The Count of Eleven

by Ramsey Campbell

  He let the flap down gently, enjoying the strength of his fingers, and stood up. "You've done it now," he heard himself say, perhaps aloud. He felt as if his bad luck was a burden which he'd managed to place outside himself at last a burden whose removal left him feeling exhilarated and youthful. He couldn't quite believe what he'd done; even gazing at the blurred dance of the flames, magnified by the leafy pattern in the frosted glass, didn't entirely persuade him. "Got to laugh, haven't you?" he said to the grin which was tugging at his lips, and turned away from the bungalow. But as he walked towards the Audi he saw the flames reflected in its windows brighten and rear up.

  He felt as if they were chasing him, until he swung round and saw that they were still beyond the door. The object which he'd assumed to be a chest or a wardrobe was made of cardboard, judging by the speed with which the flames were consuming it. In hardly any time the lower section of it collapsed, throwing the upper section across the floor, and Jack guessed it had been a pile of cartons. He had a sense of inevitability: events had been taken out of his hands yet again. Almost at once the carpet was ablaze and the flames were knocking soundlessly at the nearest inner door.

  Either the door was ajar and swinging wider or the rush of fire was making it appear to move. When he saw smoke beginning to drift across the room beyond the long uncurtained window he backed away from the house and stood at the bottom of the concrete semicircle, waiting for the flames to invade the room, then he walked rapidly downhill.

  He thought he meant to call the fire brigade, but there was no phone box in sight on the dual carriage way and walking for some minutes didn't show him one. He couldn't very well ask to phone from anyone's house. He heard a fire engine in the distance, and fled to his van. Someone else had called the fire brigade, and Jack was suddenly afraid of coming face to face with Veronica Alan.

  She was just visible on a wide lawn, her dogs doing their ponderous best to leap at a stick she was flourishing. The sight of her, shrunken by distance and quite unaware of events at her house, made Jack grin and shudder simultaneously. He climbed into the van and swung it out of the car park, so violently that the pile of letters spilled off the passenger seat onto the floor. He was waiting for the stream of traffic to let the van onto the dual carriage way when he discovered he had no idea where he was going.

  He couldn't think which was the nearest address on the envelopes. Besides, his compulsion to deliver them had lost momentum. The only place he wanted to go now, he decided, was home but Julia would sense he had done something which he couldn't tell her. He'd committed a crime, he'd destroyed someone's property. He hadn't meant to do so, at least not to begin with, but how could he explain that to her? He felt as though the events of the last half hour, or however long it had been, had involved someone other than himself.

  The blare of a horn behind the van jerked him out of the state into which he'd fallen, he wasn't sure how long ago. He stamped on the accelerator and stalled the engine. As a black sports car swerved around the van and into the main road, the flash of glossy black made him think of some kind of reptile slithering under the trees. He twisted the ignition key and drove as if the act itself might eventually suggest a route.

  He drove for hours. Avenues led him through shopping districts where the pedestrians appeared to think he'd done nothing out of the ordinary. Someone shouted, and an apple rolled towards the van from the market stall behind which the trader was shouting. Jack thought he might be able to think if he reached open country, but he seemed incapable of escaping the maze of unfamiliar streets or of reading the map. "Smile' added up to thirteen, he found himself thinking, as did 'laugh', but 'fire' was eleven. "Smile, laugh, fire," he muttered, driving. "I'm fire."

  At last he had to stop for petrol. The filling station included a video library, and some of the cassettes were for sale. He was examining the titles before he remembered he was no longer in the business. The realisation seemed to bring him back to himself. The events at Veronica Alan's had been yet another instance of the slapstick that was his life, but for once the butt was someone other than himself or his family. The woman behind the counter gave him a slightly puzzled look as he felt his face change. "Got to laugh, haven't you?" he said, and asked her the way home.

