The Grin of the Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  FORTY - MET

  As I remind myself yet again that I shouldn't phone Natalie while she's driving, a taxi draws up in front of the university. 'Where you going, chum?' the driver calls.

  'Just waiting for somebody, thanks.'

  'Sure it's not me?'

  I'm sure of very little, not even of the expression on his loose roundish face. Is some kind of smile lurking within his plump pale lips? Any number of people in cars and on buses have appeared to be ready with mirth. No doubt I look out of place, and many of them will have been celebrating or preparing to celebrate. The thought isn't as reassuring as it should be, at least if I take some of the notions in Lane's archive as more than jokes rather than utter nonsense. 'My partner is picking me up,' I say louder than I meant to.

  Either his grin is about to surface or he's making an effort to contain it as he shouts 'Aren't you Mr Milton?'

  'That's right, I'm not.' My nerves render my voice aggressive, and I try to make amends by saying 'I've not a sonnet to my name.'

  'A Mr Milton said he'd be out here.'

  'Well, I haven't seen him and I'm emphatically not him. Nor he.' As the driver continues to watch me without owning up to amusement, I can't be bothered to control my words. 'I could be Elmer Sitson if you like,' I say. 'Or Toni Smelser, or Elsie M. Snort.

  We're all here.'

  The driver shows his teeth in a grimace as contradictory as a clown's. 'Better watch where you're looking for company,' he says and drives deeper into Manchester.

  I've no idea what the encounter was about or why it took place at all, but I disliked the way his face quivered like a slack balloon as the taxi moved off. I stare raw-eyed both ways along the road, but none of the drivers that grin at me out of the dark is Natalie. I'm willing a distant glimmer to be her white Punto when my mobile invites me to remember. As soon as I answer it Mark says 'Is that you, Simon?'

  'I can't imagine who else it would be.'

  'Where are you?'

  'In front of the university.'

  'So are we.'

  I peer about until my eyes sting, but there isn't a single white car to be seen. 'You must be at the other front,' I joke and laugh as well. 'I'm on Oxford Road.'

  'So are we.'

  I shut my eyes for fear that the image of my surroundings will vanish to reveal somewhere else. 'Are you parked?' I manage to ask.

  'We're in front of the door. Can't you see us? I'm waving, look.'

  I risk a blink and see nothing at all. My vision is as blank as the inside of a screen with no power. I squeeze my eyes shut and force them open, and succeed in seeing the latest parade of merry faces in the dimness, but no sign of Natalie's car. 'If you're not moving,' I say through my shivering teeth, 'can I have a word with your mother?'

  'I am moving. Look, I am more.' As I clench my teeth in an effort to control them and my mind, which feels as if it's finally about to overload, Mark says 'Oh, you mean the car. Simon wants to speak to you.'

  'Simon,' Natalie says with patience so dramatic I hope it's directed at Mark. 'You're in the university, yes? Whenever you're ready we're outside.'

  'I'm not insside, nno.' My jaws are playing at castanets again. 'I'm outtside the mmain enttrance.'

  She's silent, and I'm afraid she has given up on me until she says 'I know you need to catch up on yourself after your travels. Do you think you might not be in Manchester?'

  'That's riddiccullous.' The words aren't worth the struggle, because I'm no longer addressing the phone but flourishing it at a taxi on the far side of the road. I almost topple over my luggage in a slapstick bid to ensure that the driver notices me. The taxi executes a screeching turn surely too fast for the icy road. I retreat for fear it may mount the kerb, but it halts alongside. 'Want me after all?' the driver shouts.

  It's the same man. My entire body quakes with my struggles to control my voice. 'I'm ssorry to ttroubble you,' I call. 'Would you mmind telling me exacttly where I am?'

  'In a bad way, aren't you, chum? Been having too much fun? Didn't know who you are and now you don't know where.'

  'I know both. It's someone else that doesn't.' I brandish the phone and jab a finger at it, almost cutting Natalie off. 'My partner says she's waiting in front of the university. I don't see her, do you?'

  'Which one?'

  He can't mean which partner, but the question still disorients me. Could Mark's directions from the Internet have done the same to his mother? 'Natalie,' I say and take an apprehensive breath. 'Are you certain you're in Manchester?'

