“My gills?” Yet again she stroked her throat, and then remembered something. “Ah! My laryngitis! When my throat hurt last December, and you examined me! Two or three aspirins a day was your advice to my mother, and I should gargle four or five times daily with a spoonful of salt dissolved in warm water.”
“You wouldn’t let anyone else see you.” The old man reminded her. “And why was that, I wonder? Why me?”
“Because I didn’t want any other doctor looking at me,” she replied. “I didn’t want anyone else examining me. Just you.”
“Kinship,” he said. “And you made the right choice. But you needn’t worry. Your gills – at present the merest of pink slits at the base of your windpipe – are as perfect as in any foetal or infant land-born Deep One. And they’ll stay that way for . . . oh, a long time – as long or even longer than mine have stayed that way, and will until I’m ready – when they’ll wear through. For a month or so then they’ll feel tender as their development progresses, with fleshy canals like empty veins that will carry air to your land lungs. At which time you’ll be as much at home in the sea as you are now on dry land. And that will be wonderful, my dear!”
“You want me to . . . to come with you? To be a . . . a . . .?”
“But you already are! There’s a certain faint but distinct odour about you, Anne. Yes, and I have it, too, and so did your half-brother. But you can dilute it with pills we’ve developed, and then dispel it utterly with a dab of special cologne.”
A much longer silence, and again she took his bare forearms in her hands, stroking down from the elbow. His skin felt quite smooth in that direction. But when she stroked upwards from the wrist . . .
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I am. My skin is like yours . . . the scales don’t show. They’re fine and pink and golden. But if I’m to come with you, what of my mother? You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with her.”
And now, finally, after all these truths, the old man must tell a lie. He must, because the truth was one she’d never accept – or rather she would – and all faith gone. But there had been no other way. And so:
“Your mother,” the old man hung his head, averted his gaze, started again. “Your mother, your own dear Jilly . . . I’m afraid she won’t last much longer.” That much at least was the truth.
But Anne’s hand had flown to her mouth, and so he hurriedly continued. “She has CJD, Anne – Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease – the so-called mad cow disease, at a very advanced stage.” (That was another truth, but not the whole truth.)
Anne’s mouth had fallen open. “Does she know?”
“But how can I tell her? And how can you? She may never be herself again. And if or when she were herself, she would only worry about what will become of you. And there’s no way we can tell her about . . . well, you know what I mean. But Anne, don’t look at me like that, for there’s nothing that can be done for her. There’s no known cure, no hospital can help her. I wanted her to have her time here, with you. And of course I’m here to help in the final stages. That specialist from St. Austell, he agrees with me.”
Finally the girl found her voice. “Then your pills were of no use to her.”
“A placebo.” Now Jamieson lied. “They were sugar pills, to give her some relief by making her think I was helping her.”
No, not so . . . and no help for Jilly, who would never have let her daughter go; whose daughter never would have gone while her mother lived. And those pills filled with synthetic prions – rogue proteins indistinguishable from the human form of the insidious bovine disease, developed in a laboratory in shadowy old Innsmouth – eating away at Jilly’s brain even now, faster and faster.
Anne’s hand fell from her face. “How long?”
He shook his head. “Not long. After witnessing what happened the other day, not long at all. Days, maybe? No more than a month at best. But we shall be here, you and I. And Anne, we can make up for what she’ll miss. Your years, like mine . . . oh, you shall have years without number!”
“It’s true, then?” Anne looked at him, and Jamieson looked back but saw no sign of tears in her eyes, which was perfectly normal. “It’s true that we go on – that our lives go on – for a long time? But not everlasting, surely?”
He shook his head. “Not everlasting, no – though it sometimes feels that way! I often lose count of my years. But I am your ancestor, yes.”
Anne sighed and stood up. And brushing sand from her dress, she took his hand, helping him to his feet. “Shall we go and be with my mother . . . grandfather?”
