Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  “Whatever you have from John Strong.”

  “Who’s that?”

  My mother might almost have glimpsed someone in the streets steeped in darkness, but she’s sharing my bemusement. “He was a pathetic nasty character who convinced a few vulnerable people that he had some kind of power over them,” says Lucinda. “I don’t think it was even his real name.”

  “He knew things nobody else knew or didn’t want to admit they did,” says my father.

  “We still aren’t in on the secret,” I say for my mother as well.

  “He was an occultist of the worst kind,” Lucinda says. “He was up to his tricks in Liverpool just after the last war, apparently. He ran some kind of cult and published a book about his beliefs. Published it himself, though you’d wonder who for when he had so much contempt for everyone.”

  “If that’s all you think of him,” my father says, “it’s more of a wonder you’re so interested in him.”

  “I’d just like to see what you say you copied in the library so I can—”

  “It’s not on the computer.”

  “You’ll have it somewhere, won’t you?” my mother says as if she’s determined to participate. “Shall I help you look?”

  “I’ll tell you where I know it is, and that’s the library.”

  “Look,” I say, “Lucinda told you—”

  “You can believe her or you can believe me.”

  “I’m really sorry if you thought I was unreasonable, Deryck.”

  Perhaps that’s a little stiff, but as far as I’m concerned she has no need to apologise, any more than my father needs to retort “You mean I was.”

  “I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. I expect you were carried away by your enthusiasm.”

  As my mother readies a question my father demands “What are you trying to get at?”

  “Simply what I said. You’re so committed—”

  “More like I should be, eh? I’ll bet Gill thinks that sometimes too.” As my mother wards off the idea with her hands he says “Tell us how I managed to copy all those pages out of something you’re telling us never existed.”

  “I don’t think I went quite that far.”

  “A damn sight more than far enough. Do you want them thinking I dreamed it there at your library table? You brought it me, so don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. Don’t bother trying to confuse me at all.” As she parts her lips he says “I never invited you in.”

  Perhaps he only means the room, but even that’s too much. “I’m afraid you get both of us,” I say and would stop there if his gaze at Lucinda relented. “Or neither.”

  “Right now that’s no choice.”

  “I could wait outside if you like,” Lucinda says.

  “I don’t like at all.” I’m infuriated to see him considering the offer. “I couldn’t be sorrier,” I tell my mother, “but you’re going to have to excuse us.”

  “You haven’t drunk your tea,” she rebukes some or all of us.

  Does she honestly think this can alter the situation? I’m dismayed by the notion that in her own way she’s becoming as odd as my father has grown. As he turns back to the screen Lucinda tells her “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again.”

  “Don’t get your dreams up,” my father says and gazes out at the premature darkness.

  My mother shakes her head and leads the way downstairs. By the time she has opened the front door while Lucinda and I take token mouthfuls of tea, she seems to have shaken the last few minutes out of her mind. As she plants her mug on the doorstep and reclaims ours she says “Better get away before it teems.”

  I leave her with a hug that feels unexpectedly flabby and damp. I hope I react no more than Lucinda does to hers. My mother watches until we climb into the Spirita. “I’m sorry I spoiled whatever that might have been,” Lucinda murmurs.

  “You didn’t, you know that. I can only apologise for him. Maybe it’s retirement. We’ll work it out,” I say, but I don’t know how much of this she hears as the car rattles and thunders like a set of percussion while the roadway roars at the top of its voice. The latest downpour is upon us, and as the front door slams the house turns wet and dark as mud at the bottom of a pool.

