Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  “You mean you don’t think you are. You don’t realise what you’re missing.”

  “Jesus, are you still in love with yourself? There’s nothing to miss because you’ve got nothing to offer.”

  “I’ve got the truth.” He hoped his pause robbed her of breath before he said “The real girl didn’t just fall either.”

  For at least a second Shell appeared to be struck dumb, and then she turned away from him. “Why don’t you try telling everyone that when we launch the magazine,” she said, “except you won’t be in it if I am. That’s what I’ll be saying to Walt. That’s a promise.”

  Dudley’s thighs were beginning to annoy him as much as she did. Perhaps he’d talked too much; certainly she had. He didn’t bother speaking as he seized the handbrake and used both thumbs to push the button in while he leaned all his weight on the lever. It fell flat like an animal cowering from a blow, and the car rolled down the slope at a speed he was happy to think of as eager. As Shell stamped on the brake pedal a wave drowned the headlamps and flooded across the bonnet, clogging the windscreen wipers with seaweed. “How mad are you?” Shell cried. “Want to kill us both?”

  “Not both.”

  She threw him a look of more contempt than there were words for as she grabbed the gear lever to throw the car into reverse. “You’re just a nasty little boy, aren’t you. You don’t know when to stop playing, but you’re going to frigging learn.”

  Her voice was rising past a snarl. Before she could let out the clutch and accelerate, Dudley had used both hands to drag the handbrake as high as it would strain. “I told you,” she said so fiercely that he felt her saliva on his cheek. “Let fucking go.”

  He managed to grin and to keep both hands on the lever while he reassured himself that the rain still trickling down his cheek would wash away her filthy spit. “No competition, is it?” he couldn’t resist declaring as the engine produced a frustrated screech that shook the car. “I’m a man and you’re just a machine.”

  Without easing up on the pedals Shell reached in a pocket. She had barely produced the item when he snatched it from her with his left hand. It was a spray she would have liked to use to blind him. Still hauling on the brake, he lowered the window and shied the weapon into the river, where it sank with an unimpressive plop. “Anything else?” he said, and remembered what he hadn’t told her yet. “I was outside all the time. I heard everything you said about me.”

  At last she seemed fully convinced of his seriousness. “You really are that mad,” she said flatly, and dug her nails into the back of his uppermost hand on the brake.

  “Scratch away. That won’t stop me.”

  By the time he’d finished saying this, his grin was gritting his teeth. A gust of rain drenched him through the window he’d had no time to shut. When Shell made to claw his face he raised a fist raw with pain to ward her off. “Go on, knock me about,” she cried over the juddering shriek of the engine. “I’ve had some of that in my life.”

  “Then you should be glad it’s nearly over.”

  All at once the engine fell silent, and Shell cocked her head at him. “That’s all the fun I’m being,” she said, reaching for her door. “I was going to scrap this old heap anyway. Christ, though, I’m looking forward to you trying to explain this.”

  She released her seat belt and clutched at the handle to open the door. It had swung less than a foot when a wave closed it again, which delighted him so much that he almost couldn’t move. Shell nudged the door wide with her shoulder and glanced back at him, just as he lurched across her for the handle. He flung her at the door as he hauled it shut. He thought—he very much hoped—that he glimpsed realisation in her eyes as the window and the corner of her forehead met with a satisfying crack.

