Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (19 page)

 
          
For
a moment George wanted to take the prescription and leave. He could feel the
man’s impatience; its momentum would carry George away if he didn’t slow it
down. “I think so,” he said slowly. “She said she wanted a tonic—”

 
          
“Yes.
Yes.
Her nerve tonic.”
George had made him more
impatient. The tendons of his hand stood out, working beneath the
almost-translucent skin. He was a framework of cables, exposed by his energy
that had burned away the flesh, the superfluity. Even his head looked as if it
had dispensed with hair.

 
          
George
took a slow deep breath. “Dr. Miller,” he said.

 
          
“Yes?”
He snapped his pen into its cap,
then
glanced up at
George’s silence. “Yes?”

 
          
He
couldn’t tell his lies. Not while battling the doctor’s impatience, not beneath
the scrutiny of his quick pale-blue eyes. In his job the doctor had to read
people all the time. George saw from the doctor’s expression that some of his
thoughts had spilled onto his face. It didn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter,” he
said.

 
          
The
doctor sighed and sat forward. “Whenever people tell me that,” he said, “it
always does.” Beneath the impatience George saw the beginning of concern.

 
          
“Now,
what’s the trouble?” Dr. Miller said.

 
          
George
teetered on the edge of the doctor’s readiness to listen, and said, “I’m
looking for Christopher Kelly.”

 
          
“Are
you now?” Emotion flickered
unreadably
on the
doctor’s face. “You’re this writer,” he said.

 
          
“No,
I am not.” In a moment he realized: “You read about the inquest.”

 
          
“So
I did.”

 
          
“Then
you read about me. I’m the son of the lady who was killed.”

 
          
“Ah,
the man who didn’t like what the writer was doing.” He peered into George’s
eyes. “And why are you looking for Christopher?” he demanded.

 
          
“I
want to see him suffer. I want to be there when he’s caught. If I can hurt him
I wouldn’t mind going to prison for it. They should bring back torture for him.
It wouldn’t bring back my mother, but it would make me feel better. I’d help
mutilate him, I can tell you.”

 
          
A
bird twittered. For George the silence was full of his own surprise. Until he’d
spoken he hadn’t known what he felt. There had been nobody he could tell, not
even Alice. He felt weak with relief.

 
          
The
doctor gazed at him. George picked up the prescription and stood. “I’m sorry,”
he said. “I know your patients trust you. I came here to try to make you betray
that trust.”

 
          
He
was at the door when the doctor said, “Have I refused to talk to you?”

 
          
George
turned. A secret emotion was flickering over the doctor’s face. “I gave my word
about some things,” he said, his voice as private as his gaze. “But that isn’t
the same as a vow of silence. Is it?” he demanded.

 
          
“I
suppose not.”

 
          
“Sit
down,” the doctor said. His purposeful rapidity had returned. “I can’t tell you
where to find Christopher,” he said as a preamble. “I don’t know.”

 
          
“I
don’t suppose you’d tell me anyway.”

 
          
“No, certainly not.
But I’d like you to know a few things
about him.
About his background.”

 
          
“Does
that explain what he did to my mother?”

 
          
“Perhaps.”
For a moment George was sure that the doctor’s
relief at the chance to talk was as great as his own. “It depends whether you believe
in black magic,” the doctor said.

 
          
George
thought of Christopher Lee shouting at a skeleton on a horse; he thought of
Barbara Steele, the girl from Birkenhead, with her face painted green. “I don’t
believe in the supernatural,” he said.

 
          
“Nor
did I,” the doctor said, gazing inward. “Nor did
I
.”

 
          
The
woman in the launderette had told Chris and Clare something—”Was Kelly’s mother
mixed up in black magic?” George said.

 
          
The
doctor nodded. “But I didn’t know until years later that she was involved. I
heard about the black magic from someone else.”

 
          
The
doctor sat back. He seemed less to relax than to anticipate strain. “Tell me
what you would have done,” he said. Hearing the start of a story, George
relaxed—realized that Dr. Miller had freely admitted that Kelly was the man
they were hunting. He managed not to react visibly.

 
          
“There
was a woman, one of my regular patients,” the doctor said. “This was
twenty-five years ago, but I won’t tell you her name.
A
hypochondriac.
Every doctor has them. It’s a disease without a cure.” He
shook his head rapidly, as if to dislodge something. “The mind can be a
terrible thing, you know. The suffering it can cause.

 
          
“This
woman, she suffered.
Terribly.
The joke of it was, she
didn’t believe in medicine—not the kind she could get here. She was one for the
miracle cures. I had to calm her down when they didn’t work. I had to cure her
of them sometimes, some of the things they fooled her into swallowing.

 
          
“She
used to catch complaints from the medical dictionaries. I thought the library
shouldn’t let her read them, but she’d only have invented something. The
trouble was
,
she wasn’t bright. Once she got an idea
in her head, it took ten men and a bulldozer to get it out again. I never
really convinced
her my
medicines weren’t addictive.

