The sunlight took up the throbbing of the screen, or his head did. He remembered nothing of his tramp home other than that it tasted like bone. As he fumbled to unlock the front door the light grew audible, or the phone began to shrill. He managed not to snap the key and ran to snatch up the receiver. ‘What now?’
‘It’s only me, Dad. I didn’t mean to bother you.’
‘You never could,’ Boswell said, though she just had by sounding close to tears. ‘How are you, April? How are things?’
‘Not too wonderful.’
‘Things aren’t, you mean. I’d never say you weren’t.’
‘Both.’ Yet more tonelessly she said ‘I went looking for computer jobs. Didn’t want all the time mummy spent showing me how things worked to go to waste. Only I didn’t realise how much more there is to them now, and I even forgot what she taught me. So then I thought I’d go on a computer course to catch up.’
‘I’m sure that’s a sound idea.’
‘It wasn’t really. I forgot where I was going. I nearly forgot our number when I had to ring Rod to come and find me when he hasn’t even got the car and leave Gemima all on her own.’
Boswell was reaching deep into himself for a response when she said ‘Mummy’s dead, isn’t she?’
Rage at everything, not least April’s state, made his answer harsh. ‘Shot by the same freedom fighters she’d given the last of her money to in a country I’d never even heard of. She went off telling me one of us had to make a difference to the world.’
‘Was it years ago?’
‘Not long after you were married,’ Boswell told her, swallowing grief.
‘Oh.’ She seemed to have nothing else to say but ‘Rod.’
Boswell heard him murmuring at length before his voice attacked the phone. ‘Why is April upset?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Forgive me. Were you about to give her some good news?’
‘If only.’
‘You will soon, surely, once your books are selling. You know I’m no admirer of the kind of thing you write, but I’ll be happy to hear of your success.’
‘You don’t know what I write, since you’ve never read any of it.’ Aloud Boswell said only ‘You won’t.’
‘I don’t think I caught that.’
‘Yes you did. This publisher prints as many books as there are orders, which turns out to be under three hundred.’
‘Maybe you should try and write the kind of thing people will pay to read.’
Boswell placed the receiver with painfully controlled gentleness on the hook, then lifted it to redial. The distant bell had started to sound more like an alarm to him when it was interrupted. ‘Quentin Sedgwick.’
‘And Torin Bergman.’
‘Jack.’
‘As one fictioneer to another, are you Ferdy Thorn as well?’
Sedgwick attempted a laugh, but it didn’t lighten his tone much. ‘Germaine Gossett too, if you must know.’
‘So you’re nearly all of Cassandra Press.’
‘Not any longer.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Out,’ Sedgwick said with gloomy humour. ‘I am. The girls had all the money, and now they’ve seen our sales figures they’ve gone off to set up a gay romance publisher.’
‘What lets them do that?’ Boswell heard himself protest.
‘Trust.’
Boswell could have made plenty of that, but was able to say merely ‘So my books...’
‘Must be somewhere in the future. Don’t be more of a pessimist than you have to be, Jack. If I manage to revive Cassandra you know you’ll be the first writer I’m in touch with,’ Sedgwick said, and had the grace to leave close to a minute’s silence unbroken before ringing off. Boswell had no sense of how much the receiver weighed as he lowered it, no sense of anything except some rearrangement that was aching to occur inside his head. He had to know why the news about Cassandra Press felt like a completion so imminent the throbbing of light all but blinded him.
* * * *
It came to him in the night, slowly. He had been unable to develop the new story because he’d understood instinctively there wasn’t one. His sense of the future was sounder than ever: he’d foreseen the collapse of Cassandra Press without admitting it to himself. Ever since his last sight of the Aireys the point had been to save them - he simply hadn’t understood how. Living together would only have delayed their fate. He’d needed time to interpret his vision of the shadows on the wall.
He was sure the light in the house was swifter and more intense than dawn used to be. He pushed himself away from the desk and worked aches out of his body before making his way to the bathroom. All the actions he performed there felt like stages of a purifying ritual. In the mid-morning sunlight the phone on his desk looked close to bursting into flame. He winced at the heat of it before, having grown cool in his hand, it ventured to mutter, ‘Hello?’
‘Good morning.’
‘Dad? You sound happier. Are you?’
‘As never. Is everyone up? Can we meet?’
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘I want to fix an idea I had last time we met. I’ll bring a camera if you can all meet me in the same place in let’s say half an hour.’
‘We could except we haven’t got a car.’
‘Take a cab. I’ll reimburse you. It’ll be worth it, I promise.’
