The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror

by Ramsey Campbell

  Ramsey Campbell

  The Doll Who Ate His Mother

  First published in 1976

  Afterword published in 1983

  for Kirby, a good agent; an even better friend

  Acknowledgments

  A great many people helped me write this book. I should especially like to thank:

  Mr. McGrath of the Liverpool City Morgue, who was kind enough to describe the formalities to me

  the Liverpool Coroner’s Court and its officials for their patience in answering my questions

  the staff of Liverpool Public Libraries, for finding out all manner of things for me, and their cataloguing department for cataloguing Glimpses of Absolute Power for me

  the assembled writers, wizards of wine, culinary genies, bibliophiles, and croquet champions of LiG: particularly Tony and Cherry, for their advice on car accidents

  my friends among the Liverpool cinema managers, for giving me glimpses of the job: especially Tony McCarthy, for his insights into suburban cinema management

  and most of all my wife, Jenny, for sharing the birth pangs of The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

  Thursday,

  July 24

  There were no taxis.

  Clare Frayn stumped back and forth on Catharine Street, shivering. The July night was mild, the entire street was orange as embers beneath the sodium streetlamps, yet she was shivering. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock, good God. No wonder she was cold; her body was at its lowest ebb. Even Rob had never kept her up so late before. In a minute she’d chance the brakes in Ringo the Reliant and drive him home.

  He was standing at the corner of Catharine Street and Canning Street, a block away, leaning his long body into the road whenever a distant motor whirred. Beside him traffic lights blinked emptily; beyond him glowed the will-o’-the-wisp of a disordered telephone box. Around them both, in the Georgian terraces of Liverpool 8, poets and artists slept—half of them drunk and snoring, no doubt, Clare thought. Rob looked back at her over his shoulder and smiled, encouraging, embarrassed. Then he leaned out again.

  Who else would have such a fool for a brother, Clare thought with a kind of irritable resigned affection. Stop leaning out, for God’s sake. There are no taxis. No sound at all, except for a ship’s low tone drifting sleepily up the Mersey from the sea. But there was: the sound of an engine; the unmistakable sound of a taxi labouring up Myrtle Street beyond the curve, beyond the Children’s Hospital. She began to run, cursing her short legs, slapping basement railings furiously with her hand, for speed. She reached the curve as the vehicle did, driving down the side street opposite, not up the hill at all. It was a lorry carrying its baby on its back.

  When she plodded back as far as the traffic lights, Rob said, “I’m sorry I’ve kept you up so late.”

  “You mean you’ve just noticed? God, Rob, you’re worse—”

  “Than all the kids in your class put together. I know. But I really did need to talk, and there’s nobody else I can talk to.”

  Except your wife, she thought. But of course it had been Dorothy he had wanted to talk about, as usual. “It’s all right,” Clare said. “You know I don’t mind really.” She was shivering again; her eyes felt as if they’d been fitted with thick lenses a couple of sizes too large. “There’s nothing I have to get up for later, anyway,” she said.

  He saw her shivering. He stooped and put his arm about her shoulders, rubbing them. From nowhere a car came roaring up Canning Street, hooting at Rob as its occupants did, at his pigtail and leather waistcoat and checked trousers and high gold-painted boots. “I’d walk if I could,” he told her.

  “I know that. Don’t worry.” He hadn’t been dressed half so bizarrely the night he’d walked home along Princes Avenue, when the youths had beaten him up and left him on the central reservation of the dual carriageway, among the trees. “But I don’t think we’re going to find a taxi,” Clare said.

  “If I could phone Dorothy I’d stay. But she might be worrying.”

  “She’s probably fast asleep in bed.” Unless she’s a fool.

  “She wasn’t last time. That was when we had the row about having children, remember, I told you. She wouldn’t go to bed until I said we’d try next year. I’m sure she’ll still be up.”

  No man would keep me up like that, Clare vowed. “I don’t see what I can do,” she said.

  “Couldn’t you drive me home? There won’t be any traffic.”