  He could keep a secret from Julia if he had to. He was seeing images of Keystone Kops, demented figures in uniform falling silently over one another and over their hose pipes as they threw oil instead of water on the flames. He ought to have an answer when she asked him where he'd been, but he mustn't say anything which might make him laugh: not "Nowhere to set the world on fire' or "Fighting fire with fire'. "I just drove around and walked for a bit," he told himself in the driving mirror, and was pleased with how convinced he looked.

  He felt as though he was coming home from another country, one of which his memories were few and very vague. As he drove, houses obscured the sunset except for a generalised reddish glow, a sign of distant fire. On the river at the foot of Victoria Road it had left a wake of burning oil. "I've been driving round and round and no, just round," he said as he turned the van along his road. The wheels nudged the kerb at the end of the garden path, and he switched off the engine and leaned over to pick up the letters from the floor. As he reached for them he glimpsed someone, not Laura or Julia, in the front room.

  Jack froze, his knuckles aching as they rested on the envelopes. He'd been found out, but how? Had Julia already been told what he'd done? He wanted to hide, except that wouldn't be fair to her, whether she knew or was only wondering why they'd come for him. He forced his head up, his fist crumpling the letters. There was nobody in the front room.

  Someone could be coming out to find him. He waited until it seemed certain that no such thing was about to happen, then he shoved the letters into his inside pocket and clambered out of the van, hoping that the glimpse of an intruder was the only symptom of jumpiness he would experience, otherwise Julia might notice. He let himself into the house and closed the door behind him. "Home," he announced.

  Julia responded from upstairs. "Someone's waiting to see you, Jack."

  Her voice was neutral. He couldn't judge if she had been told about him. Either way he thought she was being brave, almost too brave for him to bear. At least she needn't hear him confess surely that could wait until he and the police were out of the house. "Where he tried to shout, and had to clear his throat. "Where are they?"

  "Here I am, old pip." Andy Nation appeared from the kitchen. "I'd have had tea coming out of my ears if you'd kept me hanging around much longer. How'd you like to work with me for a bit? I was just saying to Mrs. Apple that it's time for your luck to improve."

  FOURTEEN

  Mrs. Merrybale lived in a tall house in a street largely occupied by retirement homes. The old man's on his way back. You'll be giving him a surprise," she said, and Jack gathered that her husband would be away at sea for some weeks yet, though perhaps her comment was also meant to imply that he hadn't time to redecorate. She was obviously unused to strangers in the house and determined to make them feel at home. At first she called them Mr. Nation and Mr. Orchard, until Andy persuaded her to use their first names, which she proceeded to apply enthusiastically and at random. She brought them pallid milky tea in fragile cups on brimming saucers, sometimes accompanied by stale currant cakes which Jack and Andy dutifully chewed and chewed. Often she lingered to chat, always breaking off before the end of any anecdote and apologising for taking up their time. That set Andy rubbing his forehead as soon as she turned her back, and her favourite refrain "If there's anything I can do to help' provoked him to denials so heartfelt it was pitiful. It was like a running gag, Jack thought, with Andy struggling not to deliver a punch line. As for Jack himself, he was having the time of his life.

  He'd always enjoyed decorating, but doing so with Julia couldn't be compared to working with a professional. After the destructive fun of stripping the walls competing with himself to see how large an area of paper he could tear off in one piece c
ame the painstaking business of preparing the walls, and then the decorating itself. Andy wasn't satisfied unless every join in the new paper was invisible, and Jack learned more about paper-hanging than he would have believed possible. He mightn't have been able to sustain such minute concentration if it hadn't been for the comic relief.

  At the end of the second day's work Andy said "I deserve a drink."

  "I'll keep you company."

  "Climb into the limo. just chuck the treasures in the back."

  Jack managed to sit in the passenger seat of the Datsun, whose exterior was patched with dabs of not quite matching paint, without treading on any of the toys and comics and fragments of biscuit abandoned by Andy's children. "We could do with using your van to carry the materials," Andy said.

  "It's out of commission. Engine trouble."

  "I'll call my friend and get it fixed for you."