  Chapter Five

  THE DRAINED LAND

  Frog’s-lane took its name from the inhabitants of the marshes around it. The creatures used to croak so loudly at night that householders dreamed of them. Attempts to hunt the frogs down and wipe them out always failed, and one maddened hunter almost drowned in a marsh. Once the ground was drained the frogs went elsewhere, although several local people complained of still hearing them at night, no doubt another dream. Could this have driven one or more of them to commit some atrocity? None is mentioned on the web site. After the street was renamed Whitechapel it became known as a place of ill repute, which I take to mean the territory of prostitutes, like the London district with which it shares its name. Later the Ripper diary claimed that the author had seen his wife with her lover in the Liverpool location. By then it had developed side streets, some leading to Williamson Square, which wasn’t named after the builder of the tunnels; indeed, the city seems to have tried to ignore his legacy for decades. The square was surrounded by concert rooms, and the York Hotel contained a mock courtroom that satirised contemporary scandals until the trial of Jack Myprick saw the players and the hotel manager prosecuted for obscenity. The web site has left Frog Lane behind, and it’s the last of the very few references the search engine produced. My attention drifts until it snags on the address of the site. It’s www.ruinedcity.com.

  The search engine brought me straight to this inner page, and I scroll to the button that calls up the home page. The visual history of the growth of Liverpool ends with the devastated landscape occupied by fat question marks, which remind me more of giant maggots than of serpents now. Topics in the sidebar include LIVERPOOL AS IT WAS and AS IT WASN’T, not to mention AS IT SHOULD BE and AS IT SHOULDN’T besides AS THEY DON’T WANT YOU THINKING IT IS and even AS IT’S DREAMED…I’m intrigued by the last one, but it shows me only my reflection on a page that has yet to be created. The underlying notion of the site appears to be that much of Liverpool has been destroyed or buried, so that the developers have no idea what they may unearth, although I’m not sure my father has; the site reads more like notes for one, and not very coherent notes either. Theatres and music halls and circuses sprang up where or close to where the Pool had been, and he wonders why, since one of the first historians of Liverpool called the area “building land of the worst description.” Why were so many early streets built there? As I share my father’s puzzlement, the Beatles announce that they’d like to be under the sea.

  I’ve changed my ringtone, but it’s still designed to sound Liverpudlian. The display withholds the caller’s number. “Gavin Meadows,” I tell whoever’s there.

  “Liverghoul Tours?”

  “And High Rip Trips,” I assure her. “Pool of Life Walks as well.”

  “It’s the council, Mr Meadows. The Tourism Events Coordinator would like to see you.”

  “Is that what they’re calling her now? I hope I can still call her Rhoda.”

  “When do you think you’ll be able to come in?”

  “How about now? As soon as I can walk there. Fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll pass that on.”

  I would ask to speak to Rhoda and confirm it if I didn’t suspect she’s attempting to cope with whatever changes her latest job description has loaded on her. She’s enthusiastically disorganised but able to produce impressive paperwork. I shut down the computer and gulp the last of my lukewarm coffee. Having dumped the mug in the sink, I lock the apartment and tramp downstairs.

  After this morning’s rain the streets look immersed in a dream of reverting to streams and rivers. On Castle Street the remnant of the sanctuary stone—a roughly circular stub etched with four irregular parallel lines—glistens like a wet fossil embedded in the roadway. At the town hall I turn alon
g Dale Street, another of the seven ancient thoroughfares. It’s full of lunchtime crowds, not least of smokers cast out of the ornate Victorian office blocks. Wide-eyed faces implanted in the frontages watch the pedestrians unobserved or, higher up, gaze in stony reveries at sights beyond my imagining. Opposite Cheapside a tower and a spire poke at the blue sky. They belong not to a church but to the massive grey Municipal Buildings, outside which stopped buses throb and chug.

  Wide steps lead to the pillared entrance. Beyond an enquiry desk, people are chattering in a selection of languages while they queue to pay bills in an expansive hall beneath lofty skylights. “Gavin Meadows for the Touristic Eventualities Coordinationist,” I tell the woman behind the desk.

  Her official expression doesn’t relent as she wields a phone. “I have Mr Meadows for you,” she says, and to me “If you could wait.”

