The Overnight

by Ramsey Campbell

  The Overnight

  Ramsey Campbell

  Originally published in 2004

  This ePub is version 1.0, published in January 2013

  for Tam and Sam, with love and vegetables

  Acknowledgements

  In March 2000 I went to work full-time at the Cheshire Oaks branch of Borders. Most of my friends were shocked that I needed to take a job other than writing, though Poppy Z. Brite sent several enthusiastic e-mails. My wife, Jenny, was supportive as always. In the months I worked at the shop I made quite a few friends and conceived this book out of my experience. What more could I ask? Let me thank all my colleagues for helping make my time there so enjoyable: Mary, Mark, Ritchie, Janet, Emma, Derek, Paul, Lisa, Melanie M, Mel R, Mel of the café, Craig, Will, Annabell, Angie, Richard, Sarah H, Sarah W, Judy, Lindsay, Fiona, Barry, Laura, Colin, Vera, Millie, Joy, John and Dave. None of them resembles any character in this book, but the lift is a different matter. My editor, Melissa Singer, was once again a fount of useful suggestions.

  Woody

  What time is this supposed to be? He seems hardly to have slept but already there's the travel alarm. No, it's the cordless phone that comes with the house and is forever wandering off. The muffled shrilling makes him feel jet-lagged all over again, though it's months since he moved to England. He sprawls out from under the quilt that's meant to protect him from the northern English weather, only to find he's left the phone downstairs. A robe would be welcome, but the tag is twisted around the hook on the door and the phone may not wait. Maybe it's Gina thinking it's daytime this side of the ocean. Maybe she's decided to give his bookstore a chance after all.

  He slaps the switch for the barely shaded light and tramps fast out of the room and down the stairs that aren't quite as wide as a telephone booth. Banisters slick with chilly paint the colour of old teeth creak a warning not to lean on them too hard. The globe over the stairs spends most of its energy just being yellow. He wouldn't have thought, until he walked on it barefoot, that a carpet could be so cold, but it can't compete with the linoleum in the kitchen. The phone isn't in there either. At least renting a house so small nobody except Brits would want to own it means there aren't many places for a phone to hide.

  It's in the front room, by the chair facing the television that has so few channels it doesn't even need a TV Guide. The stale chocolate curtains are drawn, and he switches on the pink-shaded light on the way to the chair. The phone isn't by it, it's down the side, and what else is he dredging up? A candy wrapper decorated with hair and fluff, a greenish coin so old he doubts it's legal. He turns on the phone with his other hand. "Woody Blake."

  "Is that Mr Blake?"

  Did he dream he just told the man that? "You got me, sure enough."

  "Mr Blake the manager of Texts?"

  By now Woody has shaken the sticky paper off his fingers into the dented wastebasket embellished with the same florid paper as the walls. He risks perching his unprotected rear on the edge of the prickly armchair. "That's what I am."

  "It's Ronnie on patrol at Fenny Meadows Retail Park. We've got an alarm at your shop."

  Woody's on his feet. "What kind?"

  "Could be false. We need someone to check."

  "I'm on my way."

  He's already past the shadows a flight of plaster ducks left on the stairway wall. Half a minute in the bathroom takes some of the pressure off, and then he's back into clothes that have borrowed a chill from the building. He adds the overcoat that was heavy enough for the Minnesota winter and slams the lumbering front door behind him as he steps onto the sidewalk, which is all of six feet wide. Two strides take him to the car he rented, an orange Honda, though it would be white except for the streetlights that make everything look steeped in pumpkin juice from last week's Halloween. The street—what the Brits call a terrace, houses squeezed together like a red brick concertina with their front windows bulging out—is silent except for him and his orange-tinted breath. The car marks its space with an ochreous cloud before turning one hundred and eighty degrees, past the Flibberty Gibbet pub that apparently used to be called the Hangman and the premises where half the local men seem to spend their days betting on horses. Half a mile of terraces and traffic signals showing him red lights on nobody's behalf takes him out beyond the houses and the sidewalks, past lush verges where dandelions are flowering late in the year and streetlamps colour evergreens autumnal. Two miles of highway bring him to the motorway, the freeway between Liverpool and Manchester. He's hardly topped the speed limit when he has to brake for the exit to the retail park.

