Demons by Daylight

by Ramsey Campbell

  “I’ve only been here once before, you know,” she told Kirk, who was struggling to saw his lettuce with a plastic knife. “I haven’t even been to Bidston Village.”

  “No, so you haven’t. You’ll have to escort her there, Kirk.”

  “I certainly will.” His knife slipped and tomato-seeds glittered on the paper cloth like coloured tears. “Don’t be so tidy,” Auntie Ethel rebuked as he tried to scoop them up, “you’ll show up the rest of us. Plenty more cloths where that came from.”

  “I stayed with Auntie Ethel just for a day last year. They drove me down from Manchester because they couldn’t put me up there. Manchester’s too modern, anyway. I was asleep in the back all the way here. I wished I hadn’t been, I like night driving — ” She stopped. “I was in Manchester for a wedding.”

  “They say one wedding leads to another,” said Auntie Ethel, smiling.

  The sitting-room again; Anne lifted the lid of a red record-player. “I’d like to dance with you.”

  “I can’t,” said Kirk.

  “Never mind, darling,” and she put her arms round his neck. Her perfume was as subtle as her outline in the evening. There was a brief struggle; he tried to pull her aboard his knee, she was lifting him. “Wait a minute,” she said, and pulled away. She collected cushions from the furniture and arranged them expertly on the floor. “Lie down,” she told him, and as he did so: “Darling, take my glasses off.” He wished she wouldn’t direct so much; it was like a rehearsal. Then she knelt above him, stroked his hair, brushed her lips down from his forehead to his mouth. He drew her down to him. He was filled with a timeless peace; so much for Shirley and for Graham Greene! When he felt her tongue he was suddenly dismayed; but tenderness passed through the slow luxurious movement of her mouth and gradually formed into his caresses, tenderness which drifted through them and became the dusk which merged their bodies, their warmth like a cocoon, until the coach roared round the concrete courtyard and out into the world.

  Kirk blinked weakly; the dust lay on his lips like tasteless salt. Why must the future drain his last days of Anne? The Liverpool queue had lengthened, but the young man with the sports-coat still turned at each new footstep. Sadly Kirk closed his eyes, but Anne had gone. Some link was needed. Kirk touched his pockets, his trousers full of change; he jangled the money —

  Next day the sun was a golden coin; the last few patches of rain were dwindling, like continents eroded by time. Kirk waited outside Woolworth’s on Church Street; for some reason Anne had suggested they meet there. Blobs of flesh rushed headlong past, hot cloth waited at the crossing. For a moment he wanted to cut this scene; it was too full of a lost future. But then he gave the cue; to skip it would be to lose part of Anne. Coins. As the doors of Woolworth’s were unbolted to give vent to the chatter of counted change like the musings of a vast computer, Anne was at his side. “I’m ever so sorry I’m late, darling. You can slap me if you like,” and when he aimed, “No, not here, darling!” She pulled him into the store and across to the jewellery counter; a lesser mathematician was still counting, a coin rang for each digit. “Please buy me a ring,” she pleaded, “just a little one.”

  “Which one do you like?” He was playing for time, but she’d already chosen. God, which hand? He had never before had occasion to look. He couldn’t close his eyes; he closed his mind. The odds were even: left hand. But which finger? The overalled assistant’s eyes were on them; no doubt in her mind she was already describing the scene to her colleagues. “Want some help, luv?” she called. Kirk slid the ring down the only finger it fitted, Anne’s third. “I don’t think so,” he replied, and led Anne toward the door with an obscure sense of victory. “Is this a holiday engagement?” he could not help asking.

  “That’s up to you, Kirk, isn’t it?” For a moment her eyes were as lifeless as her glasses. She caught sight of the photo booth near the basement staircase. “I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said, but her voice was sinking. “Let’s, Kirk.”

  “There we are, together for ever.” She examined each blurred shot of her ring held toward the camera. “Let’s have half each. Then we’ll each have part of each other.” And she tore off two for Kirk like an inexperienced film editor cutting shots which made nonsense of the climax.

