The Grin of the Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  A black traveller flashes me the whitest grin I've ever seen. 'Take the offer, man.'

  'I've just got the one. I'll be fine.'

  Both women look secretly amused. My driver shrugs and leads the way out. It's close to midnight, though not inside my head, but beyond the automatic doors December feels like summer. Taxis raise a primitive fanfare to hail my guide. She holds a lift open while my suitcase and I stumble in. 'Feel like coming home?' she says.

  I strive to grasp what she's asking. 'Should it?'

  'For a lot of movie people it does. This is where it all began.'

  That's an excessively simplified view of film history, but I mightn't argue even if I weren't so tired. 'I don't make films, I write about them.'

  The lift halts two floors up the car park, and she ushers me to a red Lexus. 'Even our kind?' she seems eager to know.

  'If it helps with my research, why not?'

  I dump my suitcase in the boot, and she slams the lid. I don't know if my answer prompts her to say 'Sit up front with me.'

  I don't want to nod off against her. As I strap myself in, having slung my jacket onto the back seat, I say 'Please don't be offended if I drift off.'

  While she eases the car down a ramp she rests a hand on my thigh. 'Need any drugs? There's plenty at the house.'

  'I should think I'll be away as soon as I fall into bed. It's not worth losing my sleep.'

  She glances at me as she halts at a pay booth. 'What isn't?'

  I struggle to reach the wad of dollars in my jacket, but she has already paid the attendant. When the Lexus moves into the traffic she turns her head to me again until I answer. 'Just some rubbish on the Internet,' I say wearily. 'Someone trying to destroy my reputation that won't even give their name.'

  'They're out there.'

  This jerks my eyes open. I thought I closed them only for a moment, but we were passing a horde of dormant airliners, whereas now we're far along a wide street of houses that crouch behind palm trees. The pavements are broad enough to accommodate a platoon on the march and utterly deserted. 'Who are?' I blurt.

  'Monsters from the depths, we call them.' I'm resisting an impression that the trees have increased their resemblance to undersea growths, especially in the way their leaves appear to undulate, by the time she adds 'It's like the net dredges them up. We've had your kind of trouble with them.'

  'I'm sorry to hear it.'

  'They were saying some of our performers are under age. You'll know how much time you have to pee away dealing with them.'

  I wouldn't have said the film company's troubles were too similar to mine, but her fingertips on my inner thigh seem to be suggesting the reverse. Then they're gone, and we're speeding past illuminated signs that dwarf palm trees scaly with neon. 'Do you know who they are?' I ask mostly in an attempt to stay awake.

  'Could be somebody who can't stand sex or maybe a rival. Me, though, I think it's someone crazier.'

  'Someone like my problem, then.'

  'They're all connected, these fools. It's the Internet,' my driver says and laughs. 'I don't mean they're in touch, not all of them. I mean it turns them into monsters.'

  'You don't think they already are.'

  'Some of them, sure. But most of them, because they can say anything they like and they're not afraid anyone will find out who they are, it's like they're speaking direct from their subconscious. It lets them be everything they'd want to hide from people, maybe even from themselves.'

  'You sound as if you'd be in favour of censorship.'

  'I'm not,' she says and looks insulted. 'It never works. You can't suppress stuff. It only comes back worse.'

  I rest my eyes and my brain for a moment, until a shiver restores me to consciousness. The air-conditioning has overwhelmed me, but I could imagine that the cold is reaching out of the dark that surrounds the car. The headlamp beams are drawing a portion of the blackness towards us, and it takes me an effort to realise it's the surface of the road. 'Where are we?' I gasp.

  'Not much further.'

  I assume that means we're almost at our destination, not barely on our way. From the dashboard clock I gather we've been driving for more than an hour. The edges of the beams catch rocks and dusty cacti beside the unfenced road. The uniform hum of the wheels and the monotonous unrolling of the road are more effective than any number of sleeping pills, but do I glimpse an illuminated tent across the desert? It could have been a kind of church, even if dancers inside it were casting gigantic spindly shadows on the canvas. I'm trying to decide whether it was a dream, unless I dream that too, when my driver says 'Here we are.'

