Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (30 page)

 
          
He
took hold of the doorknob, which felt like a stone rolled in grit, and went
into the house.

 
          
The
hall seemed hung thickly with dust; most of that was the light. Great damp
stains
bulged
the dim wallpaper; one pregnant swelling
was covered with pale green patches, like ancient bread.

 
          
He
moved stealthily along the hall. On his right a closed door led to the room
with the almost-boarded window. A floorboard began to shift beneath him, but he
redistributed his weight before it creaked. Above his head the posts of the banister
faded into
colourless
vagueness. Someone was moving
up there. He crept along the hall, though he hardly needed to: now he was in
the house he
need
fear nobody.

 
          
In
the wall beneath the stairs he found a door. He turned the knob, which squealed
reluctantly, and tugged. The door had clearly not been opened for a long time.
Its wood bulged from the doorframe; its moist lock was scaly with rust.

 
          
He
thrust one foot against the wall and tugged with both hands at the knob.
Something creaked faintly, but his foot slithered on a patch of mould. He
wedged his foot again and tugged; the slash on his arm was throbbing. He felt
movement—it might be the knob working loose in its socket.

 
          
He
rested. He knew he must reach the basement. That was where John Strong had used
his power on his victims. Whatever he had used to control them, he must have
kept it down there, safe from them; they would never have dared the basement.
The source of John Strong’s power was there.

 
          
Chris
braced both hands on the doorknob. It was dim and slimy. He jammed his feet
against the wall and heaved at the knob, heaved until his shoulders ached. Pain
pounded in his arm. The door was creaking. It was giving. With a loud crack it
sprang open, gasping a thick smell of earth at him.

 
          
Peering
down, he made out a large room. Slivers of light through the choked slits at
the tops of the windows lay stranded, glistening. There was no furniture, only
the dully glistening floor: it looked like a marsh at twilight.

 
          
He
didn’t want to go down there. It was too much like something he feared, that
darkness. But he had to. There was nowhere else he could go. He struck a match
clumsily and ventured onto the stone steps.

 
          
Though
the basement was large, he felt penned in. The flickering darkness shifted close
to him; he was going down into crumbling earth. His sandals rang dully on the
steps. On the bottom step he halted, fumbling for another match. The spent
match hissed briefly, somewhere in the dark. He stepped out into the basement,
and his footsteps became a moist whisper.

 
          
There
was no floor, only earth. It closed on his sandals like lips; it squeezed
moistly over them, licking his feet. The darkness crumbled toward him. There
was nothing but earth and a number of flat stones scattered near the walls.
Above him the ceiling hovered fluttering, vague and huge; a drop of moisture
blinked,
then
fell.

 
          
The
flame crept toward his fingers. He had to let in the dark before he could light
another match. He dropped the match before it burned him; the earth hissed as
it put out the flame. The darkness caved in around him. He scrabbled at the
matchbox, and its drawer fell out, spilling all the matches on the wet earth.
As his feet moved in panic, the earth seemed to stir wakefully beneath him. The
darkness filled his eyes and mouth triumphantly, choking off his scream. It
filled him.

 
          
And did nothing.
It was no threat. It was hardly dark at
all. His eyes grew used to the light seeping through the slits of windows. The
earth glistened, crawling with dim light. What he needed was beneath that
earth. There was nowhere else John Strong could have hidden it. He must dig. He
stooped,
hands ready. But the slash on his arm began
to sting, and he remembered something.

 
          
Outside
the house, the sunlight hurt his eyes. It made him more anxious to get back to
the basement. He hurried to the tin wall where the mechanical shovel howled.
Nobody was in sight. He grabbed a spade from the lorry and ran back toward the
house.

 
          
He
had almost reached the house when he saw the car turning into
Mulgrave
Street.

 
          
It
had no business here, it looked too expensive. He clambered over the rubble
beside the house and listened. When he heard the car halt at the corner of
Amberley
Street he dodged into a room of the next house
that had remained almost intact—only its fourth wall was scattered over its
floor.

 
          
He
heard Edmund say, “That is it.”

 
          
“Couldn’t
they knock it down?” George said. “Why leave just this one?”

 
          
Clare
wasn’t with them. Chris listened to their approaching footsteps, crunching over
broken glass. They’d go straight in; he’d left the front door open. They had no
reason to come round here. They’d better not. He lifted the spade; its sharp
edge glittered.

 
          
Flies
swarmed near him. He slapped them away with the spade. The swarm drifted away,
then
returned. They weren’t drawn to him. They were drawn to
something in the rubble. He looked down.

 
          
He
was running from the car crash, hands full. The man was chasing him. He ran
into
Mulgrave
Street. He heard the man’s footsteps,
pounding along a side terrace. He glanced along the side streets, looking for a
hiding place. Someone might look out of one of the houses at the noise. He
caught sight of a house standing by itself, probably abandoned. He ran around
it and hurled his burden into the rubble, throwing a few chunks of brick on top
of it. Then he ran toward Princes Avenue.

 
          
Chris
gazed down at the swarming rubble. Emotion welled up in him. He let it come; he
mustn’t struggle now, with his pursuers in earshot. Slowly he began to grin. He
was home at last. He’d been home before and hadn’t known it. At last he felt
completely safe, free,
calm
. There was no struggle at
all within him. Whatever happened now, he would be all right.

