The Count of Eleven

by Ramsey Campbell

  "Can it wait till I've finished the next job? I'll be a couple of weeks."

  "I may as well see to it myself."

  "That's my boy. Shall I hang on here while you fetch what you need?"

  Jack hadn't meant immediately, but why not? "I'll drive back," he promised.

  "No panic. I'll be doing my best to persuade folk that your films are more fun than they look."

  That prospect sent Jack sprinting down the hill once Andy couldn't see him. Victoria Road was almost crowded, the sun and the seaside-postcard sky having tempted families over from Liverpool. A breeze brought him the smell of fish and chips, or as much of it as his clogged nose could distinguish, and the unctuous amplified invitation of a Bingo caller: "Fun for all the family. Try your luck."

  Nobody was home, though Laura's bicycle was in the back yard. She'd scribbled 'Gone to Jody's' on the message board magnetised to the refrigerator door. He pulled the pedal bin out from beneath the sink and jammed his heels against the doors of the refrigerator and the oven as he manoeuvred the blow lamp from behind the pipe which led to the drain.

  The tank of the blow lamp was larger than his head, and he hadn't realised how heavy it was. He picked it up by the handle and took it to his van, on the rear doors of which there was still a ghost of a satellite dish stencilled by the previous owner. He went upstairs to blow his nose, then he found his old lighter on the kitchen windowsill and snapped it on to check the flame, imagining the taste of the first drag at a cigarette. He'd kept the lighter to remind himself how he'd managed to kick the habit when Laura was born.

  Andy was chuckling at the antics of the skip inspectors. "This looks good. You want to get it."

  "You think it would improve my business?"

  Andy looked faintly hurt. "Might help."

  "We'll see, Andy. Anyway, you've helped. Let's go out for a drink some night soon."

  Both men stared awkwardly at the television for a few seconds, then Andy stepped out from behind the counter. "Better be toddling. Got to track down my tools."

  Jack copied onto the Amstrad the details of a loan which Andy had painstakingly scrawled on the front of the wholesaler's duplicated brochure. The member's name and the title of the film were misspelled, but the number was accurate. "Safety in numbers," Jack murmured, and went to the van. The handle of the blow lamp felt satisfyingly solid in his grasp as he carried the tool to the shop doorway. "Brighten my day," he said to the blow lamp

  TWO

  Once Julia had climbed the dormant escalator from the underground platform at Moorfields she seemed to have the business district of Liverpool almost to herself. Other than several cars parked outside a sex shop there was hardly a sign of life. A few pigeons wandered away from her as she crossed the square of Exchange Flags, where a black skeleton grinned out from beneath a monumental robe, and a frieze of birds stirred and then flapped up from above the pillars of the town hall. She strolled across Dale Street, enjoying the chance to concentrate on the upper storeys of the office buildings, where gargoyles nested among stone leaves while towers suggested that the roofs were dreaming of far lands and distant times. The wail of a fire engine rose from the dock road, sounding much closer to her because of the emptiness, and jarred her out of a reverie which had felt like pure contented anticipation. Time enough to daydream when she'd sorted out Luke's problem, she thought, hurrying across Castle Street and down towards the river.

  His office was on a side street near the Slaughterhouse, a pub with sawdust on its bare floorboards. All the parking meters along the pavement by the office said EXCESS and PENALTY, except for the couple under the window, their heads having been tied up in yellow canvas bags. The gilded name of Rankin, Luke's surname, glinted at her from the window as she rang the bell beside the heavy panelled bright red door.

  The immediate response was a cry from Luke, which sounded as though several vulgar words were stumbling over one another in their haste to leave his mouth. Shortly he peered through the Venetian blind on which a faint shadow of his gilded name lay, then he came to the door. She had never seen him not wearing a suit and tie, but now he wore a purple zippered cardigan which she thought must belong to his wife. Both his grey hair and his greying eyebrows looked as if he'd been raking them with his fingers. "Oh dear, Luke, what have you done?" she said.