Now his smile was broad indeed – a smile he showed only to close intimates – which displayed his small, sharp, fish-like teeth. And:
“Grandfather?” he said. “Ah, no. In fact I’m your father’s great-great-grandfather! And as for yourself, Anne . . . well you must add another great.”
And hand in hand they walked up the beach to the house. The young girl and the old – the very old – man . . .?
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Winner
RAMSEY CAMPBELL’S CURRENT projects include a slightly revised version of his novel Secret Stories from Tor Books under the title Secret Story, and his latest novel The Communications, now retitled A Grin in the Dark.
He is currently working on a novel-in-progress, Thieving Fear, and along with his regular column in the magazine All Hallows, he has added another, “Ramsey’s Rambles”, to Video Watchdog.
And so to the author’s second contribution to this volume. As he explains: “ ‘The Winner’ was written for Kealan Patrick Burke’s themed anthology, Taverns of the Dead.
“I’ve been in pubs as unnerving as this one, and perhaps they’ve lodged in my shadowy subconscious. The worst was in Birkenhead – a pub where as soon as you walked in you felt as if you’d announced your Jewishness at a David Irving book launch.”
UNTIL JESSOP DROVE ONTO THE WATERFRONT he thought most of the wind was racing the moonlit clouds. As the Mini left behind the last of the deserted office buildings he saw ships toppling like city blocks seized by an earthquake. Cars were veering away from the entrance to the ferry terminal. Several minutes of clinging grimly to the wheel as the air kept throwing its weight at the car took him to the gates. A Toyota stuffed with wailing children wherever there was space among the luggage met him at the top of the ramp. “Dublin’s cancelled,” the driver told him in an Ulster accent he had to strain to understand. “Come back in three hours, they’re saying.”
“I never had my supper,” one of her sons complained, and his sister protested “We could have stayed at Uncle’s.” Jessop retorted inwardly that he could have delayed his journey by a day, but he’d driven too far south to turn back now. He could have flown from London that morning and beaten the weather if he hadn’t preferred to be frugal. He sent his windblown thanks after the Toyota and set about looking for a refuge on the dock road. There were pubs in abundance, but no room to park outside them and no sign of any other parking area. He was searching for a hotel where he could linger over a snack, and realising that all the hotels were back beyond the terminal entrance, when he belatedly noticed a pub.
It was at the far end of the street he’d just passed. Enough horns for a brass band accompanied the U-turn he made. He swung into the cramped gap between two terraces of meagre houses that opened directly onto the pavement. Two more uninterrupted lines of dwellings so scrawny that their windows were as narrow as their doors faced each other across two ranks of parked cars, several of which were for sale. Jessop parked outside the Seafarer, under the single unbroken street lamp, and retrieved his briefcase from the back seat before locking the car.
The far end of the street showed him windowless vessels staggering about at anchor. A gust blundered away from the pub, carrying a mutter of voices. The window of the pub was opaque except for posters plastered against the inside: THEME NIGHT’S, SINGA-LONG’S, QUIZ NIGHT’S. He would rather not be involved in any of those, but perhaps he could find himself a secluded co
rner in which to work. The lamp and the moon fought over producing shadows of his hand as he pushed open the thick shabby door.
The low wide dim room appeared to be entangled in nets. Certainly the upper air was full of them and smoke. Those under the ceiling trapped rather too much of the yellowish light, while those in the corners resembled overgrown cobwebs. Jessop was telling himself that the place was appealingly quaint when the wind used the door to shove him forward and slammed it behind him.
“Sorry,” he called to the barman and the dozen or so drinkers and smokers seated at round tables cast in black iron. Nobody responded except by watching him cross the discoloured wooden floor to the bar. The man behind it, whose small eyes and nose and mouth were crammed into the space left by a large chin, peered at him beneath a beetling stretch of net. “Here’s one,” he announced.
“Reckon you’re right there, cap’n,” growled a man who, despite the competition, would have taken any prize for bulkiness.
“You’d have said it if he hadn’t, Joe,” his barely smaller partner croaked past a hand-rolled cigarette, rattling her bracelets as she patted his arm.
