The Collected Short Fiction

by Ramsey Campbell

  He used the frilly toilet in the equally pink bathroom and lingered until his mother asked if he was all right. He was trying to stay clear of the argument he could just hear through the salmon carpet. As he ventured downstairs his grandmother pounced on some remark so muted it was almost silent. “You do better, then. Let’s see you cook.”

  He could smell the subject of the disagreement. Once he’d finished setting the table from the tray with which his grandfather sent him out of the kitchen, he and his mother saw it too: a casserole encrusted with gravy and containing a shrivelled lump of beef. Potatoes roasted close to impenetrability came with it, and green beans from which someone had tried to scrape the worst of the charring. “It’s not as bad as it looks, is it?” David’s grandmother said through her first mouthful. “I expect it’s like having a barbecue, Davy.”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed, never having had one.

  “They’ve no idea, these men, have they, Jane? They don’t have to keep dinner waiting for people. I expect your hubby’s the same.”

  “Was, but can we not talk about him?”

  “He’s learned his lesson, then. No call to make that face at me, Tom. I’m only saying Davy’s father – Oh, you’ve split up, Jane, haven’t you. Sorry about my big fat trap. Sorry Davy too.”

  “Just eat what you want,” his grandfather advised him, “and then you’d best be scampering off to bed so Santa can make his deliveries.”

  “We all want to be tucked up before he’s on the move,” said his grandmother before remembering to smile.

  Santa had gone away like David’s father, and David was too old to miss either of them. He managed to breach the carapace of a second potato and chewed several forkfuls of dried-up beef, but the burned remains of beans defeated him. All the same, he thanked his grandmother as he stood up. “There’s a good boy,” she said rather too loudly, as if interceding with someone on his behalf. “Do your best to go to sleep.”

  That sounded like an inexplicit warning, and was one of the elements that kept him awake in his bedroom, which was no larger than his room in the flat he’d moved to with his mother. Despite their heaviness, the curtains admitted a repetitive flicker from the letters ERR above the window, and a buzz that suggested an insect was hovering over the bed. He could just hear voices downstairs, which gave him the impression that they didn’t want him to know what they were saying. He was most troubled by a hollow creaking that reminded him of someone in a rocking chair, but overhead. The Santa figure must be swaying in the wind, not doing its best to heave itself free. David was too old for stories: while real ones didn’t always stay true, that wasn’t an excuse to make any up. Still, he was glad to hear his mother and her parents coming upstairs at last, lowering their voices to compensate. He heard doors shutting for the night, and then a nervous question from his grandmother through the wall between their rooms. “What’s he doing? Is he loose?”

  “If he falls, he falls,” his grandfather said barely audibly, “and good riddance to him if he’s getting on your nerves. For pity’s sake come to bed.”

  David tried not to find this more disturbing than the notion that his parents had shared one. Rather than hear the mattress sag under the weight his grandmother had put on, he tugged the quilt over his head. His grasp must have slackened when he drifted off to sleep, because he was roused by a voice. It was outside the house but too close to the window.

  It was his grandfather’s. David was disconcerted by the notion that the old man had clambered onto the roof until he realised his grandfather was calling out of the adjacent window. “What do you think you’re doing, Dora? Come in before you catch your death.”

  “I’m seeing he’s stayed where he’s meant to be,” David’s grandmother responded from below. “Yes, you know I’m talking about you, don’t you. Never mind pretending you didn’t nod.”

  “Get in for the Lord’s sake,” his grandfather urged, underlining his words with a rumble of the sash. David heard him pad across the room and as rapidly if more stealthily down the stairs. A bated argument grew increasingly stifled as it ascended to the bedroom. David had refrained from looking out of the window for fear of embarrassing his grandparents, but now he was nervous that his mother would be drawn to find out what was happening. He mustn’t go to her; he had to be a man, as she kept telling him, and not one like his father, who ran off to women because there was so little to him. In time the muttering beyond the wall subsided, and David was alone with the insistence of electricity and the restlessness on the roof.

