Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  I return to the opening screen, which shows Lucinda asleep in my bed, and wait for a response. Soon the image fades to conserve energy, and I’m drawn to peer at it so hard that a shadow on the far side of the bed appears to stir. I’ve never previously wondered what cast the shadow, and it’s impossible to tell from its undefined shape. Before long an angular 8 relinquishes a segment to denote the next minute, and I’m still watching when the 9 reduces itself to zero while the digit in front of it seems to writhe like a worm to turn into a 5. I’m not just observing, I’m being observed, and the receptionist looks ready to ask me to leave. In any case the tangled languages that echo in the payment hall are gathering in my brain, so that I feel close to incapable of thinking in English.

  I hurry out of the building and loiter on the steps. Traffic crowds down the flyover into Dale Street or lumbers up from the depths of Whitechapel. Although it’s early afternoon, many headlamps are lit. How dark may it be where my mother is? I would call her to tell her I’ve heard from my father if that mightn’t delay his next message. Why doesn’t he just call? Why haven’t I? Perhaps for fear that someone else will answer, even if only with silence, or am I not awake enough to think? I bring up his number, and hear the bell in the midst of waves of static and traffic. At last it gives way to his voice.

  “I’ve got on my bike or I’m otherwise engaged. State your name, rank and serial number…” Knowing that he can’t be on the bicycle dismays me, and the theatrical British accent he adopts makes me wish I’d never seemed impatient with any of his jokes. “I’ll ring you back,” he promises, and I will it to be true. Surely anyone who’d stolen his mobile would have deleted the answering message.

  “I got your text, dad. Did you get mine? Why aren’t you answering? Let’s talk. I’d rather talk. There’s no reason we can’t, is there? Remember you said you wanted a word, so let’s have it. You didn’t want to worry mother, but we’re both worried now. We will be until we hear from you properly. I know you don’t want that,” I say and would continue, however incoherently, except for realising that he can’t interrupt my call to speak. “I’m ringing off now,” I tell him, “so you can ring back.”

  A bus confronts me with two tiers of spectators before carrying them onwards. A 5 on the miniature screen rounds itself and infects its neighbour with the process, but that’s the only life the phone shows. I’m alone with memories of my father’s voices, and I remember the impromptu tours of Liverpool he gave me when I was a child. Even when my mother came with us, he did most of the talking. Sometimes he introduced me to places that no longer exist—the miles of gardens that adorned a landfill site for a few years by the river near the Maybrick house, the narrow lanes off Church Street that were soon to be buried under department stores—but usually I had to imagine the locations he was evoking. He liked to stroll along the grassy midways of suburban boulevards and reminisce about the trams that used to clank and spit electricity all the way to the Pier Head. Once we took a succession of buses along the dock road from Garston to Seaforth so that he could show me the route of the overhead railway. He had fun with challenging me to guess which suburban buildings he’d watched films in—an undertaker’s premises, a nightclub, a car showroom. If I succeeded I would be treated to a re-enactment of a scene from the film, especially if it starred Cagney or Bogart or James Stewart or John Wayne. He enjoyed taking me on the Mersey ferries to watch hordes of homebound businessmen walk widdershins around the decks. Didn’t he once suggest they were unconsciously reviving an ancient ritual connected with the river? Was my head ever filled with the harsh smell of coffee that greeted you at the doors of Cooper’s that used to occupy the corner of Paradise Street, or are these dreams my father gave me? I’m dismayed that just now I can’t recall more from our life together; I’m even struggling to visualise his face, as if it’s losing its shape in my mind. I feel as if my chance to locate him is retreating, but haven’t I overlooked a way of tracing him? I dash down the steps and around the building towards Whitechapel.

