn't."

  "Of course I'm not," Slater said before he grasped that she wasn't referring to him. As he looked away from a woman who was staring reproachfully at him he felt prompted to ask "How are Tom and Amy?"

  "Asleep, I hope."

  "You may as well be too. That's to say don't wait till I come home."

  "You know I'll be waiting even if I'm asleep." As if she hadn't changed the subject Melanie said "How's Eileen now?"

  "I think I've put her right. I just wonder if any of the staff at the home believe that rubbish. Well, they won't for much longer."

  "That'll be strange for them," Melanie said. "See you however late you are, then."

  "Absolutely, yes. See you then."

  He would have added some endearments if he hadn't felt overheard in the bar. He ended the call and was pocketing the mobile when a voice behind him said "Anybody here think we're all stopping at midnight?"

  The speaker—a small man who appeared to have concentrated most of his bulk in his stomach—was at a table by himself. A scowl clenched his mottled reddish face, which was decorated with a fading false moustache, a strip of foam from his latest pint of beer. "Don't be shy if you're one of that lot," he urged so vigorously that he left some consonants behind.

  Slater supposed his phone call had provoked the outburst. He turned away as other customers lowered their heads or resumed their conversations, but the man wasn't so easily ignored. "Don't any of us read the Bible? Me neither, but
they've told us what they say it says."

  A sinking movement drew Slater's attention to the window, but it was the reflection of the man's tankard, not a plane. "The Koran too," the man said less distinctly, "and the rest of them fairy tales. Shows how much crap they are when that's all they can agree about."

  Was everyone as embarrassed as Slater? The lack of a response only antagonised the man. "Who's keeping quiet?" he more or less pronounced. "Don't tell me there's none of you here. My lad's computer says you're everywhere."

  Slater felt the man's gaze on the nape of his neck, though he couldn't tell from the reflection where the fellow was looking. Perhaps the sensation simply proved how much that you took for the external world was happening inside you. It dissipated as the man said "Come to think, they won't be travelling tonight. They're all praying the rest of us are wrong, I shouldn't wonder."

  As the man's reflection slumped back in its chair Slater finished his drink. He oughtn't to have any more when he didn't know how soon he might be driving. He leafed through the magazine, but the names of favourite composers and their works didn't sound many notes in his head. He shut his eyes to rest them for a moment—at least, that was all he intended, but he was wakened by the man behind him. "It's here."

  A plane was coasting past the window, with Slater's heartbeat for its soundtrack. It glided out of sight, and he felt as if he were a member of a chorus all holding their breaths. Certainly he wasn't alone in breathing aloud when a voice from above invited passengers for John Lennon to the gate. Several people raised a feeble if not ironic cheer, and as the barman called "Safe home" Slater found himself humming a snatch of Imagine as a reminiscence of the singer who'd lent the Liverpool airport his name.

  While the bar and then the passage to the gate resounded with a prolonged drumroll of luggage, the elevated voice advised passengers to have their boarding cards and passports ready. No doubt the airline was attempting to make up for the delay, since a uniformed woman had already opened the exit to the airfield. "Come straight to me," she said.

  She barely glanced at Slater's documents before she scanned his boarding card. A boxy corridor reverberated with his luggage and led him out beneath a black sky, in which he imagined more stars were visible than he had time to glimpse. At the top of the steps to the plane a woman in a larger version of the airline uniform looked impatient for the passengers to cross the tarmac. A man in a suit that identified him as a pilot ushered Slater to a seat halfway down the aisle, not the place he'd been assigned. "There's just a few of you tonight," the pilot said. "We're seating you for balance."

  "Thanks for taking the trouble for us."

  "Someone had to. The job's the job."

  Slater hoisted his suitcase into the overhead locker and was fastening his safety belt as the pilot found a seat for the last passenger to board, the small big-bellied fellow. The larger stewardess oversaw the man's audibly peevish struggle with his seatbelt while the pilot shut himself in the cockpit, and then there was silence apart from a murmur of music that sounded reluctant to take much shape or to make clear which if any instruments were involved. The steps hacked away from the plane as the pilot's voice set about directing the cabin crew. As soon as the plane began to taxi he apologised for the delay, and then a recorded message prompted the cabin crew to perform their safety mime, which was so familiar that Slater could easily have dreamed it. The small man gave it a loose round of applause while the plane gathered speed, and the tarmac fell away as the plane sailed up into a larger darkness. The wing tilted as if the earth were calling it back, and Slater watched a few illuminated roads dwindle to filaments before the island drifted down the inclined sea into the dark.

  He could have been gesturing at the night as he flourished his wrist-watch. It would be midnight in not much over a quarter of an hour. Waiting for the slimmer stewardess to wheel a trolley down the aisle used up several minutes, and obtaining a bottle of water took one more. He sucked at the plastic nipple and then picked up his magazine, but leafing through it felt like trying to recapture information. Did he need to stay awake? Wouldn't it be wiser to catch a little sleep before he had to drive? He closed his eyes and felt the magazine sliding out of his hands until he fumbled it onto the seat beside him. His head drooped and jerked up and sank again, and the low unchanging chord of the engines seemed to expand to meet him. Then they cut out, or rather his consciousness did, and he knew nothing until he came back to himself with a violent lurch.