  He's sure the bookstore has the best position of any business in the half-mile oval. As soon as he drives onto the exit ramp he sees the giant elongated letters spelling TEXTS along the two-storey concrete wall. Fog surrounds the store with a whitish aura. He drives around the outside of the development, past several uncompleted buildings, and through the entrance between the Stack o' Steak diner and the Frugo supermarket. Trios of saplings planted in strips of grass decorate the blacktop of the parking area. They net Woody's car with shadows cast by floodlights standing guard over the stores—the Stay in Touch mobile phone showroom, Baby Bunting next to Teenstuff, TVid with its window full of televisions, the Happy Holidays travel agency sharing an alley with his bookstore. An incessant chirping like the cry of a huge maddened nightbird fills his ears as he parks across three spaces in front of the entrance to Texts.

  A heavyweight in uniform with a clipboard under his arm plods to meet him. "Mr Blake?" he shouts in a voice as flat as his crew cut and an accent as broad as his earnest humourless face.

  "And you have to be Ronnie. Not too long, was I?"

  It takes a consultation of his fat black wristwatch and a good scratch of the scalp to let the guard say "Nearly seventeen minutes."

  He's shouting louder than ever, which together with the squalling of the alarm feels capable of crowding all the intelligence out of Woody's head. "Let me just …" Woody yells, gesturing at Texts, and types on the keypad between the handles of the glass doors. Two twelve one eleven admits him to the mat that says READ ON! between the security pillars. He taps another code on the alarm panel, which is showing a red light for the sales floor, and then there's an aching silence except for a tiny shrill buzz he would blame on a mosquito if he were still working in the New Orleans branch. He hasn't identified the source when Ronnie says "You'll need to sign my board."

  "Happy to when I've checked the store. Will you help?"

  The guard is clearly daunted by the sight of half a million books, beginning with the table heaped with Tempting Texts beyond the mat. Woody switches on all the lights in the ceiling tiles and turns left past the counter with the cash registers and the Information terminal. "You could take the other side," he suggests.

  "If anyone's up to no good I'll fix them." Ronnie sounds eager to manhandle someone. He sets off fast into and out of Travel and History, where Woody noticed through the right-hand window that the shelf-end promotions are due for renewal—he'll remind Agnes, Anyes as she calls herself, that customers deserve to see something new every time they visit Texts. He's quickly through Jill's Fiction and Literature aisles in front of the left window. There's no hiding place by the side wall full of video cassettes and DVDs and compact discs, and the shelves in the middle of the floor are no taller than his shoulders. Wilf's section is so tidy you might think nobody had time for Beliefs any more, religions or the occult either, but every book has its reader—that's another Texts motto that is international now. Meanwhile, Ronnie's head is dodging back and forth in Jake's Genre Fiction aisles. "Nothing," he says as Woody catches his eye, "just books."

  Woody can't help taking this personally. Nobody should be so unenthusiastic when Texts has a world of book
s to offer—it bothers him more than the possibility of an intruder. "What kind do you read?" he calls.

  Ronnie is in Erotica before he admits "Funny stuff."

  "Humour's on the side wall."

  Though Woody was playing safe, Ronnie looks as if he's struggling to the conclusion that it was a joke at his expense, and so Woody turns his attention to the back wall, the children's section. Some of the alcoves look as if monkeys had been let loose on the shelves. That isn't how they should be left at the end of the day; he'll need to have a word with Madeleine. Nobody is lurking behind the chairs in any of the alcoves—it would take a dwarf to do that—but a book is sprawled on its face on the carpet in Tiny Texts. It's a first reading book with a single-syllable word opposite a picture on each of the pairs of board pages. Surely Madeleine wouldn't have left it there; perhaps its fall triggered the alarm. Woody checks that it hasn't been damaged and returns it to its shelf. He has found nothing else unshelved by the time he meets Ronnie beside Tempting Texts.