  When he opened his eyes the curtains had acquired a hem of daylight. It was Christmas Day. Last year he’d run downstairs to handle all the packages addressed to him under the tree and guess at their contents, but now he was wary of encountering his grandparents by himself in case he betrayed he was concealing their secret. As he lay hoping that his grandmother had slept off her condition, he heard his mother in the kitchen. “Let me make breakfast, Mummy. It can be a little extra present for you.”

  He didn’t venture down until she called him. “Here’s the Christmas boy,” his grandmother shouted as if he was responsible for the occasion, and dealt him such a hug that he struggled within himself. “Eat up or you won’t grow.”

  Her onslaught had dislodged a taste of last night’s food. He did his best to bury it under his breakfast, then volunteered to wash up the plates and utensils and dry them as well. Before he finished she was crying “Hurry up so we can see what Santa’s brought. I’m as excited as you, Davy.”

  He hoped she was only making these remarks on his behalf, not somehow growing younger than he was. In the front room his grandfather distributed the presents while the bulbs on the tree flashed patterns that made David think of secret messages. His grandparents had wrapped him up puzzle books and tales of heroic boys, his mother’s gifts to him were games for his home computer. “Thank you,” he said, sometimes dutifully.

  It was the last computer game that prompted his grandmother to ask “Who are you thanking?” At once, as if she feared she’d spoiled the day for him, she added “I expect he’s listening.”

  “Nobody’s listening,” his grandfather objected. “Nobody’s there.”

  “Don’t say things like that, Tom, not in front of Davy.”

  “That isn’t necessary, Mummy. You know the truth, don’t you, David? Tell your grandmother.”

  “Santa’s just a fairy tale,” David said, although it felt like robbing a younger child of an illusion. “Really people have to save up to buy presents.”

  “He had to know when we’ve so much less coming in this Christmas,” said his mother. “You see how good he’s being. I believe he’s taken it better than I did.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset you, Davy.”

  “You didn’t,” David said, not least because his grandmother’s eyes looked dangerously moist. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  Her face was already quivering as if there was too much of it to hold still. When she shook her head her cheeks wobbled like a whitish rubber mask that was about to fall loose. He didn’t know whether she meant to answer him or had strayed onto another subject as she peered towards the window. “There’s nothing to him at all then, is there? He’s just an empty old shell. Can’t we get him down now?”

  “Better wait till the new year,” David’s grandfather said, and with sudden bitterness “We don’t want any more bad luck.”

  Her faded sunken armchair creaked with relief as she levered herself to her feet. “Where are you going?” her husband protested and limped after her, out of the front door. He murmured at her while she stared up at the roof. At least she didn’t shout, but she began to talk not much less quietly as she returned to the house. “I don’t like him moving about with nothing inside him,” she said before she appeared to recollect David’s presence. “Maybe he’s like one of those beans with a worm inside, Davy, that used to jig about all the time.”

  While David didn’t understand and was unsure he wanted t
o, his mother’s hasty intervention wasn’t reassuring either. “Shall we play some games? What would you like to play, Mummy?”

  “What do you call it, Lollopy. The one with all the little houses. Too little for any big fat things to climb on. Lollopy.”

  “Monopoly.”

  “Lollopy,” David’s grandmother maintained, only to continue “I don’t want to play that. Too many sums. What’s your favourite, Davy?”

  Monopoly was, but he didn’t want to add to all the tensions that he sensed rather than comprehended. “Whatever yours is.”

  “Ludo,” she cried and clapped her hands. “I’d play it every Sunday with your granny and grandpa when I was Davy’s age, Jane.”

  He wondered if she wasn’t just remembering but behaving as she used to. She pleaded to be allowed to move her counters whenever she failed to throw a six, and kept trying to move more than she threw. David would have let her win, but his grandfather persisted in reminding her that she had to cast the precise amount to guide her counters home. After several games in which his grandmother squinted with increasingly less comical suspicion at her opponents’ moves, David’s mother said “Who’d like to go out for a walk?”