  “I’ll give it time,” I say, which proves equally incapable of lending her a smile. Perhaps it was how my father used to say such things that made them work. I listen to the clamour of languages, and then I hear another one along a corridor. “I’ll get back to you,” an American is saying.

  I seem to recognise the voice, and I do once he unlocks the door to the corridor. The corner of his mouth lets the hint of a grin subside, and the features of his wide face appear to clench even smaller. I’m able to believe he has been visiting some official until the receptionist indicates me with the phone. “Here’s your one o’clock, Mr Waterworth.”

  His preoccupied eyes barely take me in as he says “We’ll talk in my office, Gavin.”

  Chapter Six

  WATERWORTH

  The green paint of the high arched corridor has never seemed so institutional. Once the glass door shuts off the global hubbub in the payment hall there’s silence except for the measured tread of my escort, which puts me in mind of a pulse in mud, and my own imitation. He pushes open a fire door and another, presumably expecting me to keep up, because he doesn’t hold them. Beyond the second one he marches into Rhoda’s office.

  She’s gone. So are the photographs of the river, ousted from their places on the walls by a map of Liverpool I hardly recognise and an artist’s impressions of the future of the city, full of shopping malls and more of the skyscrapers that have invaded the famous skyline, towering above the tethered birds. Outside the window behind Rhoda’s desk a bus trundles away from the stop, exposing a row of small discoloured shops and the lower end of Cheapside. “What happened to Rhoda?” I’m anxious to hear.

  “Close the door, Gavin,” Waterworth says, which I assume is a prelude to sharing a confidence until he adds “I can’t discuss council personnel. We’re here to explore what happened to you.”

  He sits in Rhoda’s chair and permits himself an almost invisible grimace at the unstable jiggle it has acquired from her rocking and swivelling in it during discussions. As he more or less upturns a hand to indicate that I should take the chair opposite I say “She was good at your job.”

  I feel as if he’s trying to write her out of her own history, erasing every trace of her that he can find. He treats me to a mute stare before saying “Did she observe any of your tours?”

  “She mustn’t have felt she needed to.” His muteness provokes me to ask “Shouldn’t you have told me what you were?”

  “What difference would it have made to the tour?”

  I’m tempted to point out that without him we might have taken refuge in a pub where I could have told Liverpool stories. Instead I say “Was there much on it you didn’t know? I’m betting yes.”

  “My antecedents are here.” Before I can take back any implication that he’s an ignorant foreigner he says “The core issue isn’t how much people knew.”

  When raising an eyebrow and then both doesn’t prompt him to continue, I have to ask “What, then?”

  “How reliable you are.”

  “I’ve had no complaints.”

  “You have now.”

  “From whom?” Having been subjected to his scrutiny again, I say “Sorry, you, yes? Fire away. I’m always trying to improve.”

  I haven’t finished speaking when I realise that he may have a complaint about the encounter with my father. It’s a surprise, if hardly pleasant, when he says “I felt as if you’d done the walk so many times you were sleepwalking through it. You never brought it alive for me. Too much of the time you seemed to be drifting off the point into some kind of dream of your own. I believe you left most of your customers as confused as I was.”

  “About what?”

  “The Jack the Ripper business, for one thing. I don’t think anyone was clear how much of it was made up.”

  “If you’re asking for my opinion, I think the diary’s fake.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be including it in your tour.”

  “It’s about legends as well as history. They’re part of what we are.”

  “That’s another issue. You’re supposed to be promoting Liverpool and yet you spent all that time on somebody who killed”—he wrinkles his nose as if the water in the glass he’s raising to his lips is stagnant—“people in London.”

  “Prostitutes,” I’m provoked to clarify. “Someone else brought him up before I did, if you recall.”

  “Sure enough, you did seem to keep needing to be prompted. You didn’t always have the answers, though.”

  “If you mean the atrocities I’m working on them.”

  “Don’t you ever think about anything else?”

