The Grin of the Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  'I don't see how it could be when it's so important to you. Anyway, we'll make it back from your book, or maybe your publishers could cover the expense.'

  'Worth a thought,' Rufus says to Colin, who laughs.

  I'm still feeling less adept with the Internet than I ought to be, which may be why I remind Natalie 'And you said someone at work helped.'

  'Guilty as charged,' says Mark's father.

  Too late I realise I was willing it not to have been Nicholas. 'Then I must thank you as well.'

  'Gratitude accepted.'

  'Nicholas had it picked up by courier,' Natalie says, 'otherwise we wouldn't have had it in time.'

  'Dubbing the granite dude, then.'

  'Run that past me again?' Nicholas says with a frown at Mark's giggling.

  I struggle to retrieve my language from a random eruption of mirth. 'I said double the gratitude.'

  'Likewise the acceptance.'

  'Where did you have it picked up from?'

  I believe my words are clear enough, but Nicholas manages simultaneously to scowl and raise his eyebrows. I'm about to repeat the question, even if it emerges yet more deformed, when Mark says 'Can we watch Tubby now?'

  'Wouldn't you rather wait till you can make notes?' Rufus asks me.

  'I wouldn't mind having your impressions. Colin's too.'

  'Doesn't anybody else count?' says Bebe.

  Any ill-defined doubts I have about watching the film in all the present company give way to recklessness. If she's inviting the experience, she can be responsible for the consequences. 'Everybody's welcome,' I say as though I'm at home. 'It's been a while since Tubby's had a proper audience.'

  'Better fortify ourselves on the way,' says Warren.

  Of course this isn't meant to sound ominous. He's proposing to replenish our drinks, which he does. The waxy sweetness left over from the cake turns my Merlot harsh as medicine, a taste that quickens a pulse in my skull. I don't know what effect the cake has on Mark's orange juice; his smile wobbles oddly before growing firm, presumably at the thought of the imminent show. Certainly he's first into the screening room.

  Warren seems to need to take charge. He holds out his hand for the disc. I thumb the plastic spindle in the middle of the case and lift the disc with my fingertips, only to find that my precautions are somewhat beside the point. Surely Natalie knows better than to touch the playing surface, but somebody has smudged it with marks that must be fingerprints despite their lack of whorls. As Warren loads the disc into the player I sit beside Mark on the couch directly in front of the screen. Natalie is on the other side, and my publishers sit at our feet on the polished floorboards. Nicholas and Joe attempt to leave the remaining seats for our hosts, but Warren brings Bebe a diningroom chair and another for himself. By now Mark is restless with impatience, swinging his feet in mid-air while their blurred reflections pedal in the depths of the floor. As Warren picks up the remote control Mark says 'Can we have the lights off again?'

  'Why, are you fond of the dark?' says Bebe.

  I'm trying to decide whether her tone implied the comma when Mark says 'It'll make the film more real.'

  'Gee, here's something else that isn't real. It's your movie, Simon. Your call.'

  Her first comment has angered me so much that I want to put an end to the sight of her. 'I'll go for the dark.'

  I'm not sure if the unease I sense is hers as, having switched on the cinema system, Warren turns the light off. The room is illuminated by the screen, which drains everyone of colour. As Warren thumbs the control the screen takes on a cloudless blue. It stays like that until I wonder if the disc is blank and how I'll feel if it is. Then the azure vanishes, driven out by the credits of the film.

  There aren't many. Tubby Tells the Truth. A Tubby Thackeray Production. Written by and Starring Tubby Thackeray. Directed by Orville Hart. I'm wondering who photographed and edited it, not to mention who composed any missing score, when the film begins. The camera pans away from a blackboard on which the credits were chalked to show us Tubby crammed behind a desk, then cuts to another student version of him seated in the otherwise empty classroom. Both of him are broader than ever. 'Wrong ratio,' Colin protests.

  'Never mind,' Bebe says as if she's soothing a fractious child. 'I guess that was the best they could do in those days.'

  'Colin means you're showing it in the wrong one,' I say. 'It would have been shot fullscreen.'

  'Nothing wrong with your eyes, is there? That does fill the screen.'

