Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  Chapter Thirty-one

  A TRADITIONAL DINNER

  The phone is still off the hook, but the note my mother left is on the floor. I finish hoping that my father has come back once my shouts to him and then to anyone fall flat in the empty house. The sight of my mother’s lonely chair standing guard beside the phone makes the place feel even more deserted. I put the note back on the table and then check for any calls. Nobody has rung since we abandoned the house. I hang up the phone and call the estate agent on my mobile, but no potential buyers have been in touch.

  The house smells stale, close to mouldy. I leave the kitchen window open while I go upstairs. The buckets in the workroom don’t appear to have collected any more water, and as far as I can tell the stains on the ceiling haven’t grown. My parents’ bedroom is as forsaken as it was last night, and the bathroom is silent, without even the hint of a drip. I take my time over going down to shut the window, because the staleness hasn’t dissipated. As I return along the hall I grow aware of the cupboard under the stairs. My mother only asked me to check for phone calls, but perhaps the cupboard is the source of the smell. Grasping the rickety plastic doorknob, I pull the door wide.

  Does it send a mouse fleeing into the wall, or just a trick of light and shadow? Obviously the latter, since the glimpse resembled a gelatinous member recoiling like a mollusc into the corner stained with moisture and dimness. The damp of which the cupboard smells doesn’t appear to have spread, though I don’t look too hard or too long. I shut the door and am laying the receiver on the table when I’m distracted by marks on the stairs. They have to be blotches of damp, however much they remind me of tracks of various sizes and shapes or lack of shape. I must have overlooked them earlier because the light has changed. They aren’t enough to keep me in the house, and as I slam the front door I’m quite glad to see a bus.

  The city sinks towards the river as the bus carries me downhill, so that I could imagine that the land beneath the thin pale sky is reverting to marsh. I disembark at Castle Street and head for Frugo Corner. On my way home the bagfuls of provisions my mother asked me to buy lend me a sailor’s gait. The merman above the threshold looks misshapen by the weather, as do the glistening contents of his cornucopia, or ready to assume new shapes. The bags thump and slither against my door as I let myself into the apartment. “Is that you this time, Gavin?” my mother calls or cries.

  “It’s me all right. Who else came?”

  “Someone making noises like you just did. They didn’t come in. Were they drunk, do you think?”

  “How would I know?”

  “They sounded as if they were trying to find their way in somewhere. I expect they live across the corridor.”

  It doesn’t sound much like my cellist neighbour, but perhaps he’s had something to celebrate. My mother is sitting in the main room, surrounded by papers and books, and holding a magazine that’s little more than a pamphlet. “Was there anything at the house?” she says with an attempt at carelessness.

  “There weren’t any calls, and I’m sure nobody had been there either.”

  “I wasn’t really expecting anything,” she says but ducks her head as if it has acquired a burden. “Just put the bags in the kitchen while I finish reading this and then I’ll see to dinner.”

  I unload the bags, which contain enough provisions for at least a week, into the refrigerator. I haven’t finished clearing space in there when my mother waddles to the sink to gulp more than a glassful of water. “You should read that,” she says. “Or you could peel the potatoes if you like.”

  She seems to have infected me with thirst, and I drain a mug of the water that wriggles and then pours out of the tap. It leaves me feeling bloated, though surely not as much as she’s begun to look. “I’ll help,” I tell her.

  “Ham steaks and bubble. You always loved that. I hope you still do.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “How long has it been since I made your dinner? Remember when Deryck convinced you you’d hear it bubbling and squeaking when you put your knife and fork in? I had to tell him to stop. He had you not wanting to touch your food in case it did something it wasn’t supposed to.” As her reminiscence flags she adds “Or would you rather have fish?”

  “Whatever’s best for you.”

  “Let’s have that, then. The ham will keep. Fish is good for your brain, isn’t it?” She laughs, but not at this. As she consigns the gammon steaks to the refrigerator she produces the joke. “And I expect he’d say you need a bit of ham in your job.”

