Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  They’re all about tunnels. Someone whose grandfather was involved in digging Queensway, the first of the pair that take roads under the river, says attempts were made to block up the excavations. The bosses accused the workmen of trying to prolong the job, but some of her grandfather’s colleagues insisted the tunnel had been blocked from within. While I reflect that the digging began at the Old Haymarket, a square built on the highest reach of the Pool, the wife of a worker at the sorting office on Copperas Hill reveals that the postmen are loath to use the tunnel that links the office to Lime Street Station. Perhaps it’s a tale to frighten new recruits, since the veterans say the lights in the tunnel sometimes fail, unless they’re switched off as a prank, at which point you may realise you have company that doesn’t need to see you to find you, because you’ll hear its whisper in your ear before you encounter its wet flabby touch. The construction of the offices unearthed coffins lined with lead, but the presenter is growing so openly cynical about the behaviour of workers that I wouldn’t blame his listeners if they kept any more anecdotes to themselves. A ticket collector rings to talk about the underground railway, a loop of which passes beneath the centre of Liverpool, starting and returning at the bottom of the street the Castle used to dominate. All the tunnels leak, and the loop has to be closed every spring while rails corroded by salt water are replaced. The employee says he’s been told by contractors that they’ve heard intruders running or rather sloshing ahead of them in the dark, even in sections of the tunnels where there’s no water underfoot. It occurs to me that the loop crosses the route of the Pool. The presenter bemoans attitudes to work again before conceding the air to an amateur historian who points out that the city below the ridges of Everton and Edge Hill is riddled with passages—sewers, old hydraulic systems, abandoned railway tunnels and others still in use. As I wonder if my father might feel driven to explore any of them, whatever his reasons, my mobile sets about performing its underwater song.

  The call is from my parents’ house. As I pause the broadcast I think something like a prayer—an unspoken wish, at any rate. “Hello?” I say aloud.

  “Have you heard?”

  Both my mother’s question and her dull voice make me afraid to ask “What?”

  She almost laughs. “No, I mean have you heard from him.”

  “I haven’t. You haven’t either, obviously.”

  “I haven’t.” Her silence suggests that our words have been engulfed by the mire of repetition until she says “I suppose it must be time, then.”

  She means for the police. “Would you like me to call them?”

  “Oh, would you? Or do you think I better had? I was only thinking with him living here…” Perhaps she wants me to compete or at least to answer this, because some seconds take their time before she says “Maybe it would be best coming from you.”

  I feel childish for observing that it’s ten minutes short of midnight. If her watch isn’t fast, her anxiety must be. I let a last hope turn my gaze on the street, but it’s deserted; even the shadow at the window of the office has vanished while I wasn’t looking. “I’ll phone them now then if you like.”

  Of course liking doesn’t come into it, and I feel more childish still. “Go on, Gavin,” she says. “Tell them what I told you and give them my number.” This sounds like a preamble, and she adds “Tell them they can come and see me if they like. I won’t be sleeping till I know what’s happened. You have to stay there, promise me you will, but I wouldn’t mind not being on my own.”

  Chapter Nine

  WHAT THE NIGHT SPAWNS

  I wish I’d said it was an emergency, but I suspect the police wouldn’t think it was much of one. Instead of 999 I called the number for Merseyside Constabulary, where the operator put me through to a policeman who seemed frustratingly remote. He made it clear that he found this an odd time to report a missing person and wondered why I hadn’t waited until morning, so that I had to use my mother’s concern as an excuse. He was surprised I wasn’t with her, even once I’d explained about the landlines; if my father couldn’t contact us on one, wouldn’t he try the other? I described him and his bicycle and said he’d been researching local history for his web site. Since the policeman was as unfamiliar with its address as with mine and my mother’s, I gathered that he and his whereabouts were far from local. When I mentioned that my mother would appreciate a visit, I wasn’t sorry that it wouldn’t be from him.

