Dark Companions (42 page)

Beyond the cages were the flower market and the jewellery stalls and finally the whores, if it wasn’t too early for them. A parrot uttered some remark as though Dias had given it a cue, and Serena pointed in the opposite direction. “That’s more me.”

“Your choice absolutely,” Dias said and stood up.

Serena took a last sip of inky coffee before rising to her feet. “Have we finished talking, then?”

“I’d like more of a word when I’ve finished watching. You won’t be too aware of me, will you?”

“I’ll forget you even exist.”

“No need to try to do that. I wouldn’t want anyone to.”

“I’ll be forgetting everything,” Serena said. “That’s how I work.”

Had she offended him? Her remark was capable of making her feel worse than that. He didn’t offer to carry her rucksack as she propped it between the handlebars while she unchained the bicycle. When she wheeled the bicycle away he lifted the cup to his lips and held it there as if relishing a taste. As she leaned the bicycle against a lamp-standard she caught sight of a headline in a newspaper on a rack beside a kiosk.

She turned away and trapped the rucksack between her feet, holding on to the bicycle with her left hand. She was facing an alley that led into the urban labyrinth of the Raval, between a cambio and the Hotel Balagueró. Almost opposite her on the central pavement, just within her view, was another human statue, a juggler in a harlequin’s baggy costume. Not just his outfit but his face and the skittles in his hands were spotted red on white. As she put a finger to her lips Serena might have been contemplating him or the tourists crowding into the Raval. In fact she was trying to purge herself of thoughts, especially about the headline.
MURDER DOUBLES PLAYWRIGHT’S BOX OFFICE
, it had said.

She wanted to think it made no sense. There were many things you couldn’t double, and surely they included a box office. She did her best to lose herself in the view, but she could see an Internet sign in the alley. She oughtn’t to have been tempted back online; it had felt too close to reviving a threat she’d spent years leaving behind. Letting her vision drift out of focus took a while to extend to her thoughts. At least her body was at rest, and eventually the peace reached deeper, although the stillness at the core of her felt oddly hollow, like a symptom of some kind of incompleteness. Nevertheless the emptiness within her was peaceful enough that she didn’t notice when the evening grew dark.

How long did Dias plan to watch her? She thought she could sense him over by the café tables, unless the impression was lingering where he’d been. Her forward vision was clear now. A couple had just finished arguing with the woman at the glassed-in counter of the cambio, no doubt over the exchange rate or the commission she’d extracted. As they stumped back to the Hotel Balagueró the man was almost knocked into the road by several children who dashed out of the alley and darted between the traffic. They clustered around the paralysed juggler, and an open-topped tour bus paused beyond them as if to give the passengers a chance to watch the children attempt to enliven the performer. They pranced around him and stuck out their tongues at him and jumped up to snatch at the skittles without quite touching them. By the time the bus coasted onwards, more of a crowd was watching the children than the juggler had attracted, and Serena wondered if they were trying to shift him at all. Perhaps they were up to one of the tricks you should watch out for in Barcelona—distracting people on someone else’s behalf.

You could always identify thieves if you knew how to look for them. They would be the bystanders watching the audience instead of the performers. While Serena couldn’t see anyone like that, could the juggler? Shouldn’t he intervene before they picked someone’s pocket or grabbed a bag? The possibility of a crime felt like a presence at the edge of her awareness. It was close to forcing her to look around when Dias moved between her and the juggler. The jacket of his dark suit swung open, exposing a wallet that protruded an inch from his hip pocket. Serena’s hand sank away from her face, and she was parting her lips when an undernourished youth ran past her. Seizing the wallet, he fled across the road.

Several members of the crowd shouted delayed warnings or raised alarms in various languages before Serena could speak. As Dias whirled around to stare at them, the pickpocket dodged two cars and sprinted into the Raval. Dias frowned at the people who were pointing at him and calling out to him, and then he glanced down at his pocket. His eyes and mouth gaped, and he clutched at his hip as if that could somehow restore the contents of the pocket. “My photographs. My family,” he cried.

Serena had wondered if he’d deliberately left the wallet visible, but now she felt ashamed of her suspicion. None of the people crowding around him appeared to have noticed where the thief had made his escape. She grabbed her rucksack and shrugged her arms into it and gripped the handlebars to mount the bicycle. The next moment she was pedalling with all her energy past the stubbornly immobile juggler.

Cars screeched to a halt in both lanes as she sped across the road. She was already ringing her bell before the front wheel bumped over the kerb. A couple strolling out of the hotel retreated up the steps. The alley beside it curved towards the Plaza Paco and the harbour, and the black-clad figure had disappeared around the bend. As Serena pedalled faster into the lane, people backed against walls or recoiled into shops. A string of dangling souvenirs rattled like castanets or bones. Someone shouted after her, but it wasn’t encouragement or any help with locating the thief. She sped around the bend, braking hard as she came face to face with a family of tourists. When they stepped aside to let her through she saw a narrow crossing a few hundred yards ahead.

She raced to the junction and peered about, to see people in every direction. The gloom was only intermittently lit by shops, so that it took her some moments to notice a figure in black hurrying away along the lane to her left and another just as thin beyond the crowd ahead. Surely the thief would have turned aside as soon as he could, and Serena pedalled left. She had almost overtaken the fugitive when she saw it was a woman with cropped hair.