  I’m clammy with rage at my thoughtlessness. Am I ever going to wake up? As I sprint down Stanley Street I pass someone sitting on Eleanor Rigby’s bench. Are they homeless or in some other unfortunate condition? My glimpse suggests that their face is as grey and baggy as their outfit, and I’m not even sure it’s a hood that renders their cranium hairless and carelessly shaped. I’m quite glad to be on the opposite side of the road. The drain beyond the kerb in front of the bench utters a splash, and I suppose the person must have disposed of some litter and fled, because when I glance back they’re nowhere to be seen. All that matters to me is the Frugone store on Whitechapel.

  It’s on a corner of the street leading to the Playhouse, and my head begins to throb as if it’s raw with memory. It throbs more vigorously as I find the shop is locked. Beyond the window full of pink phones and striped ones, not to mention leopard-spotted mobiles and others spattered with cartoonish drops like magnified negative rain, employees with buckets are doggedly mopping the floor. At the back of the shop, water looks inches deep. One man greets the sight of me by spreading his arms wide, which displays the Frugosh special offers logo on his sulphurously yellow shirt. As I start to move away the gesture turns into a promise of an embrace, and he strides to open the door. “Don’t run off. We’re not underwater yet,” he cries, shaking his head and the jowls of his expansive mottled face. “You look like my kind of customer.”

  His enthusiasm comes with cigarette breath. “What’s happened here?” I feel bound to wonder.

  “Must be a burst somewhere with all the weather. What can I get you? If it’s anything the water’s done for we can organise it overnight.”

  “I was hoping you could trace a mobile.”

  “Nothing simpler. Let’s have the details.”

  “It’s my father’s.”

  “Needs an eye keeping, does he? I know what they can be like. You don’t want to put them on a leash but you can’t have them wandering off all hours God knows where. You’ve got his agreement, yes?”

  It must be at my parents’ house. “You don’t need to see it, do you?” I hope aloud as I take out my mobile. “I can show you his number.”

  “He gave it you is what I’m asking.”

  “Why wouldn’t he? How else would I know it?” I retort before my bewilderment begins to clear. “Sorry, you mean—”

  “He signed up to let you track him.”

  “I’m sure he would, but he’s, he’s disappeared. That’s why I need to trace the text he just sent.”

  There’s a sound of wallowing behind the salesman, and his eyes flicker sideways. As I identify the noise as the action of a mop he says “Looks like your best bet’s the police.”

  “Oh,” I say, which is mostly a sigh. “Well, if that’s all you can offer…”

  I’m turning away when he steps outside and shuts the door as a preamble to murmuring “What’s it worth to you?”

  I’m ashamed to be wary. “Quite a lot,” I compromise by saying.

  “I won’t ask what’s up between you and the authorities. Have you got another phone?”

  “At home.”

  He glances both ways along Whitechapel and leans close enough for me to smell smoke on his mutter. “Give us your mobile and fifty and your other number and I’ll give you a bell tomorrow.”

  “Can’t you do it any sooner? He might try to get in touch with me again.”

  “I’m already taking a risk for you. That’s my best deal.”

  I’m painfully tempted to give him the phone before he can abolish the opportunity, but it would feel like yielding up my father to the unknown. “Thanks anyway,” I murmur. “I’d better try elsewhere.”

  “Suit yourself, but I’m telling you for nothing you won’t find a better offer.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised if, like his employers, he undertakes to match any price I’m quoted by a competitor. Instead he raps on the shop window and clouds the glass by pressing his forehead against it. “Pa
ddle over, someone,” he says, which turns the window greyer. “You won’t drown.”

  There’s no point in trying any of the other phone shops. As I tramp up Lord Street I call the police. I’ve invented a mnemonic that represents the ten digits of the occurrence number. Oh Eustace oh God oh, it begins before degenerating further into nonsense, and I wonder if I only dreamed that St Eustace was somehow related to changes in sea level. Apparently giving my father’s number over the phone isn’t permitted. “We’ll send someone out as soon as we can,” a woman informs me, not without sharpness.