He was on his way almost as soon as he rang off. Tenements reared above his solitary march, but couldn’t hinder the sun in its climb towards unbearable brightness. He watched his shadow shrink in front of him like a stain on the dusty littered concrete, and heard footsteps attempting stealth not too far behind him. Someone must have seen the camera slung from his neck. A backwards glance as he crossed a deserted potholed junction showed him a youth as thin as a puppet, who halted twitching until Boswell turned away, then came after him.
A taxi sped past Boswell as he reached the street he was bound for. The Aireys were in front of the wall, close to the sooty smudge like a lingering shadow that was the only trace of their car. Gemima clung to her mother’s hand while Rod stood a little apart, one fist in his hip pocket. They looked posed and uncertain why. Before anything had time to change, Boswell held up his palm to keep them still and confronted the youth who was swaggering towards him while attempting to seem aimless. Boswell lifted the camera strap over his tingling scalp. ‘Will you take us?’ he said.
The youth faltered barely long enough to conceal an incredulous grin. He hung the camera on himself and snapped the carrying case open as Boswell moved into position, hand outstretched towards the Aireys. ‘Use the flash,’ Boswell said, suddenly afraid that otherwise there would be no shadows under the sun at the zenith - that the future might let him down after all. He’d hardly spoken when the flash went off, almost blinding its subjects to the spectacle of the youth fleeing with the camera.
Boswell had predicted this, and even that Gemima would step out a pace from beside her mother. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured, unbuttoning his jacket, ‘there’s no film in it,’ and passed the gun across himself into the hand that had been waiting to be filled. Gemima was first, then April, and Rod took just another second. Boswell’s peace deepened threefold as peace came to them. Nevertheless he preferred not to look at their faces as he arranged them against the bricks. He had only seen shadows before, after all.
Though the youth had vanished, they were being watched. Perhaps now the world could see the future Boswell had always seen. He clawed chunks out of the wall until wedging his arm into the gap supported him. He heard sirens beginning to howl, and wondered if the war had started. ‘The end,’ he said as best he could for the metal in his mouth. The last thing he saw was an explosion of brightness so intense he was sure it was printing their shadows on the bricks for as long as the wall stood. He even thought he smelled how green it would grow to be.
Ramsey Campbell lives in Wallasey, Merseyside. He was presented with both the World Horror Convention’s G
rand Master Award and the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in 1999. His recent novels have included The House on Nazareth Hill, The One Safe Place, The Long Lost, Silent Children, The Pact of the Fathersand the forthcoming supernatural tale, The Darkest Part of the Woods. An earlier novel,The Nameless,has recently been made into the film Los Sin Nombre by Spanish director Jaume Balaguero. As the author explains: ‘ “No Story in It” was written around an Alan M. Clark painting - the image the luckless protagonist proposes for his book cover. As with “Never to be Heard” (in Dark Terrors 4), the Clark image let me focus ideas I’d already scattered through my notebooks for possible development. I had also recently been writing a memoir of the late John Brunner for my column inNecrofile.While there is little of John in my protagonist, I’m afraid that John - were he alive now - would have no difficulty in identifying with him. Nor would far too many writers in our field as well as his.’
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* * * *
Witch-Compass
GRAHAM MASTERTON
On his last night in Libreville, Paul went for a long aimless walk through the market. A heavy rainstorm had just passed over and the air was almost intolerably humid. He felt as if he had a hot Turkish towel wrapped around his head, and his shirt clung to his back. There were many things that he would miss about Gabon, but the climate wasn’t one of them, and neither was the musty smell of tropical mould.
All along the Marche Rouge there were stalls heaped with bananas and plantains and cassava; as well as food-stands selling curried goat and thick maize porridge and spicy fish. The stalls were lit by an elaborate spider’s-web of electric cables, with naked bulbs dangling from them. Each stall was like a small, brightly coloured theatre, with the sweaty black faces of its actors wreathed in theatrical steam and smoke.
Paul passed them by, a tall rangy white man with short-cropped hair and round Oliver Goldsmith glasses, and already he was beginning to feel like a spectator, like somebody who no longer belonged here.
A thin young girl with one milky eye tugged at Paul’s shirt and offered him a selection of copper bracelets. He was about to shoo her away when he suddenly thought: what does it matter any more? I won’t be here tomorrow, I’ll be on my way back to the States, and what good will a walletful of CFA francs be in New Milford, Connecticut?
He gave the girl five francs, which was more than she probably made in a week, and took one of the bracelets.
‘Merci beancoup, monsieur, vous êtes très gen-til? she said, with a strong Fang accent. She gave him a gappy grin and twirled off into the crowds.
Paul looked down at his wallet. He had hardly any money left now. Three hundred francs, an American Express card which he didn’t dare to use, and a damp-rippled air ticket. He was almost as poor as the rest of the population of Gabon.