  She could only be stunned, but that was enough. As she wobbled and fell towards the door, perhaps to fend it off, he was able to slam the window against her forehead, and again, and once more for luck. At the second impact she made a blurred sound as if she was fighting to awaken from a dream, but after that she was silent. “I’m your nightmare,” he told her, although his was that the glass would shatter from the hardness of her skull before he could be sure she was unconscious. When he let go of the handle she lolled half off the seat into a wave that spilled into her side of the car. He crouched above his own seat and his aching groin to retrieve the plastic sheet from behind him. As he used it to wipe his fingerprints from her door handle, a wave made her nuzzle the back of his hand. He was reminded of a beaten dog trying to placate its master. “Good bitch,” he muttered to rid himself of his disgust, “down now,” and almost forgot to plant her slack fingers on the handle so that her prints would still be there. He wiped his own from the handbrake and closed her other hand around it, then let her fingers slump in the water on the floor. He had to erase his prints from the passenger door in case anyone bothered examining it. He shut the window next to him and removed his prints, and grasped the handle through the plastic sheet to release himself as the driver’s door heaved Shell at him. He elbowed her away until the wave subsided, and planted a fist alongside the handle to help shove his door wide. He lowered his foot onto the concrete just in time to meet a surge of water that filled both his shoe and his sock. That wasn’t why he gasped “Useless bitch.” Her wretched driving had left him virtually no room to stand on the ramp beside the car.

  He leaned into the car to grip the steering wheel with both hands through the plastic and wrenched it as far right as it would turn. “Thought I couldn’t drive, did you?” he asked the slumped figure. “Wrong as usual. There’s nothing I can’t do that’s worth doing.” All the same, he had to perch beside the vehicle while the waves did their best to overbalance him into the river. He braced his legs apart, though that spiked his crotch with pain, and ducked to release the handbrake. He had to grip it two-handed and bruise a thumb on the button in order to move the lever. The moment it lay flat he straightened up, scraping the back of his head on the doorframe. He slammed the door, still keeping hold of the plastic sheet as a wave glued its hem to his ankles, and prepared to stand firm whatever the car might do. He wasn’t expecting it not to budge an inch.

  He’d assumed the waves would drag it down the ramp. Instead they seemed to be anchoring it in place. He blinked to clear his eyes of the latest bout of rain as he sidled upwards to give the stubborn vehicle a push. He was resting his hands above the rear passenger door when he felt the car shift. It rolled forward, taking his balance with it, and the rear wheel caught the toe of his shoe. He could topple off the ramp or be dragged after the car—and then he snatched his foot back. He wasn’t meant to end up in the river, only Shell was. The thought gave him back his control, and he dealt the metal roof a shove that brought him upright as it sent the car down the ramp. In seconds a wave crashed over the roof and carried the vehicle into the river.

  He stood at the top of the ramp to watch. For a moment he thought Shell’s body was adrift inside the car, but it was her cap that blundered against the rear window. It ranged back and forth like a bloated dead fish in the few moments before the car sank under the black water. The heaving of the waves seemed to render his excitement visible, though that was growing as calm as the depths. When the tide reached his feet again he turned homewards.

  The buses had stopped running. He had at least an hour’s walk ahead. The rain was as implacable as ever, and stung the scratches on the back of his hand. All the same, he welcomed it. The very few people he encountered in the drenched streets looked almost as wet as he was, and in no mood to make comparisons. He had to remember not to let them see him grin too much. It wasn’t just that he had a new secret none of them was worthy to learn, any more than Shell had been until it was too late. The best part of the night’s work was that she’d helped him. His session with Vincent had left him feeling unsure of himself, but it needn’t have. Shell had proved that he hadn’t run out of ideas.

  TEN

  Patricia was helping herself to coffee from
the percolator when her father said “Why, you could have been catching up on your beauty sleep, Trish. We don’t all have to get up for work on Saturdays.”

  “I’d like to see you cooking your own meals if we didn’t, Gordon,” said her mother. “And don’t you think she’s beautiful enough?”

  He dealt his narrow forehead a glancing slap as if to disarray its parallel ruled lines and wrinkled his small mouth, drawing the halves of his neat moustache together. Next he raised his equally black eyebrows high, economising on the space between the lines under his receding hair while his large blue eyes displayed their honesty, and only his broad blunt nose didn’t join in the activity. “Trish knows I do,” he said to Patricia.

  “No need for that, dad. You know that isn’t how I grade myself.”