“I’m sorry?” Jessop wondered aloud.
She raised a hand to smooth her shoulder-length red tresses. “We’re betting you went for the ferry.”
“I hope you’ve staked a fortune on it, then.”
“He means you’d win another, Mary,” Joe said. “He wouldn’t want you to lose.”
“That’s so,” Jessop said, turning to the barman. “What do you recommend?”
“Nothing till I know you. There’s not many tastes we can’t please here, mister.”
“Jessop,” Jessop replied before he grasped that he hadn’t been asked a question, and stared hard at the beer-pumps. “Captain’s Choice sounds worth a go.”
He surveyed the length of the chipped sticky bar while the barman hauled at the creaking pump. A miniature billboard said WIN A VOYAGE IN OUR COMPETTITTION, but there was no sign of a menu. “Do you serve food?” he said.
“I’ve had no complaints for a while.”
“What sort of thing do you do?”
“Try me.”
“Would a curry be a possibility? Something along those lines?”
“What do you Southerners think goes in one of them?”
“Anything that’s edible,” said Jessop, feeling increasingly awkward. “That’s the idea of a curry, isn’t it? Particularly on board ship, I should think.”
“You don’t fancy scouse.”
“I’ve never tried it. If that’s what’s on I will.”
“Brave lad,” the barman said and thrust a tankard full of brownish liquid at him. “Let’s see you get that down you.”
Jessop did his best to seem pleased with the inert metallic gulp he took. He was reaching for his wallet until the barman said “Settle when you’re going.”
“Shall I wait here?”
“For what?” the barman said, then grinned at everyone but Jessop. “For your bowl, you mean. We’ll find you where you’re sitting.”
Jessop didn’t doubt it, since nobody made even a token pretence of not watching him carry his briefcase to the only unoccupied corner, which was farthest from the door. As he perched on a ragged leather stool and leaned against the yielding wallpaper under a net elaborated by a spider’s web, a woman who might have been more convincingly blonde without the darkness on her upper lip remarked “That’ll be a good few hours, I’d say.”
“Can’t argue with you there, Betty,” said her companion, a man with a rat asleep on his chest or a beard, which he raised to point it at Jessop. “Is she right, Jessop?”
“Paul,” Jessop offered, though it made him no more comfortable. “A couple, anyway.”
“A couple’s not a few, Tom,” scoffed a man with tattoos of fish and less shapely deep-sea creatures swimming under the cuffs of his shabby brownish pullover.
“What are they else then, Daniel?”
“Don’t fall out over me,” Jessop said as he might have addressed a pair of schoolchildren. “You could both be right, either could, rather.”
Resentment might have been a reason why Daniel jerked one populated thumb at a wiry wizened man topped with a black bobble cap. “He’s already Paul. Got another name so we know who’s who?”
“None I use.”
“Be a love and fish it up for us.”
At least it was Mary who asked in these terms, with a hoarseness presumably born of cigarettes. After a pause Jessop heard himself mumble “Desmond.”
“Scouse,” the barman said – it wasn’t clear to whom or even if it was an order. Hoping to keep his head down, Jessop snapped his briefcase open. He was laying out papers on the table when the street door flew wide, admitting only wind. He had to slap the papers down as the barman stalked to the door and heaved a stool against it. Nobody else looked away from Jessop. “Still a student, are you, Des?” Betty said.
He wouldn’t have believed he could dislike a name more than the one he’d hidden ever since learning it was his, but the contraction was worse. Des Jessop – it was the kind of name a teacher would hiss with contempt. It made him feel reduced to someone else’s notion of him, in danger of becoming insignificant to himself. Meanwhile he was saying “All my life, I hope.”
“You want to live off the rest of us till you’re dead,” Joe somewhat more than assumed.
“I’m saying there’ll always be something left to discover. That ought to be true for everyone, I should think.”
“We’ve seen plenty,” Daniel grumbled. “We’ve seen enough.”
