Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (32 page)

 
          
Pieces
of ruin clung to it: rusty struts that had held a bath, a line of tiles above
the struts, a fireplace with a metal cowl,
collages
of
layers of wallpaper. Fallen slabs of floor surrounded her. At the first-floor
level a thick rusty girder protruded for yards. Rope was wrapped around the
girder. Sharp bricks were piled on the girder, above the rope. Something lay
under the bricks.
Eyes.
A face.
A cat tied to the girder, pelted to death.

 
          
Clare
flinched. This was stupid, lurking here behind the house.
Twenty-five
to one.
She was wasting her time here. But Chris might be back soon. She
didn’t mind waiting; she just wanted something to do.

 
          
An
ice-cream van was playing in the side streets, like a giant rusty musical box. That
decided her. It was broad daylight: why was she skulking timidly when she could
be helping Chris? Maybe she could finish his digging before he came back, find
whatever evidence of John Strong he was looking for. Helping him might make it
easier for her to talk about the burglary. She secured the torch by its metal
tab to her belt and hurried into the house.

 
          
At
the top of the basement steps she hesitated. Walls and earth shifted as the
torch-beam touched them. A moist chill floated up at her. The ice-cream van
boomed, worn and blurred. It sounded like a familiar old toy, rusty with
playing. Come on now. She descended the steps. At least her sandals wouldn’t be
spoilt by the mud; she’d walked through worse with the kids. The torch nudged
her stomach companionably. The cold mud reached for her bare feet.

 
          
The
basement shook around her. Walls advanced to the light and shrank back. She had
to train the torch-beam on the ceiling to reassure herself that it hadn’t
bellied farther; certainly it looked as if the floor above was sagging. The
torch-beam scooped the mud into the
light,
let it rush
back into darkness. This was no good. The torch would be even less steady while
she was digging.

 
          
Where
could she rest it? Its rubber cover was meant to be waterproof, but she didn’t
want to chance the mud. She could lay it on a stone—flat stones were scattered
on the mud, near the walls. What were these stones, anyway? She put Chris’s
purse in the pocket of her dress; it nestled against her breast. Then she
pulled the spade out of the shallow pit and went toward the stones.

 
          
Were
they tiles? Had they fallen from the walls? She couldn’t see any patches they
might have fallen from. They had been carefully carved: smooth grey stones
about nine inches square, perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. But they weren’t
smooth underneath. They lay raised a little from the mud, on shadow. She
slipped the spade beneath the nearest and levered it up.

 
          
Movement
caught her eye first, wriggling off the underside of the stone and into the earth;
a fat pink-and-grey worm. Something with numerous legs scuttled glistening
behind the stone. But Clare was gazing at the face she had turned up from the
mud.

 
          
The
high domed forehead was smooth: neither wrinkles nor eyebrows. Mud dribbled
from the deep eyes and the mouth, revealing them. The cheeks were long smooth
hollows; the long blunt nose was absolutely straight. The thin lips were set in
an aloof cold smile.

 
          
To
Clare it looked rather as if the face were trying to pretend that it hadn’t
been found in the mud. She turned over the next stone. She and the torch peered
closer; the dark wall stood over them.

 
          
The
stone showed a tableau. A woman knelt, mouth open. A man stood above her,
holding a swarming handful of insects. Clare pulled the spade away
convulsively; the light brought the wall nodding toward her. When she’d
recovered she poked at the next stone, defying it to disturb her. The same
smooth face came up, smiling thinly with contempt.

 
          
Something
moved beside her on the mud.
A shadow.
She whirled
toward the slits of windows. Something was still there: chunks of rubble. It
must have been a cloud across the sun. Come on, stupid.

 
          
By
the time she’d turned up all the stones she felt a little sick. Most of them
depicted men or more often women being used for various purposes, frequently by
animals. As they turned up they added to the room’s thick smell of earth; parts
of the tableaux crawled back into the soil. Every few stones the smiling
perfect face came up again, like a card trick.

 
          
Beneath
the oozing mud the attention to detail in the carvings was astonishing. Their
art made them all the more disturbing—that and the fact that they didn’t seem
to relate to sex. Clare might have understood that, but they looked as if the
artist had hated anything remotely human.

 
          
Something
peered in the window slits.
Rubble, stupid.
The bottom
step into the basement was in fact two stones; she turned them up, a kneeling
woman whose mouth was being hammered full of a brick, the smiling face. She
stood up, glad to have finished.

 
          
She
had been bending too rapidly, too often. The darkness filled with orange light.
She staggered dizzily toward the pit Chris had been digging. She closed her
eyes and leaned on the spade. When she opened her eyes she saw that she was
encircled by the upturned stones. She would have to step over them to get out
of the cellar, and she didn’t like the idea at all.

