Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (2 page)

 
          
The
light soaked the three-storey Georgian houses behind their stone walls and
bulging orange hedges. Pools of it lay on the roofs of the line of cars which
barred Clare from the
kerbside
lane. Ahead, along the
edge of the central reservation, trees and tree-
coloured
lamp standards bunched, pulling lingeringly apart as they approached. Around
the high lamps, papery orange leaves were tangled in bright branches like orange
web. Soon be there now, Clare told herself. She might ask to sleep on the couch
at Rob and Dorothy’s. At the ends of pedestrian crossings, globes on poles
pulsed: orange, orange, orange.

 
          
“Dorothy
and I want you to come to dinner next week,” Rob said. “We haven’t seen you for
nearly a fortnight.”

 
          
A tree, a tree, a lamp standard, a gap in the reservation.
She glanced at Rob’s orange face, staring solemnly at her. He’d found his way
out of himself, and the last few hours might as well not have happened. “Rob,
you’re hopeless,” she said, giggling uncontrollably. “You really are.”

 
          
He
frowned at her, even more solemn. Behind his head, Christ leapt from the wall
of a church, tattered arms
clawing high, fleshless ribs
blackened by the sodium light. She started and turned back to the road, still
snorting.
A lamp standard, a thick tree.
A man stepping straight into the path of the car.

 
          
She
had time to stop. He was yards and yards away. But the brakes weren’t
responding
,
the car wasn’t slowing safely. The man
turned and saw the car; he clapped his hand over most of his face in a
theatrical gesture of shock, and began to dither between the two empty lanes.
The
kerbside
lane was occupied. There wasn’t room for
Clare to be sure of passing him.

 
          
Rob
stared at his sister, apparently driving straight at the man. “Oh Christ,” he
said, and tried to pull the wheel over; the car yawed wildly. “Get off, you
fool!” she screamed, turning her whole body to regain possession of the wheel.
She swerved the car toward the central reservation. There ought to be room for
her to steer between the trees. Her short legs had slipped from the brake. She
trod hard on the pedal, but it was the accelerator.

 
          
She
heard Rob clawing at the door release, in panic. The car bumped over the
kerb
of the reservation, toward a lamp standard. She dug
her heel into the brake pedal, dragging at the wheel. The swerve threw the door
open. The door struck the lamp standard at once, and chopped shut again with a
strange, unfamiliar sound, knocking Rob back into his seat. She heard the
window shatter.

 
          
She
was still fighting the wheel as the car crunched across the gravel, toward the
other carriageway, toward a passing car, too fast. She slewed the car round,
and its left rear wheel thumped a tree. The car halted there at the edge of the
kerb
, shuddering.

 
          
There
was silence, filled by the sound of Clare’s blood in her ears. Blood thumped in
her limbs; her throat was full of the threat of nausea. Rob lay silent, slumped
against the door, his head leaning out of the shattered window, his shoulder
pressed against the edge of the door. Someone was staring in at him: the driver
of the passing car. No, he couldn’t be the driver, because now he was running
away toward the lamp standard, before Clare could see his face. Here came the
driver, hurrying back from his car as she fumbled slowly, abstractedly, with
the clasp of her seat belt.

 
          
He
was thick-set, red-faced; he was like the man who’d owned the butcher’s shop
when she was a little girl. He looked angry and bewildered, as if he’d just
been awoken rudely. “The man must be mad,” he said. For a moment she thought he
meant Rob.
“Should be locked up.
Walking in front of
you like that. Are you all right? Look, there he goes,” and in her mirror
someone was running away up a side street, hunched over as if carrying a prize.

 
          
“My
brother,” she said, searching for words.
“Needs help.”

 
          
He
went round to Rob’s side of the car, then hurried back, paler. “I’ll get help,”
he said. “Don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t touch him.”

 
          
Curtains
blinked warily in the by standing houses; one house lit up its six flats, one
by one. A third-floor window opened. “Do you need an ambulance?” a man shouted
down.

 
          
“Quickly,
yes!” the driver shouted. He turned back to Clare. “I’ll get that swine,” he
said, furious again. “Running off like
that,”
and he
ran toward the side street, amazingly fast for his build.

 
          
Clare
managed to unclasp her seat belt. Her blood was slowing; the threat of nausea
seemed to have passed. Rob still lay against the door. She reached toward him,
then
drew back: mustn’t touch. She was surprised by how calm
she felt. But there was nothing she could do, after all: Rob was unconscious,
she couldn’t comfort him,
she
must wait for the
ambulance. She climbed out of the car and almost fell into the road; her legs
were unstrung. She propped herself against the side of the car. She was still
calm. She only wished daylight would hurry up, to wash away the clinging sodium
glow.

 
          
Something
was dripping beneath the car. She bent and peered. It was fluid from the
brakes; the hydraulic link had snapped. Never mind that. It was Rob she should
be looking at.

 
          
He
was leaning out of the window. His head lay on one side, resting against the
outside of the door. Blood and the shadows of branches blotted out his face,
his eyes. He lay as if gazing down at the hailstones of the shattered window,
scattered over the gravel in a thickening trail back toward the lamp standard.
The few hailstones beneath him, and the patch of gravel, glittered restlessly
with black blood.

 
          
Clare
gazed at all this calmly. She’d seen children bleeding in the playground, after
all. But something was wrong. The sight of Rob she had now didn’t quite fit
together with the way he looked from inside the car. She went back to her side
of the car to look. All at once the ambulance was braying to a halt beside her,
its siren sinking; people were surrounding her—the helpful red-faced butcher, a
couple from one of the flats, ambulance attendants, police.