  She’s doing her utmost to believe that our lives will return to normal. I sense that her behaviour and her conversation are determined not to acknowledge how desperate they are to bring my father back. I mustn’t shatter the pretence, and so I concentrate on scraping the potatoes until she says “I should have told you right away. Lucy says she’ll call back.”

  “When?”

  “She wasn’t saying. She doesn’t know where she’ll be. I’m glad she called, anyway.”

  “Why did she, do you know?”

  “Oh, Gavin, does she have to have a reason? She’d heard about you on the radio, or someone had. She doesn’t need to feel guilty about anything, does she?”

  The parer catches on an eye of the potato in my hand, and I feel as if the conversation has snagged too. “I couldn’t say.”

  I mean I’d rather not, but my mother says “I didn’t think so. I told her she shouldn’t. We don’t want any more of us splitting up, do we? I said I’d get you to call her, but she said you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Will she be somewhere you can’t reach her? Or maybe she’s at work and they don’t like her taking calls. I know she didn’t want you trying.”

  “Then I won’t.”

  “Don’t be like that, Gavin, not with everything else. You go and sit down now. Thanks for helping.” As she drops the potatoes in a saucepan with a series of knells like the notes of a gong too rusty to resonate she says “You could read that story and tell me what you think. Lucy might be interested in it as well.”

  The magazine is lying on the armchair my mother has vacated. It’s the third issue of Weird World, published by Gannet Press of Birkenhead. On the cover a gleeful befogged skull hovers above a marsh. While the issue isn’t dated, my father has pencilled 1956 at the top of the contents page, which lists “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” and two tales by authors I recognise as local, Eric Frank Russell and G. G. Pendarves, born in 1885 of a Cornish family that had been drawn to Liverpool. Russell’s contribution is “Vampire from the Void,” in which a voracious extraterrestrial lands in Liverpool, devouring its first victims outside James Street Station before feasting on drivers in the Mersey Tunnel. The victims are said to have “gone where the good niggers go,” and the brittle yellowed pages also emphasise the historical nature of the tale reprinted from a 1939 pulp magazine, but I don’t see why this should interest Lucinda or me. Or did my mother mean the story by Pendarves? The editorial says it was an unpublished story found among her sister’s papers. The sister was a lecturer at the oldest—indeed, then the only—university in Liverpool, and the tale was based to some extent on her research.

  It’s called “The Portrait of Jacob Williams.” He’s a Victorian engineer who builds a railway system under his home town of Vivilake. As the work progresses he spends more and more time underground, but is it his concern for security that keeps him there when his employees have finished their shifts? Some wonder what he finds to eat, while others speculate that he may have reverted to his ancestral state, since he’s said to have been born in a cellar and spent his childhood there. The workmen especially dislike the way his appearance seems to be taking on what they suspect is the family look. One day the excavations release a subterranean lake, and he’s among those carried away by the flood. All the bodies are retrieved except his, though a searcher swears he heard someone floundering beyond the limits of the lights. The
diggings are bricked up, and Williams is largely forgotten by the time the narrator—his grandson—investigates his heritage. He has been inspired to do so by a painting of his grandfather, from which some of the paint is flaking away. On an impulse more narratively convenient than plausible he scrapes off fragments to reveal that sections of the portrait have been painted over. In the original the subject’s hands were slightly but unmistakably webbed, while his round eyes were far too large and his mouth unpleasantly wide. Worse, with every detail that’s exposed the narrator feels more as if he’s gazing into a mirror.

  I’m not surprised the tale wasn’t published during the author’s lifetime. It isn’t very well told, and why should I feel defensive for thinking so? As I close the magazine my mother says “It’s ready if you are. Do you think that’s about who I thought?”

  “It’s a story.”