  In any case I should be home and making certain my father’s research doesn’t suffer any more damage. There’s a branch of Frugo Corner, the shop-sized version of the supermarket, at the Castle end of Lord Street. A supervisor sporting a Frugoal football supporter’s shirt, which is striped red and blue so as not to take sides in Liverpool, loses his enthusiasm for helping me once he discovers that I’m after empty cartons. When I produce a crumpled receipt as proof I often shop here he makes with some reluctance for the stockroom.

  A succession of hollow thuds puts me in mind of trapdoors before he reappears, kicking cartons in front of him as if he wants to live up to his shirt. I nest as many as I can inside one another and stumble almost blindly out with the pile of them. I have to rely on the crowds to move out of my way as I tramp past the regal monument and down towards the river. In my street more people than ordinarily use it to retreat into doorways or otherwise vanish from my path. In more than one instance their footsteps sound loose and rubbery—boots for the weather, of course.

  I return to the lobby to collect half the boxes. Once they’re all in my apartment I gulp handfuls of water from the bathroom tap. I’m on the way to the main room when I abandon the boxes in the corridor. I’ve yet to check that my father’s computer has survived the damp.

  I disconnect my computer tower and plug in his. The monitor flickers like the first hint of a storm, and after the usual computer preamble the opening screen fades into view. I’ve never seen it before, and it takes me off guard. It’s an image of my parents on either side of me, somewhere by the river. We’re decades younger; I’ve yet to reach my teens. The opposite bank of the river is smudged by fog, which also obscures a large vessel in the middle of the water. The blurred reflection helps produce the illusion of a vast dark shape rearing up into the fog. It can only be a ship, though perhaps my father reshaped the image—but as I reflect that he must have scanned the old photograph into the computer, the screen grows as black as the bottom of the sea.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  AN AUTHOR DISINTERRED

  Computer Combinations wouldn’t be able to deal with the problem for at least a week. Computer Shooter might have time to examine the system within five days, but I’d have to take the computer to their premises several miles away in dockland. Computer Mission offers me the same wait, but they’re even more distant, all of which is also the case with Computer Commander and Compurity. I’m close to calling a taxi to transport me and the lifeless monolith of a computer tower to dockland until I speak to one more from the yellow pages, PC Tec. They can collect the computer within the hour and attend to it tomorrow.

  I wish this were more of a relief, but too much else is wrong. There hasn’t been a message from my father while I was busy on the landline, and I feel as if he has vanished as utterly as his web site. Will the computer experts be able to retrieve his work? I tried switching the system on and off half a dozen times, but the screen remained as blank as dreamless sleep. At least I can save his research from any further harm, and I take the new cartons into the main room, only to falter. Last night I thought my tiredness was rendering the material illegible, but every visible document is so smudged by moisture that I can’t decipher a word.

  I snatch them off the cartons and strew them about the floor. The pages they were covering up are blurred too, but with some effort they’re readable. Where the topmost item is a book, the pages have become a pulpy mass. There’s no point in letting despair creep any closer. I line up the unsalvageable books and pages along the hall, and then I set about transferring the contents of the soggy boxes into the dry ones. Bits of information snag my mind. The women who made cords along the rope walks were known as the hempy girls, apparently a reference to visions some of them gained from the cannabis in the hemp. The commonest vision was of a giant rope or umbilical cord that could draw forth a creature hidden under the land. In the early fourteenth century performers of miracles that involved the Pool—healing people by immersion in it, especially cases of possession or mental states perceived as demonic—were banned from the town. In 1775 a society was formed “for the recovery of persons apparently drowned.” Couldn’t the rescuers tell? As I empty another box my mobile starts to sing about love.

  The display leaves the caller nameless. That can’t be my father, and so I don’t speak until Lucinda asks “Gavin? Are you on a tour?”

  “Do you know, I’m not.”

  “Good,” she says, which exacerbates my bitterness. “You were wanting to know about William Colquitt.”

  “Are you at work? I’ll ring you back.”

  As I grab the landline phone it occurs to me that one of her colleagues may answer. How much of an argument will that involve? After my encounter with Waterworth I’m more than ready for one, so that my eagerness takes some relinquishing when Lucinda says “Record Office.”

