Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  Chapter Seven

  OLD WORDS

  As I phone my parents’ house I seem to hear a hiss of waves, the sound of wheels beside me on Dale Street. Like the rest of the city, the street scarcely has time to dry between bouts of rain. I’m more concerned about hearing my mother. “Who’s that?” she urges. “Is that you, Deryck?”

  “It isn’t. I was going to ask if he was there.”

  “Oh, Gavin,” she says without betraying too much disappointment. “Did he call you?”

  “Not unless he rang the flat while I was out just now.”

  “Oh, were you? Anywhere nice?”

  “Not especially. Why would he have been calling me?”

  “I don’t really know. Why did you want him?”

  The conversation has begun to feel like being trapped in a small but inescapable labyrinth. I’m not sure what this suggests about her mental state, but I don’t want to upset her. “Just to see if I can sort things out,” I confine myself to saying.

  “I liked your girlfriend. We didn’t cause any problems for you two, did we?”

  “You certainly didn’t,” I say while managing not to emphasise the first word.

  “They come from being close to someone,” my mother says as if she didn’t hear me. “Try not to be angry with him. He seems to have a lot on his mind.”

  Because I’m unsure how much she knows, I can risk saying only “That’s why I wanted to talk.”

  “You used to like going out for a drink together, didn’t you? I thought he might have more time for it since he stopped work.”

  “What did he say about that?”

  “He’s found more to do than he expected. Whether it’s worth all his time, that’s a different story. I suppose at least it keeps him active.” As traffic lights release a flood of pedestrians across North John Street at me, my mother says “I’d love to see you getting him to relax a little. You could try calling his mobile if you like.”

  “I’ll do that now.”

  “Yes, now.” Her enthusiasm flags as she adds “You might have a bit of a job. I think he may still be at the new tunnel.”

  I phone as I head past the town hall and down Water Street, beyond which the perspective reduces the mile’s width of river to a stream. A thin young but patchily empurpled businessman strides uphill towards me, haranguing his mobile as he mimes a crisis that I can’t help hoping exceeds any of mine. I listen to the imprecisely distant bell that feels engulfed by the shapeless murmur of the crowd on the broad pavement, and then I hear my father. “I’ve got on my bike,” he says, “or I’m otherwise engaged. State your name, rank and serial number. Make that just your name and number and I’ll ring you back.”

  For the middle sentence he assumes the accent of an officer in an old British war film. I feel as humourless as Waterworth for not responding in kind, but I’m busy saying “It’s me, dad. We should talk. Let’s work out whatever needs it. Give me a call.”

  Wherever I’ve been speaking to, he isn’t there. He hasn’t replied by the time I arrive home. Above the entrance the blurred flood from the merman’s cornucopia is growing green with lichen. Perhaps some of the moisture responsible has trickled down the door, wetting the brass handle. I rub my stained hand on my trousers as I shoulder the door shut with an imposing thud.

  It sounds designed to daunt the lower orders—beggars, thieves, whoever might have roamed the streets after dark when the offices were built. It resounds through the building and, if I’m not mistaken, under it too. It dies away beneath me, and then the building is as silent as the old disconnected phone on the desk. So is my mobile, but suppose my father called the apartment instead?

  I run up the padded marble stairs and let myself in. A photograph of the waterfront glints as if a ripple on the sepia Mersey has moved to catch the light. The red zero of the answering machine beside my desk has rearranged its segments into an angular three. I thumb the button and sit at my desk, and wonder why the hooded figure in the dim depths of the office across the street is so immobile as I wait for the tape to speak.

  “Mr Meadows? Are you there, Mr Meadows? This is Moira Shea. Are you there? Me and the lad were on your tour when your da was talking about old Jack. We’d like to take you up on your offer, specially if he’s with you again. Are you not there? I’ll have to leave you our number, then, and you can let us know when you want us.”

