The Collected Short Fiction

by Ramsey Campbell

  The book was bound in bright blue. The table-top was pastel green. The room was warm and sunny, if a little stifling. At the further end, behind a creamy desk, one of the staff was recounting his adventures in a branch library, how he'd been plagued by old ladies pleading for what he called 'cheap novelettes'; I could tell he looked upon all fiction as the poor relation of non-fiction, like all academic librarians —so much for our writing. You couldn't get further from a Lovecraft setting, but then this was the real thing.

  I turned back the cover; it slapped the table-top. Silence fell. A blade of sunlight moved along the floor, intensifying cracks. Then the pages of We Pass from View began to turn of their own accord.

  At first I thought it must be a draught. When you're sitting in a bright new library among books and people you don't think of the possibility of the supernatural. When the book exhibits traces of its readership (chewing-gum on one page, a dead fly on another) it's difficult to view it as haunted. And yet I couldn't take my eyes from those moving pages. They turned up the dedication ('to my faithful friends') and for a second, as though my vision were failing, I saw lines of some other print waver as if superimposed on the text. The page turned to the next, a blank leaf. I put out my hand, but I couldn't quite bring myself to touch the book. As I hesitated, lines of print appeared on the blank paper.

  HELP ME

  It stood out starkly on the paper, next to the fingerprint of some unclean reader. HELP ME. The letters held for several seconds: great black capitals which seemed to burn my eyeballs as I stared at them. And I was overwhelmed by the sense of an appeal, of someone trying desperately to contact me. Then they blurred and faded.

  FEEL SOMEONE READING MUST BE

  That flashed and disappeared; I read it in a second. The soom seemed airless; I was sweating, my ribs were closing on my lungs. I could see only the book open on the table and feel a terrible, tortuous strain, as of a mind in torment trying to communite its suffering.

  SHE HAD ME BURIED HER REVENGE TOLD HER CREMATE BITCH WOMEN CANT TRUST HELP ME

  That HELP ME was molten.

  FEEL THEM COMING SLOWLY BURROWING WANT ME TO SUFFER CANT MOVE GET ME OUT SAVE ME SOMEHWERE IN BRICHESTER HELP ME

  And the page, which had been lifted trembling, fell back. I waited. The room assembled round me in the merciless sunlight. The page remained blank. I don't know how long I waited. At last it occurred to me that the setting was wrong; back in my room I might be able to re-establish contact. I picked up the book—holding it rather gingerly; somehow I expected to feel it move, struggle between my fingers—and carried it to the desk and back into mundanity.

  'I'm afraid this is a reference copy only,' said the girl at the desk, flashing a smile and her engagement ring at me.

  I told her that it seemed to be their only copy and that there were various of my books in the fiction section and that I knew the chief librarian (well, I'd glimpsed him enthroned in his office as someone bore in his coffee the day I was invited by his secretary to sign my books). I could have told her that I felt the book throbbing in my hand. But she replied 'Well, personally I know we can trust you with it and if it were up to me I'd let you have it, but—' and much more of the I'm-only-doing-my-job speech. I set the book down on the desk in order to wave my hands about and she handed it to a girl who was replacing books on the shelves, belatedly asking 'You didn't want it again, did you?'

  I saw it carried away on the toppling pile; already the transcendental was being erased by the mundane; Franklyn would be filed carefully and forgotten. And that showed me what I must do. Of course I knew that it was Franklyn whose paragraphs I had been reading from beyond the grave, indeed, from in the grave. But I didn't know how to find him. The Brichester Herald had given neither his address nor where he was buried. 'Do you know anything about Roland Franklyn himself?' I enquired.

  'Yes, he used to come in quite often .. .' but she obviously didn't want to talk about it. 'Eric, don't let Mary do all the clearing,' she said to her companion at the desk, who was building a house of holiday postcards.

  'Franklyn, the little queer in the cloak?' he addressed me. 'You're not a friend of his, are you? Good job. Used to come in here with a whole crowd of them, the Twelve Disciples we used to call them. One of them came up to the desk one day because we were talking about his master and waved his great emaciated fist at us—you could see the drugs running out of his eyes. Why are you interested in that queer? Can't think what attracted them all, what with that moth-eaten cloak and that huge bald head—he'd probably pulled out the last few hairs to stick on that spidery beard. He had a wife too, I think—must've been before he came to the crossroads. What's the matter, Mary, you want me to rupture myself?'