  It felt worse than any panic he'd experienced in his life—worse than the endless minutes he'd once spent searching for baby Tom and lost toddler Amy in the retail park where he worked. He felt as though his innards had dropped out of him, and he was just a shell that ached with emptiness. He wasn't even seated any longer; he'd plummeted into the dark so violently that it had snatched away his vision along with his ability to breathe. He was utterly alone in the midst of a vast silence unrelieved by so much as a heartbeat. He couldn't have said whether it lasted for an instant or longer than he had the means to comprehend before he heard a voice. "Just someone expected word you meant," it said.

  Or was it saying that he'd sent someone a worm or that they expected a firmament? He had to struggle to grasp who was speaking, and then he managed to deduce that the pilot was apologising for some unexpected turbulence. As he risked opening his eyes his sight returned, unless the uncontrollable lurch of the aircraft had put out the lights in the cabin at the moment he'd jerked awake. How could the voice be declaring "Police state sees to damned"? No, it was telling the passengers "Please stay seated and keep your belts fastened. Justify caution. No cause for alarm."

  The last words let Slater understand that the pilot had said it was just a precaution. He could have thought the turbulence had dislodged his perceptions, which might explain why he felt so alone in the cabin. The lights were dimmer than he remembered, and they appeared to be showing him row after row of empty seats. He was absurdly grateful to hear a blurred voice. "Christ, give us a drink."

  The tops of heads rose above half a dozen seats, and Slater glanced around to see faces leaning into the aisle like cards displayed by a cagey player. The stewardess who'd been at the boarding gate appeared from behind a curtain near the cockpit to murmur "We're only serving water now, sir, and could you please watch your language."

  "Holy water, is it? We'll be needing more than that if you keep on chucking us about."

  "We've started our dissent," Slater heard her say until he thought about it. A glance at his watch showed him that the time was several minutes after midnight. He'd no idea how much time had passed since the plane had encountered the turbulence, and there was certainly no reason to ask. All that mattered was that they would be landing soon, and he strained his eyes at the blackness that appeared to have become the substance of the window. At first he wasn't sure that he was seeing tiny lights lying too low for stars, and then the pattern like a distant constellation resolved itself into a set of grids. They were marking airstrips, and he didn't need the announcement that the plane was about to land.

  Perhaps the pilot was resolved to make up for the turbulence, since they touched down as if the plane weighed nothing to speak of. It came to a virtually imperceptible halt while noises almost too undefined to resemble music hovered in the cabin, and then a staircase lumbered out of the dark. The more substantial of the stewardesses opened the door to it, and her colleague waited on the tarmac to point the passengers towards the terminal. Slater made for the entrance so fast he hadn't time to notice any stars in the black sky, but when he stepped into the extensive bare white room he had to join a queue for the solitary operating immigration booth.

  He'd never seen anyone so apparently determined not just to do but to look like their job. The officer's long face was an all-purpose warning, and jowls resembling a bloodhound's made it even more morose. He questioned a woman at length before sending her on her way and beckoning the next passenger forward. He was still quizzing her when the man with the pro
minent stomach began to complain. "What's the holdup this time? Some of us want to get home."

  The immigration officer sent him an ominous look that only provoked him to raise his voice. "We're all Brits here, aren't we? Don't treat us like we've landed somewhere else."

  Before he'd finished speaking two men in identical sombre suits appeared from behind a partition beyond the booths and converged on the protester. "Please come with us," one said Slater couldn't tell which.

  "That's more like. You don't get anywhere if you don't kick up a row."

  One official led the way between two empty booths while the other followed close behind the passenger. When they reached the partition the man turned to the queue as if his belly was swinging him around. "You want to kick up as well," he told them. "Hang on, where are you taking—

  As his escorts ushered him behind the partition, each with a hand on one of his arms, his voice ceased. The only sounds were at the booth. At last the officer handed back the woman's passport and beckoned Slater with a gesture reminiscent of a fighter summoning an opponent. Slater tried offering a generalised smile along with his passport, but the overture might as well have been invisible. "Name?" the officer said.

  "Paul Slater. Derek Paul, if you want the whole thing."

  "Which are you?"

  "I was born Derek Paul. Not born it, obviously, but that's what they called me when they did. I left Derek behind a long time ago."

  "You've changed your name."

  "Not officially, no. It's still in there if you look."

  The officer opened the passport at the identification page and glanced away at last from Slater's face. "Date of birth."

  'Just had my birthday last week. Twenty-third of April." Since this apparently wasn't enough Slater added "Seventy-six."

  "Age."

  For a moment Slater didn't know, or at least had to remember the date. His answer only made way for another toneless question. "Place of birth."

  "Right here in Liverpool."

  "Citizenship."