Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (26 page)

 
          
“There’s
a man on the phone for you, Miss
Frayn
.”

 
          
Three
more of Clare’s little girls were waiting outside the staffroom to watch her
reaction. “Thank you, Debbie,” she said, and saw them glimpse her eagerness.

 
          
Why
were there so many stairs? Her mind counted her footfalls, forty-eight loud
hollow blows on stone, retarded by the duller clunks of her hurry across four
landings. Why couldn’t they have a phone in the staffroom? The playground
dazzled her. “John and Trevor are fighting, Miss
Frayn
,”
Lynn shouted.

 
          
“They
hadn’t better be when I come back.” She hurried past screams of glee, hurtling
footballs, impromptu Morris dancers and morose watchers, but her kids were
converging from various directions. “Have a sweet, Miss
Frayn
.”

 
          
“Oh,
thank you, Susie.” She popped the boiled sweet in her mouth and almost running
(Susie, or was it Yvonne? swallowed it whole. Oh no, she groaned. The sweet
bulged
her throat as she tried to choke it up; it felt
enormous. She could only keep hurrying upstairs. The sweet slipped down into
her chest, held immobile and painfully hard for a moment before slipping
further, beyond discomfort. She stumbled into the office, gasping her thanks to
the deputy head, and picked up the receiver tenderly. But it wasn’t Chris. It
was George.

 
          
“I’ve
booked you a show,” he said.
“Next month, the morning of
Friday the twenty-fourth.
The Amazing Mr. Blunden.”

 
          
“Oh, great.
Thank you, George. The kids will be pleased.”
She wished she felt more so. “Have you seen Edmund lately?” she said, to say
something.

 
          
“He’s
been in touch with me.”

 
          
“We
had a row. Anyway, I think Chris and I have done all we can to help. We went
looking for the magician’s house on Sunday. A bit pointless, really.”

 
          
“Didn’t
you find it? We have, nearly.”

 
          
“What
do you mean?”

 
          
“Well,
we’d missed something. Ted only realized on Sunday. Mrs. Kelly told Dr. Miller
the magician’s name when she took the boy to see him. I went to ask him
yesterday, and he didn’t mind telling. The magician’s name was John Strong.
John Strong!” he repeated incredulously. “Ted is getting his address from the
Local History library. I should stay out of it now, my dear,” he said. “We’ll
deal with it.”

 
          
She
went to her classroom instead of the staffroom, to think. The walls looked less
bare now; they were beginning to accumulate paintings and stories. John Strong
could be a reason to ring Chris.

 
          
Her
class crowded in, chattering,
then
calmed down. Yvonne
Lo was less tidily dressed than Susie Lo; Susie was tidying her hair. So there
was a way to tell them apart; good. Debbie and her friends gazed at Clare,
speculating. John Strong. It must be a false name. It would be useless.

 
          
They
had to calm down again when she announced George’s film. “Now we’re going to do
division,” she said, and they groaned. She hadn’t understood division either,
at their age—it was the hardest arithmetic to grasp; they had to be reminded of
it constantly. Soon they’d be faced with long division, poor kids. “John
Strong” didn’t sound like a magician, but what did magicians sound like?
Wouldn’t he have to sound unremarkable, except to his victims?

 
          
David
and Trevor and Margery didn’t understand what she’d said so far; she began
again. At least Trevor and Margery were good readers. She was getting a sense
of the class; she’d tested their reading ages and sorted them out a reading
scheme each. John and Mark were fighters. Sandra and Ranjit tended to sit apart
and mope, and had to be encouraged to work in groups. Half the kids had
unstable family backgrounds.

 
          
She
wanted to get in touch with Chris; she wanted to know why he’d left so abruptly
on Sunday. Had he been offended because she’d made excuses for Kelly? He was so
unpredictable: she remembered how his feelings about his cat had changed. Had
her excuses reminded him what Kelly had done to his cat? Surely he wouldn’t
still feel offended. She could
ring
him about TTG,
but he hadn’t seemed too interested when she’d mentioned that. She knew he was
interested in John Strong’s house. The children struggled with division,
tongues squeezed out,
pencils
awry. She mustn’t lose
touch with Chris.

 
          
At
the end of the afternoon Debbie said, “Did you speak to the man, Miss
Frayn
?”

 
          
“Yes,
Debbie, I did.” Her own smile took her by surprise, and grew.

 
          
When
she reached Ringo she knew where she was going. She drove downtown. Small white
clouds were scattered low on the blue sky, like elaborate shells. In the city
centre, homebound cars were beginning to slow one another down; at last a
driver let Clare slip through their ranks. She parked near the columns of the
museum’s Corinthian portico. Past more columns, a semicircle standing forward
from the rotunda of the
Picton
Reading Room, she
hurried through the entrance to the libraries.

 
          
“Tally,”
said a uniformed man behind a counter.

 
          
He
was thrusting a cardboard rectangle at her. “Oh, thanks,” she said.

 
          
She
was several steps away when he said, “Bag.”

 
          
“I
beg your pardon?”

 
          
“Your bag.
You can’t take that in with you.”