  "I've already booked someone, thanks, Andy." Jack thought better of saying "It's going to take a few days' in case Andy offered to have the work done sooner. All that was wrong with the van was that it contained the twelve remaining letters and the blow lamp a reminder which Jack had preferred to stow out of sight. Andy would have been bound to question its presence in the van.

  They drank at Stanley's Cask, a small pub which served such ales as Wobbly Bob and Black Bat and Old Fart and Old Peculier. Jack expected Andy to pour out his frustrations about Mrs. Merrybale, but even after two pints of Bishop's Finger, Andy confined himself to talk about his family and Jack's. He must think it was bad form to decry an employer for simply being herself, and Jack reflected that both he and Andy had secrets to keep.

  His own didn't seem to have attracted much comment. He hadn't heard the fire reported on either of the local radio stations. The Liverpool Echo had carried a paragraph to the effect that Veronica Alan's bungalow had been partially destroyed and that the cause of the fire was unclear. The property must have been insured, Jack thought, and if not she had nobody to blame except herself, but he couldn't help feeling angry: the woman had only had to send out copies of the letter and then nothing untoward would have befallen her. "Sometimes," he said to Andy, "I think it's fear of change that stops people improving their lives."

  "What's given you an attack of the philosophers?"

  "I was just thinking how little it takes to change ourselves."

  "Here's to making the most of ourselves."

  To ourselves," Jack simplified, and clinked tankards with him.

  As Andy delivered him home Julia opened the front door. Jack's first glance was for the stairs behind her, but they were bare of envelopes. "No responses yet," she said.

  He put an arm around her waist as they went along the hall. There will be."

  "Don't count on too much, Jack."

  "Hey, I'm supposed to make the puns around here," he said, and was reminded by her puzzled look that she couldn't know she had made one. "I won't promise anything I can't deliver."

  "I'll hold you to that later," she said, giving him a quick open-mouthed kiss.

  Later the Quails, who had viewed the house last week, rang. They were still interested, and almost certainly had a buyer for their own property, though that depended on someone else's ability to find a purchaser. Jack imagined an infinite series of house-buyers stretching through time and space, the people at one end of the series dying of old age before the succession of purchases could reach, the far end. "Except," he said to Laura over dinner, "there isn't an infinite number of people, so the person at the end must be the person you began with, holding themselves up."

  "You're making my brain fuzzy," Laura complained.

  "Don't you like playing with numbers?"

  "Sometimes."

  They're what life is made of. Without them we'd never understand the world."

  "And the Quails aren't the only ones who are interested, Laura," Julia reminded her. The young couple who came yesterday who are getting married said they were."

  The week brought Jack several replies to his job applications, two of them inviting him to be interviewed. One job was in Wales, the more attractive was in Ellesmere Port, too distant for any rumours of arson to spoil his chances but less than half an hour's drive along the motorway. The interview was scheduled for early next week, before he and Andy would have finished decorating. If he drove the van to the interview Andy was bound to be puzzled, but Andy saved the day by clearing out the Datsun. "It's like you said," he told Jack, "you can get into the habit of thinking how you are is how you have to be."

  This was on Monday, and he seemed restored by a day off. The car had just pulled into the cracked weedy drive when Mrs. Merrybale emerged from the porch, her arthritis making her sway like a sailor. "You won't want this tea. I'll make some new," she said, and pitched away into the house.

  She was wearing a long black dress down which her grey hair trailed lower than her prominent shoulder-blades. "Going out dancing tonight, Mrs. M?" Andy suggested as he and Jack bore hefty cans of paint into the hall.

  "He's a comedian, isn't he?" she said for at least the twelfth time to Jack, sucking in her lips so that her grin wouldn't expose her false teeth. When she returned to the kitchen Jack murmured to Andy "I don't know if I should mention this, but it's witches who go dancing on May Eve."

  "Hit me on the head and call me Peg. You don't think she thought I meant that, do you?"

  "I don't think anyone could think you're capable of malice."

  "Same goes for you, old pip."

