Creatures of the Pool

by Ramsey Campbell

  As I retreat from the window the water bed stirs again, and I could fancy that it’s eager to be used. I don’t need to be reminded that I’m in not just her house for the very first time but the bower of her bedroom, and being teased by a faint perfume from the army of cosmetics on the Victorian dressing-table. Their twins float low on the surface of the oval mirror, which shows me shambling across the room against a backdrop of ferny wallpaper. I wait beneath the inundated skylight until Lucinda emerges from the room, and then I say “So are you going to tell me?”

  “What would you like to know, Gavin?”

  This only makes me aware how little I’m sure I would like. I gesture at the subterranean photographs, which appear to be coming obscurely alive with shadows of rain. “Why are you doing this?”

  “How about a book?”

  “How about one? Which book?”

  “Yours, I hope.”

  She’s trying on a smile, but I feel as if she’s referring to a development that has escaped my consciousness. “I’ve got nothing to do with any book.”

  “I was thinking you could write one. I hope it wasn’t just my dream.”

  “Don’t start talking about those.” Even if Lucinda hasn’t, I’m certain someone has kept putting dreams or rather the subject of them into my head. Somewhat less sharply I add “What kind of book?”

  “About Liverpool. That’s what you’re all about, Gavin. If you aren’t going to be able to do so many tours you should publish everything instead, the history and all your stories. You never know, it could help revive your tours.”

  We’ve been descending the stairs like the leaders of a stately ritual procession through animated adumbrations of water. I’m distracted by the photographs, which seem to form even more of a labyrinth than the tunnels they depict. Perhaps that’s simply in my head. As Lucinda takes another step down and turns yet again to me I’m reduced to protesting “They aren’t my stories.”

  “If they’re the city’s that’s better still, isn’t it? It made you and they’re part of it just like you.”

  I’ve begun to find her eagerness unsettling, and I have to say “I’m not sure how I can use these pictures when I wasn’t there.”

  “We’ll get you down there, don’t worry. I just thought I should take them while I could,” she says and gazes up at me from the hall. “Do you think you might like my dream, sorry, my proposal a little bit?”

  “More than a bit, and forget what I said about dreams.” I take hold of her shoulders, murmuring “You understand if my mind’s elsewhere at the moment. I only wish I knew where.”

  “You will, I’m certain.” She puts more reassurance into resting her soft grasp on my hands, then glances past me at an almost shapeless noise—another onslaught of rain above the stairs. “What would you like to do now?” she says.

  The sense of water revives my thirst. “I wouldn’t mind a drink,” I croak.

  “Will it be all right from the tap?”

  “I’m not my father.”

  I follow her past subterranean vistas to the kitchen. It’s brimming with water or at least with liquid shadows, which crawl over items—cupboards, a table and chairs, kitchen equipment, a stone sink—so pale they might have forgotten what sunlight is like. Beyond the window a garden and the backs of houses are yielding most of their shape to the rain on the glass. Lucinda fills a pair of tankards inscribed LIVING LIVERPOOL from the tap, which delivers with such spirit that it wets her hand. While I gulp she sips and then refills my tankard as I ask “Did you get any pictures today?”

  “A few before we had to run for it. I haven’t had time to print them out.” She fetches her handbag from the foot of the banisters and produces a small black Frugo Digital camera. “See what you make of them,” she says and switches on the screen.

  Her hand must still be wet from the tap. I wipe the camera on my shirt before examining the miniature images, which show yet more tunnels stretching into darkness. I assume they’re in geographical sequence, unless Lucinda looked back to take some of the photographs, but they add to my sense of an indefinable labyrinth, whether Williamson’s or in my skull or both. Most of the tunnels have arched brick roofs, but some passages are roughly triangular. A few of the photographs include explorers leading the way or glancing at the camera, their faces blanched by the flash. They’re the only signs of life, although two successive images produce an illusion of some other movement in the dimness. I toggle between these and then zoom in, none of which clarifies the impression. “What were you taking there?” I have to ask.

  Lucinda sips from Living Liverpool and tilts her head. “One of the side tunnels.”

  “Yes, but what were you trying to catch?”

  “Just the focus. I wasn’t sure I’d got it first time.”

  “Then what did you think you were seeing?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, Gavin. Someone thought they heard water and that rather distracted me. They were all for getting out, and we did.”

  I zoom in closer—too close for clarity. Zooming out doesn’t help either. In the first image, the long narrow triangular passage seems to end at a wall glistening with moisture and pallid with lichen that has never seen the sun, but in the second the passage leads only into darkness. Did the flash fall short of the depths on that try? I needn’t imagine that the first image shows a body—even part of one—that shrank from the light like a snail into a shell before the flash could work again. I’m even less happy to wonder if it had already started shrinking—in which case, from what size and shape?—by the time the flash caught it in the act, and so I’m glad when the blackbird in my pocket twitches awake and starts to sing. The phone doesn’t identify the caller, and I can only blurt “Hello?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I know who I am,” I tell him with all the conviction I can summon. “Who are you?”

  “You first.”

  I manage not to clench my fingers on the keypad. “Gavin Meadows. Satisfied? Your turn.”