  The guard is poking out his lips at them. Some bestseller appears to have captured his fancy. Woody is about to encourage him when Ronnie slams the clipboard on top of the pile of Ringo by Jingo. "That's for you, you little pisser."

  However much he hates the Beatles or just the drummer, there's never an excuse for damaging a book—and then Woody sees what the assault accomplished. A mosquito is twitching its last on the famous nose. Ronnie scrapes the insect off with a thumbnail he wipes on his trousers, leaving a snotty trail under Starr's left nostril. "It's all this global warming," Ronnie mutters. "Weather doesn't know where it is any more."

  Woody cleans the cover with his handkerchief until there's no trace of the incident. He's watching the guard pore over inking a letter on the clipboard sheet when the overhead speakers burst into song. "Goshwow, gee and whee, keen-o-peachy …" It's the first track on the compact disc that head office provides to liven up the staff when they're fitting out and stocking a new branch. Woody has to admit it's one of the few things that make him ashamed to be American, and why has it started up? Perhaps a similar glitch in the power supply tripped the alarm. As he turns off the player behind the counter, Ronnie frowns at it "I liked that," he complains.

  Woody ignores the implicit request while the guard labours over writing and at last passes him the clipboard and a ballpoint fractured by his grasp. FALS ALARM TEXT'S BOOKSHOP 00.28—00.49, says the whole of the inscription, followed by an inkspot. "Thanks for looking after my store," Woody says as he tries to incorporate the inkspot in the first of his vowels, though this lends it a resemblance to the less blind of a pair of eyes.

  "That's my job."

  He sounds as if he thinks Woody said too much. Maybe he thinks the manager oughtn't to be so proprietorial. Woody is tempted to reveal this is the first branch he's managed after working his way up through New Orleans and Minneapolis, but if that didn't mean enough to Gina, why should it to the guard? It was bad enough that she took a dislike to Fenny Meadows, far worse that she couldn't say why. Impressions are no use if you can't or won't put them into words. No doubt Mississippi is where she ought to stay—this wouldn't be her kind of weather. "Okay, I guess we're through for the night," says Woody, realising too late that Ronnie is nothing of the kind.

  Ronnie drags his shadows past the stores and unoccupied properties towards the guards' hut next to Frugo as Woody resets the alarm. The floodlights sting his eyes until he climbs into the Honda, but he'll save feeling tired for when his head returns to the pillow. As he speeds onto the slip road, graffiti on the concrete pillars under the motorway meet the headlamp beams, short crude words in primitive letters as giant as the mind behind them is small, he suspects. That's one breed of customer Texts can manage without, and Woody hopes Ronnie and his colleagues will keep them clear until the store has its own guard. Otherwise he's sure his staff are up to any challenge, including the Christmas season, however much more experience they would have brought to it if the store had opened in September. He couldn't have brought that about; the builders overran their schedule. Now he can do everything that's required, though, and he needn't expect less of the staff. It doesn't matter where he lives until he's happy with the store. Maybe that's really why Gina decided against working there: she didn't like sharing his narrow bed, though it didn't stay cold for long. The possibility brings a wry smile to his lips as he drives onto the motorway and the fog sinks into the glow of the retail park.

  Jill

  Fifteen minutes take Jill's Nova out of Bury, where delivery vans have turned the narrow main street into an obstacle course, and onto the motorway past Manchester. A faster quarter of an hour brings her to Fenny Meadows Retail Park. Mist precedes her across the tarmac and trails across the wet green fields towards the distant Pennines, a darker jagged frieze cut out of the grey horizon. She parks behind Texts, whose final plastic letter towers like a giant worm over the car. She touches the photograph of her daughter that's perched above the windscreen mirror. "We can do this, Bryony," she declares.

  The blank concrete alley between Texts and the Happy Holidays travel agency leads straight to the books she's responsible for, or at least to the sight of them through the display window. Fiction and Literature didn't sound too daunting, since Jake has Genre Fiction, but trying to invent shelf-end promotions kept her awake last night. Her seps are going septic, she can't help thinking now, and she still has to concoct a way to promote Brodie Oates, the bookshop's first visiting author. Her doubts must have escaped onto her face, because Wilf looks uncertain how to greet her across the counter. "Don't worry, Wilf," she says and wonders if he too has a reason as she makes for the staffroom.

