Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  A black cab is squatting opposite the merman. As I climb in, the latest rain starts to thump the roof like a soft but relentless pursuer. “Where you going?” says the driver.

  Her voice is still blurred—thick with Liverpudlian and perhaps compromised by the looseness of her wide lips. She’s wearing a combat outfit that tones in with the camouflagepatched baseball cap yanked low on her broad head. She stares big-eyed in the mirror while I tell her the address, then seems to expand—at least, her shoulders do—as she crouches towards the wheel, muttering “Ever going to stop?”

  She means the rain, which looks capable of washing away the streets or at least the sight of them. The windscreen wipers struggle to dash it aside, so that her ability to see ahead seems close to miraculous. The Victorian streets have been transformed into a liquid impression of massive architecture, but the downpour slackens as we swing uphill beyond the edge of the old town at Deadman’s Lane. Last year a tenant of one of the houses dreamed so vividly that undiscovered victims of the plague still infested the muddy earth that he complained to the council. It seems I’m not the only one beset by history and whatever it breeds.

  Sunlight cuts the clouds open above the bay as we climb the road to Everton. Off to the right is a bridewell still used by the police. Previously it was the site of the house of a man called Harrison, though some of his neighbours declared that he wasn’t a man after he invited them to share his diet, consisting entirely of insects. His guests said he belonged in the zoological gardens beyond the ridge. Dogs were often set to fight in the fields around the zoo, or to hunt anything that ran, and in its latter days the zoo attracted drunks who set animals free, unless they escaped. One large ungainly creature was seen in the nearby pits used for public bathing, though what kind of animal would have taken refuge there? More to the point, can nothing put a stop to the chattering of history in my bruised head? I feel as if it’s even invading my language. But the taxi is speeding along the ridge, and I have a reason to speak—indeed, to repeat it when the driver doesn’t react. “We’re there.”

  The house is dripping as though it has been dredged up into the temporary sunlight. It looks repainted by the rain to help the sign attract potential buyers, and I’m able to hope that its cheerful appearance may be an omen of things within. Nobody comes to the door or the windows as the taxi backs up and halts outside the gate, however. “Can you hang on?” I ask the driver.

  “Picking someone up?”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  This is more inadvertently eloquent than I like. As I hurry along the garden path I feel as if the house is yet another of the places to which I seem compelled to keep returning. How disloyal is it to think of my parents in the same context as Williamson or Maybrick or the High Rip or the Pool? Surely the weeds flanking the path and beginning to sprout from it can’t have visibly grown since my last visit, even given all the rain. I shove my key into the lock and push the front door wide.

  Someone is or has been here. The hall is more deserted than last time; the armchair that was standing sentry by the phone has returned to the front room. The phone is on its hook, and the note my mother left is lying on the stairs. It flutters a little to greet me, but otherwise I’m met only by an intensified smell of damp if not of mould. “Mother?” I call. “Father? Anyone?”

  The words drop like stones into an empty well. I glance at the taxi driver, who seems close to pressing her face against the window of her cabin, and then head for the stairs. Damp patches mark the carpet all the way up. Despite their irregularity, the trail could have been made by someone with wet feet. Perhaps their hands were wet too, because half a word of my mother’s note is distorted by moisture; it looks as if she wanted to be reassured that my father was sane rather than safe. I pray, however aimlessly, that both of them are both as I call “It’s me. It’s only me.”

  Why am I nervous of looking in their room? I grasp the clammy plastic doorknob and ease the door open. At first the sunlight through the window dazzles me, and then I make out a dark shape, if it can be described as a shape, crawling towards me across the bed. It’s the shadow of a cloud that is lowering itself towards the river. Otherwise the room is deserted, and there’s no sign of life up here apart from a single drip that falls into the bath or into one of the buckets in my father’s workroom.

  The smell that the house has acquired rises to meet me as I tramp downstairs. It puts me in mind of lightless places and of a reptile house at the zoo. There are even traces of damp on the telephone receiver—of moist fingerprints, at any rate, so blurred that I doubt they would be of use to the police. Should I ring Wrigley or Maddock about the latest developments? My mind seems unable to focus on the situation. Once I’ve removed the phone from the hook I open the door under the staircase.

  Nobody can be hiding there—certainly not my parents. Perhaps the patch in the darkest corner has grown, and the smell is stronger, but that’s all. If a shape appears to surge out of the corner as I close the door, it’s a shadow, and I refuse to look again. I need to concentrate on the rooms, though they feel drained of memory, more lifeless than museum exhibits. Mustn’t I phone the police? If I do, will they intensify their search or scale it down? I haven’t decided when I notice an item on the chair that was moved from the hall.