  He took her to Bidston Hill. The grass was damp as reeds. They admired the proud white windmill on the Hill, to Kirk a rough white texture of stone; they progressed through the marshy grass to the cock-pit further down the slope, where Anne said: “The past must have been cruel sometimes.” Kirk knew why but couldn’t act; he wasn’t sure of her. They passed the futuristic house at the bottom of the Hill, as full of bright rectangles as a Mondrian painting. “If only,” Anne said, “I could go back into the past.” She wasn’t speaking to him, he knew; her hand was limp in his. He showed her Bidston Village: stone walls, old grey houses, a little shop, a lamp-post before the church porch, the occasional car roaring by unheeding. “It’ll be swallowed up by a council estate any day now,” he told her. “Poor village,” she said, but it wasn’t there for her. “Anne darling,” he said; the first time. She rushed into her eyes. “If we go up to Caldy Village we can have tea on the lawn. If you’d like to.”

  “Oh, darling,” she told the countryside, “you made the effort for me!”

  He led her through the woods to Caldy Hill; clusters of leaves hung aloft like clouds. From the rocks, carved with initials which perhaps had survived their authors, she took in the sunset; Kirk visualized Hilbre Island far below in the Dee, holding its place in the waters, if it were not Hilbre which forged forward through a static medium. At last they returned to the bench to join a presumed series of lovers before sunsets. If only he could tell her why he’d brought her here — to exorcise Shirley; Shirley, the student from his course who’d come with him one evening to Caldy, the only haunt of his which freed him to enter the glittering water, the distant trees on the edge of the universe. He’d cast his gaze into the feathers of colour laid along the horizon for minutes before he’d slid one arm round Shirley’s shoulders and leaned across to kiss her. For a moment she had stared at him; then she’d burst out laughing. No, he couldn’t tell Anne; she might resent this substitution; besides, he didn’t feel ready to trust such a secret to her. He covered her face; her eyes closed.

  Among the trees the shadows shaped the passing of a breeze. “Sometimes I wonder where you go when you dream,” said Anne. “Do I go into the past, do you think? Just now I feel I’m in a dream. A lovely dream.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Anne watched her feet flicker through the bars of shadow like a film about to stop. “I wish you knew what to say to girls,” she said.

  A colossal green leper stood on the horizon; the Liver Clock, flaking off each second from the future. Kirk paced the bare wood of the Woodside landing-stage and peered at the bilious lights floating with the current. He did know what to say to girls, it was simply that he couldn’t often verbalize; he sought peace, not to strain for words. What about his letters to Adrienne? But of course writing in French was different; to declare love in a language other than your own was like placing it in quotes — you weren’t emotionally committed. Adrienne. No, Anne; he loved Anne; was he still flinching from Shirley’s laughter? But his hand was groping in his pocket for Adrienne’s letter; if he must exorcise her too before he could reach Anne, then he would. Hurriedly he stuffed back the other letter with the note attached and placed the envelope on the stone bench, perhaps hoping that it would blow away. “My dearest Kirk — I was so glad to hear that you intend to come to Paris. I hope you will be able to --- the money (decades of pockets had erased that word: “gather,” if he recalled correctly). If you could find a job here — ” No, that was enough; he settled himself on the stone bench, finding new areas of cold, fighting cramp. Time might have frozen on this concrete square like a film; no direct sunlight told the time of day. Victoria Station — No, that took him back before Anne — or afterward. The light behind his
memories went out. Anne had gone. He could remember his love for Anne, like a film he’d once seen. “I love you, Anne,” he whispered to the dust. And jerked out of sequence, their last scene lit up in his memory.

  A pub on the approach to the Pier Head; lights like inverted hanging wineglasses; maritime prints of outward-bound ships; from one table a rush of laughter; Anne sitting chin on hand, sipping a vodka. “What will you do eventually, Kirk?” That could mean anything; he chose one meaning. “I hope I’ll make London sometime in the future,” he said, Paris forgotten; after all, he mightn’t be equipped to earn a living there, and he’d never even met Adrienne. “I hope you do,” Anne said. “And please come and see me in Southend. You remember how to reach me? But until you do, you will write to me, won’t you?”

  “Of course I will. Do you mind them typed? I type faster than I can write.”

  “Oh, don’t. I want them in your writing.”

