Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (15 page)

 
          
“Ex-
cuse
me,” Chris said, bowing limply toward her. “Are you
the friend of Christopher Kelly’s granny?”

 
          
Oh
my God, Clare thought, disguising her mirth as a sneeze. Women turned to stare
at Chris; their children scrambled over the machines. “Eh?” the woman said, as
if that were all she intended to say.

 
          
“Christopher’s
a dear friend of mine. I promised I’d visit his old granny if I was ever in
town.”

 
          
“He
doesn’t live there now,” the woman muttered. Next to her,
a
pair of knickers sailed up and were
snatched back.

 
          
“Oh,
I know. That’s why he asked me to look her up. He tells me she’s a lovely lady.”

 
          
“She
doesn’t like strangers.
Doesn’t trust them.”
She
stared at him.

 
          
Clare
knew he’d failed. Kelly would never have called his grandmother a lovely lady,
not if the way she’d behaved at St. Joseph’s was typical. Nor would he have
asked Chris to look her up. They’d betrayed themselves and Edmund. She looked
away, at the young man with the sack, who had retrieved a loose button and was
gazing at it as if it were a miserly tip.

 
          
“He
wasn’t any friend of hers. She wouldn’t have taken him in, except he was her
daughter’s boy. I wouldn’t have taken him, not after what his mother done.” Her
tone had changed; something about it walled Clare in, away from the sunlight.
“There’s no wonder he was what he was, not after what his mother was, the
things she was mixed up with. He wasn’t born human.” She ducked quickly and
kissed a saint’s medal sewn inside her overall. “It’s no use you going round
there,” she said, having conjured back her old tone. “She wouldn’t want to see
you.”

 
          
“Oh,
she would. All the things I could tell her—she’d want to hear them, I just know
she would.” His voice rose hysterically; Clare could hear his frustrations.
“You wouldn’t want to upset him. Did you ever know him? Do you know what a
sensitive boy he is?”

 
          
“That
wouldn’t be my word for him. Now go on, stop bothering me. I won’t tell you,
whatever you say.”

 
          
“Oh God.
I don’t mean to upset you, but I promised. You do
look ill.”

 
          
Clare
suspected he was simply playing now, as he had with the kids. “It’s you that’s
made me ill, then,” the woman said; Clare saw her in a porthole, looking for
help from the audience, but the women had returned to their washing. “I’ve got
a weak heart,” the woman said. “I mustn’t be upset. The doctor said so.”

 
          
“Oh God.
Me too, I need treatment. Is he good, your doctor?”

 
          
“He’s
the best there is. I’ve known him all my life. You can trust him, not like some
people I know.”

 
          
Come
on, Chris, give it up. But he said, “What’s his name? Where’s his surgery?”

 
          
“Dr. Miller in Boswell Street.
But he won’t have you. He
only has local people.”

 
          
“He
should have Christopher’s granny. Then there’d be someone she could trust.”

 
          
“He
has got her.”

 
          
“I
thought he might have,” he said, gaily but no longer gay. “Well, thank you.
You’ve been really helpful.”

 
          
Her
face closed, trapping her with the truth. She stood
up,
shaking, but Chris dodged her. In the doorway he swung his hips as a farewell.
“I’ve wanted to do that ever since I saw Lauren Bacall,” he told Clare as they
fled to Ringo.

 
          
“How
did you know about the doctor?” she demanded, snagging the key in the ignition.

 
          
“Well,
it made sense, right? For that woman to collect him from school she must have
lived near them.

 
          
So
it sounded like they’d have the same doctor.”

 
          
The
car shuddered out of the alley. “You could act your way through anything,
couldn’t you?” she said.

 
          
“Yeah.
But it sounds like you did pretty well at St.
Joseph’s.”

 
          
“I
suppose I did.” She felt rather pleased with both of them. Edmund couldn’t do
without them now.

 
          
As
she drove past the launderette toward Upper Parliament Street, she saw the
woman glaring out. What had she meant about Kelly, about what his mother had
done? Clare was suddenly all the more glad to be with Chris. For a moment she’d
wondered what their prey might do if he realized they were hunting him.

 
          
Wednesday, September 10

 
          
It’s
only a mound, he told himself.
Only earth.
But the
mound was rising, slowly as a sleeping breath. It split lethargically open, and
what had pushed it up emerged with a maggot’s
gropings
,
its unsteady head nodding. He was surrounded by the mounds. Several pale shapes
were already crawling feebly, lopsidedly toward him. They were babies, scaly
with earth.

 
          
When
he opened his eyes the darkness piled on them. That, and his terror, trapped
him in himself. He lay trying to gaze out.
Sounds of cars,
infrequent waves on the distant beach of the road.
The dark was too huge
for him to dare making for the light switch.

 
          
He
burrowed under the blankets. At least
his own
warmth
was down there, instead of the dull suffocating heat of the darkness. His
breath was huge, trapped. The dream had brought back more than terror. It had
brought back his grandmother’s voice,
unmuffled
.

 
          
“I
was never going to tell you what you are,” she said. “But you’ve shown your
true
colours
today. You’re a child of the Devil. Do
you think I’m exaggerating? Then let me tell you something. Your mother
promised you to the Devil before you were even born.”