  Apparently everyone did, which meant they couldn’t go fast or far. David felt out of place compared with the boys he saw riding their Christmas bicycles or brandishing their Christmas weapons. Beneath a sky frosty with cloud, all the decorations in the duplicated streets looked deadened by the pale sunlight, though they were still among the very few elements that distinguished one squat boxy house from another. “They’re not as good as ours, are they?” his grandmother kept remarking when she wasn’t frowning at the roofs. “He’s not there either,” he heard her mutter more than once, and as her house came in sight “See, he didn’t follow us. We’d have heard him.”

  She was saying that nothing had moved or could move, David tried to think, but he was nervous of returning to the house. The preparation of Christmas dinner proved to be reason enough. “Too many women in this kitchen,” his mother was told when she offered to help, but his grandmother had to be reminded to turn the oven on, and she made to take the turkey out too soon more than once. Between these incidents she disagreed with her husband and her daughter about various memories of theirs while David tried to stay low in a book of mazes he had to trace with a pencil. At dinner he could tell that his mother was willing him to clean his plate so as not to distress his grandmother. He did his best, and struggled to ignore pangs of indigestion as he washed up, and then as his grandmother kept talking about if not to every television programme her husband put on. “Not very Christmassy,” she commented on all of them, and followed the remark with at least a glance towards the curtained window. Waiting for her to say worse, and his impression that his mother and grandfather were too, kept clenching David’s stomach well before his mother declared “I think it’s time someone was in bed.”

  As his grandmother’s lips searched for an expression he wondered if she assumed that her daughter meant her. “I’m going,” he said and had to be called back to be hugged and kissed and wished happy Christmas thrice.

  He used the toilet, having pulled the chain to cover up his noises, and huddled in bed. He had a sense of hiding behind the scenes, the way he’d waited offstage at school to perform a line about Jesus last year, when his parents had held hands at the sight of him. The flickers and the buzzing that the bedroom curtains failed to exclude could have been stage effects, while over the mumbling of the television downstairs he heard sounds of imminent drama. At least there was no creaking on the roof. He did his best to remember last Christmas as a sharp stale taste of this one continued its antics inside him, until the memories blurred into the beginnings of a dream and let him sleep.

  Movements above his head wakened him. Something soft but determined was groping at the window – a wind so vigorous that its onslaughts made the light from the sign flare like a fire someone was breathing on. The wind must be swinging the bulbs closer to his window. He hadn’t time to wonder how dangerous that might be, because the creaking overhead was different: more prolonged, more purposeful. He was mostly nervous that his grandmother would hear, but there was no sign of awareness in the next room, and silence downstairs. He pressed the quilt around his ears, and then he heard sounds too loud for it to fend off – a hollow slithering followed by a thump at the window, and another. Whatever was outside seemed eager to break the glass.

  David scrambled onto all fours and backed away until the quilt slipped off his body, but then he had to reach out to part the curtains at arms’ length. He might have screamed if a taste hadn’t choked him. Two eyes as dead as pebbles were level with his. They didn’t blink, but sputtered as if they were trying to come to a kind of life, as did the rest of the swollen face. Worse still, the nose and mouth surrounded by a dirty whitish fungus of beard were above the eyes. The inversion lent the unnecessarily crimson lips a clown’s ambiguous grimace.

  The mask dealt the window another blundering thump before a savage gust of wind seized the puffed-up figure. As the face sailed away from the glass, it was extinguished as though the wind had blown it out. David heard wires rip loose and saw the shape fly like a greyish vaguely human balloon over the garden wall to land on its back in the road.