  He won’t be conducting the search. Having established that someone will contact me if there’s any news, I’m left with an occurrence number so protracted that it feels as if my father’s disappearance may be crushed into insignificance by the weight of the multitude of reports. I listen to the rest of the phone-in, which turns into an argument about workers’ rights and responsibilities. There are no more calls in response to my father’s, but should I have told the police about the earlier ones? I did say that when I last heard from him he was under a railway bridge, and that’s really all I know. I shut the computer down and head for the bathroom.

  I leave the mobile and the landline receiver in the corridor. There’s little space to keep them with me now that some of Lucinda’s toiletries have moved in, and the phones might be affected by the damp that sometimes seems to linger in the bathroom. In the midst of the buzz of the electric toothbrush I imagine that the mobile stirs on the floor, but it must be my nervous eagerness to hear, unless someone’s in the corridor between the apartments. Having finished foaming at the mouth, I send some water on a journey to its source and fill a glass from the bedewed tap before retrieving the phones on my way to bed.

  Although I’ve shared it with Lucinda just a few times, it feels deserted. I lay the phones next to the clock on the bedside table, where the colon between digits almost an hour past midnight blinks insistently as I tug the cord above the pillows. Darkness swallows me, but it contains no sleep. I’m lying with my face towards the table and the window, and soon I hear a whisper that becomes a liquid chorus. The rain sounds torrential, almost blotting out the uneven sluggish tread of someone in the street. At last the presumably drunken wanderer grows inaudible, and at some point the rain does, because I’m asleep.

  I would rather not be. I’m in utter darkness and wet with it too. Am I swimming blindly or groping my way along a tunnel? I’m being drawn towards a presence so unimaginably vast that I can sense its eager awareness of me. I’ve no idea how close it is or where. I’ll find out by touching it, because it apparently has no need to breathe, unless its breaths are too immense and slow for me to identify them as such. I would very much prefer not to encounter it—to learn anything about its shape or nature—and I struggle to cry out, to dredge myself up from the dream. While it seems to take not much less than forever, I succeed in projecting a feeble shriek into the darkness.

  At once I’m afraid that it will attract some part of the presence to reach for me. Dreams have no logic, or perhaps panic doesn’t, because the thought raises another cry. It manages to travel beyond the dark, and I flounder in pursuit until I see the darkness of my room. I would be reassured by its dim but familiar outlines and the amicable winking of the colon of the clock if the cries hadn’t followed me out of the dream. They’re no longer mine.

  It’s past three o’clock. No doubt everyone is asleep except me and whoever is uttering scream after scream, but how can anybody sleep through that? I kick off the quilt and lurch to the window, where I fumble at the lock. The sash slides up, spattering the sill with traces of rain. The cries sound as if they’re streets away. I want to believe they’re the natural call of some animal—an urban fox, perhaps—but they’re all too recognisably human, even if I can’t tell the gender. They seem close to exhaustion by terror or agony or both. If anyone besides me can hear, how can they bear not to find out what’s wrong? Are they too afraid to see? That’s how I’m behaving, which is almost as awful as the screams. I blunder away from the window to switch on both lights in the room.

  They provide no relief. Th
ey simply make the screams more real. I’m dragging yesterday’s clothes on when the cries falter, and I can’t help hoping they’ve come to an end. Their source must have been drawing breath, because in a few seconds they recommence, sounding more outraged and agonised than ever. I shove my feet into socks and shoes and almost forget to lock the window before dashing out of the apartment and slamming the door.

  If the slam awakens any of my neighbours, they aren’t apparent as I run downstairs. Apart from my footfalls the building is silent, and I’m able to hope that someone more qualified than I feel has dealt with the problem outside. When I emerge into the temporarily rainless street, however, the cries are just as atrocious, and my whole being shrinks from imagining what they express.

  They’re behind the building, away from the river. They aren’t in Castle Street, which is deserted except for a few empty cars. The street is staked out by pairs of traffic lights mindlessly juggling colours and staining the drowned sanctuary stone, which glows like luminous moss before it turns the colour of a false daylight and then flares a warning red. As I sprint down Cook Street I hear the baying of a police car. I’m willing it to head for the scene of the crime when the siren shrinks into the distance and is gone.