  I'm keeping my gaze on the film, which makes her and everybody else's faces flicker at the edge of my vision. 'We mean it wasn't shot that way. It shouldn't fill this screen.'

  'That's the way we like it.'

  'Right, we've paid to have it wide,' says Warren.

  By now Tubby has pranced into the classroom to lecture his students, who fling missiles at each other whenever his back is turned. What feels like at least a minute's impassioned oration is translated as a single intertitle of gibberish. As if he's aware of the inadequacy, the teacher grabs a stick of chalk from the shelf of the blackboard and sets about scribbling in a hand I recognise all too well. The board seems to have other ideas; it pivots away whenever he tries to write on it until, having sprawled over it and jumped at it to catch it unawares and stood on his head to write while the board is back to front and upside down, he clings to it with one hand and rides it while it swings over and over. The result of all these exertions, throughout which he maintains his unblinking wide-eyed grin, is precisely the same as the intertitle. I could imagine that he's growing desperate, since I've yet to hear a single laugh.

  Perhaps the argument about ratios has left everyone too conscious of the wrongness of the image. For myself, I'm additionally thrown by seeing Tubby as a slapstick victim and by the irrelevance of the title of the film. The silence feels unquiet, and it's emphasised by the speaker system; I could fancy I'm surrounded by the absence or the threat of Tubby's laughter. Could everyone be waiting for me to laugh, since it's my birthday present? Tubby finishes another dramatic pop-eyed grinning declaration and seizes a piece of chalk to summarise it. I expect more antics from the blackboard, and when the chalk explodes as he inscribes the first stroke I emit a surprised chuckle. That's apparently the cue. At once everyone is competing for mirth.

  Is the film really so hilarious all of a sudden? Perhaps they're releasing amusement that was pent up. Mark is giggling wildest, but Rufus and Colin aren't far behind. Warren's merriment is almost as shrill as his wife's; despite their habitually amused looks, I don't recall ever having heard them laugh before. Joe chortles like an understudy for Santa Claus while Nicholas signifies his jollity with a succession of staccato grunts. The uproar covers Natalie's reaction. She's shaking and weeping, so that only her wide grin and intent eyes convey that she's doing so with glee. The unstable light appears to be turning all the faces around me into blanched comedic masks, unless it's simply emphasising aspects of them I've overlooked. I strive to concentrate on the screen, where the students are exchanging increasingly extravagant missiles – having graduated from balls of paper and ink pellets to exercise books, they're now slinging baseballs at each other's heads and through the glass of the classroom windows – while pedagogue Tubby battles with his chalk and removes its latest errant fragments from his nostrils. He manages to write another incomprehensible line before he returns to his desperate clownish mouthing. Mark gulps and succeeds in controlling his laughter enough to pronounce 'I want to know what he's saying.'

  'Do you want us to make less noise?' Rufus splutters.

  'What a rude young – ' Colin disguises his last word as a laugh.

  'You're asking us to be quiet so you can hear,' Rufus suggests, though his mirth is close to shaking his words to bits.

  Mark stamps his foot, which appears to send quivers through the floor. The unreliable light seems close to transforming the boards into jelly or some less stable medium. 'I just want to know,' he protests, no longer laughin
g.

  'I expect he's saying things as silly as he is,' Natalie says.

  'We can't be sure of that, can we?' While I realise she means to calm Mark, I think a better method is to admit I agree with him. 'I'd like to know too,' I say. 'Even if it's nonsense it would be worth seeing what he's inventing.'

  'I could tell you.'

  I can't identify the speaker amid all the mirth until Rufus responds none too invitingly 'How are you going to do that, Colin?'

  'I taught myself to read lips. Nothing simpler. I was going to write about what silent actors really say for Cineassed.'

  Bebe's laughter stops so abruptly it might have been cut from a soundtrack. 'Excuse me, were you involved with that publication?'

  'Involved up to my hilt and proud of it. Wrote a lot of it and edited it all.'

  'You didn't tell us that about your friend, Natalie,' Warren objects.

  I'm afraid he or Bebe may ask Colin to leave before he interprets the film. 'Have you been following what he said, Colin? Tubby, I mean.'