  'Do you know where he lived?' I stayed him.

  'Bottom of Mercy Hill. House looked like Satan was in residence. You can't miss it.' He knocked down the house of cards and walked away, and so, feeling rather adrift, did I.

  I suppose I could have tried to find Franklyn today, but I wanted to crystallize the experience, to preserve it before it lost its form. I came home and set this down; I think it needs rewriting. Reality always does; I suppose we have to give it some form, even while paying the price of distortion. I keep thinking of Franklyn in his coffin, aware of something tunnelling toward him, unable to move a muscle but still capable of feelings. But it's dark now; I couldn't find him in the dark. Tomorrow, more. Goodbye, girl in the window.

  EU

  a fixed point: 15 July 1967

  DearJRG:

  Today has been disturbing.

  I knew Franklyn lived on Mercy Hill, but the Hill covers a lot of ground; I couldn't search it for his house. Finally I thought of the street directory—odd I didn't think of that before—and called at the library today to check. There was only one R. Franklyn on Mercy Hill. I did return to the Religion section but they couldn't find We Pass from View; I suppose they're classifying me as one of their regular cranks.

  I caught a bus to Mercy Hill. High sun, slight breeze; a bluebottle was patting its reflexion on the window, trying to escape. In the streets couples were taking their ice-creams for a walk; toward the Hill tennis-balls were punctuating their pauses, girls were leaping, bowls were clicking, and from the houses behind a procession was bearing trays of cakes to the pavilion. It was one of those days when if anything is to happen you have to make it happen; or for me to complete the next episode of my short story.

  I dismounted at the foot of the Hill and climbed the piled terraces. At one corner they were erecting a new school; workmen were sunning themselves on girders. Two levels further up I came into Dee Terrace, and at once saw Franklyn's house.

  It was unmistakeable. The personality which gave that house its final form was not the architect's". One chimney had been built into a frustum of white stone; an extra room had been added on the left, and its window had been blocked with newer brick; all the curtains, except those of one ground-floor window draped in green, were black. The house looked deserted, the more so for its garden, which could not have been tended in years; grass and weeds grew knee-high. I brushed through, imagining things crawling into my shoes. A bustling cloud of flies rose from something to one side. I reached the front door and saw the green curtain move; a face peered and drew back. I knocked. There was silence for a moment. Then inside a woman's voice screamed: 'Oh, lie down with you!' Before I could ponder on that, the door was open.

  The woman was certainly not in mourning—which was encouraging, for I hadn't known quite what approach to make. She wore a red dress, which looked pale against the crimson wallpaper of the hall. She was heavily, if inaccurately, made up, and her hair was rather arbitrarily bleached. She waited.

  'Would you be Mrs. Franklyn?'

  She looked suspicious, as if I'd intended a threat. 'Roland Franklyn was my husband,' she admitted ungraciously. 'Who are you?'

  Who indeed. It didn't seem as though I'd get far by declaring the supernatural nature of my quest. 'I'm a writer,' I compro
mised. 'I've read your husband's book several times. I was shocked to hear of his death,' I added to get it over with.

  'Well, you don't have to be. Come in, anyway,' she said. She looked round the hall and grimaced. 'Look at this. Would you live with this? Not likely. Getting them in the right mood—half of them didn't know what they were being got in the mood for. Nice boys, some of them, to begin with.' She kicked the crimson wall and ushered me into a room on the right.

  I wasn't prepared—I couldn't have been. A ground-floor room with wardrobe, dressing-table complete with cob-webbed mirror, a bed beneath the window, piles of women's magazines, some thick with dust, and a cat chained to the leg of a chair in the middle of the floor; it wasn't a sense of evil or fear that choked me, it was a sense of something locked away, forgotten and gone bad. The cat padded up to meet me; its chain gave it freedom of the room, but it couldn't quite reach the door.