  “Were you in here before?”

  “In where, you—” Barely in time I control the explosion of language enough to say “Is that Frugone? Then I was.”

  “Gerry here.” He pauses long enough for me to wonder if he’s the salesman I approached, and then he says “I’ve got your information.”

  “Go ahead. Go ahead.”

  His hesitation makes me repeat the plea, which he uses as an excuse for another silence. At last he says with some pique “It was from Brookland Street near the docks.”

  “What’s there?”

  “How should I know? I’m just telling you what you asked. That’s your fifty quid’s worth.”

  “Well, thank—”

  By now he has departed with an electronic bleep that sounds like censorship. Perhaps he’s afraid of being overheard. Lucinda holds out my tankard in case I need a drink. My voice has indeed grown hoarse. As I take a gulp she says “Was it good news?”

  “It has to be. It’s where my father sent his last text from.”

  “Oh, Gavin, where?”

  “Brookland Street. It’s somewhere by the docks. Have you got a street map?”

  I’m at her back as she opens the door to the front room, where I glimpse leaves sprouting from far too many surfaces in the restless dimness. She switches on the light, revealing that the leaves are printed on the cushions of a suite as well as on the wallpaper. A table squatting in front of the settee is piled with volumes of old maps of Liverpool. As Lucinda stoops to them she says “These are for your book as well.”

  She selects a volume and turns to the index. She’s leafing through the maps when I see from the cover that the latest is no more recent than James Maybrick. “Here it is,” she says. “The site of, well, that may not still be there.”

  I don’t know why this should make me nervous to ask “What?”

  She rests a fingertip on the page as she holds up the book, then moves her hand away. Her finger hasn’t left a mark on the page; the grey not quit
e oval stain beneath the short narrow street bridged by a railway is a dock. “Just a church,” she says. “St Cuthbert’s church.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  A DISTANT SONG

  As Lucinda’s car reaches the top of the hill, having emerged from the garage near the houses, a last sweep of the windscreen wipers shows me the churchyard. Just a few inches of the tent are visible above the wall. Two policemen flank the gateway to bar the inquisitive, specifically a woman with two hounds straining at their leashes as if they’re eager to hunt the denizens of the graveyard. The policemen remind me so much of guards that I could imagine they’re enacting some historical memory. I lose sight of them as the car starts downhill, and I try to leave the stirrings of history behind as well.

  The rain has stopped, but clouds are lingering or reforming above the river. There’s no reason I should fancy that they’re waiting for us to arrive at the street near the dock. I’m already sufficiently troubled by wondering why we’re bound there, but where else can we go? Brookland Street passes under a railway bridge, which sounds like the location of my father’s last call. The church was mentioned on the phone-in after his appeal, but how significant is that? Like the request slip he filled in, it could be a clue that seems to lead only to another random dead end in the labyrinth of my search. The thought prompts me to grope in my pocket for the slip.

  Suppose it has grown as illegible as the page of John Strong’s notes? It isn’t, but I have to wait while the car descends the hill to Pembroke Place. Traffic lights halt us outside an old infirmary that the university has taken over, and I flourish the slip. “That’s why I was in the stacks.”

  Lucinda accords it barely a glance before concentrating on the road. “All right, Gavin, I believe you.”

  I wave it in front of her. “Does it look familiar?”

  “Don’t do that unless you want us to have an accident.” She pushes the slip away, although the lights are staying red, and gives it another blink. “I deal with them every day,” she says.

  “You don’t at the moment, and you know what I mean.” When she accelerates as the lights drop to green I say “My father wrote it. It’s his request for John Strong’s papers. It proves they exist after all.”

  “How does it?”

  We’re passing the School of Tropical Medicine. My mouth has grown dry again, and my forehead prickles as if the school has released a fever. Once upon a time these symptoms of disease were feared by people who lived here, close to the upper reaches of the Pool. I swallow and croak “One of you took it in the stacks.”

  “That doesn’t really prove anything either, does it? We don’t assume people make requests up.”

  “He didn’t. I saw it in the catalogue.” I don’t know whether I’m flapping the slip for emphasis or from frustration as I insist “And this was on the shelf where they brought the papers from.”

  “Was there a gap? There wasn’t, Gavin, was there? I looked.”

  “You couldn’t have looked too hard if you didn’t find this. Why was it there if nobody brought him anything?”

  “Maybe they left it to try and avoid an argument.”

  I feel as if not just the dark clouds but the shops on both sides of London Road are shutting off light from my mind. I could wish they would give way to the old mills and cottages and the view of fields beyond. For a moment, as a shaft of light between them finds the car, the landscape seems to have reverted, but the clouds have released a sunbeam along a side street. As the library comes into view beyond the Welly Market I say “More like they wanted to start one.”

  “Why on earth should anybody want to do that?”

  “Maybe to get rid of him. He didn’t make a row till he was told the papers didn’t exist, did he? So the question’s back to you. Why should somebody want him kept out of the library?”

  “Do you want me to argue or drive?”