  “I don’t want to drive until the garage has looked at the brakes.”

  They both heard the taxi. It was whirring purposefully toward them, so loudly that they strained their eyes at the empty street. Its sound had filled the street before it turned, tantalizingly, somewhere out of sight. “Oh Christ,” Rob said, swaying rapidly and unhappily from one foot to the other, tick tock.

  Clare gazed at him. He looked exactly like a child who was frantic to pee. All at once she realized that he wasn’t anxious to get back to win the argument with Dorothy, which he’d abandoned along with his dinner. He wanted to go home because he was worried about Dorothy, because he loved her. She shook her head, sighing. Some things about him she would never understand.

  “Come on,” she said suddenly. “I suppose if I drive slowly we’ll be all right.”

  They made for Blackburne Terrace and Clare’s car. Several babies were walking across the roofs of the garages opposite, crying. When Clare looked again they were cats. Rob said, “I still don’t understand how Dorothy can stand those people.”

  Don’t go through that again, Clare thought, for God’s sake! She’d already heard once how Dorothy felt he was losing her all her friends. He’d arrived at midnight but had waited until one o’clock to tell her he was famished, to say nothing of his doubts about his marriage, whether he’d married Dorothy just for sex, how they’d run out of things to talk about, how working for the same people as your wife meant you were together too much of the time. To Clare, all this had sounded like one of his Radio Merseyside record shows without the records, hours of sheer nervous energy, uncontrollable words. When he’d begun to mention taxis, she’d thought he had run down at last, but here were Dorothy’s friends again. “Perhaps you should ask her why she likes them,” Clare said, hurrying toward Ringo the three-wheeler.

  “Oh, she went through all that. They aren’t reasons that make any sense to me. I can’t understand how she could have friends like that. I’ve told her before I don’t like them. They’re just a load of boring middle-class shit.”

  “Keep that for your record shows. You’re never going to convince me you’re working-class.” In the grainy light beyond the streetlamps she squinted at the car door, fumbling with the key; her eyes prickled. “Not with parents who’ve retired to a spa town,” she said.

  “That doesn’t make me any class, love. Don’t try to throw me in that shit.” He sounded as he did on his late-night programme, “The Working Class Hero Show”: aggressive, dogmatic, secretly unsure. “You ought to meet her friends,” he said. “You ought to see them, walking around the flat and looking as if this is all you can expect from a secretary married to a deejay.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t you who think that?”

  He slid into the front seat, packing as much of his folded legs as he could beneath the dashboard; then he turned to gaze at her. “No more so than you do,” he said.

  What, Clare despise Dorothy? Just for putting up with Rob? Dorothy, who’d married him out of admiration for his drive and his refusal to conform, who suffered him quietly most of the time now, perhaps because she knew that if she didn’t contain herself he’d simply flee to Clare?
Yes, Clare thought, she despised her a little. Dorothy did herself no good by keeping quiet. And all that was called love, good God.

  Rob was nodding triumphantly. “I know you,” he said. “I know what it means if you’re more polite to someone when you get to know them better. It means you can’t stand them.”

  “Maybe you should feel responsible for reducing her to that,” Clare said sharply. “Put on your seat belt.”

  “We aren’t going far. I don’t need it with you driving.”

  “No doubt you’ll do exactly as you please.” She was determined that he wouldn’t make her angry. She groped for the clasp of her seat belt.

  “I know I’m irresponsible. Don’t you think I know?” He’d reached another monologue, as if he’d slipped it out of a rack. “But what can I do? By the time I knew myself it was too late. Father and Mother put down everything I was, you know that. That wasn’t likely to give me a sense of responsibility, was it? But there you are. I’m not even taking responsibility for what I am. That’s what I’m like. Self-pitying, as well. You can hear that, can’t you?”

  He was retreating deeper and deeper into a maze of himself. He frightened her when he was like this; he became, in the fullest sense, beyond her. He’d had these moods more often since he’d begun smoking pot habitually. She shivered as she grasped the wheel. She must get him home quickly. She couldn’t handle him in this mood, not at this hour. The car dragged its headlights over the terrace; on the porch the shadows of the columns crept out from behind their stones and across the front doors, spreading.