  Jack didn't quite know how to respond to this, but was saved from trying by Mrs. Merrybale, who seemed bent on racing Andy to the top of the house so that he would have old towels on which to stand the cans of paint. Today they were to paint the wall above the stairs. On Saturday they'd finished halfway up the wall on the middle landing. Jack was working upwards while Andy tackled the most difficult stretch, the wall below the skylight over the stairwell, by perching on a fully extended aluminium ladder propped on the top landing. Whenever Mrs. Merrybale approached the stairs Jack heard the ladder rattle. "Don't let her rattle you,

  "Andy," he said under his breath.

  Once she had brought them elevenses, currant buns and china chattering on a tray awash with tea, she kept trudging halfway up the stairs to see if she could retrieve the tray and then hurrying apologetically down again. Jack handed it and its cargo of remains to her as soon as he decently could, and saw Andy closing his eyes at the top of the ladder as she set foot on the stairs again. "That makes me think of a parrot," she said.

  "Oh," Andy said helplessly.

  "Ah,"said Jack.

  She was gazing at the tea-cosy which she'd left on the post at the foot of the stairs. "Just say if you're busy," she said.

  Andy gripped the ladder with one hand and rubbed his forehead with the other. "Not too busy to listen. We couldn't ever be that."

  "Exactly what I was telling myself. There's nothing like a chat to keep us going." She was silent except for a wheeze at each stair until she reached Jack. "What was I saying? Oh, the parrot; I was saying that the cosy made me think of it. I expect you'll be wondering why."

  "Yes," Andy said in a tone of pure anguish.

  "It was the old man, you see. Brought him home from Africa because he thought I'd like some company. Sat on that post where the cosy is and never said a word."

  "The parrot did, not your husband," Jack said.

  "He's a laugh, isn't he, Mr. Jack, Mr. Andy, I mean?" she called to Andy, who groaned. "It was the bird sitting there right enough, not the old man. Sat there whenever I let him out of his cage, till I just left him there most of the time. Looked as if someone had carved him on the post and painted him, he did. Now you'd think he'd be no use there, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you think he wouldn't be any use?"

  Andy nodded so vigorously that the ladder shifted. "Well, you'd be wrong," she said triumphantly. "He was better than a dog, that bird. I found that out the day someone broke into the house."

  The two men waited whi
le she halted two stairs short of the landing above which Andy was perched and turned towards Jack. "Well, I've held you up enough. I'll get out of your way," she said, and started down.

  Andy emitted a strangled noise, just short of a recognisable word, and she swung round. Are you all right, Mr. Jack, that's to say Mr. Andy?" she asked him.

  Jack himself was trying to decide whether the intruder had fled in terror when the carving on the banisters had come to life, or it had found its voice at last and convinced the burglar he was caught, or it had been able to imitate his speech with an accuracy which had led the police to him. He was about to ask Mrs. Merrybale and put Andy out of his misery when she lost her footing on the edge of a tread.

  She didn't fall far. She grabbed the banister with both hands and landed on the next stair down with a thud which jarred her legs and made her wince. Her heels had dragged the carpet away from the stair above her. As she either lost her footing again or sat down to recover from the shock, her heels tugged at the carpet and she slid down one more step. The carpet began to snap free of all the treads above her, a process which would end where Andy's ladder was propped. "Is she hurt, Jack?" Andy shouted.

  In an instant Jack was no longer the audience for a slapstick routine in which nobody would be injured but an onlooker at an accident which he was powerless to prevent: if he tried to reach Andy his weight would dislodge the carpet further. "She's," he said wildly, and saw Mrs. Merrybale slide down another stair and clutch at the banister, saw the carpet rise up taut from the top stair. "Step down," he cried.

  Mrs. Merrybale thought he meant her. She hauled herself to her feet and let herself down one more stair. "You'll," Jack shouted and saw that she hadn't shifted the carpet any further. At that moment Andy, who was descending the ladder, caught sight of the disaster advancing towards him. He was perhaps twelve rungs up the ladder, and clattering down at speed, when the top of the ladder began to screech across the wall towards the stairwell, and he jumped.