  The next message is from my father, but at first I’m not sure if it is. It begins with a long loud breath that’s the basis of an even more protracted sigh, apparently of resignation. “I’m sorry you’re not there,” he says, “but I’m ready to say this, so I will. If somebody’s got to be worried I’d rather it wasn’t your mother.” Perhaps he plans to own up about his retirement, but his voice turns aside for an altercation, returning to say only “I don’t think this is the place. Give us a ring, Gav, when you get this.”

  By us, like many Liverpudlians, he presumably means just himself. I’m distracted by attempting to make out a face within the green or greenish hood of the still figure beyond the office window rendered little better than opaque by sunlight. As I reject the notion that the hood contains a pallid flat featureless lump reminiscent of a jellyfish, the tape produces its third message.

  At first this seems to consist entirely of the chatter of a drill in stone. The aggressive rattle lessens, though not a great deal, and I’m just able to hear my father remarking “This is a joke.” Through a clangour of scaffolding he adds “Don’t call me for a bit. Give it half an hour at least.”

  I mustn’t waste any more time on the spectacle in the office, even if the featureless contents of the hood have begun to suggest some underground denizen that owes its pallor to never having seen the light. I crouch to replay my father’s first message. He has just finished expressing his reluctance to worry my mother when the mobile strikes up the octopus song on my desk.

  It’s out of reach unless I’m on my feet, and I need to squat lower to hear what he was saying away from the phone. “I just want a look at your—” The song of the sea blots out the next muffled word and accompanies “I won’t be riding anywhere near them. Look, I’m getting off.” As the ringtone ceases I rewind the section of tape and play it yet again. Was my father viewing bones or stones? Several replays leave me unsure, and I lurch to my feet to see that my mobile has taken a call. Once I’m past the bright young female voice that Frugo uses on its network and online and at its automatic supermarket checkouts, I hear my father.

  “This is fun, isn’t it?” he says but doesn’t mean. “I expect we’ll meet up sooner or later. I really could do with a word before I’m much older.” As his hollow voice is almost drowned by the thunder of a train I deduce that he’s under a bridge. “Hang on a minute,” he says, and I assume he’s waiting for the train to pass until he adds through the uproar “Bloody hell, Gav, you won’t believe—”

  That’s all, and it’s lent a full stop by the single yip of a car alarm. Or is that a solitary clink of bricks? There’s certainly plenty of rubble around town just now. As I poke the key to call him back I reflect that while I was listening to him I ought to have been listening to him. It’s as if he’s able to inhabit two places and a pair of times at once, though he didn’t sound particularly happy with the trick. A bell signifies his ringtone, and then he says “I’ve got on my bike…”

  “Get back off it, then. Why aren’t you answering now?” I imagine him speeding away from whoever threw a brick at him. “It’s me again,” I say as soon as he gives me the chance. “You’re right, this isn’t much of a joke. I’m at home now, so ring either number. I promise I’ll pick up.”

  I sit on the edge of my chair, ready to grab the mobile or the cordless phone, while the sun removes the patina of light from the window opposite. Are the offices disused? I can’t recall seeing anyone at work in there or even entering them, though admittedly the entrance is out of sight from my apartment. The view into the room is still blurred by dust or grime, through which I
see parts of two desks and the edge of a grey filing cabinet and a calendar beside it on the wall, but not the date. Behind and between the desks the greenish hooded shape isn’t a figure after all. It’s an old coat abandoned on a hook.

  I need to produce the information for Waterworth, and I bring up my accounts on the computer. I’ve listed all the payments for my tours, though not the tips some customers added, but I’ve never bothered listing names. If Waterworth wants some, I’ll provide them—he has no means of checking how genuine they are. I copy the amounts and dates into a new file. The amounts represent the takings for each date, and I have to divide them—twenty pounds for Liverghoul, twenty-five including train fare for the High Rip Trip, twenty for Pool of Life. There are years of them, and by the time I’ve finished making sense of them it feels like years since my father last rang. I gaze at the indirectly sunlit street while I think of calling him, and then I see there’s no hooded shape in the room opposite.

  So the offices are in use after all. Why am I wasting time over them? In a rage at my procrastination I grab the mobile. “Where are you?” I demand once my father has gone through his routine. “Are you down a tunnel? My mother said you might be. I really would appreciate it if you’d call as soon as you get this.”