  “You’d get honours if you did. You ladies or is it women now must forgive me for waking up feeling old-fashioned. I blame all this misbehaviour of our computers at the bank.”

  “So long as you don’t go away thinking dinner is all we’ll be up to,” Valerie said. “How are you getting on with Dudley Smith, Trish?”

  “Is this someone I should know about?”

  “There’s nobody like that,” Patricia said as she spooned scrambled egg from the russet Cretan platter onto her plate. “Just plenty of friends.”

  “Wasn’t one chap at university rather more than that?”

  “Gordon, I hope you show more tact when people come to you for advice.”

  “It’s all right, mummy, I’m perfectly over it now. He wanted to be more, in fact he insisted till I had to turn very nasty with him, and I don’t care to risk that kind of unpleasantness again.”

  “Good God, if you mean what I think . . .”

  “I nearly do, daddy, but as I say, it’s dealt with. I left enough of an impression that I don’t think he’ll try it with anyone else. Now if you two don’t mind, and don’t look so worried, mummy, it isn’t something I ever meant to discuss.”

  To ensure that was the end of it she gazed past her parents and out of the floor-length windows of the dining-room. Beyond the trim privet that boxed in the long garden sparkling with sunlight and last night’s rain, an early golfer in a buggy chugged to the top of a knoll and trundled down the far side with all the leisure of a pensioner. Patricia was enjoying the resemblance to a wind-up toy when Valerie said with determined neutrality “Dudley Smith is the young thriller writer, Gordon. You’ve heard us mention him. Trish has to turn in her copy by Monday for the printer.”

  “I think I’ve covered nearly everything we need. Except I tracked down where his old English teacher works, but he was off sick till next week.”

  “We’re supposed to be introducing Dudley Smith to our readers. I wouldn’t like to include things he doesn’t want us to,” Valerie said as the phone rang in the hall.

  “Speak of the devil, do you think? Maybe he wants to get together with Trish,” Gordon said, throwing Patricia a more than apologetic smile that instantly reversed itself in case it needed to and vanished. A few lanky strides took him down the hall. “Martingale,” he said, and then “Well, good morning. Which of the creative partnership would you like to speak to? The senior first. She’s on her way.”

  Patricia watched a golf ball dwindle to a speck of chalk in the bright air towards the sea until her father rejoined her. “That’s me proved wrong, then. You journos have to be up and about at least as early as an old bank manager,” he said, and looked ready to revive his earlier concern when Valerie called “Trish.”

  Patricia hurried down the wide pale hall that was decorated with flowers she’d collected on childhood picnics and pressed under glass. She couldn’t tell how much of Valerie’s troubled expression related to the phone call. “It’s Walt,” Valerie said.

  “Walt,” Patricia said as her mother left her alone with him. “Patricia.”

  “Hey.” After a pause she could have done without he said “I’m sorry to have to tell you we’ve lost Shell Garridge.”

  “You mean we’ll have that space to fill.”

  “Not lost that way. She was killed last night or early this morning.”

  “Oh gosh.” Patricia was shocked but tried to sound upset as well. “How?”

  “They aren’t saying much on your local news station yet. A guy walking his dog found her in her car on the beach. All I can get from the police so far is she must have driven into the river somehow. I guess we did see how she liked to drink.”

  “That’s awful. What a waste.” Patricia lingered over a silence she hoped would imply sadness before she said “So you want me to . . .”

  “How soon do you think you can deliver a tribute to her?”

  Patricia felt a little guilty for not having anticipated the request, but disconcerted by it too. “How long?” she said.

  “Much more than two thousand words could be a problem.”

  “Would less?”

  “I should think you might have trouble keeping it that short. That’ll give us four pages with some photos and subheads. The printer needs it first thing Monday morning. You can email it direct, right? Valerie can edit it before you send it if she has to, and you could let me have a preview too.”