  'I'm looking straight at the name on the front of the building. There isn't much wrong with my driving or Mark's navigation either. Now, Simon, if you've finished whatever you're doing...'

  I wave the phone as I call 'She's insisting she's at Manchester University.'

  'Which one?'

  I feel as if the conversation has backed up, and his unintelligible grin doesn't help. 'Manchester, England,' I say through whatever rictus is baring my teeth. 'The world. Space. The ccosmos.'

  'There's two.'

  The throbbing of my brittle head makes my vision gutter. 'Two Manchesters in England?' I ask, if I'm not pleading.

  'Two universities. This and the Met up the road.'

  I lower the mobile, which I've been holding aloft like a feeble torch. 'You'll laugh. Turns out – '

  'I heard. Which way are you?'

  While Natalie hasn't accepted my offer of amusement, the taxi driver seems to have. His face is wobbling with silent jollity, which spreads pallor around his mouth and up his cheeks. I try to ignore this while I ask 'Which way does she need to come?'

  As he points ahead, I refuse to believe that his gloved fingertip squashes more than twice the width of the finger against the windscreen. 'Drive out of town,' I advise Natalie and pocket the mobile as my teeth start chattering again. 'Thanks for your assassistance.'

  The taxi performs a turn so violent that the driver seems in danger of leaving his face behind. The light from a streetlamp catches the number plate, which appears to be blank, more like a rectangular display of teeth. As the taxi speeds into the distance I grip the handle of my case with all my strength. I feel as if I'm holding onto the sight of the road while I battle to regain control of my thoughts. I'm afraid that when I greet Natalie and Mark my words may spurt forth as nonsense, the kind I've been reading too much of, not to mention the sort to which I was reduced in the deconsecrated chapel. Neither my jaw nor the rest of me has finished shivering when the Punto draws up on the far side of the road.

  All too soon a gap in the traffic lets me drag my suitcase to the car. 'Well, that was an adventure,' Natalie says. 'Let's hope it's our last for a while.'

  'I sick on that.'

  Is this how it sounds? She gives me an uncertain blink as she opens the boot. 'Do you want to sit in front with mum?' Mark calls.

  'Whoever's navigating should,' says Natalie.

  'I'll spay in the back with nobody's mind. I made those.'

  Presumably she hears me proposing to doze in the back if nobody minds. Mark can scarcely wait for me to buckle up before he asks 'What did you find out about him?'

  'Een ugh.' I don't mean this as a rebuke, but the mirror shows me how his eyes flicker. 'Tall crater,' I mumble and let my eyelids droop, and feel as if I'm being carried into blankness. The prospect isn't blank for long; I might almost be watching some form of creation. I can see the notes Lane made on the way to becoming Tubby Thackeray, but now they're inscribed on a single scroll. However many of them are little more than nonsense, there's no question that they were in the handwriting I saw in the margins of Surréalistes Malgré Eux, a connection that strikes me as so meaningless I can only laugh. 'What's funny?' someone says, and then they're gone.

  FORTY-ONE - RITES

  As the celebrant approaches the altar he lifts his robes high, exposing his naked posterior. The congregation responds with emissions of wind, simulated or actual. The priest fills the chalice as he pleases and sprinkles all those p
resent with his blessing. He (whose sex may be obscured if he is rouged and costumed as a woman) then leads them in confession. The more outrageous the offences, the more they are greeted with laughter and applause. 'Kyrie eleleleison,' he prompts, speaking not in tongues but as a sheep. Once all have brayed Glaury-a the readings are given in no known lingo, and the greatest senselessness is hailed with Allelallelulila. 'Credo in nihil,' the priest may then improvise, unless he chooses to utter less sense. His gabblings will be designed to confound the responses of the faithful, leaving them in mirthful disarray. 'Dominus go, piss come,' he may supplicate, while in place of the Sanctus he may intone 'Thank us, Dominus Deus Azathoth.' Hard on the heels of the Pater Jester comes the Agnus Daaay-eee, during which he may pretend, if only that, to sodomise a lamb. The excesses of the Communion, however, have been stricken from the record and from the common consciousness, except for the final cry of 'Mumpsimus'. To release the congregation the priest hisses 'Eassy misssa esst,' and the worshippers respond 'Deo gratiarse' as they join him in prancing around the altar and through the aisles. Further less restrained activities may ensue before all escape from the church or cathedral.