  Will he think we’ve been discussing him behind his back? Anything I add may aggravate the impression, and I terminate the call. I put the names I can remember to the amounts on the screen, and then I set about inventing. Derby, Strange, Underhill, Colman, Aikin, Houlston, Farren, Roscoe, Lemon, Molyneaux, Pocock, Hime…I’ve no idea where I’m dredging up these names from; I feel as if I’m dreaming them into existence as the home-going murmur of pedestrians and traffic fades from the city and the sunlight starts to follow. I could imagine that I’m wakened by the Beatles singing where or what they’d like to be. I snatch up the mobile and see the number is unidentified. “Hello?” I urge.

  “Gavin. Are you terribly busy?”

  “Never too busy for you, Lucy. Why?”

  “You aren’t usually so abrupt.”

  “I’m just in the middle of some work. Nothing I can’t get back to.”

  “I’ll let you. I was just going to say you’ll be on your own tonight.”

  “Oh. All right then.” Audible disappointment might seem too possessive, but at least I can ask “Where will you be?”

  “There are some things I ought to get on with at home.”

  “I’ll see you soon though, I expect.”

  “Of course. I’d better go. I’m on the phone at work.”

  This explains why it kept its number to itself. Perhaps concentrating on my task will bring my father, however childishly magical the idea is. Tayleure, Ryley, Raymond, Thillon, Copeland, Levey, Loraine, Chute, Egerton, Tearle…When my ringtone dams the gradual but steady stream of names, I look up to see the summer dusk.

  The call is from my parents’ house. My father’s mobile must have run out of power, and he’s had to wait until he returned home. This time I’m simply glad to say “Hello?”

  “Did you hear your father?”

  All I can hear is a mocking chorus of seagulls down towards the river. “I’m not with you,” I tell my mother.

  “On the radio asking people to phone or get in touch.”

  “So that’s where he’s been. No wonder his mobile’s switched off.”

  “Not now. At lunchtime.”

  “I didn’t catch him. So where is he now?”

  “I haven’t seen him since breakfast. I haven’t heard from him and I can’t get through to him.” As the gathering darkness appears to trigger the streetlamp at an intersection, erasing a dim shadow or a stain on the pavement, she says “I don’t know where he’s got to, and I’m worried sick.”

  Chapter Eight

  RADIO DESPERATION

  “Don’t listen to anyone else. If anybody tells you not to tell, that’s a reason to. Tell us things you thought were too strange to talk about and people would think you were mad if you did. Tell us before they’re forgotten or somebody covers them up. We need to hear the things you won’t see in the official books, things the people in charge wouldn’t let in even if they knew about them, and I’m not saying they don’t. Doesn’t matter if you aren’t sure if your story’s true. We need to look at the legends as well and see how it all fits together.”

  “You sound like you’re reading off a script, Deryck.”

  “Well, I’m not. It’s all up here.”

  “All in your head, you mean. Where can listeners call you if they’ve got something for you?”

  “Here. Phone you is what I’m saying. That way everyone can hear and nobody can pretend it wasn’t said or didn’t happen.”

  “Don’t know about that,” the presenter says, but he’s an amateur, one of the winners of the competition to front the phone-in show for a day of Liverpool Diversity Week (“Including You” is the slogan). The radio station has also hired a blind man to review films and adults with learning difficulties to cover concerts. “We can give them your mobile, can’t we, Deryck?” the temporary anchor says. “They’ll find you wherever you are.”

  “That’s second best,” my father says, which is the last of him.

  It has taken me nearly an hour to track him down. I’ve heard callers insisting that the name of Liverpool’s new French wine bar—the Legless Frog—is racist, or advertising the Learning Differents cinema matinees for the mentally impeded, or complaining that John Lennon Airport is named after a druggie, to which the next contributor retorts that Lennon’s widow displayed a poster of her cunt in Church Street…The word has the caller removed from the air, but otherwise the presenter seems content to let monologues run uninterrupted. My father’s sounded all too reminiscent of the kind a late-night phone-in show attracts.