  She withdraws her hand before I can be absolutely certain that she laid her fingers on my crotch. The car is turning left at a sizeable rock carved with the word LIMESTONES. In a moment I see why: at the end of a concrete driveway fenced with spiky cacti as tall as guards, an elongated single-storey house is built of the material. The headlamp beams glare out of a long window curtained by a white blind as the car veers into an open space that could hold about a dozen vehicles. The house raises the door of a garage and closes it behind us with no sound I can hear. As I climb none too steadily out of the car I feel as if I'm still travelling. 'Ready for bed?' says my driver.

  'Ready to get my head down,' I say, which seems less than ideally phrased.

  She retrieves my case and wheels it to a door into the rest of the house. A corridor shaggily plastered in white and paved with large grey stone tiles leads past four doors to an extensive lobby. My escort opens the first door on the left and turns up the concealed lighting to an intimate glow. 'Everything you need should be in here,' she says and leaves the case at the foot of the lightly clothed double bed. 'Sleep as long as you like.'

  'I shouldn't say hello to Mr Hart, should I? I expect he'll be asleep.'

  She halts in the doorway with her back to me. 'Mr Hart.'

  The sudden flatness of her voice makes me feel as if I'm asking for the late Orville. 'Willie Hart,' I say. 'The film director.'

  She turns her head and then the whole of her front view towards me. 'I thought you were a movie researcher.'

  'I am. What do you mean?'

  'Where did you get your information?'

  'From the online database. He's the grandson of Orville Hart.' When she gazes at me I insist 'He is. I've had emails from him.'

  'You didn't read it right.'

  'What?' It doesn't help that she has decided to be amused. 'I'm not surprised, the way he writes.'

  'Not the emails.' Her amusement wavers and returns, if more wryly. 'I'm sorry if you don't like my style,' she says.

  I feel as if the room has quivered like an image on a monitor, but it must be my stance that has. 'You're...'

  She gazes at me to be sure I've finished, and then she plants a hand on her left breast. 'Wilhelmina,' she admits. 'I never liked the name.'

  TWENTY-SEVEN - SIRENS

  I have the impression that faces are moving over me, and when I leave the dream behind I'm tied up. I can't move a limb. The sight of pudgy pallid faces crawling over one another clings to my mind as my eyes bulge open and I bare my teeth, which doesn't help me to utter a sound. I'm tangled in a nylon sheet and clawing at the one beneath me on the double bed. All this would be more reassuring if I weren't adorned with an erection. Once it subsides beneath the weight of my dismay with the nightmare, I fling off the clammy sheet and drain the glass of water that I can't recall pouring. Also on the bedside table is my watch, showing ten past eleven for a moment before the digits grow identical.

  Is it late morning or nearly midnight? I pad across the tiled floor to part the slats of the blind. Outside are the other extended half of the V-shaped house and an unlit building beyond the dim outlines of cacti, and that's all except featureless darkness. I've slept through the day, and I still haven't told Natalie that I've arrived. I would have if I hadn't been overwhelmed by Willie Hart's identity and my lack of sleep.

  I hurry to my bathroom, which is as thoroughly
stocked with toiletries and towels as any in a hotel. I have a quick fierce shower and grab clothes from my suitcase. Buttoning my shirt, I step out of the room. The house is quiet except for a faint sound of lapping. The corridor ends at a tiled lobby across which the outer door faces a dining area occupied by a heavy table and twelve chairs, and beyond them an extensive open kitchen. A further corridor leads to the rest of the house, where the noise is coming from. It's the sound of simulated waves on a computer inside the first room on the left. I knock on the door and look in.

  The office is deserted. Grey filing cabinets flank a white desk. The walls are full of posters, or rather flattened sleeves from videocassettes and DVDs. Guy Hard, Star Prick: The Search for Cock, Rumpy Young Women, Fun with Dick, A Dong to Remember, Guy Hard with a Vengeance, Good Day at Black Cock, Star Whores: A New Grope... I venture to the desk and touch the mouse, and the screensaver vanishes to reveal that the computer is online. I'm sure Willie won't mind if I email Natalie. I log onto my account and find a message from her.