  The door to the featureless concrete stairway lets her in once she shows the plaque on the wall her staff badge. Beyond the toilets confronting each other across the passage at the top, the staffroom door isn't so particular about whom it admits. Though Jill is five minutes early, the rest of her shift is seated at the laminated table in the pale green windowless room. Jill takes her card from the Out rack and slides it along the slit beneath the clock and drops it in the In. Connie gives her a big pink-lipped smile bright enough for a toothpaste ad as Jill sits down. "Ouch," Connie says and twitches her small snub nose at the squeal of the chair on the linoleum. "No rush, Jill. You aren't really late."

  Angus makes to hand Jill a copy of today's Woody's Wheedles sheet but snatches his hand back when Connie is faster. For a moment the August tan that's fading from his elongated face turns even blotchier. The weekend figures are the best yet for the branch, and now Woody wants to see the weekday sales increase. "Anybody with ideas, just pin them on the board," says Connie as she deals everyone printouts of the shift rota. "Gavin, that's a monster yawn, you're shelving. Ross, could you put security tags inside anything over twenty pounds? That's price, not weight, but it could be both. Anyes, you can be informative at Information. Jill, you're a till till eleven."

  As Jill hurries downstairs she's hoping she'll have time to remind herself of the various routines the till demands, but Agnes is looking for help with a queue. Jill types her staff identification number at Till 2 and rubs her clammy hands together. "Who's next, please?"

  A thin but pregnant girl in a floor-length raincoat wants to buy six romances with her Visa card. The codes on the books scan, the till accepts the card, and Jill remembers to lay each book on the pad that neutralises any security tag a manager may have hidden randomly in them. From the heap under the till she peels off a plastic Texts bag that squeaks against her nails and loads it with the books, not forgetting to smile and say "Enjoy them" as she hands the package to the customer. "Who's next, please?" brings her a large man in a small hat of the same prickly tweed as his suit. He presents Jill with his armful of a single book on fighter aircraft and then a cheque, which she has to feed into the till so that it prints the details of the transaction on the back. The till hums to itself while she pleads silently that it won't shred the cheque. At last the till sticks out its tongue, and she on
ly has to compare signatures—they're not quite the same, but surely close enough—before she writes the guarantee card number under the print from the till. The largest bag only just accommodates the book, and she has hardly finished struggling with them when a young mother, who keeps hoisting a toddler with her left arm, dumps a handful of books on the counter, along with a Texts gift voucher for half their price and a Switch card. She delivers a running commentary on Jill's actions as the till buzzes to itself like an insect all the more dangerous for being half-awake—"Now look, the register's had its breakfast and the assistant has to give it Patricia's piece of paper that we call a voucher. Now see, the assistant has to type all mummy's big long number from her card"—and it hardly helps that she has to explain more than once that she isn't calling Jill a sister. "Enjoy your books and come back to see us soon," Jill says at last and takes the chance to tickle Patricia under the chin; at least, she tries, but the toddler draws back. "Thank you," the young woman says briskly and carries both her items out of the shop.

  As Jill treats herself to a quiet but expressive sigh, Agnes sidles along the counter from the Information terminal. "Sorry I left you to serve all those people," she slightly more than whispers, stowing her black tresses behind an ear to reveal a thin pale bony cheek mottled by embarrassment. "The computer didn't seem to want to help me find a book."

  "Don't worry, Anyes, we're all still learning," Jill says and is resting a look of encouragement on her when the ceiling speaks. "Jill call four, please. Jill call four."

  She feels as if Connie has caught her loafing. At least she doesn't have to use the public address system to reply. She doesn't like listening to herself on the speakers, which show up her Mancunian accent as though the voice she hears in her head is a posh costume she can't quite affect, or perhaps one with holes she doesn't notice. When they're connected Connie says "Would you mind taking your lunch now? Wilf wants to shoot out at twelve and Ross does at one."