  I'm even more unsure what Lane meant to do with all this. It reads as if he was preparing it for publication or as the text of a lecture, but how could he have imagined he would get away with either? I don't like to think that his research would have affected his mind. The conclusion seems unavoidable, however, as his notes progress.

  The Black Mass at its most blasphemous? A saturnalian attempt to deride the Christian ritual? Neither, yet all is connected. This is simply an account of the Feast of Fools, that celebration which was held for centuries at the darkest time of the year, when the skies are emptiest and the world feels closest to the void. No less than Saturnalia or Yuletide, this feast sought to occupy and drive back that darkness. Or may its purpose have been forgotten like the nature and identity of its instigator? What if its intention was to reach back to a state which preceded any rite?

  What indeed? I'm losing my grasp of the argument, such as it is. Does the last sentence refer to the ritual or to its creator? Surely there must have been more than one of the latter, even if Lane speculates that the tradition might have simply taken shape from chaos. Perhaps his archive doesn't consist entirely of fanciful nonsense, but the notes end up full of it or worse.

  Nor was the rite concluded by the emergence from the church. Often the clergy would run through the streets, pelting the populace with excrement. Their approach was frequently announced by a clangour of handbells. Comic plays might be staged in the open, lampooning local dignitaries. The players were sometimes disguised with masks, ancient even then, or with elaborate makeup. This aspect of the festivities was certainly one reason why the practices came to be condemned by the Church. Perhaps it was also felt that they too closely resembled the anarchic Decembrian revels of the pagans, when for a few days the slave was the equal of his master. Despite the issuing of condemnations, the feast survived in that form for a further two centuries, although here and there it had already separated into twin ceremonies, namely the Troupe of Fools and the Black Mass.

  They were sufficiently dissimilar for the link to have been overlooked. Not only do they proceed from a common source, however, but also both seek to overthrow an established order. Where those involved in the Black Mass were persecuted, the Troupe of Fools was not merely tolerated but often encouraged by the authorities as an apparently harmless alternative to unrest. That which is most seen is most hidden, and for centuries the Troupe would enliven the shortest days with appearances, sometimes advertised but more usually unheralded except by the ringing of bells, across the countryside. We must assume there to have been several groups of players for so many performances to have been mounted in towns and villages so widespread. In time their antics proved too subversive for the subjects of their parodies, the self-styled great and good. The misrule which the Troupe left in its wake caused by-laws to be drawn up which excluded the company from many communities. Just the same, appearances of the Troupe are documented as late as the 1850s, both in Britain and on the European continent as well as the American. Perhaps some found a haven in New Orleans, where in 1830 the first masked American parade appeared on New Year's Eve, ringing cowbells and throwing flour at the populace. Certainly the Troupe has been heard of in the town of Mirocaw. Elsewhere the players would often set up their tent under cover of night and depart before daybreak. Now the music-hall may seem to have subsumed their buffoonery, but it survives in a purer form, in that purely human circus whose members are clowns to a man.