  I may as well carry on listening, since I have to stay home in case my father calls the landline. My mother is giving him until midnight to phone one of us before she contacts the police, a deadline that seems both magical and ominous. Next on the air is a woman from Garston who declares for several strident minutes that she wasn’t involved in the slave trade and sees no reason why the city should apologise to the descendants of the victims for owing some of its wealth to the business. I’m tempted to retort that when the government proposed to abolish the trade, the city council objected at length. I’d be wasting my time, since her call is close to twelve hours old, and playing back on the station’s web site. “Maybe some of our black listeners have an opinion,” the presenter risks suggesting when she eventually departs. “Now I hope you’re listening, Deryck.”

  For a moment I share the hope, but I’m not making sense. “Here’s Frank from Old Swan,” the presenter says. “What’s your story, Frank?”

  “They used to say the devil left his footprints in St Cuthbert’s down near the docks.”

  “The devil they did. Did you see yourself?”

  “Some of us thought we did. We were just kids. It was bombed in the blitz and we used to play there. We’d dare each other to stand in the footprints. Told the girls if you looked behind you while you were standing in them you’d see the devil creeping up.”

  “Used to make your own amusement in the good old days, eh? What did these footprints of yours look like?”

  “Nothing much. They got bigger and smaller as they went along, and you wouldn’t know what shape they were trying to be, except one looked like a man’s foot with the toes gone wrong. They must have been worn away, all the footprints. My granddad said that part of the floor was made out of mud so old it’d turned to stone. One kid swore he went in there one night and saw the devil wriggling out of a hole in the floor. Said it didn’t know what shape to be. He was always a bit peculiar, though. Got put away when he grew up. Is that the kind of thing you’re after?”

  “Deryck might be. Are you out there, Deryck?”

  I don’t know if my father heard. Did he follow up any leads the show provided? “Now here’s Mildred from Great Homer Street,”
the presenter is saying. “Have you got a tale for us, Mil?”

  “It’s another one out of the blitz.”

  “Before my time, love. Part of our history, though. Were you there?”

  “My dad was, and his mate Tommy Lawless. You’ll have heard of Tommy, will you?”

  “I’d call a lot of folk lawless these days, but I don’t know about him.”

  “They were in the papers and a book as well, and it wasn’t for doing anything bad. They found the man in the metal thingy, what do you call it, a cylinder. He must have crawled in and not been able to get out, that’s what the book said. We used to wonder what he was trying to crawl away from. It was in the 1880s, and then he stayed hid till a bomb dug him up. Thomas Cregeen Williams, his name was, and he had his own business in Leeds Street. And the coroner that did the inquest was a Mr Mort.”

  “Mort the coroner, eh? Never heard that before. The old ones are the best. Next up is Beverley from Everton. Hiya, Bev from Ev. Is that what your friends call you?”

  “Not to my face.”

  “We can’t see that. We’ll use our imagination. You’re on about the blitz as well.”

  “We never liked going down in the shelter because one boy kept saying he could hear somebody on the other side of the wall where there was nothing but earth. Funny, his name was Deryck as well. It wasn’t Deryck Meadows on before, was it? That was him.”

  “A friend of his, are you? We’d never have guessed. Have you told your tale or is there more you’ve thought of?”

  “I think he thought the blitz was stirring things up that shouldn’t be. If you call him back you could put him in touch. We’ve not spoken since he went off and got married.”

  “You’re certainly full of—” The presenter coughs on the way to saying “You’re certainly full of surprises, Bev. Bev?”

  Perhaps she’s tired of his increasingly blatant scepticism, but I wouldn’t mind sharing it so late at night when I’m already nervous about my father. Across the street the deserted office lit by the lamp at the intersection seems unsettlingly reminiscent of my childhood bedroom—the dim discoloured oblique light from outside, the long misshapen shadows that resemble dream versions of the furniture. I could almost imagine that one rounded blotch is a face that’s peering at me around the edge of the grubby window. I mustn’t be distracted from listening to calls my father may have followed up.