  Patricia might have admitted that she didn’t know much about Shell, but that would reflect on her mother’s choice of a journalist. “Get all the quotes you can from people who knew her,” Walt was saying. “Maybe you can find a tape of her to listen to. Okay, don’t let me keep you from it, but before you pass me back to Valerie—”

  “Phone, mum,” Patricia called and felt absurdly as though she was appealing for help.

  “Before you do, has your Dudley Smith piece gone to the printer yet?”

  “I was going to give it a bit of a polish this morning.”

  “So long as it gets there first thing Monday also. Now I’d better speak to Valerie.”

  “What will we have to drop?” Valerie asked him, then told Patricia “We’ll have four extra pages, I see, of course” as if it solved more than that problem.

  Patricia made for the comfortably uncluttered discreetly antique dining-room, only to find her father awaiting her with a murmur. “Are you quite certain this swine you mentioned has been sufficiently dealt with?”

  “More than quite, daddy. It really wasn’t as bad as I expect you’re imagining, and it wasn’t entirely his fault. I could have been more definite sooner.”

  “Just remind me of his name again.”

  “It was Simon, wasn’t it, Trish?” Valerie said on her way into the room. “As in pure, I don’t think.”

  “This is why I never talked about it.” They were making her feel that just because she was smaller than average she couldn’t look after herself—the mistake Simon had made, she suspected. “I didn’t want you two upset when there’s completely no need,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t keep bad things inside you,” Valerie insisted. “That isn’t how a writer deals with them. I knew there was something wrong when there was. I asked, if you remember.”

  “I’d better make a start,” Patricia said, feeding herself a last mouthful of breakfast before carrying her items to the kitchen sink. In her bedroom she straightened the quilt that was printed with a night sky and transferred the Margaret Atwood novel she’d finished last night from the floor to the bookshelves in the corner flanked by pages of the student newspaper bearing her byline. By this time the computer had produced its opening screen. An online search brought her several references to Shell, starting with her web site. She clicked on the address, and Shell’s face commenced spreading down the screen.

  It appeared beneath a banner that proclaimed SHELL GARRIDGE STANDUP in red. It came in strips, beginning with one that contained her eyes, which offered less a welcome than a challenge. Her small blunt nose had little to add to that, but as it was produced Patricia had an unnecessary impression of watching grey water drain away to reveal Shell’s head. Now here was the mouth, its right corner awry on the way to a grin or a smile
, what sort wasn’t clear. Shell’s image stopped at the chin to leave room for a banner reading DO I MAKE YOU LAUGH? Patricia thought that could as easily be taken for a dare as for an invitation. The page contained nothing else apart from Shell’s email address and phone number. Other pages were promised—press quotes, photographs, Shell interviewing herself, links to sites for people she admired—but they were still under construction. “You’re another one who isn’t giving much away,” Patricia murmured, having thought of Dudley Smith, but he had no relevance to Shell. She fetched her mobile from the bedside table and dialled the number on the screen. At least she would have followed the solitary lead, if it was one, that the page provided.

  The phone rang five times, and then she seemed to hear someone pick it up. “Shell Garridge,” Shell said. “If you’re not a stalker there’s nothing to be scared of. Say who you are and what you want and where I can call you back.”

  Patricia had hoped the message might be humorous. The reference to a stalker suggested paranoia, which would scarcely fit into a tribute. She was wondering if she ought to leave a token response in case anyone played the tape when a not entirely steady voice said “Hello?”

  It could have been Shell’s or an attempt to mimic hers. Patricia had to overcome both notions so as to say “Hello.”

  “Who’s that? What do you want?”

  “I’m a reporter. Patricia Martingale. Could I ask who you are?”

  “One of them, are you. I expect they’ll be all over her now.” Almost as bitterly the woman added “I’m her mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs . . .”

  “Don’t you even know that? Garrett,” Shell’s mother said with either pride or resentment.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. I worked with Shell for a little while.”

  “You don’t sound like anyone she’d know. Worked on what, like?”

  “The Mersey Mouth. The new magazine. She was writing a column for us.”