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

by Ramsey Campbell

  Edmund strode in. “He’s probably only gone out for a minute,” he said. “We’ll wait.”

  He strolled about. “That’s stolen,” he said, kicking a DANGER sign. “I don’t understand his kind at all. They don’t care. They’re all criminals.” He pointed to a pair of patchwork trousers lying on a heap of clothes: “This is him all right. God, look at all this. Could you live in this?”

  He seemed furious with the disorder. George disliked it too, but not so vehemently; it was up to Chris how he lived, after all. “He’s got a bloody wardrobe, for God’s sake,” Edmund said. “Why the devil can’t he use it?”

  He tugged at the wardrobe door; something rolled, something bumped. “I’ll bet it’s nearly empty. Here you are, George, give me a hand.”

  “No, I don’t think I will. Leave the man’s wardrobe alone.”

  “This mess annoys me. I’ll tell him so when I see him. It’s typical of him.” He wrenched at the door; the wardrobe rocked back, and the door burst open. Something rolled out onto the floor—a metal rod for hanging hangers.

  George hoped that was worth Edmund’s trouble. But Edmund had stooped into the wardrobe. “My God,” he said, muffled.

  The tone of his voice penetrated the wood. George turned apprehensively to watch what he was lifting out. It was a framed photograph. Two of the faces were blotted out by stars of smashed glass, but between them was the face of Christopher Kelly’s mother.

  Edmund sat back on his bent feet, as if he couldn’t feel their aching. He gazed at the poster on the wardrobe. “Barrow,” he said. “Chris Barrow. My God. With all his fat gone—yes, I should have seen it. And he did need glasses, after all. He’s a good actor, I’ll give him that. He nearly fooled me.”

  He pointed to the photograph, speaking to George now. “You can see him when you look, can’t you? There, in her face.”

  Still hoping he hadn’t understood Edmund, George began to see Chris almost hidden in the outlines of the woman’s face. Oh God. “I’ve got to phone my wife,” he blurted.

  “Go ahead. I won’t be going anywhere.” Edmund was poking through a heap of clothes; his growing eagerness seemed almost hysterical. “My God!” he said. “Do you realize, we might have wasted our time in Mulgrave Street!” He was laughing.

  At the phone, George thought for a giddy moment that he had no change. After a long time Alice answered. “Just when I’m making dinner,” she rebuked. “Did you go to the house?”

  “It was awful. There was a girl trying to feed her baby in that place. But there’s something worse. We’ve found out who killed my mother. It was Chris Barrow, the boy who came to our house.”

  After a silence she said, “Oh, George,” in what might have been sadness or disbelief.

  “It was!” he said, his voice cracking with bewilderment. “We’ve found a photograph he stole from his grandmother!”

  “All right, George. Thank God, at least they’ll catch him now. Come home now, George. Don’t stay there, please.”

  “I’ve got to see what Edmund’s going to do.” She didn’t seem to understand why he had phoned. “Don’t you realize,” he shouted, “he knows where we live!”

  “Yes, that’s true. But I don’t think he’d hurt us. I’m sure he wouldn’t.” She was silent for a long time. “There’s one good thing,” she said.

  “Good!” he shouted angrily. “What’s so good?”

  “Well, I was just thinking. Clare will be at school. At least she’s out of this.”

  Twenty past twelve. She was wasting her time sitting here. Clare got out of the car. She didn’t dare go into the house, but she couldn’t wait all day in the hope that Chris would look out and see her. She picked up a handful of gravel from the reservation and, venturing into the garden, pelted his window. She was glad there was no response; she retreated hastily to the car.

  There was one more place he might be. She drove to a gap in the reservation, drove back to Mulgrave Street. Boys were playing outside St. Joseph’s; footballs rang on stone, over the loud whirring of her car.

  John Strong’s house stood sharply grey against the blue sky. She and Chris must have driven past it several times; it seemed incredible that they hadn’t noticed. But of course there were other houses isolated by the desolation. She halted Ringo outside the house; the echoes of the engine faded across the waste. The sun blinked dully in cramped attic windows.