  'Of course. That's what I'm here for.'

  I let that joke go and say 'Can you tell us what it was?'

  'A lot of it's the same kind of crap as the intertitles.'

  'Ladies present,' I feel bound to mutter.

  'You don't say.'

  Presumably he's cynical because we know that Natalie has heard and indeed said worse, but I hope Bebe isn't newly offended. 'What's made sense?' I insist.

  'If you're putting it like that, not much at all.'

  'Anything coherent,' I say, I'm not sure how much on Mark's behalf.

  Colin turns his colourlessly luminous face but not his eyes in my direction and begins to intone sentences solemnly as a priest or a celebrant of some other ritual. 'The portal once opened can never be closed. The infinite shall be contained beyond the portal. The known shall never be unknown, nor shall the unknown be. All that cannot be shall be. All shall be revealed to he who searches. The search shall choose the searcher. All doors open to him, and all doors are one. He who opens the portal is the portal.'

  Colin's chant has grown increasingly parodic, though I'm unsure of what. It and some aspect of the film I'm unable to define are making me worse than nervous. Tubby has run out of chalk and is trying to write with his forefinger, which – in a gag so gruesome that all by itself it might have denied the film a release – breaks. He clutches his injured hand while he executes a wide-eyed grinning agonised jig until he spies an object on the floor. Whether it's chalk or the joint of his finger, he seizes it and runs at the blackboard. The board flips over, taking him with it, and when it comes to rest his face is dangling upside down beneath it, still lecturing. During all this Colin has been saying 'The searcher is the jester of the universe. He is its jest, which is his search. He shall perform the quest that spans all time and space. The quest is as ancient as the dark. All is created of the dark, and all shall be dark. The searcher shall hear the voice of the dark, which is infinite laughter.'

  The student Tubbies fling mud or handfuls of some other glistening substance at their inverted tutor and into his fallen mortarboard. Perhaps that's the coda, though the copy seems incomplete; with no words to announce that it's the end, the film is over. As the screen turns white with the blankness of the rest of the disc, everybody grins at me. In the relentless light they might all be wearing pallid makeup if not masks. The sense that they're all waiting for me to speak makes me do so before I can think, and I hear myself demand 'Was that about me?'

  After a prolonged silence Bebe says 'My goodness, what a way to thank a person for a present.'

  'Maybe he shouldn't have opened it till tomorrow,' says Warren.

  That strikes me as the far side of ridiculous, but no more so than my own thoughts. I'm wondering if Colin invented any of the material he claimed to be translating. Why would he have done so? What possessed me to ask the question I asked? Warren switches on the room light, and I feel so exposed to everybody's scrutiny that I have to struggle not to hide my face. A grinning stillness seems to underlie everyone's features, a buried mask about to be revealed. I must have their bones in mind, although I could imagine that Warren's and Bebe's suntans – perhaps other people's too – have faded so as to betray traces of clownish makeup. Nobody must suspect I'm seeing what I can't really be seeing. I mustn't draw any more attention to myself, and I'm tentatively grateful when Mark speaks. 'Colin?'

  'Sir.'

  Mark isn't sure what kind of joke this is, but falters only momentarily. 'You know all the things you were just reading to us?'

  'All that, I better hadn't call it crap, had I. All that mess.'

  'Why is it funny?'

  The silence that greets this feels like an enormous held breath. Then Bebe says 'Oh, Mark, you're precious' and leads the laughter.

  I have to join in, if only to be less conspicuous. 'I'm not funny,' Mark protests. 'Don't laugh at me.'

  His outburst aggravates the hilarity, not least mine. So does his scratching his wrist as if the merriment has been transformed into physical irritation, and his jumping to his feet to stamp his way out of the room. He hasn't reached the door when Natalie finds words, however unsteady. 'All right, Mark, don't put on a show. Let's enjoy the party.'

  'It's not a proper one. There's no hats.'

  'Perhaps we'll have some of those tomorrow.'

  I have a vision of her in a paper crown complete with papier-mâché jewels while Mark wears a headband that sprouts a cardboard halo. I might prefer not to know why the image is so disconcerting, and to some extent I'm glad when Mark changes the subject. 'We haven't had any games.'