  It’s the photograph my father scanned into his computer to use as the opening screen. He did indeed manipulate the image. My parents are still holding my younger than teenage hands, but he looks harassed; perhaps he’s nervous that the timer of the camera will be too quick for him. The object in the river at our backs is even harder to define, and the fog makes it look composed of water, but it must be one end of a vessel. I take it for the prow, because there are suggestions of a face—domed forehead, great round eyes, a mouth wider than the three of us. Would any ship have had a figurehead like that just a couple of decades ago? Perhaps it was part of some historical celebration, but then why can’t I remember it? I could fancy that my parents are trying to ignore whatever’s behind us and distract me from it, in which case they seem to have succeeded. I pick up the photograph, though it feels almost as damp as the scene it depicts, and lock the house. “Got what you came for?” says the driver.

  I’ve no answer except to display the photograph as I resume my seat. Having twisted her head around on no great length of neck, she says “That your wife?”

  “My mother,” I say and then catch up with her mistake. “That’s me in the middle.”

  “And what’s that behind you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “How should I know?” She turns away, tugging her cap down as if the hairless nape of her neck feels exposed. “Looks like something I used to dream about when we lived by the river.”

  I’m by no means sure of wanting to learn “What?”

  Her eyes widen in the mirror—bulge, even—with some kind of disbelief. “It was a dream. I was a kid.”

  The taxi swings towards the river, above which the tethered metal birds blaze like a brace of phoenixes as the clouds train the sunlight on them. I rub my fingers dry and take out my mobile. Her number has barely rung when Lucinda says “What’s happening, then?”

  “My mother isn’t there.”

  “Oh, Gavin, I’m sorry. Anything at all?”

  “No, I mean she hasn’t come home.”

  “I gathered that much, but is there—”

  “My home. My home now. Where you are.” Is my brain so overloaded that I’ve lost control of language? “You’re telling me she isn’t there,” I manage to say without snarling.

  “She isn’t, so I have to.”

  “I know. I know.” Repeating this makes me aware how little else it’s true of. “Let me know if she turns up,” I say. “I’ll be back soon.”

  As I lower the mobile the driver says “Are you in a rush?”

  Only to contact the police, and I shouldn’t put it off; suppose my parents are still near the house? Perhaps my mother is trying to stop my fath
er from wandering, unless she has succumbed to it. I resent having to take time to say “Why do you ask?”

  “If you’re not I’ll just get a wash. I’ll knock it off your bill.”

  She means the car wash by the road ahead, where once there was a pond. “I can use my phone in there, can’t I?”

  “I won’t be stopping you.”

  I key the police number as the taxi turns off Islington. I’m waiting for the switchboard to connect me when the driver inserts a token in the slot and moves the car forward to await the machinery. “When I was a kid,” she says, “I used to call this going under the water.”

  The gantry advances and begins to spray the taxi, solidifying the dusk that the clouds have brought forward. The windows are swimming by the time a voice says none too positively “Yes?”

  “Sergeant Maddock?” Since this proves unproductive I offer “Sergeant Wrigley?”

  The promotion doesn’t seem to please him. “No trace yet,” he says.

  “Yes there is. He phoned not much over an hour ago.”

  “From where?”

  “He was at the house.”

  “Took your time, didn’t you? What’d he say?”

  I’m distracted by someone who must work in the car wash. The windows are virtually opaque with soap now, so that I can see only a blurred shape near my side of the taxi. “I didn’t speak to him,” I say. “My mother did.”

  “And he said what?”

  “I don’t know.” Three massive brushes close around the vehicle to wipe away the soap, revealing nobody. “She went out,” I say. “All I know is he definitely called from the house. He’s the only one who could have got in.”

  There’s silence except for a soft thud against the window at my back. It’s a brush. As the apparatus starts its return sweep the policeman says “We’ll come and have a word.”

  “Is that necessary?” Since he apparently feels this doesn’t deserve an answer I say “I’m on my way home, but—”

  “That’ll do us.”

  I would say more if it weren’t for the sight outside the taxi. The spray is blurring the glass again, but I’m almost sure that a figure is standing utterly still outside my window, within reach if it were to extend a long arm. The water has lent it some qualities; the head looks wet, and its rounded outline and vague features seem as uncertain of their shapes as the turbulence on the window. Surely just the water is distorting the squat figure, but when I say “I’ll be out of here any moment” it feels akin to a wish.

  As the spray droops and the pipes glide away with a farewell hiss I realise that the policeman has cut me off. I peer through the window while a blower reduces trickles to drops and lines them up in the process of raking them off the glass. Long before they’ve gone it’s plain that nobody is near the vehicle. It’s cruising out of the car wash when the driver says “You could imagine all sorts in there.”

  Even if she’s reminiscing about her childhood, I feel compelled to ask “What sort of thing?”

  “That’d be telling.”

  I’m less anxious to know than I am to be home, but a tailback halts us on the flyover behind the library. The central barrier prevents us from taking another route. I can’t even pay and walk, because there’s no pavement. Surely Lucinda will ring if she has any news. The trinity of traffic lights controlling the junction at the end of the flyover releases vehicles two at a time, and at last we pass the obstruction. Half the road at the foot of Cheapside is flooded and has been coned off. Is Waterworth watching the thoroughfare revert to its historical state? Someone’s at his office window, turning the glass grey with breath.

  Two minutes later I’m outside my door. “Call it ten,” says the driver.