  She pulled her emergency torch from its nest beneath the dashboard. Was the house occupied? Curtains drooped behind grimy panes, behind boards. If Chris wasn’t inside she would come out quickly. At least the front door was ajar. The blistered paint crumbled beneath her fingers as she pushed the door.

  The sunlight failed almost as soon as she entered the hall; dimness came at her; she stumbled over something. The dankness that had closed around her didn’t fall back as she switched on her torch.

  An iron bar was propped against the wall at her feet. That was stupid, dangerous. It might have hurt someone. She carried it out and dropped it clanking into the gutter, near her car.

  She probed her way into the hall with her torch-beam. If she hadn’t been worried that the house was occupied she would have called to Chris. Shadows burst from swellings in the wallpaper; green spots glimmered. Shadows slid out from the posts of the banister, a rank of them swaying down the moist wall above the stairs. Beneath the stairs a door swung further open, moved by shadow.

  The basement. That was where John Strong had taken his victims. It was dark; Chris couldn’t be down there. She shone her torch through the doorway. Bare plaster glistened on the wide walls beneath the bellied ceiling. A spade, a new spade, stood in the earth of the floor. Hanging from the handle by a drawstring was the purse from which Chris had bought her lunch. He must have left the purse as a sign that he’d be back soon. She would wait outside.

  She stood by Ringo. How could Chris have left her a sign when he didn’t know she was coming to the house? Maybe he’d meant it for George and Edmund. If they were here, she would have to make sure of seeing Chris alone.

  She gazed about. A burly man in discoloured overalls was plodding away across the waste. Cars hastened along the bared roads, but otherwise there were no people. On the exposed wall of a demolished house wallpaper lolled, feebly stirring. The basement windows of the nearest street were choked with rubble; the front steps of the houses were thick with shattered slate. The sun hung brightly above the waste. Boys shouted in the school playground. She glanced toward them.

  God! She stumbled hastily around the house. She was all right; he hadn’t seen her. She would have to stay hidden as long as she waited for Chris. The master she had tricked was on playground duty. He would be there all lunch-hour.

  She surveyed the area beside the house. The surrounding earth was a network of bulldozer tracks. If anyone lived in the house, he must have sat in it to prevent demolition. Why would anyone want to protect it? Because he had nowhere else to go, she supposed.

  Rubble scraped beneath her feet. In the remnants of a room of the adjoining house, flies gathered over fallen brick. She touched the bricks with her foot, then drew back. She gazed at the side of John Strong’s house.

  Pieces of ruin clung to it: rusty struts that had held a bath, a line of tiles above the struts, a fireplace with a metal cowl, collages of layers of wallpaper. Fallen slabs of floor surrounded her. At the first-floor level a thick rusty girder protruded for yards. Rope was wrapped around the girder. Sharp bricks were piled on the girder, above the rope. Something lay under the bricks. Eyes. A face. A cat tied to the girder, pelted to death.

  Clare flinched. This was stupid, lurking here behind the house. Twenty-five to one. She was wasting her time here. But Chris might be back soon. She didn’t mind waiting; she just wanted something to do.

  An ice-cream van was playing in the side streets, like a giant rusty musical box. That decided her. It was broad daylight: why was she skulking timidly when she could be helping Chris? Maybe she could finish his digging b
efore he came back, find whatever evidence of John Strong he was looking for. Helping him might make it easier for her to talk about the burglary. She secured the torch by its metal tab to her belt and hurried into the house.

  At the top of the basement steps she hesitated. Walls and earth shifted as the torch-beam touched them. A moist chill floated up at her. The ice-cream van boomed, worn and blurred. It sounded like a familiar old toy, rusty with playing. Come on now. She descended the steps. At least her sandals wouldn’t be spoilt by the mud; she’d walked through worse with the kids. The torch nudged her stomach companionably. The cold mud reached for her bare feet.

  The basement shook around her. Walls advanced to the light and shrank back. She had to train the torch-beam on the ceiling to reassure herself that it hadn’t bellied farther; certainly it looked as if the floor above was sagging. The torch-beam scooped the mud into the light, let it rush back into darkness. This was no good. The torch would be even less steady while she was digging.

