Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  Lucinda lets go as if I’ve betrayed her affection. “Who is?”

  “John Strong. You can’t honestly believe my father could have made all that stuff up.”

  “I’m saying nothing, Gavin.”

  I have the impression that she doesn’t want me to go after her or the remark, but I follow her along the hall. “Say whatever you need to. Say what you’re thinking.”

  “I looked in the stacks.” She opens the door and leaves me with a kiss that may be meant to compensate for any disappointment. “We’ve got nothing by him, not even a book,” she says. “He might as well be another Liverpool legend, just something else the city dreamed up.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  DEONTU KLNOK

  I listen until the basement door cuts off Lucinda’s footsteps. The stairway looks as empty as my mind. I know writers have concocted tales of Liverpool—one even claimed that a fictitious anecdote of Arthur Machen’s was true and attributed it to a Scouser—but John Strong was a writer, not a tale. I can’t imagine anything that could have got into my father to make him invent all that material. I’m struggling to make sense of Lucinda’s comments when my mobile bursts into its nocturnal song.

  I slam the door and dash to grab the phone from the table. The caller is unidentified, and apprehensiveness is one reason why I’m short of breath. It dismays me how feebly I gasp “Hello?”

  “Hank Waterworth.”

  I don’t exert myself much to say “Yes.”

  “Have they been in contact with you?”

  I’m anxious to learn more after all. “Who?”

  “Whoever wanted to take one of your tours.” Quite as disapprovingly he says “I didn’t speak to them.”

  Before I can respond he says “Has there been any news of your father?”

  The reminder turns my throat dry. “I’m expecting some,” I croak.

  “I apologise if this is upsetting for you. May I express my hopes that you’ll hear something soon.”

  He’s mostly conveying his attempt to be more human. “Thank you,” I say with as much of an effort and break the connection.

  It’s nearly noon. I need to hear the news, and I switch on the radio to be met by a football crowd chanting “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The song has been adopted by the city for its own use, and it occurs to me that Jack the Ripper was as well. As I gulp a glass of water I’m urged not to fear the dark when I walk through a storm. Somehow I don’t find this reassuring, and I can use some distraction. Perhaps I can do something for my father while I’m waiting—prove that he copied the thoughts of John Strong.

  I dump the carton by the table and fish out the topmost document, several photocopies stapled together. The first reproduces a page from the Liverpool Mercury that includes an account of the Thomas Cosgrove case. Cosgrove was discovered in Cheapside just before dawn on 22 February 1815, after having tried all night to force his wife to swallow a corrosive poison. As dawn approached he choked her to death with a finger and thumb before taking the poison himself and cutting his throat. Despite all this, he was described as conversing in “a collected and rational manner.” He refused to give a reason for his actions, pinching his lips together with a finger and thumb whenever his motives were raised. He died a fortnight later in the bridewell opposite his house. My father has scribbled Strong’s observations in the margin—Strong’s, not his own. “How muscular a brute, or how malleable a mate! Did he make an end by daylight so that he would never see her face plain, or the one in the mirror?”

  The next page of newspaper gives an account of Cosgrove’s burial at the crossroads where the first High Rip murder would take place. Surely Strong could only have been speculating that among the mob watching the burial were the families of all the Tithebarn Street thugs. “Did the spectators dream that they were witnessing savagery submerged? To cast it into darkness is to add darkness to its power.” The third sheet is a page from the Liverpool Echo dated decades later. One paragraph reports how Cosgrove’s body was disinterred during the construction of a sewer, but who is my father quoting to the effect that the corpse seemed barely human? Supposedly it was swollen and distorted by the water that had brought it closer to the surface in an attitude suggestive of a bid to worm its way to freedom. I don’t care to imagine the spectacle or entertain the fancy that the Flashes had resurfaced—the pond that used to sport a ducking-stool. I’m glad to be diverted by the one o’clock news.