 
          
He
leaned against the wall, grinning. He heard George and Edmund reach the house:
Perhaps Clare wasn’t working with them, after all. He hoped she would come to
the house by herself while he was there, since she liked playing games with
him. He’d just thought of a game he would enjoy playing.

 
          
Surely
nobody could live here, George thought. The hall was damply chill; it smelled
of earth and wet stone and paper—it smelled like a ruin sinking into a marsh.
There was no place for life here; it would suffocate.

 
          
“We’ll
start at the top,” Edmund said.

 
          
Beneath
the stairs a door stood ajar. George had assumed they would head for the
basement, but he followed. The staircase was even colder than the hall. Each
stair gave a separate sharp creak. A strip of wallpaper had flopped across the
stairs. Small pale grubs squirmed on its underside; some had been trampled.
George imagined groping upstairs here at night.

 
          
The
first floor stank of urine. A flex like a rat’s tail dangled above the landing.
In the dimness George failed to see that the floorboards were scattered with
plaster; he slithered. “Hell is murky”—but for once Shakespeare couldn’t sum up
the situation. The underbelly of the ceiling hung down, grey and sweating.

 
          
A
trickle of stained sunlight lay across the hall: a door was ajar. Beside it the
wall had broken out in pale pimples of chewing gum. The lower half of the door
was covered with trails of urine. Edmund reached out gingerly and pushed the
door open.

 
          
The
curtains were drawn, warding off most of the sunlight. In the room a young
woman sat on a collapsed bed. George was sure she was young, but her breast in
the baby’s mouth was withered. She gazed out of the room at them,
indifferently.

 
          
When
George stepped forward, startled and horrified, she hurried forward and kicked
the door shut. George saw that her pupils were huge and moist, but lifeless. He
heard her dragging something against the door. “Junkie,” Edmund explained,
shaking his head.

 
          
George
was about to demand what they were going to do about the baby when he realized
they were being watched.

 
          
He
whirled, grabbing at the wall; fallen plaster shifted in its cradle of
wallpaper. The man was standing at the top of the stairs to the attics. His
small body stooped as he peered at George with one eye; the other socket was
bright pink. He wore a raincoat the
colour
of the dim
light. One sleeve was missing; his bare arm hung slackly almost to the floor.
He drooled. As soon as Edmund gazed up at him the man burst into tears and
scuttled back into an attic.

 
          
“Jesus,”
Edmund said. George gazed at where the man had been. From the edge of his eye
he glimpsed sunlight creeping out behind them, into the hall. The other
first-floor door was opening.

 
          
A
burly man stood there. The bib of his faded overalls was thick with old food.
He hefted an iron bar above his head as he advanced toward them. His face was
smooth and bland as an infant’s, but his eyes were those of a man backed into a
corner, defending it, although he hardly knew why. Behind him George could see
the room he was defending. Except for a pile of old newspapers against the
wall, it was completely bare.

 
          
“It’s
all right,” Edmund reassured the man. “We’ve got permission to look around.”

 
          
The
man kept advancing. That wasn’t the way to handle him, George thought
scornfully. He stood his ground. “Just you put that down,” he told the man. The
two of them could handle him. He was glad to have something to confront at
last, something more solid than the suffocating atmosphere of depression.

 
          
But
Edmund was plucking at his elbow. “It’s all right. Leave it, George. We’ll talk
outside.”

 
          
Suddenly
George knew why Edmund had asked him to come: not for help in the search, but
for reassurance. Edmund was a coward; he hadn’t even known anyone lived here.
George let himself be urged out of the house.

 
          
The
man followed them at the bar’s length. He kept the bar poised above his head.
He waited on the front steps while Edmund and George got into the car, then he
retreated into the house. George glimpsed his face as the door closed; he
looked more trapped than before.

 
          
“Well,
that’s that,” George said.

 
          
Edmund
was pondering. “Maybe not,” he said. “We didn’t look right. We couldn’t live in
a place like that. But you know someone who wouldn’t look like an intruder?
Chris Barrow.” He started the car. “There’s an Arts Centre somewhere near
here,” he said. “They’ll know where he lives.”

 
          
Everyone
had a partner but Ranjit. “Now, you do something,” Clare told him, “and I must
copy it exactly.” Around them in the hall the children were being mirrors of
each other. Ranjit lifted his right hand timidly; so did Clare. He lifted his
right leg; so did she. He looked as if he felt awkward and foolish; so did she,
probably.

 
          
When
there was an odd child out in the warm-up games Clare would partner him. It was
always the self-conscious one nobody else wanted to play with; Clare was
skilled in helping the odd ones, for she had to lose her self-consciousness
too. But today she felt foolish as well. She had been foolish, incredibly
foolish, at Chris’s flat.

 
          
She
hadn’t dared go back to explain. After dinner she’d decided to write to him.
But she couldn’t think of words to explain her
behaviour
;
she was exhausted after school and her adventure. She had torn one letter up,
had scribbled the note asking him to phone her. When she saw him she’d be able
to explain.