 
          
“Oh,
I see. All right then.” In exchange for the bag he gave her a plastic tab
fitted with a rattling metal ring, but wouldn’t take back the cardboard tally.
Released at last, she hurried away. A notice directed her to the fifth floor
for Local History. A long-haired young man was emerging from the lift; she
slipped past the closing door. The dull-green metal box, which felt crowded
with her alone, creaked up to the fifth floor.

 
          
The
Local History library was a long room full of tables; sunlight poured through
portholes in the ceiling. A woman in her thirties came to the counter at once,
smiling. “I’m trying to find someone’s address from about twenty years ago,”
Clare said. “John Strong, his name is.
Probably in
Mulgrave
Street.”

 
          
“Good
heavens. Is there a John Strong revival?”

 
          
“I
don’t think so,” Clare said, confused.

 
          
“How strange.
It’s just that you’re the second person to ask
for his address today. I won’t be a moment.” She returned with a bound volume
of voters’ lists, and rapidly found the page. “John Strong. Twenty-one
Amberley
Street. That’s just off
Mulgrave
,
or it was. I’ll be surprised if it’s still standing. Are you researching his
book too?”

 
          
“That’s
right.” In a moment she realized what they were talking about: if Edmund had
read this book, whatever it was, so would she. “Have you a copy here?”

 
          
“There’s
one down in
Picton
. It’s restricted, not on public
access. But they’ll give it to you if you ask.”

 
          
She
scribbled on a piece of paper. “Just fill in these details on one of their
forms and you’ll have it in no time.”

 
          
133.0924
Strong: Glimpses of Absolute Power. “He used to come in here, you know,” the
librarian said.

 
          
“What
was he like?” Clare said eagerly.

 
          
“Well,
I wasn’t here myself. Mr. Carrick is off today; he was here then. If you come
in again you could ask him what he remembers, if you’re interested.”

 
          
“Yes,
I might. What sort of thing, do you know?”

 
          
“Well—the
trouble is, there’s no photograph of him on the book, and it sounds silly when
you say it, but people used to say he had a horribly beautiful face. As if
someone had put eyes inside a statue. Mr. Carrick does say he had the most
perfect complexion he’s ever seen, and he never seemed to look any older. Of
course he was getting older really; they could see him slowing down the last
few times he came in here. But that thing about being horribly beautiful—there
were people on the staff who couldn’t bear to look at him, really, couldn’t
bear to be alone at the counter if he was here, even on a day like this. One
girl used to say seeing him in daylight made it worse. As if someone had made a
statue walk about and pretend to be alive. And yet his clothes were rags, more
or less, as if they didn’t matter. I wish there were a photograph, don’t you?”

 
          
A
man walked by outside the window. On the fifth floor—but he was an
overalled
workman on scaffolding. “I’ll tell you what Mr.
Carrick told me,” the librarian said. “John Strong always used to talk to you
at the counter, unless you got away. It was all rubbish—nobody could understand
it, like his book. But Mr. Carrick used to have a feeling that the words didn’t
matter; it was the way he said it, the sound of his voice, the cadences. Like a
song hidden under the words. I remember, he said it reminded him of the music a
snake-charmer plays. He always used to get rid of John Strong as soon as he
could, and call away anyone who was listening. Sometimes Strong would talk to
readers in the library and they’d go out with him. I expect they were friends
of his, don’t you?”

 
          
All
Clare thought, not quite soberly, was that he sounded even less like a John
Strong. She hurried back to call the lift. A stringy man emerged from it. “Book
lift,” he snapped.

 
          
“Pardon?”

 
          
“Book lift, book lift.”
He rapped the words on the closing
door with his knuckles: BOOK LIFT ONLY.

 
          
He
was carrying no books. Nevertheless, she used the stairs, green stone speckled
with darker green and white, like a pointillist painting. The
Picton
Reading Room was two floors down; at the top of the
dome a round window spilled dazzling sunlight over the stone rim. Clare found a
wad of forms in a pigeonhole among the catalogues that walled the curve. At the
counter, a girl handed Clare’s completed form to a younger girl, who went away
swinging a key to let out the book from the Henry Millers.

 
          
“I
should watch out if I were you,” said an invisible man beside her.

 
          
It
took her a while to locate him: whispering to a young librarian, a hundred feet
away across the diameter. The dome was full of acoustic tricks. She gave in her
tally for the book and carried it out beneath the dome; the echoes of her
footsteps on the green carpet thumped distantly, like a heart.

 
          
She
opened the book on one of the tables. The clack of its cover fluttered high in
the dome; readers glanced up reprovingly—some of them did little else, glaring
at the shrill of a telephone, frowning at the clank of footsteps on iron
balconies around the dome, full of bookcases. They should sit elsewhere, Clare
thought.

 
          
John
Strong had published the book himself. Half the print was askew in the frame of
the pages. The ink looked thick as paint; the
p‘s
and
d‘s
and others were
stoppered
with ink, as if the print were breaking out in crotchets. The gray paper was
full of splinters. The book had been a fat pamphlet, bound later by the
library. Glimpses of Absolute
Power,
set down and
published by John Strong. Clare turned the page.

 
          
“I
have undertaken this work late in life, for it was no part of my design. The
truly great man confides his wisdom to a single pupil and companion, rather
than publish it to the paws of the mass.