  “But it’s about the tunnels Lucy lives near, don’t you think?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “You keep on imagining. It’s still your job.” From the kitchen my mother says “Stories about a place are part of it, aren’t they? They’re like what it dreams.”

  Is she quoting my father or something she found in his research? I’m tempted to look for it, but she’s waiting, so visibly eager for me to be pleased that it feels like a last hope. Two platters of grilled sea bass and potatoes grace the table, along with sets of my best cutlery and glasses for a jug of water. “Is that all right,” my mother says, “or are you having something stronger?”

  “Maybe we both should.”

  “We ought to stay alert in case…” Instead of going on, perhaps because her hope is greater if it remains unexpressed, she says “I expect a glass won’t hurt us.”

  I fetch two from the cupboard and a bottle of Muscadet that has been chilling in the refrigerator for days. It’s Lucinda’s favourite, but it has waited for her long enough. “That’s nice,” my mother says, having followed a sip of wine with a gulp of water, but seems distracted. “I feel as if it’s watching me.”

  More reluctantly than I care to understand I ask “What?”

  “My head. I’m going to cut it off. Shall I do yours as well?”

  She means the fish, of course. “If it bothers you.”

  The dead eyes encrusted with blindness do look rather large and wide. Perhaps they’re reminiscent of the portrait in the story, and she may be assailed by that memory too. I’m also reminded that the early Liverpudlians lived mostly on fish from the river and the Pool. As she severs the heads and consigns them to the kitchen bin my mother says “What do you think they’ve seen? You’d wonder if we’re putting it inside us.”

  I’d prefer to wonder nothing of the sort. Once I’ve enthused about the meal and we’ve filled some time with nervous smiles whenever our eyes meet, she says “Shall we have the radio on?”

  We’re just in time for the news, but not of my father. Dozens of cellars are being used to grow cannabis. Several pet animals have been slaughtered in back gardens near the docks. A gang beat up three men last night as they left Club Rubadub, which—though the newsreader doesn’t mention it—becomes the Happy Spanker, formerly the Slap and Tickle, once a month. Animal rights activists are picketing the new Korean restaurant, the Good Dog. My mother greets this with a laugh that she seems to want to take back, then drinks from both her glasses. Either the wine or the fish is making me thirsty too, and soon I have to replenish the jug.

  The wine hasn’t relaxed her as much as I hoped. After dinner we finish the bottle, but it hardly helps. At her suggestion we watch television, comedy shows that become increasingly outrageous as the night advances. She meets the jokes and oaths with tentative smiles or determined mirth. It seems important to her that I share her merriment, and I make an effort, though it feels as if we’re both striving to ignore my father’s research all around us. As the vulgarities multiply she tries to seem up to their date, but she can’t hide her restlessness. When we run out of dutiful laughter at the sight of men apparently tying their genitals in knots she says “Don’t feel you have to stay up just for me, Gavin. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I may go to bed as well. Shall I have the ordinary phone? Then we’ll have one each and you aren’t so likely to be disturbed. I’ll try not to be in your way much longer.”

  “Who said you were?”

  “I do. Yours and Lucy’s. Maybe she doesn’t even like to call you while I’m here.”

  “I hope she’s not like that.”

  “I wasn’t saying anything against her.” My mother continues to look apologetic while she says “I expect I was just being stupid, don’t you? I’m too old to behave like that.”

  “I don’t understand what you—”

  “At the house,” she says impatiently, though it isn’t clear with whom. “I must have dreamed it. Some dreams don’t feel like dreams, do they? I’ve been having quite a few of those.”

  That’s hardly a good basis for her to be on her own. Perhaps sensing my objections, she says “I’ll go home soon, and that’s a promise. Let’s see if I can tomorrow.”

  She switches off the television as I head for the bathroom. I run a tap to drown the sounds of urination, and so does she when it’s her turn, unless she’s having yet another drink of water. “Good night,” she murmurs along the hall. “Try and sleep.”