  Where could she rest it? Its rubber cover was meant to be waterproof, but she didn’t want to chance the mud. She could lay it on a stone—flat stones were scattered on the mud, near the walls. What were these stones, anyway? She put Chris’s purse in the pocket of her dress; it nestled against her breast. Then she pulled the spade out of the shallow pit and went toward the stones.

  Were they tiles? Had they fallen from the walls? She couldn’t see any patches they might have fallen from. They had been carefully carved: smooth grey stones about nine inches square, perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. But they weren’t smooth underneath. They lay raised a little from the mud, on shadow. She slipped the spade beneath the nearest and levered it up.

  Movement caught her eye first, wriggling off the underside of the stone and into the earth; a fat pink-and-grey worm. Something with numerous legs scuttled glistening behind the stone. But Clare was gazing at the face she had turned up from the mud.

  The high domed forehead was smooth: neither wrinkles nor eyebrows. Mud dribbled from the deep eyes and the mouth, revealing them. The cheeks were long smooth hollows; the long blunt nose was absolutely straight. The thin lips were set in an aloof cold smile.

  To Clare it looked rather as if the face were trying to pretend that it hadn’t been found in the mud. She turned over the next stone. She and the torch peered closer; the dark wall stood over them.

  The stone showed a tableau. A woman knelt, mouth open. A man stood above her, holding a swarming handful of insects. Clare pulled the spade away convulsively; the light brought the wall nodding toward her. When she’d recovered she poked at the next stone, defying it to disturb her. The same smooth face came up, smiling thinly with contempt.

  Something moved beside her on the mud. A shadow. She whirled toward the slits of windows. Something was still there: chunks of rubble. It must have been a cloud across the sun. Come on, stupid.

  By the time she’d turned up all the stones she felt a little sick. Most of them depicted men or more often women being used for various purposes, frequently by animals. As they turned up they added to the room’s thick smell of earth; parts of the tableaux crawled back into the soil. Every few stones the smiling perfect face came up again, like a card trick.

  Beneath the oozing mud the attention to detail in the carvings was astonishing. Their art made them all the more disturbing—that and the fact that they didn’t seem to relate to sex. Clare might have understood that, but they looked as if the artist had hated anything remotely human.

  Something peered in the window slits. Rubble, stupid. The bottom step into the basement was in fact two stones; she turned them up, a kneeling woman whose mouth was being hammered full of a brick, the smiling face. She stood up, glad to have finished.

  She had been bending too rapidly, too often. The darkness filled with orange light. She staggered dizzily toward the pit Chris had been digging. She closed her eyes and leaned on the spade. When she opened her eyes she saw that she was encircled by the upturned stones. She would have to step over them to get out of the cellar, and she didn’t like the idea at all.

  Why on earth not? They were only stones. John Strong had carved things on them to frighten his victims, but they didn’t frighten her—they just disgusted her. Why should she want to step over them now? She could if she wanted to. She was supposed to be digging. It was only ten to one. Chris would be back shortly. She hoped he’d hurry.

  A dog was chasing the ice-cream van, which played on obliviously; the dog tried to shout it down. Clare smiled. Daylight was only yards away; splinters of sunlight lay between the pit and the stones. She rested the torch on the edge of the pit nearest the steps, pointing down where she intended to dig. She didn’t want it lying on any of the stones. It had better be waterproof, that was all.

  The pit robbed her height of a few inches. It was all right for Chris, but it made her feel like a child lost in a huge dark bedroom. How silly. So long as the sides of the pit didn’t cave in on her poor old sandals. The crumbling edges tumbled down the sides.

  The pit was several feet square, on the way to six inches deep. The earth was harder than the mud had looked. Should she widen the pit? But Chris might have had some reason for digging in this spot. It looked as attractive as anywhere else in the basement.

  She dug. The torch gazed brightly at the thrusts of her spade; above the torch, at the top of the steps, was the dim rectangle of the doorway. She hurled spadefuls of earth toward the stones—most of which had propped themselves up when she’d turned them, rather than falling: John Strong must have meant them to do that. She dug vigorously. She’d show Chris. Too vigorously: all at once she felt her exhaustion and lack of lunch—prickling heat poured over her amid the chill of the basement; the darkness throbbed orange; she had to support herself with the spade. After that she dug more slowly. Five to one. Come on, Chris.