  A man has been arrested for drugged driving in the Queensway tunnel, having swerved a bus to avoid an obstacle he can’t describe. The police are having to protect street cleaners from attacks by clubgoers in the early hours. A television reporter surveying her hometown of Liverpool has been pelted with bottles and threatened with a gun. Some football supporters object to the use of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as an anthem for the city, since it’s sung by fans of the rival team. My parents’ disappearance is the final item of the bulletin. A phone-in caller sets about accusing the television reporter of bringing the city into disrepute, and I switch off the radio, to be disconcerted by the next page of John Strong as transcribed by my father. Strong might almost have been predicting the call.

  He believed Liverpool was founded on denial. The construction of the town and in particular the draining of the Pool have been attempts to deny the nature of the place. “That which is buried shall rise up darker,” he wrote, and I wonder if his style was designed to reach into the past. “The jealous spirit of the Pool shall cast down spire upon spire.” Even the old spellings of the name were acts of repudiation: Lirpole, Litherpool, Leverpule, Laverpole…“The men who shape the town are blind as any troglodyte. Never did the laver name the seaweed which the bird holds in its beak. The bird is not the emblem of the city but the symbol of the vision which the builders tether to the earth, and what is the liver if not that which lives in the Pool?”

  I’ve no idea, and none of how this could lead me to my parents. “The city cloaks its nature in borrowed names, names risen south.” It has indeed lifted street names from London, and I’m reminded of a passage in the supposed Maybrick diary: “Whitechapel Liverpool, Whitechapel London, ha ha. No one could possibly piece it together.” The diarist also rants about cutting people open and eating their offal, even if he never mentions the liver by name, and seems obsessed with destroying a church—St James’s, whether in London or Liverpool. The Merseyside church is above the docks, close to Prince William Street, from where a letter signed by the Ripper taunted police for failing to locate him. The narrator of the diary often addresses himself and even questions why he can’t bring himself to destroy the journal. It reads like the work of someone dreaming he’s a writer, and I’m dismayed to feel that’s true of the annotations on the photocopies. Need I care? My father didn’t think them up, he only wrote them down.

  “Have the names the power to send dreams southwards?” I could take this as a reference to Maybrick, but why has my father added the next sentences? “Those whose ancestry lies in the mud are drawn back to the dark to breed. Men have been driven mad by discovering their parentage or the nature of a mate. Some families cannot bear to have an album.” I can’t help recalling that the Ripper scribbles were found in a Victorian scrapbook, the first forty-eight pages of which had been removed with a knife but were shown to have held photographs. My father has stapled a sheet to this one. It’s a photocopy of a crude handbill, which I deduce is early Victorian, advertising a mock trial at the York Hotel in Williamson Square. The title is Jack Myprick and his Miraculous Stalk: The “Cellary” Champion Caught on the Hop in Whitechapel.

  Presumably the pun or puns meant more at the time. I don’t have time to speculate about the name—to wonder if their reactions to some family secret sent Michael Maybrick one way, James another. As I stare at the handbill, a tapping at the window grows larger and more shapeless. The rain makes me aware that I’m thirsty once more. I’m filling my empty glass at the kitchen sink when I catch sight of a figure through the window. Th
e beads and equally restless threads of water on the pane let me distinguish only a squat blurred glistening shape outside the abandoned offices. Instead of taking refuge in the doorway it’s standing in the downpour without an umbrella. Is it in its element or too preoccupied or not intelligent enough to move? I plant the glass with a clank beside the sink and unlatch the window. As I heave at the swollen sash the figure comes to life with a swift but ungainly movement that the water on the pane must be enlarging and distorting. By the time I raise the sash the street is deserted.

  I lean over the sink and out of the window, to be rewarded with a faceful of rain. Where could the loiterer have gone so fast? Craning out simply blinds me with rain, and I massage my stretched neck as I slam the window. In the bathroom I towel my head until it feels as if I’m rubbing it bonelessly soft, and then I retrieve my drink. I’m back at the table when I notice the page that’s now uppermost in the box.