  She tested the brakes as the car emerged between the square pillars onto Blackburne Place. “He’s still not right,” she said.

  “Look, I’ll stay if you like. I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  God forbid, she thought. She wanted at least a little sleep. “Let’s get you home,” she said.

  She inched the car out onto Catharine Street, grateful for the lack of traffic. The headlights gleamed on the sign of a jujitsu club in a Georgian basement, then were swallowed by the sodium glow. The car dawdled toward the traffic lights, but their green held. Clare depressed the accelerator warily. Once they’d crossed the five-way intersection at Upper Parliament Street, they would be safe.

  Rob was silent now. In a way, that disturbed her more. She imagined him trapped deep in himself, with no way out, not even words. She looked sideways at him; beyond him, houses streamed by, blurred orange; the columns of a Greek Ionic porch had sprouted tubular metal scaffolding. “Soon be home now,” she said, and his lips twitched.

  Upper Parliament Street was deserted, dilapidated; its terraces soon gave way to razed waste. The green light ushered her across, and she accelerated toward Princes Avenue, past the drive-in bank and the redbrick domed Byzantine church and the Cypriot fish-and-chip shop. Ahead, at the near end of the reservation which divided the dual carriageway, William Huskisson the merchant stood on a pedestal, clutching his robe glumly about him, against exposure; beneath the sodium light he retained a faint dull-green gleam, like verdigris. Clare drove by, into the flood of orange light.

  The light covered everything, thick as paint. It sank oppressively into the car, filling it with shadows that moved like submarine vegetation as the lamps sailed repetitively by. Clare resisted an urge to drive faster, to be free of the light, but she felt it clinging stickily to her. She squirmed. She shouldn’t have driven without sleep, after all.

  The light soaked the three-storey Georgian houses behind their stone walls and bulging orange hedges. Pools of it lay on the roofs of the line of cars which barred Clare from the kerbside lane. Ahead, along the edge of the central reservation, trees and tree-coloured lamp standards bunched, pulling lingeringly apart as they approached. Around the high lamps, papery orange leaves were tangled in bright branches like orange web. Soon be there now, Clare told herself. She might ask to sleep on the couch at Rob and Dorothy’s. At the ends of pedestrian crossings, globes on poles pulsed: orange, orange, orange.

  “Dorothy and I want you to come to dinner next week,” Rob said. “We haven’t seen you for nearly a fortnight.”

  A tree, a tree, a lamp standard, a gap in the reservation. She glanced at Rob’s orange face, staring solemnly at her. He’d found his way out of himself, and the last few hours might as well not have happened. “Rob, you’re hopeless,” she said, giggling uncontrollably. “You really are.”

  He frowned at her, even more solemn. Behind his head, Christ leapt from the wall of a church, tattered arms clawing high, fleshless ribs blackened by the sodium light. She started and turned back to the road, still snorting. A lamp standard, a thick tree. A man stepping straight into the path of the car.

  She had time to stop. He was yards and yards away. But the brakes weren’t responding, the car wasn’t slowing safely. The man turned and saw the car; he clapped his hand over most of his face in a theatrical gesture of shock, and began to dither between the two empty lanes. The kerbside lane was occupied. There wasn’t room for Clare to be sure of passing him.

  Rob stared at his sister, apparently driving straight at the man. “Oh Christ,” he said, and tried to pull the wheel over; the car yawed wildly. “Get off, you fool!” she screamed, turning her whole body to regain possession of the wheel. She swerved the car toward the central reservation. There ought to be room for her to steer between the trees. Her short legs had slipped from the brake. She trod hard on the pedal, but it was the accelerator.