  Why haven’t I called the police? I might feel absurd for calling them twice in a night, especially if the same policeman answered, but the truth is that the screams haven’t let me think. I even forgot that I was meant to be waiting at home in case my father rang the landline. The doormen who bar undesirables from the restaurants on Victoria Street have left their posts, and the deserted road stretches to the site of the Old Haymarket, where a car with its roof lights flashing swings around the roundabout at the tunnel entrance. “Police,” I yell despite the distance, “police,” and then I realise that the lights are reflections of streetlamps. As I leave Victoria Street for the narrow lane of Temple Court I hear the rattle of a window behind me. “Shut your row,” a man bellows, and the window slams like a lid.

  How can anyone respond that way? He sounded as if he thinks he owns the night as well as wherever he lives. He has left me feeling more alone than ever between the shuttered shops that occupy the lowest floor of the unlit buildings. I hurry into Matthew Street, the lane where a cellar produced the Beatles and other Mersey sounds. The cellar used to resound with screams, but the ones I’m hearing aren’t down there. They’re to my left, beyond a bend of the lane. They’re in Whitechapel.

  They sound raw and weary, yearning for an end. The lane seems to channel them towards me as I venture to the corner. Figures dressed in very little confront me across Whitechapel—women as still as the stone that frames them. They’re dummies in the window of a sex shop. The screams are to their left, but my view is blocked by a cage around roadworks. I have to force myself to head that way, not least because the screams aren’t the only sounds I can hear.

  Beyond the roadworks Whitechapel leads to the Old Haymarket. Even the taxi rank outside a shopping mall is deserted. The only object anywhere on the pavements is lying at the intersection with Richmond Street, which leads to the theatre square. The object is a body, and it’s naked.

  If it’s male, it’s horribly incomplete. That would explain the screams, but not the chorus of croaking. The legs are splayed towards me, and a glistening shape lies between them, separate from the body. The abdomen is heaped with items, wet with them. The mouth is as wide as lockjaw, but the shrieks are growing feebler, and the victim appears incapable of any movement other than an uncontrollable twitching of the stomach. I stumble forward, groping for my mobile with a shaky hand.

  I shouldn’t have moved. The torso jerks, or the mass that’s strewn over it does. Perhaps this was all I saw twitching. The creature between the legs hops towards me with a croak, and another springs over the victim’s chest to land in the gaping mouth as if the cries have served their purpose. I’m hardly aware of lurching forward to determine whether the horde of creatures is on top of the body or inside it or both.

  I’m so anxious to see and equally to avoid seeing that I barely hear a rush at my back. It sounds like water, and my assailant doesn’t seem a great deal more solid. All the same, the pavement thumps my forehead before I’ve time to catch my balance. Is the stain that spreads around my vision more than a shadow? I’ve hardly glimpsed it when I’m engulfed by my personal dark.

  Chapter Ten

  REPRESENTING THE LAW

  It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. That’s the message my head is repeating, verbally and otherwise, while various parts of my body throb in agreement. The waves of light flicker so much that they could just be pain made visible. I can see little more when my eyes falter open, because my face is pressed against a dark unyielding blur. That’s the pavement, but is it so dark at the edge of my vision because whoever attacked me is standing over me? Perhaps I’m next for the treatment that was dealt to the screaming victim. My body prickles, aggravating the roughness of the pavement and discovering a sweaty trace of rain on my back. The world rolls upside down, or at least I do, confronting the attacker.

  There’s nobody above me. When I plant my hands on the damp pavement and waver into a sitting position, the huge soft drum that’s my head barely lets me determine that nobody is to be seen anywhere around me—nobody, not even the screaming victim. The city seems as quiet as stone, and straining my ears until my head redoubles its painful pulse only brings an undercurrent of sound, the omnipresent urban murmur. I rise or rather wobble to my feet and dodge unsteadily around the enclosed roadworks before stumbling to the lane I came along and then to the one that leads to Williamson Square. Neither of them shows me a corpse, and across the road Sir Thomas Street is just as innocent of any, like the entire length of Whitechapel with its patina of rain. Why am I wasting time? I drag out my mobile so hastily that it almost ends up in the gutter, a prospect that leaves me nearly blind with pain.