  The content may be rambling if not incoherent, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a photocopy of a page of typescript, some of which is annotated or rewritten. The handwriting isn’t my father’s, and the type is so primitive that I wouldn’t be surprised if the machine was a century old. There’s no question in my mind that I’m looking at the actual work of John Strong. So much for Lucinda’s strange mistake.

  “Before it was invaded by a river, the Mersea was a pool.” Some geologists think this may have been the case in the Mesolithic era, but I doubt they would go any further with Strong. “While the earth dreamed of evolution, the Pool shaped spirits with its dreams…The god takes on the aspects of the sacrifice…Do the god’s dreams inspire the tributes of the savage, or must the savage tributes shape the god?…Some of its dreams rise as mist, and some are trapped in mud to take on the flesh of the dark…” I’m beginning to feel as if Strong was compelled by the landscape or something beneath it to piece together a secret tale of the city—a labyrinth that gives only glimpses of sense. That sounds like Williamson’s problem, but was my father overtaken by a similar compulsion? Has it infected me, preventing me from thinking properly about him? “The Pool yet dreams of the light beyond light…Its dreams confound the tyranny of time and space…Sometimes it finds a worthy vessel for the dreams it stretches forth. Carl Jung was touched by one, and Strong became its ark once Strong drank from an ancient well.” Some old wells were recommissioned during the blitz, but that’s all I mean to believe—certainly not “The deeper it spreads through the dark, the more vessels it sets dreaming. Even the dead may become its receptacles and regain a form of life. What are ghosts but the dreams of the dead? Those who live by the dead may share their dreams…”

  The last word swells up before my eyes and changes shape. The page has been spattered with rain—with water, at any rate. The landline phone is ringing, and my nerves jerked the glass in my hand. I let go of it and grab the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  The voice is too hoarse for me even to sex. “Gavin Meadows,” I tell it. “Who’s this?”

  “You’ll be the tours, will you? All by yourself?”

  I could imagine that the caller’s ascertaining whether I’m alone. “It’s always been a one-man show.”

  “Can you fit us in the next one?”

  “I’m sure I can,” I say but think it best to add “How many are you?”

  “We’re a big family, us. Some little ones and a few old things as well. Don’t worry, you won’t leave any behind. We can all keep up.”

  “I’m just wondering about umbrellas with this weather. I try to provide them, but I’ve just got six.”

  “Don’t bother bringing any if you don’t need one. We’ve got plenty. Never know when it’ll change. We’ll see you then, then.”

  Despite the inexpressiveness of the voice I sense enthusiasm, even urgency. “Sorry, when?”

  “Two o’clock, isn’t it? We’ll be round the old witch in her temple.”

  This is the first time I’ve heard Victoria described that way. “I don’t know if I’ll be running that tour.”

  “The council said you were. It’s now or nothing for us. We’re only up today.”

  “Could you wait until tonight at least?”

  “The youngsters need to get their heads down. They want more sleep than us.”

  “I see, only—”

  “Better let them have their dream time. They’re the future.” As I mumble not much of a response the caller says “He wants to know what we think.”

  Does that mean Waterworth or his colleague? I don’t want to hear any more from the monotonous voice just now. I could imagine that it has lulled me into saying “All right then, two at the monument.”

  “Lots more than two. You won’t believe it. So long as you can cope.”

  “Certainly I can,” I say without meaning to end the conversation. I should have asked for the number in case I need to cancel, but it’s withheld. Can’t I go out? If my parents are together, surely they’ll call my mobile rather than or at least besides the landline if they call, whyever they haven’t yet. The phone at the house is still off the hook—blocked, at any rate. I’ve more than an hour before I have to leave for the tour, and I can hope the situation will be resolved by then. I shouldn’t live down to Waterworth’s opinion of me, especially when I would be disappointing a good many more people than him. I still need to earn a living; I’ve little enough put aside for a rainy day. Meanwhile one of Strong’s thoughts has caught my attention, if the fancy can be called a thought. “Some will not learn their own nature until they find the Pool.”