 
          
“A
man walked straight in front of me,” she told the police. She only had to speak
quietly, they would know she was telling the truth; shouting did no good,
teaching taught you that. They couldn’t know about the brakes. “Straight into
the road,” she said.

 
          
“That’s
right,” the butcher said. “I saw him.
A bloody madman.
I chased him, over there, but he got away.”

 
          
An
ambulance attendant was taking her arm. “I’m all right,” she said, giggling at
his look of concern. “What do you
think’s
wrong with
me? I’m only shivering because it’s so late. It’s my brother you’ve got to look
after.” But they had, she saw; the car was empty.

 
          
“He
was out in the middle of the road. He wouldn’t go one way or the other. He
distracted her completely, and I don’t wonder,” the butcher told a policeman
who was writing down the butcher’s name. They would believe him, Clare thought
gratefully. But another policeman was examining the car, the door, the
interior,
the
brakes.

 
          
“Come
on now, love,” the attendant said, steering her gently toward the bright white
box of the ambulance, away from the orange glow. “You don’t know how you are
yet. Anyway, you’ll want to be with your friend.”

 
          
Her brother, not her friend.
But let the man have his own
way; he was only trying to be kind. Except that she wanted to hear what the
other attendant would say to the policeman who had beckoned him urgently over
to the car. She was sure they were talking about Rob. There was something they
didn’t understand, that much was in their faces—perhaps the same thing that had
confused her as she’d looked at the outside of the car. The policeman was
urging the attendant over to the lamp standard, to the parked cars; they were
peering beneath the cars, gazing about at the pavement. They looked like
children hunting for treasure. “Wait a minute,” she said, wriggling her arm in
the attendant’s grasp.

 
          
They
were walking slowly back toward Ringo, poor old car. She couldn’t hear their
voices yet, but their faces and gestures were talking. There?
the
policeman said, including everywhere they’d searched in
a sweep of his arm, pointing to the car, the ambulance. No, the attendant
admitted, shaking his head doubtfully. Well then, the policeman said, looking
as if he liked the idea even less. But surely, the attendant said, looking
shocked, actually ill. They were nearly in Clare’s earshot. She strained her
ears, herself, toward them.

 
          
They
were talking about the man. Which man? The man must have opened the door to
throw himself out, or it had fallen open. The man was Rob, then. His something
had something at the moment of first impact. But then what? Surely you aren’t
saying—Clare strained forward, away from the restraining grasp. The sharp blue
beacon of the ambulance cut through the orange glow, repeatedly flashing in her
eyes, pounding, insisting that she hear the truth, that she admit she’d heard
the policeman’s words. All he was saying was that the man’s arm, Rob’s arm, was
what?

 
          
“Missing,”
he repeated irritably. “His arm is missing.”

 
          
Wednesday, September 3

 
          
“Tell
me about Bob,” Dorothy said to Clare.

 
          
They
were sitting on the balcony outside Dorothy’s, on the fourteenth storey of a
stack of flats overlooking
Sefton
Park. Ahead of them
lay the playing field, like green baize worn through in black patches. Beyond
the park and the huddled chimneys and church towers of
Aigburth
,
a tanker slid over the glittering shattered sunlight of the Mersey. Beyond
that, except for the occasional factory chimney standing smoking on the far
bank of the river, there was nothing but the enormous open early-evening sky.

 
          
“I
remember when Rob and I were kids,” Clare said. She’d never been able to call
him Bob, which he’d rechristened himself for the BBC. “He wouldn’t play with
his friends unless they let me join in. Usually they liked me to.” She gazed
out across the playing field, toward the iron-and-glass dome of
Sefton
Park Palm House, packed deep in trees. She was glad
of these memories. She’d had them for years, and she loved to remember them.
She was grateful that even now they weren’t spoilt.

 
          
“But
once they reached adolescence he changed toward them completely,” she said. “He
became all serious and protective, wouldn’t let them near me. There was one
boy, Lionel. I thought he was all right; we used to have some good fights when
we were younger. He asked me out once, to the pictures. When Rob heard, he
nearly knocked him down. He stood in front of the house that night to make sure
Lionel couldn’t get at me, and wouldn’t tell Father and Mother why. I was
upstairs sobbing my heart out, you can imagine. It was years later Rob told me
Lionel had used to boast about all the girls he’d had, all the details. I don’t
think he could have had so many, though. He was only twelve.”

 
          
Dorothy
was leaning forward, alert, ready to learn. Her wide eyes were black and shining
as her wiry curls, on which the sunlight rested softly. Clare could see why Rob
had found her attractive. But then, she’d never denied that Dorothy was pretty.

 
          
“He
could be really tough when he was looking after me,” Clare said. “You wouldn’t
have thought it was Rob. I remember the first time I ever went to the Cavern,
when the Beatles were on. Did you ever go? It was an experience.” Beneath the
warehouses, dark thick stone overhead and close around her, musty-smelling, a
crowd squeezed in so tight she could hardly lift her arm to drink her Coke,
dense smoke hanging low beneath the ceiling: beyond the crowd she could just
see four figures on a stage, making loud blurred sounds. “There was a boy there
I knew from school,” she said. “He only touched me, only just below my
shoulder, here, but Rob gave him such a push he nearly got trampled. I must
have been about thirteen then.”