  I’m nowhere near succeeding when I hear the radio. She’s playing it so quietly that I could almost be dreaming the faint surges of music, which must be why some of them seem capable of turning into Michael Maybrick’s waltz. Can I also hear the rustling of documents? Eventually the melodies are interrupted by a newsreader, but I can’t distinguish a word. Since my mother doesn’t call me or come to me or otherwise react so far as I can tell, it seems clear that there’s no word of my father. Once I give up striving to listen my mind begins to sink into itself, but I’ve no idea how long I’ve lain in its depths before my mother says “Are you awake? I’ve found him.”

  My mouth feels shapeless with sleep, and that’s how my question sounds. “Where?”

  “Not Deryck. Sorry. Were you asleep?” It’s unclear which mistake she’s apologising for: probably both. “The person he asked Lucy about,” she says. “John Strong. I’ve found what he copied of his.”

  I feel weighed down by all the water I drank, however much of it I returned to the land via the bathroom. As I struggle to sit up or at least to waken fully my mother says “You stay there if you’re comfortable. Shall I read it to you?”

  I blink my watery eyes into focus and see her standing in the bedroom doorway. The light from the main room glimmers on a sheet of paper in her hand. “If you like,” I mumble. She plods to switch on the light in the hall and then fetches a kitchen chair along with a handful of pages. Planting the chair outside my room, she perches on the edge of the seat. “Tell me when you’ve had enough,” she says, and all at once I wonder if she prefers not to be alone with what she’s found.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  STRONG DREAMS

  “If we dream gods they dream us,” my mother intones to show she’s reading, then returns to her ordinary voice. “Do you think he means only if we do, or has it got to be both?”

  An unenlightened mumble is the best I can produce. The material she’s reading and the comments she interpolates make me feel like a child in bed in the dark. She and my father often used to read to me as I drifted off to sleep. Sometimes my father would tell me a story instead. I must have been very young when he convinced me that a mermaid was someone who helped you to speak up. On that occasion and others too, my parents’ disagreements over how to tell a bedtime story resembled a comedy routine they were performing on my behalf. My mother’s version of the tale wasn’t much more traditional than my father’s joke about aid, since she ended with the little mermaid’s painless transformation into a human girl rather than the agonising process to which Hans Andersen subjected her. Presumably the amphibious creature ha
d enough control over her shape that she was able to pass for human, though I didn’t think that then. “I don’t know why Deryck copied all this,” my mother is saying. “What did Lucy say he was?”

  “I didn’t know she said he was anything.”

  I’m not sure how much if any of this I pronounce. “Not Deryck,” my mother says. “The man I’ve got here. Mr Strong.”

  “An occultist.”

  “You didn’t say an octopus. He seems to have plenty to do with water. All life is in the pool, and all comes forth.”

  I’m preparing to ask whether the pool has a capital P when she adds “Its spawn stalks the streets and thinks itself the purpose of creation. I suppose he’s talking about evolution. Everything came from the sea.”

  Even if she’s clarifying the text to herself, I could fancy she’s addressing a child until she says “The townsfolk and their maggots are creatures of the pool. A maggot used to be an idea, didn’t it?”

  Given the writer’s contempt for humanity, I think there’s another interpretation, but my mother is saying “The magician is borne up on its dreams while the mob wallows in them. He’ll be the magician, won’t he? I wonder what tricks he got up to.” She abandons the question to add “The mob look down upon the products of the congress in the depths, but are they not themselves as low a form of life?”

  She isn’t asking, and it doesn’t seem to bring an answer. “The parturition in the dark is shaped by the pool,” she says. “I don’t know what Deryck could have wanted with all this. You can’t even tell if it was like this to begin with or he just copied bits of it.”

  “Don’t read any more if you don’t want to.”

  She hears this, unless she’s simply pursuing her thoughts. “It could help, couldn’t it? It might show us the kind of thing he was trying to look into, your father.”