  “All right.” The bell for closing time pealed between them. Kirk helped her don the jacket of the suit she’d worn for him; he didn’t look down at his own. They left without speaking, struggling through the maze of tables from which a girl collected glasses of soap-suds. The night was chill; a drunk yelled after them and gesticulated, almost overbalancing. As they waited at the traffic-lights on the last stretch to the Pier Head, Anne gripped Kirk’s arm. They stepped on the disused railway track between the cobbles and Anne turned: “Kirk, I love you. Please — ” He knew what she was forbidden to say; he was on the edge of acting out so many movies that he’d seen. The lights blazed down into his face. “Je t’adore,” he said. It was the best he could do; he didn’t know whether it was enough, he felt the light fading. But at once she looked up at the clock; he couldn’t be sure if she’d even heard.

  They had crossed the river; it rushed by unobstructed. As they climbed the Woodside ramp, past a newspaper flattened on the grey wall like a poster, Anne said: “I can’t pay for a taxi and I suppose you can’t either Kirk?”

  “I can’t,” he told her; he didn’t like to add that she had cleaned him out.

  “Oh, Kirk, five minutes to my last bus,” she mourned. They kissed feverishly in the bus shelter, then on the platform, beneath averted eyes; then the engine snarled. Anne moved up the aisle; Kirk’s hand clung limply to the pole. Suddenly she cried his name and running back, pressed something into his hand: “My darling, your glasses, I almost forgot!” The bell rang. The bus pulled out. Anne waved as she was drawn away, blurred, was gone. A light was carried off into the night. He couldn’t see. He struggled with the case, opened it, fumbled on his glasses; but the bus had turned a corner, the street was dark, cold, empty.

  His glasses brought the pavement closer, sharp as the sights of a delirium — but why go on? If only that was how it had ended! — on one last luminous image which he gave himself of a tiny Anne borne waving away around the corner. The pain of parting was more bearable than the dull ache of disillusionment, which itself was preferable to the all-embracing horror of disorientation. But his memories were headlong in their flight from happiness; already they’d rushed through the Liverpool coach station at Edge Lane, bypassing a tableau of a man with a hose and the grey trails of buses like snail-tracks, and had dumped him on the coach to Southend, his first visit to Anne. Penniless, he’d sold his typewriter; the girls in the downstairs flat on Smithdown Road had complained of its nocturnal tapping — not that he cared, but Anne had said she wanted him to write. And allowing for the remainder of the month he’d still realized enough to pay his fare to Southend. He’d written to Anne two days ago to herald his arrival, but she hadn’t replied yet. The letter from Adrienne lay in his flat unanswered. But he knew how to reach Anne, and next week he’d be back to class and Shirley.

  The doubts commenced on the edge of Southend; as in a film, he glanced up and gazed out across the first laps of sand. Had it been a holiday romance? Had she called him “darling” in the casual London way? Had she declared her love to intensify their parting, to create a scene for her album? He wished he’d waited for a reply to his letter. If she were eager to show him the door, if there were someone else sitting in the front room waiting for him to leave, it would annihilate him. Trivial, trivial, his future self scoffed on the bench; but doubt now was all he could trust. He willed it to dissipate like morning mist over Southend: the amazingly protracted pier, thrusting entertainment seaward to hold steady on the water, faceted yet featureless as time; the sea unfolding sibilantly on the sand; the flowers bordering the streets; the street-names elevated on poles like varieties of flowers. Flowers for love or for a wedding. A wedding night on Mount Pleasant, street of Liverpool’s hotels and “of all the Mr and Mrs Smiths of the world,” as he’d told Anne. Having wavered and chosen a hotel, they found the desk-clerk suspicious; but Anne in her white skirt looked too innocent to be guilty. The desk-clerk smiled, perhaps at some remembered escapade, and unlocked the double room. As soon as the door had closed Kirk stroked Anne’s hair, found the fastening of her dress, opened it and led her to the bed. Gently he pushed her back and lifted her legs onto the coverlet. As he began to draw her dress down from her shoulders he realized she was trembling. He glanced at her face. She was shaking with laughter.

  A girl laughed in the dry square; Kirk awoke. He kept his eyes closed; he was afraid to open them on tears. “Don’t be long for heaven’s sake, the bus must be due,” said the young man in the coach queue. High heels clicked away. How could he have dreamed that of Anne? Of course they’d never been to a hotel; he’d never seen a girl naked; but if it had been Anne, she’d never have done that to him. She couldn’t do that to me, he told himself, passing an old man wheeling his wife along Southend promenade. And he turned up the side street leading to Arlen Street, where Anne lived.