 
          
“Now then.
All of a sudden she didn’t come in for months. I
almost thought she’d found her miracle. Then back she came one day. But she
stopped me writing her prescription; she didn’t want that. She wanted to ask me
something.

 
          
“She
was worried.
More than usual, much more.
I honestly
felt that if I gave her the wrong answer she’d panic. It took her a while to
get the question out. Well, she wanted to know if anyone could say in advance
that a baby would be born deformed.

 
          
“No,
she didn’t say ‘deformed’. She said ‘monstrous’.”

 
          
He
nodded sharply. George wondered if he should have heard more meaning than he
had. “You say she wasn’t Kelly’s mother?” he said, to say something.

 
          
“Oh no.
That was another business entirely.” The doctor
wrinkled his brow hard, as if trying to squeeze something out. “I never saw
Christopher’s mother at all,” he said, but for a moment an emotion peered from
behind his poise; it had gone before George could make it out. The floor-length
plastic curtains shuffled, creaking.

 
          
“Well,
I wanted to know who’d been telling the woman rubbish like that,” Dr. Miller
said. “But she wouldn’t say. I could see she suspected I was ducking her
question. Well, I didn’t take the question seriously, but the anxiety behind it
was another matter. I told her there was no reason why she should have a
deformed child. She was in her early thirties; there were no medical
complications. I told her not even her worrying could harm the child. I hoped
that was true. I’d seen some bad accidents of birth in my time.
Very, very bad.”
He pressed his eyes with his fingers. “Then
I packed her off home, told her not to listen to any more rubbish.

 
          
“She
didn’t come back for a couple of months—which was unusual, of course. When she
did, she was nearer to panic, much nearer. I thought she’d been sitting at
home, getting herself worked up, but do you know what she told me? Her husband
had forbidden her to come, because he said I’d been lying to her. The baby was
going to be born monstrous.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t like to tell you what I called that man. I told her if he thought he
could do my job he could come in here any day. I told her to send him anyway,
if he dared come; and if he didn’t, to stop listening to his drivel. I honestly
believe I got through to her for once. When she left she actually looked
happy.”

 
          
George’s
attention was wandering. This story couldn’t be the vital link he’d hoped for.
The doctor seemed so relieved to talk that he was rambling. George glanced
about, mentally tidying the office. Prescription forms lolled from a
pigeonhole; he restrained himself from pushing them in.

 
          
“The
next time she came,” the doctor said, “she was completely terrified.”

 
          
His
voice was harsh; his eyes gleamed like glass, held still by memory. “You see,
it wasn’t her husband who’d told her originally what would happen to her baby.
It was another man, who had power over her and her husband. Those were her
words: had power. And he hadn’t just said the baby would be born a monster.
He’d said he would make it born that way.

 
          
“I
didn’t lose my temper with her, not even when she wouldn’t tell me his name.
I’d have arranged for the police to call on him, I can tell you. She did tell
me how she’d heard of him. She’d seen his notice in a shop window, among the
other postcards—wouldn’t tell me where. It promised youth, new
vigour
, perfect health, the meaning of life,
the
usual nonsense. She told me the slogan: The Way of
Absolute Power.

 
          
“So
she went to the address on the card.” The doctor gazed at a memory, as if
glimpsing something from the corner of his eye. “She would never describe him,
that man, even when I asked her. It was as if I’d asked what God looked like,
or the Devil.
That kind of pure terror.
That was part
of what he did to her.

 
          
“She
said he asked her first of all why she’d come. He was finding out how gullible
she was. Then he said he was going to model her. And he made a model of her, in
some kind of clay. She had to sit absolutely still for an hour. If she so much
as moved a finger he would look at her, and she’d feel as if she’d committed
the worst sin in the world.

 
          
“That
was her first taste of his power. He was a witch-doctor, even if he was an
Englishman. That’s what they do—show their victims they’ve been cursed, to make
the curse work on their minds. But this swine was an Englishman.

 
          
“She
said the model looked exactly like her. Not very like—exactly. As if she were
lying there in his hands, gone grey and
shrivelled
up. He said that was what she was like, but he was going to change it.

 
          
“She
said he made her younger, just by smoothing out the clay a tiny fraction.
Everyone told her she looked years younger. Well, she always looked older than
her age, because of the worry. But you know
,
it seemed
to me she’d looked younger the day she came back here after vanishing for
months. I couldn’t be sure, though, because I’d been looking at how worried she
was.

 
          
“The
next thing was
,
he made her healthier. He dipped the
model in some herbs. And of course she hadn’t come to me for medicine for
months. You could see why she believed in him.

 
          
“Then
she roped her husband in, because the witch-doctor asked her to. Now, he didn’t
need miracles. He wasn’t bright, but he’d never needed me in his life. I should
have realized there was something wrong; he wasn’t the kind to get mixed up in
that sort of thing, but I thought he must be doing it to please her. Well, she
said he felt like a new man. So they both began going to the meetings.