  'Pussy likes you,' said Mrs Franklyn, closing the door and sinking into a chair amid a haze of dust; her dress drew up her thighs, but she didn't pull it down. 'That could be a good sign, but don't they say only effeminate men can make friends with cats? Why are you looking at me like that?' I hadn't realized I was looking like anything in particular; I was carrying the cat, chain and all, to the chair I took opposite her. 'Don't like the chain, is that it? But me and my cat, we're all we've got—I'm not letting her out so they can carry her off and sacrifice her. They would, you know, on their nights. I take her in the garden, that's all; wouldn't trust them further than that.' I remembered the flies. 'What do you write?' she demanded.

  In this context it seemed a little pale to say 'Stories of the supernatural.'

  'Stories, eh? Yes, we all like stories,' she mused. 'Anything's better than the real thing. Do you want some tea? I'm afraid that's about all I have to offer.'

  'It's all right, thank you,' I refused; I could see cracked cups in the kitchen behind her head. She caught my eye; she was always doing that, damn her.

  'Oh, I can't blame you for thinking,' she said. 'But it gets you down after a while. After he took the house over—you didn't know that, did you?—yes, he did, Re married me and then he encroached on every room, keeping things I wouldn't touch all over the house, until I took this room and the kitchen and I told him if you try anything in my rooms I'll kill you!' She thumped the chair-arm and dust flew out.

  'But why did you put up with it?' I had to ask.

  'Why? Because I married him!' The cat fled, knocked over a pile of magazines, sneezed and jumped back; she reeled it in and fondled it. 'Now, pussy's not scared of mummy,' she soothed and put it down. It began to scratch at her shoe. 'Lie down with you, for God's sake,' she hissed. It came to me for comfort.

  'When I married him,' she returned to me, 'he promised I'd have all this house to entertain, to do all the things I never could. I believed him. Then I found out how he really was. So I waited. Every day I wished him dead, so I'd have my house, what was left of my life. I haven't spoken to him for years, did you know that?—hardly even seen him. I used to leave his meals outside his room on a tray; if he didn't eat them that was up to him. But when he didn't touch them for three days I went into his room. No, I didn't go in—all those filthy statues and lights and books—but I could see he wasn't there. He was in his stupid little printing press room. He was dead all right. There was a book—he must have been going to copy something—but I didn't read it; the way his face looked was enough. I threw it in the bin. Didn't touch him, though—oh, no, they're not going to say I killed him after all the years I've suffered.'

  'But how did you stand it?' Of course the answer was— she didn't.

  'Oh, he made me long ago. We met when we were students—I was impressionable then, I thought he was a good man, the best—and later we got married. I ought to have known; there was a rumor he'd been expelled from the University even then, but when he swore he hadn't I trusted him. Then his parents died and left him this house and we got married. My husband—' Her face contorted as if she'd put her hand in something foul. 'He took me down to Temp-hill and made me watch those things dancing on the graves. I didn't want to but he said it was for a book he was writing. He held my hand, then. And later we went down the steps below Glotton—oh, you may write, but you'd never dare to write about ... I don't want to think about it. But it hardened me. It made me tough when he began his mummery back here, trying to stop me destroying all his muck...'

  That sounded like a cue. 'If you haven't thrown away all his books do you think I could look them over? Purely from a writer's viewpoint,' I tacked on, why I'm not sure.

  'But you're a nice young man, you don't want to become another of his,' she said, and sat down on the bed; her dress rose again like a curtain. She began to clear piles of magazines festooned with dust away from the bed; atop one was a vase of dandelions—'Just a touch of color, what's it matter what they are, no-one ever comes,' she explained, though the petals had curled and dulled in the flecked light. 'Did you ever write from experience? How could you, you've never had what I'd had to put up with. The things he's doing even now to hinder me— Only yesterday I picked up one of his books to throw it out and it went sticky and soft things started pushing between my fingers—God!' She wiped her hands down her dress. 'I used to lie awake listening to him going to the bathroom and wishing he was dead— and last night I heard him flopping round his room, beating on the walls. And this morning I woke early, I thought the sun was coming up—but it was his face floating over the rooftops ... It came to the windows, filled them, it followed me from room to room, mouthing at me—God! You'd never write about it, you'd never write about anything again. But he can't get me down, and he knows it. He was always scared of me. That's why he kept me here, to keep me quiet. But he can't have left many of his little tricks behind him. He knows I'll win. But you don't want to get mixed up with the wrong things. You're a nice young man.'