  Earth stirred moistly on her spade. She hoped it wouldn’t wriggle, slough off its crumbling skin of earth. But the earth seemed free of crawlers here, and felt comfortingly solid underfoot. She threw the spadeful wide, spattering the stones. If she was burying them, good. Let Edmund dig them up if he wanted them. No doubt they were the sort of thing that would interest him.

  Someone was moving upstairs. She glanced up at the hovering dark ceiling. There was movement on its underside, running along the ceiling in the dark, falling near her: moisture. For a moment she’d thought the ceiling was caving in. But she’d heard someone upstairs. She felt the spade rest in soft yielding earth at the side of the pit as she listened.

  A baby. A baby crying. It couldn’t be, not in this house. But the sound was certainly overhead. Of course, it must be a cat. When her pulse grew less insistent she recommenced digging. For heaven’s sake, wasn’t Chris ever going to come?

  She threw earth. The room was less dark now, her eyes were adjusting. She found she’d preferred the dark. Grey light gathered very slowly on the stones; the basement filled with the same dim smiling face, watching her from every side, watching her dig herself deeper into the earth. She threw a spadeful straight in one of the faces. Go on, piss off. He’d disturbed her with his book; he wouldn’t disturb her again.

  The dim light accumulated on the walls, the ceiling, the shifting drops of moisture. It brought the room closer, made it more difficult to ignore. She was a little girl lying in bed, surrounded by six, seven, eight smiling faces almost as vague as the dark, waiting for her to cry out. Oh no she wasn’t. She hurled earth at them. The next thrust of the spade touched something.

  She gazed at the torchlit patch of earth. Perhaps it was only a stone. She pushed the spade down gently, timidly. She didn’t want to break her find, if it was worth having. She wasn’t scared of what it might be, she wasn’t. She dug the spade beneath the object. Come on, get it over with. She heaved.

  The earth cracked, glistening in the torchlight. The crack caved in. The spade levered up, spilling earth. In the mound of earth on the spade she could see a small pale form. She could see its ti
ny whitish bald head.

  She couldn’t touch it. She shook the spade gently, so that the mound fell away from the figure. Earth crumbled from the head. In the torchlight she saw the tiny perfect face, smiling contemptuously up at her. The first time she had turned up the face she’d known it was John Strong.

  He was naked: pale grey, and smooth as an infant. His erect penis reached up beyond his belly. He lay smiling up from the spadeful of earth. Had he needed to bury this doll to preserve himself? Unimpressed now, Clare pushed at the doll with her finger. As it rolled over, a slug squeezed out between its legs.

  She hurled the doll away. It flew from the spade and broke on her torch. Clay limbs fell apart on the mud. The head landed upside-down, smiling. She shoved it further from her with her spade. Then she pulled the torch away from it, closer to her.

  Well, that was that. If John Strong had left any of his power here, she’d destroyed it. And good riddance. She picked up the torch and poked its light at his faces. They came forward at once, still smiling; their eyes filled with shadow, gazing at her; their mouths worked. The light flinched away from them, toward the steps.

  A fly buzzed beyond the steps, in the hall. Distant cars whispered. Otherwise the house was still; the ice-cream van had moved on. The chill of the basement settled on Clare. Drops of moisture shifted overhead, glinting dully, not quite falling.

  She’d wait outside, after all. She would have to be heading back to school soon. She’d be catching cold if she wasn’t careful; her feet were cold already. At the top of the steps the doorway swayed restlessly. She made her torch glance away from that into the pit, to show her there was nothing crawling on the spade.

  She had uncovered something else besides the doll of John Strong.

  It was pale grey, a swelling in the earth. A stone. But it was exactly the colour of the doll. The spade hovered over it. She’d seen the worst, and smashed it. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be as bad, but it might be important. The grey bulge swelled up toward her, gathering light, swaying feebly.