  "Nothing too fatal, I hope," he said with a pleading grin which pinched the wrinkled corners of his eyes. "I was on the computer for hours before I called you. I feel as if I've still got a green light jumping around my head."

  "The curse of the cursor," Julia recognised, and lifted the flap in the Reception counter. "Let's see how bad things are."

  The outer office contained six desks in ranks of three, facing away from the window. The five word processors were hooded, but the computer on Julia's desk, which was nearest to the door of Luke's room, was uncovered, and she saw a problem at once. "You left a disc in when you switched off the computer."

  "I must have done that just now. Is it bad?"

  "So I've been told. Say a prayer," Julia advised him half-seriously as she slipped the disc out of the drive and switched on the Apricot. The blank slate of the monitor turned green, and she held her breath until it displayed the specifications of the computer. She reinserted the disc as Luke drew up a chair next to hers. By the time the computer had finished chirping to itself over the disc and showed her the directory of contents, Luke was so restless that his chair was squeaking like a mouse.

  The disc contained a record of several years' worth of investments he'd made on behalf of those of his clients whose surnames came first in the alphabet, but now the directory was crowded with new files. Since a file name couldn't be more than eight characters long, some of them were obviously the beginnings of phrases he'd typed in increasing desperation: EXPLAIN, PLEASE EX IDONTUNDE, WHATDOYO, GOOD GOD WHAT NOW BUG GERIT... "What were you trying to do, Luke?"

  He cleared his throat and stared hard at her as if to remind her who was boss. "I thought I'd figured out a better way to organise the information."

  "That's what you pay me for."

  "I'm not planning to dispense with you. I know you need the work. But you've got to appreciate I need to be in control of every aspect of my business. I thought you'd shown me the ropes."

  "Just enough to hang yourself with, by the look of it," Julia thought better of saying. "You must have forgotten something I showed you," she said, "and anyway I was planning a few more lessons."

  "Here we are with no distractions," he said, his eagerness revealing itself as nervousness. "I've lost nothing, have I? Everything it says is there is there?"

  "All the files that are listed are on the disc. I take it you haven't been able to get into them."

  "I haven't seen a word of them all morning, so I can't have harmed them, can I?"

  "Let's hope not," Julia said, and having typed the command to edit a file, moved her chair aside. "Go ahead, ask to see one."

  "But I don't want to edit, I only want to look."

  "That's the command you use anyway."

  He typed a client's name and crouched forwards, resting his fingers on the keys, and Julia wanted to pull them away in case he panicked and typed something disastrous. When the columns of figures and dates and names of investments appeared he relaxed, but not for long. As soon as he'd scrolled to the end of the file he demanded "How do I get rid of this?"

  "You don't want to erase any of it, surely."

  "What are you getting he began, so fast it sounded like a single word, and controlled himself. "You know what I mean. How do I make it disappear?"

  Abandon it."

  He drummed his fingers on the desk, dangerously near the keyboard. "That can't be right. I want to keep it."

  "You will. If you didn't want to you'd delete it."

  "Why didn't you say so?"

  Of course she had, at his first lesson, even if not in those words. She watched as he closed the file and opened another, scrolled through it, abandoned it, ope
ned the next file.... His delight at his competence reminded her of Laura unwrapping birthday presents, though Laura was never so self-absorbed. As he opened the third file he said without looking at her "Feel like a coffee?"

  She felt more like a spare part. "How many sugars in yours?"

  "One teaspoonful, as level as you can make it," he said, and sent the names and numbers streaming upwards like smoke.

  Julia looked on the floor by the spare electric socket and then behind the desks. "You wouldn't happen to know where the kettle's hiding, would you?"

  "Sorry," he said, fumbling for his keys. As soon as Julia had unlocked his room he said briskly "Thanks."

  The kettle was beside his desk, the top of which was covered with neat heaps of documents and with Luke's memos to himself in handwriting that looked wilfully illegible, a telephone, a pocket tape-recorder, an executive toy with its steel balls dangling. It seemed as if he wanted to keep everything about his business under tight control, even the coffee and sugar and powdered milk, and she wondered if she would be able to hear working for him once he stopped regarding her as in some ways more knowledgeable than himself.