  Down the blazing street came two figures, arms about each other. Even with his glasses and in the piercing sunlight, he could not make out their faces. Kirk’s fist clenched in his pocket. They came closer; a young bearded man strolling with a girl Kirk had never seen before. His fist opened, already feeling Anne’s fingers between his, and he ran to the end of the street, to Arlen Street, and was confronted by a desert of waste ground.

  That image was clearest of all: the humps of spewed earth, the ruts and folds of bulldozer treads like the gums of a toothless mouth, a dog urinating brightly in the sunlight against the notice-board which claimed the wasteland; the abandonment, the disorientation. Kirk moaned. He must have been mistaken. He stumbled back toward the promenade and overtook the couple; he put his hand on the girl’s warm shoulder to make them turn and to feel a human body. “I’m wrong for Arlen Street, aren’t I?” he pleaded. “Can you put me right?”

  “Allen Street you want, mate,” suggested the girl’s escort.

  “No, A-r-l-e-n,” Kirk spelled desperately, hearing Anne say: “Like Michael Arlen, you know.”

  “Wrong town, I’d say,” the girl broke in. “You’re not from round here, are you?”

  “Are you from round here?” Kirk caught at the possibility.

  “I’m half-a-mile up the front, mate, and Anne’s in the next street.” Kirk’s stomach twisted; then he saw that the other was referring to the girl on his arm. Kirk moved away, almost fleeing; sand stung his cheeks. As he reached the promenade they called behind him: “There’s a map up the prom if you don’t believe us.”

  Of course no Arlen Street was noted on the map. Chaos churned in Kirk like the breeze-blown sand. He shuffled toward a group of shops; beside one a staircase led beneath a dead electric sign to a basement coffee-bar. He took one step toward it; Anne might be there — then a pang shot up from his stomach, blocking his way. He no longer wanted to meet her. He wanted to go home. He made for the bus-station, past inverted chairs defending cafe tables, signs on stalls: “Novelty Hats”, “Torture Thro’ the Ages”; the illuminations hung lifeless in sunlight, and “The Longest PIER in the World” had been drained of all but a pink tinge. The next bus was for London; but anything to escap
e Southend.

  The sight of Victoria Station as it had once been, movie posters vast against the sky, actresses of cardboard, drivers sipping coffee from paper cups beside a photo booth (of course, thought future Kirk, he should have known then) was superimposed over the sounds of the concrete square, like a film whose dubbing emphasizes its unreality; on the stone bench Kirk felt the world receding, revealing itself as his hallucination. If he opened his eyes he might find figures mouthing like fish, their dialogue continuing unsynchronized — while in his memory, more vivid, more intense and more convincing, he found he had three hours to wait for the Liverpool coach. He lost himself in the night. Presently, the lights of a cinema blazed; the film was Vertigo. No, it was too cruel. But he refused to tire himself for three hours in pursuit of a memory when he could be grappling with it. The film had started; the camera moved alluringly through the shadows of a night-club, and suddenly, bright in a blonde aura, there was Kim Novak. Kirk watched wide-eyed; then he shook and buried his face in his hands. Inexorably the film continued. A giant kiss filled the screen: flaps of skin engulfing each other like the jaws of cannibal snails, thought Kirk, still shaking. Beneath the kiss the audience rustled and coughed; neither was real. Abruptly Kirk stood up. Above him in the circle a couple took the cue; as they stood, silhouetted on the fan of light which was Kim Novak, they kissed luminously. Kirk spun about, rammed into a vacated seat and stumbled blindly out.

  At Victoria Station a man staggered into the bar, stuttering that life was a bad joke played on humanity, and Kirk directed him out with such force that even this man’s fervour failed. Kirk found a stained table, its plastic top decorated with linked brown rings like a Chinese puzzle, arranged his plate of sandwiches and glass of Coca-Cola and threw his coat on the next chair. Before his slumped coat stood a half-empty glass, stained with drink like dismal clouds. A waitress somnolently sponged the tables, shovelling the debris onto a single plate as if to feed a dog; she saw the half-drained glass and left it for Kirk’s girl-friend, whose place he must be keeping with his coat. Oh God, he said, realizing. He wondered what he’d do until the coach arrived; sit and stare at the bare bar, people the seat beside him and weep if necessary; another drunk, they’d think.