  “Somebody wanted to know,” I say, only to remember it was me. “Anyway, when you made that kind of comment on the tour—”

  “We need to move this forward. I’m interviewing a team with a proposal for some tours. They’re actors and they’ll play figures from Liverpool history. How do you think you’ll compete?”

  “We’ll have to find out,” I say, which his stare convicts of insufficiency. “I’ve got bookings for this week and next.”

  “I’d like to see the figures since you started, particularly for returns. You need to show me why we should continue to include you in our brochures.”

  “I’m offering a lot of knowledge about Liverpool and what it means to be a native.”

  As I realise he could take this as a gibe he says “Maybe once upon a time that could mean small-town and disorganised, but it doesn’t hack it now.”

  “Sorry,” I say, which I’m anything but. “Are you telling me that’s me?”

  “You must have known there was a strong possibility of rain on your tour, but you didn’t have a contingency plan. All you could offer was hanging around in a passage and coming back for a rerun.” Before I can remind him of the proposal to head for a pub he says “Did anybody take you up on that?”

  “Not yet. I expect they’re waiting for the weather to improve. I’ll invest in some umbrellas if I have to. Bumbershoot Tours, that’ll be me.”

  I thought the term was American—certainly my father would adopt that accent when he used the word—but Waterworth seems not to find it worth recognising. Having stared at it, he says “I’ll hold off making a decision till all your tours have been looked at.”

  “You’ll be tagging along, you mean.”

  “Somebody will.” His gaze makes it clear that no further questions on the subject are invited. “May we assume your father doesn’t usually accompany you?” he says.

  “That was the first time.”

  “And the last, can we hope? Along with the last time you make a detour to visit your girlfriend.”

  “You know that was to sort my father out.” My anger grows as I feel I’ve been forced to blame him. “I think most people quite liked having him along,” I say. “You saw how much he knows. He used to work for the museums.”

  “But doesn’t now.”

  “He did since before I was born. He only took early retirement to make way for someone younger.”

  A strip of seated figures glides into sight behind Waterworth as if a slide depicting an audience has been inserted in
a viewer. It’s the upper deck of a bus, which offers little distraction from his stare. Far too eventually he says “Who told you that?”

  “Who would?”

  “He did, I imagine. This is unfortunate.” He takes a sip of water, apparently to help him say “I regret to have to be the one to tell you he was asked to leave.”

  All the visible passengers on the bus appear to be joining in his scrutiny, through so much glass that I have the wholly useless notion that they’re gazing at me out of or into an aquarium. “Why?” I hear myself demand.

  “I understand he was telling the public—”

  The shrill bell makes my heart jerk. Waterworth lifts the receiver and listens and returns it to its plastic niche. “I’ve already told you I won’t discuss council personnel,” he says. “You’ll have to excuse me now. I’ll be in touch in due course.”

  Some of the glassed-in heads rise to watch me stand up. I follow Waterworth along the corridor, where I feel like an afterthought to his progress. The doors he doesn’t bother to hold open thump shut behind me like insubstantial yet painful blows to the back of my head. I shove the door to the lobby aside before he can, a triumph that seems worse than petty. As he blocks it with his foot a man booms “Mr Waterworth?”

  He’s expansive in every way, not least his enthusiastically ruddy face. The two young women who flank him are half his width and not quite so thoroughly bald. He heads straight for me, thrusting his brawny arms out of a T-shirt emblazoned HISTRIONIC HISTORY. It looks as if he’s threatening to hug me, but I’m let off with a moist handshake while I say “He’s Waterworth. I’m the competition.”

  Of course the actor wasn’t trying to turn Waterworth even further against me. I’ve enough to worry about, and Waterworth reminds me of some. As a bus draws away, giving me a glimpse of a ragged pedestrian bearing an incongruously open dilapidated umbrella up sunlit Cheapside, he calls after me “I need those figures on my desk this week, and the names of your clients as well.”