  I add a pound and let myself in. The pen in the inkwell seems eager to communicate as I run to the stairs. I’m not sure why I should be in such a hurry—at least, until I hear a man’s voice beyond my door. As I twist the key I’m able to believe he’s my father. I’m stepping into the hall when I realise he’s a policeman, but that isn’t why I falter. He’s talking about Operation Ripper.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  A TROGLODYTE

  As I leave the photograph on my desk Lucinda calls “Is that you, Gavin?”

  “Who else is it going to be?” I do my best to leave this behind by demanding “What was that about the Ripper?”

  “We weren’t talking about him.”

  I don’t know why she should laugh, and I’m further thrown to see that the other person in the room commandeered by boxes is Maddock. He’s seated at the table and drinking from a glass of water. His flat undented nose and indeed his face in general still look like invitations to a fight, so that I’m provoked to ask “Where’s your cousin?”

  He lingers over a gulp and puts the glass down beside a document. “Who’s been blabbing?”

  “Careful you don’t spill that on there. Who do you think?”

  “I’m asking you,” says Maddock, leaving the glass where it is. “You want to be careful what you stick your snout into.”

  He won’t daunt me, especially not in front of Lucinda. I cross the room and move the page away from him. “It was your cousin who opened his mouth. He didn’t need much coaxing from me.”

  It’s clear I could have phrased this better, which may be why Lucinda intervenes. “It was ripple, Gavin.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Operation Ripple. I thought you might be interested.”

  An audience might find it comical that Maddock and I have the same response, though his is harsher. “Why?”

  “It was on the news. There were dawn raids around the docks and up in Marsh Lane and Aigburth. The Marsh Lads and the Eggy Gang have been fighting over drugs that are shipped over in containers. That’s why there were all the shootings in the spring.”

  Having grasped that she’s referring to the season, I’m left to wonder “What’s that to do with me?”

  “Marsh Lane was as far as the High Rip went, wasn’t it? And the Eggy Gang meet on some waste ground down by the river at the end of Maybrick’s road. I thought it sounded like material for you.”

  “First I’ve heard that’s why you asked,” says Maddock.

  “It isn’t why you came, is it?” I remind him. “Have you still not traced my father’s mobile?”

  “Show us someone that’ll do it quicker.”

  I’m on the edge of mentioning the Frugone salesman when Lucinda says “Is it likely to take much longer, do you think, Inspector Maddock?”

  I’ve no idea whether she has established his rank or elevated it to placate him, and his scowl isn’t telling. “His signal’s down the last I heard. Might be dead.”

  “We know where he was an hour ago,” I protest, “and now my mother’s with him surely they’ll be easier to find.”

  “Maybe they don’t want finding.”

  “I’m absolutely sure my mother will. Just because my father called her—”

  “You don’t know that,” Maddock says not far short of triumphantly. “You got it before. You tell him.”

  Lucinda takes a moment to look apologetic. “Don’t we only know somebody called from the house, Gavin?”

  “Someone who didn’t have to break in, so it had to be him.”

  “Unless it was Gillian. Could she have phoned to say where she was and not wanted to talk to the machine?” When I don’t immediately argue Lucinda says “Did you find any sign of Deryck at the house?”

  “Not that he’s been there recently, no.”

  “So all you know is his wife went out this afternoon,” says Maddock, “and already you’re calling us again.”

  “You can understand why he’s concerned,” Lucinda says. “The situation with his father and now not knowing where his mother is or what frame of mind she’s in.”

  “He’s still got you, love. Maybe you can calm him down. We don’t like him wasting our time.”

  As Maddock stares at me hard enough to revive a twinge from W
hitechapel I blurt “Aren’t you doing that by coming here?”

  His stare doesn’t relent, and I won’t slacken mine, even when Lucinda murmurs “Gavin…”

  “How long would you suggest I leave calling you next time?”

  “If you don’t hear something,” says Maddock, “just wait and remember what I said.”

  “I don’t think you’re being entirely reasonable,” Lucinda tells him.

  “You wouldn’t want to see me when I’m not, love,” Maddock says and stands up. “Thanks for the water.”

  I follow as he loiters in the corridor, frowning at the sodden documents. “You want to get her to tidy up a bit,” he advises. “Never know who’s going to come visiting.”

  He halts again outside the door. “I’ll see myself down,” he says and produces what I take to be his version of a grin. “Watch out you don’t end up sunk in the tunnel with this weather.”

  For various reasons I’m disinclined to respond, but I say “Which tunnel?”

  “The Mersey one. The Queen’s hole. Didn’t they tell you when they sold you your digs? It goes right under you.”

  He means Queensway, the road tunnel that goes underground close to the upper reaches of the Pool and leads beneath the river to Birkenhead. The best I can do in the way of a parting shot is “Where’s your car today?”

  “Don’t need a car to get to the bridewell.”

  His thick neck seems to grow yet more undeveloped as he drops out of sight stair by stair, and then I listen to his soft but heavy tread until a door brings it to an end. As I return along the hall Lucinda says “Has he gone?”