“Forgive me if I haven’t yet.”
“No need for that,” said Mary. “We aren’t forgivers, us.”
“Doesn’t it make you tired, all that reading?” Betty asked him.
“Just the opposite.”
“I never learned nothing from a book,” she said once she’d finished scowling over his words. “Never did me any harm either.”
“You’d know a couple’s not a few if you’d read a bit,” said Joe.
“Lay off skitting at my judy,” Tom warned him.
For some reason everybody else but Jessop roared with laughter. He felt as if his nervous grin had hooked him by the corners of his mouth. He was wobbling to his feet when the barman called “Don’t let them scare you off, Des. They just need their fun.”
“I’m only . . .” Jessop suspected that any term he used would provoke general mirth. “Where’s the . . .”
“The poop’s got to be behind you, hasn’t it?” Betty said in gleeful triumph.
Until he glanced in that direction he wasn’t sure how much of a joke this might be. Almost within arm’s length was a door so unmarked he’d taken it for a section of wall. When he pushed it, the reluctant light caught on two faces gouged out of the wood, carvings of such crudeness that the female was distinguishable from her mate only by a mop of hair. Beyond the door was a void that proved to be a corridor once he located a switch dangling from an inch of flex. The luminous rotting pear of a bulb revealed that the short passage led to an exit against which crates of dusty empties were stacked. The barred exit was shaken by a gust of wind and, to his bewilderment, what sounded like a blurred mass of television broadcasts. He hadn’t time to investigate. Each wall contained a door carved with the rudiments of a face, and he was turning away from the Gents before the image opposite alerted him that the man’s long hair was a patch of black fungus. He touched as little of the door as possible while letting himself into the Gents.
The switch in the passage must control all the lights. Under the scaly ceiling a precarious fluorescent tube twitched out a pallid glow with an incessant series of insect clicks. There was barely enough space in the room for a pair of clogged urinals in which cigarette butts were unravelling and a solitary cubicle opposite a piebald slimy sink. Beneath the urinals the wall was bearded with green mould. High up beside the cubicle a token window was covered by a rusty grille restless with old cobwebs. Jessop kic
ked open the cubicle door.
A watery sound grew louder – an irregular sloshing he’d attributed to the cistern. He urged himself to the seatless discoloured pedestal. The instant he looked down, only the thought of touching the encrusted scabby walls restrained him from supporting himself against them. Whatever was gaping wide-mouthed at him from the black water, surely it was dead, whether it had been drowned by someone or swum up the plumbing. Surely it was the unstable light, not anticipation of him, that made the whitish throat and pale fat lips appear to work eagerly. He dragged one sleeve over his hand and wrenched at the handle of the rickety cistern. As a rush of opaque water carried the mouth into the depths, Jessop retreated to the first urinal and kept a hand over his nose and mouth while he filled the mouldy china oval to its lower brim.
He dodged out of the fluttering room and was nearly at the door to the bar when he faltered. A confusion of angry voices was moving away from him. A clatter of furniture ended it, and a hoarse voice he identified as Betty’s ordered, “Now stay there.” He was wishing away the silence as he eased the door open a crack.
The bar seemed emptier than when he’d left it. Two considerable men who’d been seated directly ahead no longer were. The stool hadn’t moved from in front of the exit. Could the men be waiting out of sight on either side for him? As he grew furious with his reluctance to know, the barman saw him. “Food’s on its way,” he announced.
Mary leaned into view, one hand flattening her scalp, to locate Jessop. “Aren’t you coming out? This isn’t hide and seek.”
When embarrassment drove Jessop forward he saw that Daniel had changed seats. He was penned into a corner by the men from the abandoned table, and looked both dishevelled and trapped. “He was trying to see your papers, Des,” Betty said.
“Good heavens, I wouldn’t have minded. It isn’t important.”
“It is to us.”
As Jessop resumed his corner Tom said, “Got a sweetheart abroad, have you? Was she the lure?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 61