  She heard Rob clawing at the door release, in panic. The car bumped over the kerb of the reservation, toward a lamp standard. She dug her heel into the brake pedal, dragging at the wheel. The swerve threw the door open. The door struck the lamp standard at once, and chopped shut again with a strange, unfamiliar sound, knocking Rob back into his seat. She heard the window shatter.

  She was still fighting the wheel as the car crunched across the gravel, toward the other carriageway, toward a passing car, too fast. She slewed the car round, and its left rear wheel thumped a tree. The car halted there at the edge of the kerb, shuddering.

  There was silence, filled by the sound of Clare’s blood in her ears. Blood thumped in her limbs; her throat was full of the threat of nausea. Rob lay silent, slumped against the door, his head leaning out of the shattered window, his shoulder pressed against the edge of the door. Someone was staring in at him: the driver of the passing car. No, he couldn’t be the driver, because now he was running away toward the lamp standard, before Clare could see his face. Here came the driver, hurrying back from his car as she fumbled slowly, abstractedly, with the clasp of her seat belt.

  He was thick-set, red-faced; he was like the man who’d owned the butcher’s shop when she was a little girl. He looked angry and bewildered, as if he’d just been awoken rudely. “The man must be mad,” he said. For a moment she thought he meant Rob. “Should be locked up. Walking in front of you like that. Are you all right? Look, there he goes,” and in her mirror someone was running away up a side street, hunched over as if carrying a prize.

  “My brother,” she said, searching for words. “Needs help.”

  He went round to Rob’s side of the car, then hurried back, paler. “I’ll get help,” he said. “Don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t touch him.”

  Curtains blinked warily in the by standing houses; one house lit up its six flats, one by one. A third-floor window opened. “Do you need an ambulance?” a man shouted down.

  “Quickly, yes!” the driver shouted. He turned back to Clare. “I’ll get that swine,” he said, furious again. “Running off like that,” and he ran toward the side street, amazingly fast for his build.

  Clare managed to unclasp her seat belt. Her blood was slowing; the threat of nausea seemed to have passed. Rob still lay against the door. She reached toward him, then drew back: mustn’t touch. She was surprised by how calm she felt. But there was nothing she could do, after all: Rob was unconscious, she couldn’t comfort him, she must wait for the ambulance. She climbed out of the car a
nd almost fell into the road; her legs were unstrung. She propped herself against the side of the car. She was still calm. She only wished daylight would hurry up, to wash away the clinging sodium glow.

  Something was dripping beneath the car. She bent and peered. It was fluid from the brakes; the hydraulic link had snapped. Never mind that. It was Rob she should be looking at.

  He was leaning out of the window. His head lay on one side, resting against the outside of the door. Blood and the shadows of branches blotted out his face, his eyes. He lay as if gazing down at the hailstones of the shattered window, scattered over the gravel in a thickening trail back toward the lamp standard. The few hailstones beneath him, and the patch of gravel, glittered restlessly with black blood.

  Clare gazed at all this calmly. She’d seen children bleeding in the playground, after all. But something was wrong. The sight of Rob she had now didn’t quite fit together with the way he looked from inside the car. She went back to her side of the car to look. All at once the ambulance was braying to a halt beside her, its siren sinking; people were surrounding her—the helpful red-faced butcher, a couple from one of the flats, ambulance attendants, police.

  “A man walked straight in front of me,” she told the police. She only had to speak quietly, they would know she was telling the truth; shouting did no good, teaching taught you that. They couldn’t know about the brakes. “Straight into the road,” she said.

  “That’s right,” the butcher said. “I saw him. A bloody madman. I chased him, over there, but he got away.”

  An ambulance attendant was taking her arm. “I’m all right,” she said, giggling at his look of concern. “What do you think’s wrong with me? I’m only shivering because it’s so late. It’s my brother you’ve got to look after.” But they had, she saw; the car was empty.

  “He was out in the middle of the road. He wouldn’t go one way or the other. He distracted her completely, and I don’t wonder,” the butcher told a policeman who was writing down the butcher’s name. They would believe him, Clare thought gratefully. But another policeman was examining the car, the door, the interior, the brakes.