  She swung her legs up and lay back on the pillow, where I could see imprints of hair-dye.

  For some time now I'd had the impression that my short story was taking over its own writing; now we seemed to be building to a climax I hadn't foreseen. I had to be direct. 'Your husband was buried, wasn't he?' I asked. 'Didn't he want to be cremated?'

  She seemed to take an age to sit up; her eyes were on me all the while. 'How did you know that?' she demanded softly. 'You gave yourself away there, didn't you? You are one of his! I knew it before you got to the door! Yes, he's buried, where you all should be. Go on, go up and be with him, I'm sure he'd like you to be. He must be able to feel them coming by now—I hope he can. Yes, he was always on about his Eihort, but he doesn't like it when they come for him. You go and look after him, you—'

  I didn't know what she might be capable of; I retreated hastily, seeing her watching in the mirror and sneering when she caught my eye. Somehow I dislodged a heap of magazines and buried the cat, which fought its way out and tangled my feet in its chain. 'Don't you touch my cat!' she screamed. 'She's worth a million of you! What is it, darling, come to mummy—' and I escaped, running down the hall, an inflamed intestine, and through the grass, careless of what I might tread in unseen.

  Suddenly I was on solid pavement. Down the street an ice-cream van was playing Greensleeves. This time the intrusion of mundanity didn't seem so tasteless. I walked home.

  By the time I reached the typewriter I'd glimpsed the paradox. Even the supernatural-story writer who believes what he writes (and I'm not saying I don't) isn't prepared for an actual confrontation. Quite the reverse, for every time he fabricates the supernatural in a story (unless based on experience) he clinches his skepticism; he knows such things can't be, because he wrote them. Thus for him a confrontation would be doubly upsetting. It would at least force him to re-think all his works. Is this desirable? From the self-completion angle I suppose it is. At any rate, I'm going. 'Go up and be with him' she said—it must be the cemetery on Mercy Hill.

  Tomorrow.

  EU

  (Undated, unadd
ressed)

  I don't know what (Foregoing deleted, does not appear on carbon; page apparently withdrawn, carbon attached, reinserted into typewriter) Nonsense. Of course I can write about it. The very fact that I can write proves that I'm still functioning.

  I took the bus up Mercy Hill at the height of the day. Few things moved; flies and pedestrians crawled, and the workmen climbed sluggishly on the skeletal school. At the intersection with Dee Terrace I saw the house; it seemed swallowed up by grass, forever isolated from its surroundings.

  I want to get this over. The caretaker directed me down an avenue, and when I reached—No. Description of graveyard. Why write as if this were my last page? Willows, their branches glowing stippled curves, were spaced carefully toward the Hill out of which the cemetery was carved; in the Hill itself were catacombs, black behind ivy or railings, and above stood the hospital, a grey reminder of hope or despair. What awful iron juxtaposed hospital and graveyard? The avenues were guarded by broken-nosed angels yearning heavenward; one showed a leprous patch where her left eye and cheek had sloughed away. Urns stood here and there like empty glasses at a sick-bed, and a young woman was kneeling with a wreath at a shining memorial; I wonder how long before she shakes him off? And then, toward the catacombs, I saw the new headstone and its bed of pebbles. They gleamed behind the high sun. I read Franklyn's name and the framing dates, and waited.

  It eventually occurred to me that I didn't quite know what I was waiting for; not in that sunlight. Yet the air had hushed. I paced around the grave, and the pebbles shifted. My shadow had moved them. I'm still capable of an anticlimax! My God. I thought: Franklyn is alive down there—or perhaps no longer. Then I saw a possibility. I looked back down the perspective. The young mourner was passing through the gates. I lay down on the grass and put my ear to the pebbles. They ground together, then there was nothing. I felt vilely uncomfortable. Suddenly I realized that I was visible all the way down the avenue to the gates. I went hot all over and scrambled to my feet.