  Are you landed yet, Simon? Is everything as you expected? Let us know you're safe. Mark sends a big grin.

  I type so fast that my fingernails twinge.

  Couldn't be safer. Sorry I didn't get back to you as soon as I arrived. No sooner in my room than I fell asleep until just now. It's breakfast time in London, isn't it? If you read this in the next few minutes I'll probably still be at the computer if you want to let me know you have. Meanwhile I'm being well looked after by my host and hoping to start what I'm here for very soon. Love to you both and a bigger grin back to Mark.

  I'm not sure about the last comment, but I send the email before I can change my mind about withholding the gender of my host – I think the revelation is best kept until I'm home. I bring up the Internet Movie Database, but it doesn't lack the information I was convinced it did. Willie Hart's page shows her birth name as Wilhelmina.

  Has it been added since I looked? At least there's nothing unfamiliar on Tubby's pages. The newsgroups have been busy with me while I was asleep, however. To begin with, Colin intervened on my behalf.

  Reverting to baby talk now, are we? Not much of a regression when you've been flinging the contents of your nappy at anyone you disagree with. Just because people read you on the Internet doesn't mean you're worth anyone's attention. It's the biggest slush pile in creation. A slush pile is where writers like you that are never going to see print end up. Real writers like Simon have real editors like me who haven't time to waste with illiterate unpublishable ignoramuses like you. Have you caught on yet that the last thing we are is jealous of you? I see your name spells I'm Slime, Me. Good to see you writing the truth for once even if you didn't know you were.

  I can't help grinning at Colin's discovery, but my amusement doesn't last.

  No, it spells Me, I'm Miles. That's miles abbove you nipping at my heels, except it's more like treading on an innsect. Don't bother wonderring if it's my name any more than yours is Collin Vernon. Do you really think you'll connvince anyboddy you're an edditor by talking to us all like that? Real edditors help people, they don't try to make us think we're no good and just you are. We all know you wouldn't make such a fuss trying to deffend yourself if you bellieved in yourself.

  Other posters on the newsgroups have joined in the argument or tried to end it.

  What's any of this got to do with this group?...

  Can't the three of you take your row outside?...

  I don't know who any of you losers are and I'm sure nobody here wants to...

  However many of them there are, they're all as bad as each other...

  I think the last comment is especially unfair, but I'm not going to be diverted. I address my reply to Smilemime.

  I absolutely agree with everyone who's tried to stop this. Just hush and we will.

  Though I'm tempted to advise him to depart propelled by a jet of his own urine, I post the message I've typed instead. I hope there will be no answer, and there's none from Natalie. As I log off I become aware of a sound at the end of the corridor. It's the rhythmic moaning of a female voice.

  It must be in a film. If it weren't amplified it would hardly penetrate the door in the wall that terminates the corridor. It seems to intensify as I venture closer. I ease the door halfway open, and then my arm continues the action as if the spectacle ahead has taken control of my brain. The room beyond the door is as wide as the house, and much brighter. The subject of the brightness is an unclothed double bed occupied by two slim naked girls. The one whose face is visible looks dauntingly young. She continues to moan, such an exaggerated sound I'm not surprised it was audible through the door. The handle drifts out of my distracted grasp, and the movement catches her attention. She lowers her head, which was thrown back, and rests silver fingernails on her friend's shoulder. The other girl lifts her face from between her friend's thighs and licks her glistening lips. She appears to be even younger. For that reason among others I'm hesitating in the doorway when both girls produce smiles that age them several years – at least, I'd like to think so – and stretch out a hand each to me.

  How impolite would it be to refuse? I'm unable to look away. As I pace forward they turn their supine bodies to me. I feel as if the entire naked lengths of both of them are aware of me, a notion so intensely stimulating that there's no question my no doubt foolish grin originates in my crotch. I follow the swelling into the room, or at least that's my excuse. I've no idea how many steps I take before noticing the arc-lights and, already behind me, the camera. I'm in a film until I grin sheepishly at the camerawoman. 'Cut,' Willie Hart shouts beside her, twice.