There was scarcely room to turn the bicycle. Serena had to dismount and twist the handlebars virtually back to front, not helped by a party of large men with cameras who offered a variety of comments on her steering and suggestions about how to handle the machine. Once they gave way, none too readily, she pedalled back to the junction as fast as a scattering of pedestrians would let her. She was expecting to see Dias, but he must still not know which way the thief had gone. Serena thought she did, and only hoped she hadn’t given him time to escape.

She swung left and picked up speed along the lane, which was virtually deserted. There were almost no shops to attract tourists, and the apartments closing in on both sides did less to alleviate the gloom. A cat sprang out of a waste-bin, dislodging a dead fish, and vanished up a flight of stone steps in a dim hallway illuminated by a single bleary yellowish bulb. Serena smelled cannabis smoke and heard a baby crying and a radio snatching at fragments of broadcasts, but saw nobody at all. She’d ridden for at least a minute between walls full of windows, either curtained or unlit, when the alley came to an end.

At first Serena thought it led to a square she had never seen before, and then she realised that the unlit open space was a building site. The apartments around it barely relieved the darkness, and she had to wait in the alley while her eyes adjusted. The foundations of a demolished block had been dug out, making a hole like a chunk of the night sky several hundred yards square. A wire mesh fence boxed it in, leaving a narrow strip of pavement alongside the apartments. Someone had wrenched two sections of fence apart, opening a gap about a yard wide straight ahead.

Could the thief have hidden down there? Serena pedalled to the gap and eased the bicycle forward. Even by gripping the brakes and raising herself on the pedals she couldn’t see over the edge. She was making to dismount when she realised that she’d cycled past an alley almost opposite the gap. It was little better than unlit, but the glow from an open vestibule just managed to silhouette a figure standing in the mouth of the alley. As Serena caught sight of it, the figure sprang at her like a beast out of a lair.

It was Dias, and Serena could only think he intended to pull her away from the opening. Nevertheless the shock loosened her grip on the brakes, and her weight pushed a pedal down. The front wheel blundered through the gap in the fence and found nothing to support it. The bicycle tilted forward and toppled sideways. Before Serena could regain control, it carried her over the edge.

Weren’t people supposed to see their entire lives at such a moment? Serena saw only darkness all around her and rushing like a gale past her face. It was inside her too, an emptiness that felt like far too much of herself. She just had time to grasp that the blackness filling much of her vision was the sky before she hit the bottom of the excavation. She was hoping the rucksack would at least cushion her fall, but her spine struck a chunk of rubble. She heard and felt herself snap like a branch.

The bicycle fell on top of her, a handlebar bruising her forehead. She tried to heave it away from her, but she couldn’t move—not her arms, not her legs, not a finger. She couldn’t even call out to Dias, who was standing in the gap twenty feet or more above her. The best her mouth seemed able to produce was a halting feeble breath. Perhaps she didn’t need to speak, because he had located her. As she struggled to make some kind of sound, a light blazed in his hand.

It was the screen of a mobile phone. She thought he meant to call an ambulance until he shone the light into the excavation and found a ladder against the wall. He sidled along the edge inside the fence and clambered down one-handed. By straining her eyes sideways Serena was able to watch the light jerk downwards rung by rung. It lingered on a patch of exposed rock, and then it turned in her direction. As it came at her she heard rubble shift under his feet, and a pebble that he must have kicked struck her thigh a blow she barely felt. The next moment he was standing over her.

He lifted the bicycle and flung it away. If she’d had the strength to speak she might have asked him to be more careful—it would have felt like hoping that she would someday return to her everyday life. He leaned towards her and aimed the light at her, running it over her body before shining it into her face. In a few seconds he spoke, but she didn’t think he cared whether she heard. “Not real enough,” he said.

He lifted his free hand to his ear and mimed listening for a response. When he heard none he stooped closer. The glow of the mobile glinted on his teeth as his mouth stayed open in some kind of anticipation. He squatted to watch her, putting a finger to his lips as Serena no longer could to hers. The light glared into her face and lit up his eyes, but she could see nothing within them, just an absence where a person ought to be. Soon he stood up, and Serena thought he was going to abandon her until he lingered over making a decision. Apparently he was considering whether to kick her first or stamp on her, and in either case where to begin. In due course—almost casually, for quite a while—he set about testing his preference, and when he tired of that he produced a knife.

Dark Companions

Ramsey Campbell

A brilliant collection of stories by one of the masters of horror.

Not all companions are friendly. There are many that you most definitely do not want to see. When Elaine was working late at the office, she thought she was all alone. But something sinister was in the elevator shaft…working its way to her floor. Miles, too, thought he was alone in his new house, the house of a murderer, but he, too, had an unwanted companion. And Knox will never forget what was waiting for him in the dense fog.

Come and meet all of these companions and more in this chilling collection of horror tales by award-winning master of terror Ramsey Campbell. That clawing sound you hear, the haunting singing, the moving shadow—they all mean that something is waiting to make your acquaintance.

Contains “The Companion”, the story Stephen King called “one of the three finest horror stories I have ever read”.

This book has been previously published.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

Cincinnati OH 45249

Dark Companions

Copyright © 2011 by Ramsey Campbell

ISBN: 978-1-60928-648-4

Edited by Don D’Auria

Cover by Kanaxa

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Original Copyright: 1982

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: October 2011

www.samhainpublishing.com