  When she returned from the tap in the toilet Rankin's shared with the accountants upstairs she found that Luke had brought out the coffee ingredients and locked his door. By the time the lid of the kettle started dancing he'd examined all the files on the disc. He sat back to sip from his mug. "How about opening new files? I think that's where I went wrong."

  "Give it the command you've been using to edit."

  She was sitting at Lynne's desk, but Luke's snarl of disbelief made her twist around. "It's doing the same bloody thing," he cried. "It's asking for the name of the file when the damned file hasn't got a name."

  "It's asking you to name it, Luke."

  Then why the devil wasn't that made clear?"

  Julia told herself that he was blaming the machine, not her. "Once you've named your file you can do what you like with it. Write it, edit it, copy it, rename it, anything."

  "It's as simple as that?" he said with a laugh so mirthless it had to be directed at himself.

  "Call it something, Luke. Whatever comes into your head."

  Luke typed HIDEY HO and stopped, fingers twitching above the keyboard. "So?"

  Tress Return."

  He did so and immediately brought his fists down on either side of the keyboard, shaking the desk. "Now the bloody screen's gone blank."

  "Because a new file's empty until you write something in it."

  "Oh, I see." Not before time, he sounded chastened. "What shall I write?"

  "The screen is yours."

  Some time passed, presumably while he arranged his thoughts, before he started typing. Occasionally he asked her which key to strike to produce an effect, but when she made to go to him he waved her away: "I can't work with people hovering."

  "Shall I leave you to it?"

  "Can't you stay? I need to learn while there's time. While there's nobody here to distract us, I mean."

  She took pity on him until he began to snarl and make mistakes. "Enough for today. Your memory's overloading," she said.

  "How do I clear space on the disc without losing anything?"

  "Copy some files onto another disc and then delete them from this one."

  "That's what I thought," Luke said. "Just show me that."

  When she had he switched off the computer, to her relief. "When do you want me to bring the records up to date?" she said. "There's still about a year's worth not on disc."

  "I may do that myself. They're locked away safe. Don't worry, there'll be work for you. The girls need training."

  He let her out of the building and locked the door behind her. As she passed the window she heard the renewed chirruping of the computer and remembered her own feelings of compulsion as she'd learned how to use one, switching the machine on again to try just one more idea before bedtime, waking in the middle of the night convinced she'd worked out a solution. "Once I'm across the river I'm gone for the day," she promised herself, making for the ferry terminal.

  As the boat swung away from the landing stage the Liver Clock showed ten past three. As a toddler Laura used to say the clock looked like an egg laid by the Liver Bird above it. Children leaned over the stern of the ferry and pulled bread to pieces, seagulls flew up like whirling shards of the foam in the wake. A jet plane trailed its cloak of sound down to Speke Airport, beyond which, at the bend of the river, an oil flare stood like an indistinguishable match. On weekdays the rumble of Liverpool and of the peninsular motorway seemed to call to each other across the river, but now, as the ferry steamed towards the peninsula, the streets piled on the approaching bank were as quiet as the idle docks of Birkenhead.

  She disembarked at Seacombe and walked along the promenade towards New Brighton. The tide was out, exposing flanks of sand and reddish rock pimply with winkles. A Doberman was dashing through the long slow waves, its lead in its mouth, while its owner, a woman in aged baggy trousers, searched the rock pools. A man with a cloth cap yanked low on his forehead cycled past Julia, wheeling a second bicycle. Boys on skateboards raced down the sloping streets between houses overlooking the river, and Julia had to grit her teeth so as not to interfere as the boys challenged one another to be last to jump off before the skateboards shot over the twenty-foot drop at the edge of the promenade. Past the war memorial, children wearing headphones were skating in Vale Park, between picnic tables and the pillared bandstand whose dome said Brahms, Mozart, Bach. Tiny bright figures with shrill voices scurried back and forth on screens in the Golden Goose amusement arcade near the mouth of the river, and Julia wasn't sure if it was the screens or the hyperactive mites which reminded her of Luke. She climbed the slope of Victoria Road opposite the arcade and turned along her street. "Anybody home?" she called as she opened the front door.