  “William Colquitt.”

  If my abruptness takes her aback, she stays professional. “There’s nothing in his poem about burying the Pool.”

  “Nay, though it be buried furlongs deep…” I sound as if I’m making this up and growing antique too. “It’s only in the edition you’ve got,” I insist.

  “Nothing like that. I read the whole poem. There was only ever one edition. He wasn’t that popular.” With barely a pause she adds “Did you say your father copied it and wrote something about John Strong? Maybe he—”

  “If you haven’t got it, tell me where else it could be.”

  “I don’t think I can, Gavin.”

  “In his head and mine, you mean. You don’t need to say it.”

  “I wasn’t about to. I’m just trying to tell you the truth.”

  “You’re pretty fond of doing that, aren’t you.”

  “I hope so. Honestly, Gavin, you sound—”

  I’m even angrier for having made such an apparently idiotic comment. “Telling your colleagues about me, for instance.”

  “Who says I did that?”

  “Hank Waterworth.”

  “I’ve no idea who that is.”

  “The man behind our image. One of that mob. The tourism organiser. The character who decides what the city’s going to support, and that doesn’t include me after your people complained to him.”

  “Gavin, I’m sorry. I didn’t know they meant to.”

  “What did you think they wanted, to send me a get well card?”

  My retort is too close to suggesting one might have been appropriate, an idea Lucinda exacerbates by saying “I just tried to tell them how you are.”

  “Which is what?”

  “How much you’re adding to the city and how Deryck has to be preying on your mind.”

  “So which vindictive sod called Waterworth?”

  “I couldn’t say. I can’t talk any more now. Let’s wait till we can go to our place by the river.” When I mutter less than a word she says “Don’t you want to see me later?”

  “Just not there for a change.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” she says and is gone before I can ask where. Presumably she means to come to the apartment. I take both phones into the hall and hobble along it on my knees. I could imagine that, like some spectacularly malleable circus performer, I’ve turned into a dwarf, but I’m scrutinising the blurred documents. None of them looks like the remains of verse, and I didn’t see the poem in any of the cartons. Could it be online?

  I stumble to my feet and into the wor
kroom to disconnect my father’s computer. I substitute mine and watch the icons float up from the blackness. Having logged on, I send the Frugoget search engine after William Colquitt. It seems Lucinda didn’t exaggerate his unpopularity, because there isn’t a single reference to him.

  Staring at his name in the search box won’t dredge him up, and I’m about to quit Frugonet when I think of something else to look for. While it isn’t urgent, I wouldn’t mind a few moments’ break from emptying and loading cartons. I type “mermaids down below” in the box and start the search engine. I’ve hardly drawn a breath when I have the source, and the breath comes out loud and harsh.

  Of course I knew it was unlikely that the name in the song Lucinda sang could originally have been Gav. Perhaps I should have guessed the name it supplanted. “…For all the landsmen lovers are nothing after Jack…” The song is called “They All Love Jack,” set to music by Stephen Adams. I could think he was trying to dissociate himself from some aspect of his family, because his real name was Michael Maybrick. He was James’s brother.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  PASSED DOWN

  The site is called James Maybrick Is Jack the Ripper. As I stare at the lyrics, which first saw publication three years before the Ripper made his name, an accompaniment on a piano more tinny than tuneful starts up. It sounds like the kind of enthusiastic amateur performance you might hear in a pub, and I imagine drinkers chanting the song and swaying in time with the waltz. The notion isn’t too appealing. No pub would be so dark that the figures reeling back and forth like underwater vegetation appeared to lose and then regain their indistinct shapes with each reiterated movement while they sang so lustily that their mouths opened far too wide. I’m striving to expel the image from my mind—perhaps I need to turn off the computer, since the tune I first heard Lucinda sing feels as though it’s acting like an uninvited lullaby—when my reverie is punctured by a bell.