He had come here three and a half years ago to set up his own metals-trading business. Gradually he had built up a network of contacts amongst the foreign mining companies and established a reputation for achieving the highest prices for the least administration costs. After two years, he was able to rent a grand white house near the presidential palace and import a new silver Mercedes. But his increasing success brought him to the attention of government officials, and before long he had been summoned to the offices of the department of trade. A highly amused official in a snowy short-sleeved shirt had informed him that, in future, all of his dealings would attract a ‘brokerage tax’ of eighty-five per cent.
‘Eighty-five per cent! Do you want me to starve?’
‘You exaggerate, Mr Dennison. The average Gabonese makes less in a year than you spend on one pair of shoes. Yet he eats, he has clothes on his back. What more do you need than that?’
Paul had refused to pay. But the next week, when he had tried to call LaSalle Zinc, he had been told with a great deal of apologetic French clucking that they could no longer do business with him, because of ‘internal rationalisation’. He had received a similar response from DuFreyne Lead and Pan-African Manganese. The following week his phones had been cut off altogether.
He had lived off his savings for a few months, trying to take legal action to have the ‘brokerage tax’ rescinded or at least reduced. But the Gabonese legal system owed more to Franz Kafka than it did to commercial justice. In the end his lawyer had withdrawn his services, too, and he knew there was no point in fighting his case any further.
He walked right down to the western end of the Marche Rouge. Beneath his feet, the lights from the market stalls were reflected like a drowned world. The air was filled with repetitive, plangent music, and the clamour of so many insects that it sounded as if somebody were scraping a rake over a corrugated iron roof.
At the very end of the market, in the shadows, an old woman was sitting cross-legged on the wet tarmac with an upturned fruit box in front of her. She had a smooth, round face and her hair was twisted into hundreds of tiny silver beads. She wore a dark brown dress with black-printed patterns on it, zigzags and circles and twig-like figures. She kept nodding her head in Paul’s direction, as if he were talking to her and she was agreeing with him, and as she nodded her huge silver earrings swung and caught the light from the fish stall next to her.
On the fruit box several odd items were arranged. At the back, a small ebony carving of a woman with enormous breasts and protruding buttocks, her lips fastened together with silver wire. Next to her feet lay something that looked like a rattle made out of a dried bone and a shrunken monkey’s head, with matted ginger hair. There were six or seven Pond’s Cold Cream jars, refilled with brown and yellowish paste. There was a selection of necklaces, decorated with teeth and beads and birds’ bones. And there was an object which looked like a black gourd, only three or four inches long and completely plain.
Paul was about to turn back to his hotel when the woman said, ‘Attendez, monsieur! Ne voulez-vous acheter mes jouets?’
She said it in surprise, as if she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come up to her and asked her how much they cost.
‘I’m sorry, I’m just taking a walk.’
She passed her hands over the disparate collection on top of her fruit box. ‘I think that is why you come here. To buy from me something.’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘Then what is bringing your feet this way?’
‘I’m leaving Libreville tomorrow morning. I was taking a last look around the market, that’s all.’
‘You come this way for a reason. No man comes looking for Jonquil Mekambo by accident.’
‘Listen,’ said Paul. ‘I really have to go. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think you have anything here that I could possibly want.’
The woman lifted up the ebony figure. ‘Silence those who do you bad, peut-être?’
‘Oh, I get it. This is ju-ju stuff. Thanks but no thanks. Really.’
The woman picked up the bone with the monkey’s head and tapped it on the side of the box. ‘Call up demons to strangle your enemy? I teach you how to knock.’
‘Listen, forget it. I got enough demons in my life right now without conjuring up any more.’
‘Jonquil knows that. Jonquil knows why you have to go from Libreville. No money, no work.’
Paul stared at her. She stared back, her face like a black expressionless moon. ‘How did you know that?’ he demanded.
‘Jonquil knows all thing. Jonquil is waiting for you here ce soir.’
‘Well, Jonquil, however you found out, there’s nothing you can do to help me. It’s going to take more than black magic to sort my life out. I’ll have to start over again, right from scratch.’
‘Then you need witch-compass.’
‘Oh, yes? And what’s a witch-compass going to do for me, whatever that is?’
Jonquil pointed with a red-painted fingernail to the gourd. ‘Witch-compass, genuine from Makokou.’
‘So what does a witch-compass do?’
‘Brings your feet to what you want. Money, woma
n, house. Work all time.’
‘I see. Never fails. So what areyou doing, sitting in the street here, if you could use the witch-compass to guide you to whatever you want?’
‘Jonquil has what she wants. All thing.’
Paul shook his head. ‘It’s a great idea, Jonquil. But I think I’ll pass.’
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 13