  What secrets may be coded within their performances? Each of my nightly visits seems to promise revelations that never transpire, unless they occur without my recognising them. Every performance is so unlike every other that the zanies might be enacting any maggot which hatches in their heads, and yet at times I feel close to grasping a plan amid the randomness, only for it to prance like its performances out of my reach. On more than one occasion I have dreamed that the show is being staged on my solitary behalf, and indeed I have sometimes been alone in lingering until the clowns take their deformed bows. If it were not for the advertisements which were posted, however transiently, about the town, I should be tempted to conclude that the Clan of Clowns was a fancy of my own, conjured up by an excess of research. Indeed, no one but I admits to having encountered the notices, nor have any of my colleagues or my students obeyed my exhortations to cast off their inhibitions and rediscover the joys of infantilism for a night. Do the clowns mean to reproduce the genesis of language, whether in the newborn child or in the newborn universe? Such sounds as escape their gaping mouths resemble formulae more ancient than intelligence, yet I persist in my instinct that close study may reveal a structure or the impossible absence of one. More than once I have seemed to hear some distorted remnant of a chant or other ritual. Am I embalming comedy in my academicism? Should it not be swallowed whole rather than picked at with my pen? Am I not the worst example of the timidity of which I have accused my fellows and my pupils, because I alone have been accorded the opportunity to open my mind? Every one of us is a portal to the universe, and nature knows no locks. The mind hungers for development, to what end other than encompassing the whole of knowledge and experience? Let us celebrate our cerebration, not idolise the id. Mime the mind! Uncork the unconscious! Laughter is the language of the world! Embrace the errant, love lunacy, loon I say, lune ace A, loo naice eh, cul any, you clan, lack uny, lacunae, naculy, naculy, naculy...

  By now I've given up. I'm simply remembering Lane's papers – at least, I think the memory is accurate, although why should it matter? I assume that by the incoherent end of the paragraph he's making notes for some performance of his own; the gibberish reminds me of the intertitles of his films. There are few complete sentences after that. Sometimes the painstaking script degenerates into scribbles too introverted to be legible or symbols that might be some highly personal version of shorthand or just symptoms of an intermittent inability to write, if they don't betoken a rush of ideas too overwhelming for the pen to keep up. Occasionally a sentence coheres out of the babble, but with so little in the way of context that these interludes fail to convey much. One I copied with the pencil I was allowed to use seems either to foresee or to propose opening some portal to infinity. What this infinity might contain or consist of seems important but remains unclear. Then Lane sets about mutating and otherwise improvising on the word: port all, paw tall, gait weigh, pile on, en trance, can treen, can't reen, can't reen... Here as elsewhere there's a sense, if that's the word, that once he creates an utterly meaningless fragment of language he becomes carried away by its echoes in his head. I imagine Tubby prancing to the rhythm, grinning wider and more big-eyed at every step. I don't want to see that, nor to hear the words resounding in my skull. I'm grateful to be distracted by the librarian who has brought me a spool of microfilm. 'I'll try not to shut you down this time,' I tell her.

  'I beg yo
ur pardon?'

  'I'll do my best not to blow any of your fuses.' When she continues to give me a delicate frown I add 'Like I did last time I was here.'

  'I'm afraid I'm still not with you.'

  She's unquestionably the same girl, even if her black curls are now blonde, as if she's turning into a negative image. There's no point in offering my name. 'My mistake,' I say. 'Don't let it worry you.'

  It appears to as she loads the spool into the reader. I turn to a blank page of my notebook, glimpsing Lane's notions on the way: 'The masque becomes the world' and 'Who shall say the guise is not the face?' and 'All shall be spoken behind a mask'. It seems impossible that they'll find any place in my book. At least today's research is more straightforward. Surely the newspaper I mistook for the Preston Chronicle was the Preston Gazette.

  That's the publication on the microfilm. As I wind the issues for January 1913 through the viewer, every photograph of people in Edwardian dress reminds me of extras in a Tubby Thackeray film. Am I too immersed in my research? There were surely more significant events back then, not least the imminence of a world war. Then a pair of headlines makes me grip the rudimentary controls as if I've won a video game.

  MUSIC-HALL PERFORMER BOUND OVER TO KEEP PEACE.

  PERFORMANCE MUST BE KEPT WITHIN PROPER BOUNDS.

  So this was the newspaper I bought from the Comical Companions stall. The idea that I could have misread it, especially since even the typeface differs from my memory of it, blurs my vision. Or is the display losing definition? I twist the focusing screw, which only aggravates my inability to read the headlines. I, FORMER, ACE... I'm barely able to decipher these letters before they succumb to the indistinctness that's blackening the page. I turn the screw the other way, and the image sharpens. It doesn't contain a single recognisable word. I feel as if nonsense is spreading through the text – as if the silent clamour of Lane's misshapen language in my skull is infecting a historical record – and then I identify the blackness that's overwhelming the page. The microfilm is charring like a cinema film that has become stuck in a projector.