  A few fumbles at the keys recall the police. “Just put me through,” I snap at the operator, because the pulse in my skull won’t let me describe the situation twice. Either she’s spurred by my urgency or she wants the police to deal with me, because with almost no delay a man says “What’s the problem, please?”

  I should have rung 999. Surely this is still an emergency, and more to the point, I’m sure I recognise the voice. It’s the policeman to whom I spoke at such length about my father. What would my father do in the circumstances? The pounding of my head drives me to adopt the thickest Scouse accent I can summon up. “Mergencee,” I declare. “Youse need—”

  “Who is this?”

  “Youse don’t need me name. Dere’s no time, like. Dere’s been—”

  “Is this Mr Meadows?”

  My skull seems to grow enormous, or the pain does. He must have recognised my number. “Mr—” I blurt, but that won’t work. “It is, yes.”

  As if to compensate for my abandoning my Liverpool sound, his Lancashire accent becomes more pronounced, emphasising the distance between us. “What’s this about, Mr Meadows?”

  The best I can produce between jabs of pain is “I was trying not to confuse you.”

  “How were you going to do that?”

  “I thought you might think I was calling about my father. Is there any news of him?”

  “You just said you weren’t calling about him.” The policeman lets my head pound several times before he says “We told you we’d inform you if there was.”

  “Has anybody been to see my mother?”

  “I couldn’t tell you without checking. Is that why you rang?”

  “No, it’s because somebody, I think somebody’s been murdered.”

  “That’s why you put on a silly voice.”

  “No.” I grope through the pain for an explanation. “I was confused,” I try saying. “I was attacked. Knocked out. Knocked down.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  You could use the pain in my head for a metronome, and it barely lets me read the time on my mobile. “Maybe quarter of an hour,�
� I say. “There was a body but it’s gone.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Frog Lane.” My headache has befuddled me, or the atrocious memory has. “It isn’t called that now,” I say. “I run historical tours, that’s why. It’s Whitechapel.”

  “Which town?”

  As long as he recognised me, how can’t he know? “I haven’t gone anywhere. Liverpool.”

  “Please stay where you are and don’t touch anything.”

  He has nothing more to say to me. Presumably he’s busy sending a car. I pocket the mobile and hold on to the barrier around the roadworks. I should like to close my eyes in the hope that it might ease my headache, but it would make me feel open to attack. The city murmurs all around me like a subterranean flood. I can’t hear any vehicle, even one without the siren it surely ought to be sounding. I’m sure rain is imminent, unless the climate has grown so wet that there’s always water in the air. The police need to examine the scene before the next downpour washes away any evidence. Just because I mustn’t touch anything, that doesn’t mean I can’t look.

  I stumble forward to squint at the pavement where the body was. The flagstones are cracked and tilted by years of parked cars and vans and trucks. They’re moist with rain and stained with oil, but I’m able to distinguish faint tracks. A trail that I’m sure was left by the dragging of a body is flanked by prints that must have lost shape in the rain. They lead towards the tunnel at the Old Haymarket, but once they’ve crossed a deserted taxi rank beyond the last shops they veer away from Whitechapel, along the approach to an entrance that lets shoppers drive under the theatre square to collect goods from beneath the stores on Church Street. Has the corpse been abandoned in the underground area? I can’t see any tracks to suggest whoever moved it has emerged. If they do before the police arrive, shouldn’t I photograph them with my mobile? I’m venturing towards the entrance when my headache gives me a moment to reflect that I’m better staying out of sight. Before I can retreat, a police car screeches into the approach road and halts, blocking my way. “In there,” I call, pointing past the car.