  The repetition is so clearly a rebuke that the embodiment of my libido sags at once. 'Sorry,' I mumble.

  'Okay.' It audibly isn't, and she adds 'For what?'

  'For ruining your take.'

  'And how do you figure you did that?'

  I'm not sure even of the question. 'By being here?'

  Each of the girls on the bed gives a sigh that Willie puts into words. 'By looking at the camera.'

  'I'm not a professional. I mean, I am, but not that kind.'

  'Amateur is good too. Just be yourself. Mona and Julia would show you how.'

  'I know perfectly well who I am.'

  'Then let's find out,' either Mona or Julia says.

  'Looked like there was plenty of you before,' says Julia with as wide a smile, unless she's Mona.

  'Don't be offended, but I'm just here to write a book,' I say and face Willie. 'And I'll be correcting all the errors on the net about your grandfather.'

  'Take a break, everyone. Which errors?'

  The performers swing their legs off the bed, and I see that one girl is wearing a ring through her right labium. As they catch me watching, her friend gives the ring a gentle tug. I wince, not least at the responsive pang that travels along my penis, and manage to pronounce 'The descriptions of his films.'

  'How do you know they're wrong if you haven't seen the movies?'

  'I think this character specialises in writing rubbish.'

  'Show me.'

  I linger to ask 'You won't be including me in the film, will you?'

  It's the camerawoman who answers. Her hair is cropped even shorter than the other women's. 'What,' she says, 'as a joke?'

  'Not even as that if you don't mind.'

  The girls send a final sigh, mocking or otherwise, after me as Willie ushers me out of the room. 'Don't mind Marilyn,' she murmurs. 'She has quite a tongue when she uses it.'

  I'm tempted to rejoin that the same is true of the performers. Instead I say 'Don't think I'm prying, but how old are the girls?'

  'Legal. Proof on file. Want to see?'

  'Good heavens no. Of course not.'

  As I open the door to her office she says 'Well, you seem to know your way around.'

  'I heard the screensaver before.'

  'Really? I'll have to cancel the repairman. The sound card must have fixed itself.'

  The waves have falle
n silent. Before they can prove me truthful, Willie rouses the mouse. 'Where do I need to look?'

  'The IMDb.'

  'I'm not familiar with it.'

  I lean over her to bring up the site. She's wearing the thinnest of T-shirts, and the V of the neck is even more revealing. The heat of her body seems to surge at me as I use the mouse to pull down the list of recent online visits and click on the reference. At once I feel as if the computer has tricked me into betraying myself. 'Sorry,' I blurt. 'I was on here earlier. I couldn't find you and I wanted to let my partner know where I was.'

  'Hey, don't worry. Were you feeling lonely?'

  I'm distracted by Mona and Julia, who are strolling naked past the office. 'Not at all,' I say hastily. 'Just making sure she wasn't.'

  'In case she was looking for company, you mean?'

  'Not at all,' I repeat as a memory of Nicholas barring the way to her flares up in my head. 'We don't do that kind of thing.'

  'Gee, you Brits. You can have too much control, you know.' Willie types her grandfather's name in the search box on the database. 'Okay, what's the son of a bitch been saying?'

  I let Smilemime's comments speak for themselves. Willie gazes longest at the claim that Fool for a Day helped destroy Charley Chase's career, and I reflect that an administrator must have edited the comments somewhat, since they aren't misspelled. Willie is silent until she has read back as far as Crazy Capaldi, Orville Hart's first sound film, and then she says 'So what am I meant to be seeing?'

  'Inaccuracies, I should think.'

  'I don't see any. Where are they?'

  'You aren't saying you can confirm everything this person wrote.'

  'Sure, that's what I'm saying.'

  The mirth I was affecting dies in my throat and deserts my face, leaving it almost too stiff for me to ask 'How could he know about your grandfather's last film when it was never released?'

  'Read about it, I guess. There's always advance publicity. I don't understand what your problem is with this guy.'