Haunted Legends (39 page)

“Inhale!” she sang out cheerfully. He obeyed without thinking and held his breath as he watched the other car and trailer cruise past with what looked like less than an inch to spare.

“Close one,” said the dark-haired woman. “You sure we didn’t scrape some paint off?”

“It looks closer than it was,” said the blonde.

“No, it doesn’t,” he said shakily. “When did we leave the highway?”

“We didn’t,” the blonde told him. “If we were in the U.S., we’d be lost in the sticks. In rural England, this is a major artery.”

“Warn me next time we’re gonna do that, so I can curl up on the floor and pray.” He tried to laugh with them and couldn’t.

•  •  •

Fifteen minutes later, the blonde pulled the car onto the dirt shoulder. “Behold,” she said. “The Humber Bridge.”

He sat forward and gazed through the windshield, all but awestruck in spite of himself. “Suspension bridge” seemed too plain a term for the structure that spanned the water under the late-afternoon sun. Had the builders imagined it this way—a mile-long structure of metal, stone, and asphalt that would look somehow as elegant as a section of spiderweb? The suspension appeared almost delicate and yet strong enough to hold anything, even a piece of the world.

Abruptly, he shook off the sensation of dreaminess that had been creeping at the edges of his mind and rubbed his eyes hard. He looked at the bridge again; the clouds had bunched up again, cutting off the late-afternoon sunlight, and mist was beginning to build up.

“See? Amazing sight, isn’t it.”

He nodded silently, unsure which woman had spoken to him. The car was moving again and they were heading toward the bridge. As they got closer, he saw that it wasn’t anywhere nearly as narrow as it looked from a distance. That was a relief; no danger that they’d go over the side and end up in the water trying to pass another car and trailer.

Before they were even halfway across, however, the mist had built up so thickly that the rest of the bridge ahead of them had disappeared. He was about to suggest that the blonde should put on the headlights when, to his horror, she brought the car to a complete stop.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice rising with fear as she put on the emergency brake.

“This is where you get off,” she said as the dark-haired woman opened her door and climbed out. She pushed the back of her seat forward and leaned in to look at him.

“Come on, you heard Loretta,” she said.

“Are you two crazy? You want me to get out in the middle of—”

“The sat nav’s never wrong,” the blonde said. “Now hurry up. You’ve got less than a minute.”

“Till what—I get hit by a car in the fog?”

The dark-haired woman leaned in and grabbed hold of the front of his shirt. He tried to draw back and discovered that she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked. She dragged him out of the car and shoved him against the rail that divided the road from the pedestrian walkway, tossing his backpack at him so hard he nearly fell.

“What are you
doing
?” he demanded.

The dark-haired woman paid no attention, looking up into the mist. Abruptly, she grabbed his arm and pulled him closer to her. “Just shut up and stand there,” she snapped.

He reached for her but she drew back and his hand closed on empty air. Angry, he took a step toward her, reaching for her again. The next thing he knew, he was falling, rolling over and over down a cold, muddy incline covered with wet leaves. He came to rest flat on his back, looking up at the night sky. Somewhere nearby, a truck rumbled by doing seventy, air-horn fading as the pitch dropped.

Stunned, he pushed himself to his feet and struggled up the incline. Another truck blew past as he reached the side of the road. Route 2A—he knew it immediately. He knew every inch of it; it was still the best place to catch a ride with one of the many long-haul truckers avoiding the newer interstate so as not to get weighed. Or someone traveling on business in a company car who preferred the old highway for the quality of the roadside cafés.

He brushed himself off as best he could, shrugged on his backpack, and stuck out his thumb, thinking he must have been pretty tired to fall asleep in a ditch.

•  •  •

“All gone,” said Doni, climbing back into the passenger seat and slamming the door.

“I just wish he’d stay gone,” Loretta grumbled. She released the emergency brake and inched the car forward cautiously, watching the side-view
mirror for anything coming up behind her before she pulled all the way onto the lane again.

“Never mind that now,” Doni said. “As soon as we get off the bridge, we’re in Hull and I for one would like to find the road out of it this time instead of driving around and around in circles for an hour.”

“Hey, it could be worse,” said Loretta good-naturedly. “At least I know how to find reverse gear on this thing now.”

“Shut up and drive already.”

Afterword

If there’s anything I love other than chocolate, a wild party, and the love of a good cat (to name but a few things I cherish), it’s an urban legend, especially if there’s a possible supernatural angle to it. Great stories to tell after dark and into the night, when you’re too tired to be much of a hard-headed realist, and the shadows are long and deep enough so that you think you might have seen something moving out of the corner of your eye.

Or you can tell them right out in the light of day on a long car trip. Especially if the long car trip is exceptionally long, much longer than it should be.