  Nobody answered. Jack would be at the video library for hours yet, and Laura had left a note in the kitchen. Now that Julia was alone in it the house no longer felt too small, but every meal-time the home computer had to be moved off the table in the cramped dining-room, and Laura liked to do her homework lying on her bed. Laura had been born in the front bedroom when there hadn't been time to rush Julia to hospital at close to midnight, but since a prospective buyer's surveyor had found damp and dry rot Julia had felt rather betrayed by the house. She knelt to rummage through the freezer compartment, and had just located the turkey pie she'd made after Christmas when the phone rang.

  "If that's you, Luke By the time she'd finished replacing foil trays in the freezer the phone had jangled twelve times and was still ringing. She ran into the hall and grabbed the receiver from its den among the coats on the hall-stand. "Orchards," she said.

  "Julia. You're home, thank God. Can you come over quick as you can? Emergency."

  "I'm on my way," she said, slapping coats aside and replacing the receiver, shoving her arms into the sleeves of her anorak, slinging the strap of her handbag over one shoulder and rushing out of the house. For a moment she'd been about to tell Luke to calm down, and then she'd recognised the voice despite its shrillness. It was Jack's.

  THREE

  A woman returning a video tripped over the blow lamp on her way into the shop. Jack wedged the door open with a pound coin and dragged the tool out of the doorway. Now the edge of the door seemed perilously close to the nearest shelves. He was moving handfuls of video cases onto the floor, where they leaned like hollow dominoes, when a boy of about twelve loitered in the doorway, combing his oily hair. "Are you selling those, mister?"

  "Depends how much you've got in the bank."

  The boy treated the leaning titles to a bored glance. "They might be worth using for blanks," he said and strolled downhill, squeezing the sides of his scalp with the palms of his hands as though he was extracting oil.

  "Nothing like unsolicited encouragement," Jack said loudly, "and that was..." Stooping to the blow lamp he uncoiled the nozzle from the tank of Calor gas. He turne
d on the gas and ignited it with his lighter. A metal fish-tail clipped to the nozzle spread the flame and rendered it practically noiseless. Jack aimed the fish-tail at the door, then snatched it back. The surface of the door had begun to writhe at once.

  He had to peer at the unaffected door and finger it gingerly in order to convince himself that he had only been seeing a distortion produced by the wavering of the air. In fact the yellowish flame had little effect until the fish-tail was almost touching the door; then the paint started to smoulder and bubble and pop. Jack played the flame slowly over the door, using his free hand to wave smoke away from his itchy nostrils. He'd been crouching for several minutes when a sneeze overwhelmed him. The nozzle swung wildly, dislodging the fish-tail, which clanged against the charred paint and struck the floor amidst a shower of blackened flakes.

  Was he supposed to be scraping the paint off the door? There was nothing in the shop he could use. Presumably he could scrape later. Now that the nozzle had been divested of its accessory, the flame was much louder and fiercer, though almost invisible. It blotted out any nearby sounds, and so he couldn't tell how long he failed to notice that someone was standing behind him. "Go on in," he said, shuffling aside on his knees.

  When there was no response he lifted the nozzle away from the door and glanced back. An old man was leaning on the window, his hand surrounded by an aura of moisture on the glass. His face and sparse hair and blue eyes all looked faded with age. His raincoat was buttoned in the wrong holes, and a wattle of his neck overhung the left side of the collar. His lips were parted as if he'd been waiting for Jack to meet his eyes so that he could speak. "I know you," he said.

  "I shouldn't be surprised. I'm here every day from eleven till eight."

  "Not here."

  "If it isn't me then someone must be doing an impression."

  The man's lips parted again as if he was trying to mouth the answer he required. "Was there anything you wanted?" Jack said.

  The old man grimaced at the blow lamp "That isn't what you do."