 
          
She
went on, and on. The past was dragging him down, like exhausted sleep. He tried
to snatch himself back, and for a moment was lying not beneath blankets but in
the earth, lying contented and waiting.

 
          
He
writhed. The feel of his skin, the taste in his mouth were hideous. He forced
himself to relax. There was no use struggling. He had come through the horror
before. He had only to remember how. He let himself down into the past.

 
          
He
remembered his grandmother, remembered her telling the headmaster, the doctor;
he remembered the slow thick shame swelling him, until he’d thought he would
burst. At night he had lain awake, shrinking away from the loathsome horror in
his bed, himself. The house had echoed with his grandmother’s voice, praying
for him. He had buried himself under the blankets, but a memory had always
crept into his hiding place: the way he’d grinned to feel the piece of Cyril’s
arm inside his grin.

 
          
Only
a child of the Devil could have enjoyed that. He would clench himself tightly,
as if to squeeze out the poison of what he was. He would grind his teeth in
self-disgust until, insidious and
tempting,
there had
come the taste of blood.

 
          
Then,
one night, he had realized there was no God.

 
          
He’d
been suspicious for a while. He had been noticing things: the boy who passed
around nude photographs during school mass and who had somehow not been struck
down by Heaven; Mr. Nicholas, who prayed
ringingly
,
and who spread-eagled naughty boys against the classroom cupboard, so that he
could watch them while teaching. There had been books on biblical archaeology,
films by Bunuel,
the
way the masters condemned
communist persecutions but didn’t want to discuss the Spanish Inquisition. “No
book has caused more torture and murder than the Bible.” All of this
accumulated in him, until the night it had flooded out.

 
          
He
had been listening to his grandmother’s hollow prayers, to stop himself
remembering Cyril. All at once, as he heard the echoes stretch out her prayers
only to drop them into reverberating silence, he’d realized she was praying not
out of love but out of fear. She was trying to fill the vast waiting silence.
She was holding back her awareness of death. She couldn’t risk being alone with
herself in case,
fatally,
there might be a moment
during which she failed to believe.

 
          
He’d
lain gazing at the dark, allowing the implications to flow through him. He had
known them already; only his grandmother’s apparent absolute faith had made him
deny them uneasily. If there was no God, there could hardly be a Devil. But
then he wasn’t a child of the Devil. He wasn’t a monster at all.

 
          
The
horror was
fading,
the past was losing its hold on
him. Why had he thought he was a monster? He reached for the memory, happy now
with the past.
Because of what he’d done to Cyril?
It
hadn’t been much worse than what Cyril had done to him. As for the other thing
his grandmother had said he’d done—well, he hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d made it
sound worse than the Spanish Inquisition. He’d thrust his head out of the
sheets, grinning at the dark. Cyril had got what he deserved. He’d grinned at
the desperate voice surrounded by its own echoes.

 
          
He’d
needed no more reassurance until he had begun to dream of lying in the earth.

 
          
It
was a childhood dream; he had had it many times. But once he’d left home it had
vanished—only to return without warning a few months ago. He had figured out
why. Since returning to Liverpool he had become increasingly restless; he’d
moved several times, usually away from landlords who seemed too inquisitive. He
had been moving always nearer
Mulgrave
Street.

 
          
At
least that explained the dream. Probably the last traces of his childhood guilt
were luring him back toward the school. It was disturbing, but bearable. The
dream must be returning along with the memories
Mulgrave
Street prompted. He didn’t know what the dream meant, but that didn’t matter.
His guilt and its source were past.

 
          
But
the pull of
Mulgrave
Street had increased. At night
it was worst; he couldn’t go into that dark. During the day he’d considered
visiting the street, to be done with it. But he didn’t want the staff at the
school to recognize him. He’d begun to wake at four in the morning, his nerves
jagged with the problem. He’d been trying to walk it off when there was the car
hurtling at him, the car slewed against the tree, the orange-painted meat on
its bed of blood and gravel.

 
          
He
had felt no guilt. It was only the same as Cyril. When the man had chased him
he had been annoyed. He’d been uneasy when the man had forced him to dodge into
Mulgrave
Street, but he hadn’t had to stay there
long. Half an hour later he’d returned to his flat and had fallen asleep at
once.

 
          
Afterward
he hadn’t quite known how he felt, until he saw the newspaper reports. They
were enormously reassuring. They had the tone of schoolgirls whispering in a
haunted house; none dared mention what he’d done. As if it
were
so unspeakable! Why, it had been more the driver’s fault than his.

 
          
The
cat hadn’t upset him. It had been lying there dead in the alley, after all. He
had kept remembering the man chasing him; he’d felt vulnerable. The cat should
have given him back his freedom.

 
          
As
for Mrs. Pugh—well, he shouldn’t have gone near
Mulgrave
Street at night. But the newspapers had made him laugh again, with their
screams of horror—WHAT MAKES A MAN A MONSTER? He’d felt happy: Mrs. Pugh had
been so easy that it seemed to have left him completely satisfied.