In 1993, Ellen Datlow and I took a long car trip from London to Scarborough. We had no idea how long it would be, although the fact that it took me forty-five minutes to find my way out of Heathrow Airport with the rental car should have given us some idea. We did not reach Scarborough for another eight hours (the last forty-five minutes of which we spent trying to find the parking lot for our hotel). In between, we had An Adventure.

In a perfect world, it would have been this one. A Phantom Hitchhiker, after all, would have no trouble hitching all around the world. If the Web can spread computer viruses, why can’t GPS spread phantoms?

We did see a few hitchhikers. One of them did watch as we zoomed the wrong way around a roundabout (if you’re going the wrong way,
you’d better do it fast). Then, as we barreled up the entrance ramp where he was standing, he very deliberately pulled his thumb in, put his hand in his pocket, and averted his gaze. I doubt he was a phantom. But if he was, perhaps there are also two phantom American women in a phantom rented Ford Mondeo still driving around and around in a phantom Hull, desperately trying to find their way out.

P.S. When my license finally expired, I gave it a Viking’s funeral.

Ramsey Campbell has been described as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer,” and he has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. His most recent novels are
The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool,
and
The Seven Days of Cain.
His short fiction has been collected in
Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead,
and
Just Behind You,
and his nonfiction is collected as
Ramsey Campbell, Probably.
His novels
The Nameless
and
Pact of the Fathers
have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in
All Hallows, Dead Reckonings,
and
Video Watchdog.
He is the president of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife, Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His website is
www.ramseycampbell.com
.

Campbell is a writer whose work has been consistently excellent, despite its quantity. His influence has been felt over the several decades since he started publishing (originally perhaps overinfluenced by Lovecraft when very young), and his current output hasn’t faltered. Most of his short fiction takes place in England.

As Robbie watched his mother he felt ten years old, but it wasn’t unwelcome for once. She looked as she used to when they played board games together; her eyes would calm down while her face hid its lines until she seemed no older than she was, hardly twice the age he’d racked up now. She’d been happy to concentrate on just one thing, and it included him. He was buoyed up by the memory until she glanced away from the computer screen in the front room and saw him.

Did she think he was spying on her through the window, the way his father had after they’d split up? Her head jerked back as if her frown had pinched her face hard, and Robbie hurried to let himself into the house. Her bicycle and rucksack had narrowed the already narrow hall. As he dumped his schoolbag on the stairs she was snatching pages from the printer, so hastily that one sailed out of her grasp. “Leave it, Robbie,” she said.

“I’m only getting it for you.”

It was a cinema poster headed
CHUCK IN THE DOCK
. Most of it consisted of a doll’s wickedly gleeful round young face, which was held together with stitches that looked bloody even in black and white. Whatever it was advertising would be shown over the weekend at the Merseyscreen multiplex as part of the Liberating Liverpool arts festival, which was all Robbie had time to learn before his mother reached for the sheet. “Well, now you’ve had a good look after you were told not to,” she said.

“What’s all that for?”

“Something you mustn’t see.”

“I just did.”

“That isn’t clever. That’s nothing but sly.” Once she’d finished giving him a disappointed look she said “It’s about films I don’t want you ever to watch.”

There were so many of those he’d lost count, if he was counting—any with fights or guns or knives, which could make him behave like boys did, or bombs, though mostly grownups used those, or language, which didn’t seem to leave him much. “More of them,” he said.

“I won’t have you turning into a man like your father. Too many of you think it’s your right to bully women and do a lot worse to them.” Before Robbie dared to ask what she was leaving unsaid, which was very little where his father was concerned, she added “I’m not saying you’re like that yet. Just don’t be ever.”

“Why did you print all that out? What’s it for?”

“It’s time we took more of a stand.” He guessed she meant Mothers Against Mayhem as she said “They’re evil films that should never be shown. They were supposed to be banned everywhere in Liverpool. They get inside children and make them act like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that thing,” she said and poked the pages she’d laid facedown on the table. “Now that’s all. You’re bullying me.” She gazed harder at him while she said “Promise me you’ll never watch any of those films.”

“Promise.”

“Let’s see your hands.”

He felt younger again, accused of being unclean. While he hadn’t crossed his fingers behind his back, he didn’t think he had quite promised either. Eventually she said “You’d better put dinner on. We’ve a meeting at Midge’s.”

Midge was the tutor on her assertiveness course and the founder of Mothers Against Mayhem. Robbie sidled past the bicycle to the kitchen, which was even smaller than the front room, and switched on the oven. He still felt proud of learning to cook, though he would never have said so at school. He only wished his mother wouldn’t keep reminding him that his father was unable or unwilling even to boil an egg. He watched bubbles pop on the surface of the casserole of scouse, a spectacle that put him in mind of a monster in another sort of film he wasn’t meant to view. Gloves too fat for a killer in a film to wear helped him transfer the casserole to the stained mat the table always sported. “Mmm,” his mother said and “Yum,” despite
eating less and faster than Robbie. “Enough for dinner tomorrow,” she declared. “Have you got plenty of homework?”