  I’m tempted to ask why she can’t do both, but perhaps I’ve made her miss the direct route to the docks. We’re speeding down the concrete flyover that mocks the age of William Brown Street behind its back. Just ahead of the slope to the second Mersey Tunnel we veer left at Deadman’s Lane. Addison Street, it’s called Addison Street, the birthplace of James William Carling, who used to say the dead sent him dreams. Perhaps he meant the recently deceased Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Carling illustrated while he lived in Virginia at the same time as James and Florence Maybrick. He died in the workhouse on Brownlow Hill, close to a lunatic asylum and far too much else, and I’m glad when Lucinda interrupts the monologue of history. “I did find something to show you,” she says. “I can’t now.”

  I won’t ask why. She drives along Leeds Street and turns right at Pinfold Lane—Vauxhall Road, which takes us deeper into High Rip territory. I stay quiet—even my mind does, thank God—while she drives into a side street that leads under a railway bridge towards the river. Graffiti glisten like bones dredged up in the dimness beneath the arch. The large ungainly letters spell KEEP OUT, but we’re back in the open before I’m sure whether the last word is TROGS or FROGS; there’s not much difference between them, after all. The little that remains of the narrow street takes us between a small industrial estate and a row of rudimentary houses to Great Howard Street, where Lucinda turns left towards the Pier Head. The vista is dominated by a glassy greenish skyscraper like a challenge to the past, but it’s still distant when she steers left again. “See, you could trust me,” she says.

  We’re in Brookland Street. The sign tells me so, and the double vowel eyes me with pupils that someone has added, spanning the width of each letter. The left-hand pavement is walled off by an edge of the industrial estate. To the right is a patch of waste ground inside a vandalised wire fence, which extends across the far end of the stub of a street in front of a bricked-up railway arch. Presumably the fence was intended to prevent trespassers from climbing onto the railway. “Thanks,” I say as enthusiastically as I’m able and climb out of the car.

  The sky seems to sink to meet me, so that I could fancy its darkness is seeping into my head. Certainly the view in front of me—the waste ground scattered with debris and bristling with gloomy weeds—is no more illuminating than illuminated. A few jagged sections of mosaic must have belonged to the floor of the bombed church. A diagonal stretch of mosaic has been prised up, revealing an elongated patch of clay. At first I think only the age of the clay is troubling me, whyever it should, and then I see that it has preserved a set of tracks.

  They can’t be footprints—not their actual shapes. They’re too varied, both in their sizes and their grotesquely varied outlines, which appear to be trying vainly to resemble the prints of naked human feet. Weathering must have distorted them, but I can see why the caller to the phone-in said the ruins were supposed to feature a demon’s tracks. Perhaps people thought the church was meant to hold down any lingering presence, but how does this help me find my parents? If my father came to examine the tracks, that was hours ago. I’m distracted by a blurred scrap of song, which at first I think is behind me on the docks, though it isn’t a sea shanty. It’s a feeble or faraway rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I stare along the main road, where the only signs of life are speeding vehicles, and the side street opposite, which leads to the dock road and its massive fifteen-foot wall. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I complain. “What were you going to show me?”

  Lucinda hesitates and then reaches in her handbag for the Frugo Digital. “I’m not sure if it’s any use just now.”

  She searches backwards through the calendar before handing me the camera. The miniature screen displays a page of text from which long esses sprout like reeds in a marsh. I have to zoom in to identify the first page of Colquitt’s Description of Liverpool. Given that the book is less than two centuries old, the antique esses suggest that he was trying to fish for the past.

  “Me to describe in verse my muse alarms;

  Our native land attracts by secret charms;

  Oft wh
en remote from these salubrious shores

  We wish to see our country and its stores.

  Behold the Pool, where Neptune’s kin doth dream

  Of antic life in marsh and secret stream…”

  I have to scan back and forth to read all this. My efforts simply leave me more aware how wretched a poet he was. There’s no trace of the second couplet that my father copied down, and I thrust the camera at Lucinda. “You’re right, it’s no—”

  “Look at the next one, Gavin.”

  I toggle to it and peer closer. The afternoon twilight seems to intensify the lurid glare of the shrunken page, which is covered with handwriting—not my father’s. There’s virtually no space between the lines, and the letters bend so steeply to the right they’re almost prone, like a forest in a great relentless storm. As I zoom in I could imagine that I’m being drawn into the past, because despite the absence of elongated esses this is the first draft of Colquitt’s poem.

  “Shall the muse now relate of Liverpool,

  Seated near Mersey’s banks serenely cool?”

  So the unpublished version is even worse, but part of the next line catches my eye. As I scan across the couplets they begin, though not immediately, to grow familiar.

  “Subject to frequent rains though fit to trade,

  And to receive large ships which here are made.

  Behold the Pool, where Neptune’s kin doth dream

  Of antic life in marsh and secret stream.

  Nay, though the Pool be buried furlongs deep,

  This stifles not the maggots of its sleep…”

  I feel as though I’m close to one—as though the doggerel itself is one. The distant song drifts into my consciousness and prevents me from grasping my ill-formed thoughts. “You see, I’ve been trying to help,” Lucinda says. “I found that in the stacks.”