  'I think this is supposed to be a party for a grown-up,' Bebe says.

  'Grown-ups can play too. We were going to have games with, with Simon's mum and dad, but we never played any.'

  My fingertips tingle with the rubbery sensation of the face that slithered off the skull in the dark. My own cranium feels as brittle as the bones that gave way to my touch. I'm suddenly uncertain whether it's a dream I had on the drive home from Preston or a much earlier memory that I'd suppressed. I yearn to be distracted by the sight of Warren removing the disc from the player and returning it in its case to me, but his jovial face is too suggestively piebald. 'Back to the party, then,' he says. 'Who can I offer another drink?'

  I'm doing my best to lose myself in the general movement towards the door when Bebe says 'What were you sitting on, Simon?'

  'My arse,' I manage not to retort as I turn and see nothing on the couch.

  'It's behind you,' Mark giggles.

  His words sound ominous, not only because of their seasonal significance, until I catch up with their meaning. I twist around faster to let him laugh at me – to help him forget he was the butt of so much mirth. 'It's still behind you,' he can hardly say for giggling.

  'For heaven's sake,' Bebe protests, apparently missing the joke, and snatches at my back pocket. 'Are you so mixed up with him you even carry him around with you?'

  She's holding a strip of half a dozen frames of film. For a grotesque moment I have the notion that she has planted it on me as though it's as incriminating as a drug, and then I remember finding it in Charley Tracy's van. I must have been carrying it about with me intermittently ever since, and at last I see that it consists of footage of Tubby. I've barely glimpsed his face when Bebe holds the film up to the light. She stiffens while her mouth forms an O so pronounced it doesn't need to be audible, and her shocked silence takes hold of the room.

  The only sound is a plastic creak from the case of Tubby Tells the Truth until I relax my grip. Everyone has turned to gaze at the strip of film dangling from Bebe's finger and thumb, but I have an unnecessary sense that they're surreptitiously aware of me. 'Is it questionable?' Mark says.

  He heard me use the word earlier. I mustn't make too much of his using it now. Nevertheless I'm scrutinising his grin, which seems rather too wide for the innocence it's claiming, when Bebe says 'I'd call it worse. Put it away, Simon, unless
you want me to burn it.'

  Is this an offer or the kind of threat you might issue to a child? She holds the film at arm's length as if she's anxious to be rid of it, but now her finger and thumb conceal a frame in the middle of the strip. As I take the film I see that Tubby is wearing a gown and mortarboard. I've been carrying footage from the first scene of Tubby Tells the Truth all over the world without realising. He's pointing at the incomprehensible formula on the blackboard with his stick, which reminds me more than ever of a wand, perhaps because the isolation of the frames lets me observe that his other hand appears to be describing some kind of occult sign, so complicated that the fingers look misshapen. The next frame shows them performing a different but equally elaborate gesture, but how can they have moved so quickly? I'm about to examine the third frame when Bebe releases her grip on the fourth, and I see that it wasn't any of his secret gestures that offended her. I'm only just able to hold my face expressionless and choke off a gasp.

  The frame shows two girls crouching over an equally naked man on a bed. One holds his eager penis while the other takes it in her mouth. The solitary reassuring detail is that the man's face is offscreen, though reassuring is scarcely the word. I recognise his body, and the bed, and the girls. They're Julia and Mona, and we're in Willie Hart's house.

  A further unwelcome thought surfaces from the chaotic clamour that fills my fragile skull. Though the girls' hair is tousled out of style, they look far too modern for the film. This surely can't betray me, but my lack of expression might. How ought I to react? The best I can produce is a grin so automatic that it hardly feels part of me, accompanied by an incredulous laugh. I'm about to pocket the film and attempt to forget it until I have an opportunity to try and understand when Colin takes hold of the end of the strip. 'Isn't this what we were watching?'

  'No mistaking that,' says Rufus.

  'Jesus.' Colin has caught sight of the interpolated frame. 'I thought there was something odd, but I couldn't get hold of it. We're seeing film history rewritten here. This has to be the earliest use of a subliminal.'