  It sounded as if someone had thrown away a used plastic bottle or an empty hamburger carton. Was the noise enough to bring his grandmother to her window? He wasn’t sure if he would prefer not to be alone to see the grinning object flounder and begin to edge towards the house. As it twitched several inches he regretted ever having tipped an insect over to watch it struggle on its back. Then another squall of wind took possession of the dim figure, sweeping it leftwards out of sight along the middle of the road. David heard a car speed across an intersection, its progress hardly interrupted by a hollow thump and a crunch that made him think of a beetle crushed underfoot.

  Once the engine dwindled into silence, nothing moved on the roads except the wind. David let the curtains fall together and slipped under the quilt. The drama had ended, even if some of its lighting effects were still operating outside the window. He didn’t dream, and wakened late, remembering at once that there was nothing on the roof to worry his grandmother. Only how would she react to the absence?

  He stole to the bathroom and then retreated to his bedroom. The muffled conversations downstairs felt like a pretence that all was well until his grandmother called “What are you doing up there?”

  She meant David. He knew that when she warned him that his breakfast would go cold. She sounded untroubled, but for how long? “Eat up all the lovely food your mother’s made,” she cried, and he complied for fear of letting her suspect he was nervous, even when his stomach threatened to throw his efforts back at him. As he downed the last mouthful she said “I do believe that’s the biggest breakfast I’ve ever had in my life. I think we all need a walk.”

  David swallowed too soon in order to blurt “I’ve got to wash up.”

  “What a good boy he is to his poor old granny. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you. We won’t run away and leave you,” she said and stared at her husband for sighing.

  David took all the time he could over each plate and utensil. He was considering feigning illness if that would keep his grandmother inside the house when he saw the door at the end of the back garden start to shake as if someone was fumbling at it. The grass shivered too, and he would have except for seeing why it did. “It’ll be too windy to go for a walk,” he told his grandmother. “It’s like Grandad said, you’ll catch cold.”

  His mouth stayed open as he realised his mistake, but that wasn’t the connection she made. “How windy is it?” she said, standing up with a groan to tramp along the hall. “What’s it going to do to that empty old thing?”

  David couldn’t look away from the quivering expanse of grass while he heard her open the front door and step onto the path. His shoulders rose as if he fancied they could block his ears, but even sticking his f
ingers in mightn’t have deafened him to her cry. “He’s got down. Where’s he hidden himself?”

  David turned to find his mother rubbing her forehead as though to erase her thoughts. His grandfather had lifted his hands towards his wife, but they drooped beneath an invisible weight. David’s grandmother was pivoting around and around on the path, and David was reminded of ballet classes until he saw her dismayed face. He felt that all the adults were performing, as adults so often seemed compelled to do, and that he ought to stop them if he could. “It fell down,” he called. “It blew away.”

  His grandmother pirouetted to a clumsy halt and peered along the hall at him. “Why didn’t you say? What are you trying to do?”

  “Don’t stand out there, Dora,” his grandfather protested. “You can see he only wants—”

  “Never mind what Davy wants. It can be what I want for a change. It’s meant to be my Christmas too. Where is he, Davy? Show me if you think you know so much.”

  Her voice was growing louder and more petulant. David felt as if he’d been given the job of rescuing his mother and his grandfather from further embarrassment or argument. He dodged past them and the stranded sleigh to run to the end of the path. “It went along there,” he said, pointing. “A car ran it over.”

  “You didn’t say that before. Are you just saying so I won’t be frightened?”

  Until that moment he hadn’t grasped how much she was. He strained his gaze at the intersection, but it looked as deserted as the rest of the street. “Show me where,” she urged.

  Might there be some trace? David was beginning to wish he hadn’t spoken. He couldn’t use her pace as an excuse for delay; she was waddling so fast to the intersection that her entire body wobbled. He ran into the middle of the crossroads, but there was no sign of last night’s accident. He was even more disconcerted to realise that she was so frightened she hadn’t even warned him to be careful on the road. He straightened up and swung around to look for fragments, and saw the remains heaped at the foot of a garden wall.