  I don’t know why this bothers me, but I look for something else to occupy my mind. “The Pool reaches for the light through the magician but is retarded by every inferior vessel, by the mass and their dead and by the troglodytes its lesser visions spawns…Every native of the city is its creature, and every one of their creations strives to set down a dream of the Pool…” Mustn’t that include this rigmarole? “History consists of tales men tell to bring the past to an end, but legends are its life…” I’m instantly prompted to wonder which kind of tale the Ripper diary was. Hasn’t the Ripper become a legend, and one that stays alive by being unresolved? All at once I’m sure that the truth about the diary will never be established—that the whole point of the document is to remain mysterious. The notion seems to lead deeper into a labyrinth as well as proving how possessed by history I am, so that even the muffled throbbing among the papers on the table—a sound suggestive of an intruder trying to dig itself forth—comes as a relief.

  The mobile is throbbing, and my skull. The screen displays one message received—just that information. As I jab the key to reveal the message I’m afraid it will prove to be an automated sales pitch. But it’s a personal communication, however garbled, and as I translate it my mouth grows parched with urgency. Deontu klnok fnor UVS means Don’t look for US. It’s from my father’s mobile number.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  THE SAME DEAL

  If I ring back on my mobile it might delay another message or at least my reading of it. My father’s number isn’t stored on the landline receiver. Although typing it in takes just a few seconds, the delay sets my forehead aching with a wordless reminiscence of Whitechapel. I poke the key to call the number and add another bruise to my face by fiercely pressing the receiver against it. At last the mobile gives up ringing, and I hear my father’s voice.

  He has seldom sounded livelier or more cheerful. The trouble is that he’s recorded. “No, you aren’t on your bike,” I protest. “I know you’re otherwise engaged, or are you just not answering?” I’m shouting over him, and I have to moderate my tone as he falls silent. “Don’t tell me you aren’t still there,” I plead and try to appeal to his sense of the ridiculous. “Or go on, tell me that if you like. Just speak to me, that’s all. You must know how worried I am. I’m certain mother does. I need you to tell me what’s going on. If you don’t I’ll have to come looking, and you say you don’t want that. Tell me why. For the lov
e of whatever’s still sacred, tell me what’s happening.”

  My words are growing as uncontrolled as Strong’s appeared to be. I’m saying everything that comes into my head, even when this puts me at some distance from the truth. Have I really implied that I won’t go to find them if I learn where they are? Perhaps my father sees through the ruse, because once I finish babbling he doesn’t respond. In a few minutes I have to accept that he has no intention of calling back.

  I’m wasting time. I should have the message traced. I dash to the bedroom and grab the first clothes that come to hand—yesterday’s, though they’re so crumpled by their night on a chair that they make me look close to homeless. I’ve no time for a shave. I plant the landline receiver on its stand, though it feels like abandoning a connection with my parents or at least the chance of one, and run down the hall.

  The pen in the inkwell clatters like a faulty alarm as I tramp to the street door, outside which I’m tapped softly on the shoulder by a drip from the merman’s cornucopia. The sky is growing as dark as deep water. On Castle Street the remnant of the sanctuary stone inset in the roadway gleams like an exposed trilobite as a cloud toys with the sun, but nobody in the lunchtime crowds appears to find it worth a glance. A pair of green men offer me protection as I cross opposite the old Bank of England branch. A stream beside the pavement races me down Cook Street, and as I hurry through the lanes to Whitechapel a blackbird starts to sing. It isn’t the dead of night, whatever the sky imagines, and the melody is trickling out of one of the shrines to the Beatles. The notes continue to twitter in my skull as I dodge through the mob on Whitechapel to the Frugone shop.

  As soon as I open the door the salesman I spoke to last time steps forward, raising his arms. He’s still advertising special offers with a Frugosh shirt. His arms subside once he recognises me, and the scaly tail of a tattoo withdraws its fin into the yellow sleeve. “Can I help?” he says loud enough for his colleagues to hear.