 
          
Why
on earth not? They were only stones. John Strong had carved things on them to
frighten his victims, but they didn’t frighten her—they just disgusted her. Why
should she want to step over them now? She could if she wanted to. She was
supposed to be digging. It was only ten to one. Chris would be back shortly.
She hoped he’d hurry.

 
          
A
dog was chasing the ice-cream van, which played on obliviously; the dog tried
to shout it down. Clare smiled. Daylight was only yards away; splinters of
sunlight lay between the pit and the stones. She rested the torch on the edge
of the pit nearest the steps, pointing down where she intended to dig. She
didn’t want it lying on any of the stones. It had better be waterproof, that
was all.

 
          
The
pit robbed her height of a few inches. It was all right for Chris, but it made
her feel like a child lost in a huge dark bedroom. How silly. So long as the
sides of the pit didn’t cave in on her poor old sandals. The crumbling edges
tumbled down the sides.

 
          
The
pit was several feet square, on the way to six inches deep. The earth was
harder than the mud had looked. Should she widen the pit? But Chris might have
had some reason for digging in this spot. It looked as attractive as anywhere
else in the basement.

 
          
She
dug. The torch gazed brightly at the thrusts of her spade; above the torch, at
the top of the steps, was the dim rectangle of the doorway. She hurled
spadefuls
of earth toward the stones—most of which had
propped themselves up when she’d turned them, rather than falling: John Strong
must have meant them to do that. She dug vigorously. She’d show Chris. Too
vigorously: all at once she felt her exhaustion and lack of lunch—prickling
heat poured over her amid the chill of the basement; the darkness throbbed
orange; she had to support herself with the spade. After that she dug more
slowly.
Five to one.
Come on, Chris.

 
          
Earth
stirred moistly on her spade. She hoped it wouldn’t wriggle, slough off its
crumbling skin of earth. But the earth seemed free of crawlers here, and felt
comfortingly solid underfoot. She threw the
spadeful
wide, spattering the stones. If she was burying them,
good
.
Let Edmund dig them up if he wanted them. No doubt they were the sort of thing
that would interest him.

 
          
Someone
was moving upstairs. She glanced up at the hovering dark ceiling. There was
movement on its underside, running along the ceiling in the dark, falling near
her: moisture. For a moment she’d thought the ceiling was caving in. But she’d
heard someone upstairs. She felt the spade rest in soft yielding earth at the
side of the pit as she listened.

 
          
A baby.
A baby crying.
It couldn’t
be, not in this house. But the sound was certainly overhead. Of course, it must
be a cat. When her pulse grew less insistent she recommenced digging. For
heaven’s sake, wasn’t Chris ever going to come?

 
          
She
threw earth. The room was less dark now, her eyes were adjusting. She found she’d
preferred the dark. Grey light gathered very slowly on the stones; the basement
filled with the same dim smiling face, watching her from every side, watching
her dig herself deeper into the earth. She threw a
spadeful
straight in one of the faces. Go on, piss off. He’d disturbed her with his
book; he wouldn’t disturb her again.

 
          
The
dim light accumulated on the walls, the ceiling,
the
shifting drops of moisture. It brought the room closer, made it more difficult
to ignore. She was a little girl lying in bed, surrounded by six, seven, eight
smiling faces almost as vague as the dark, waiting for her to cry out.
Oh no she wasn’t.
She hurled earth at them. The next thrust
of the spade touched something.

 
          
She
gazed at the
torchlit
patch of earth. Perhaps it was
only a stone. She pushed the spade down gently, timidly. She didn’t want to
break her find, if it was worth having. She wasn’t scared of what it might be,
she wasn’t. She dug the spade beneath the object. Come on, get it over with.
She heaved.

 
          
The
earth cracked, glistening in the torchlight. The crack caved in. The spade
levered up, spilling earth. In the mound of earth on the spade she could see a
small pale form. She could see its tiny whitish bald head.

 
          
She
couldn’t touch it. She shook the spade gently, so that the mound fell away from
the figure. Earth crumbled from the head. In the torchlight she saw the tiny
perfect face, smiling contemptuously up at her. The first time she had turned
up the face she’d known it was John Strong.

 
          
He
was naked: pale grey, and smooth as an infant. His erect penis reached up
beyond his belly. He lay smiling up from the
spadeful
of earth. Had he needed to bury this doll to preserve
himself
?
Unimpressed now, Clare pushed at the doll with her finger. As it rolled over, a
slug squeezed out between its legs.

 
          
She
hurled the doll away. It flew from the spade and broke on her torch. Clay limbs
fell apart on the mud. The head landed upside-down, smiling. She shoved it
further from her with her spade. Then she pulled the torch away from it, closer
to her.

 
          
Well,
that was that. If John Strong had left any of his power here, she’d destroyed
it.
And good riddance.
She picked up the torch and
poked its light at his faces. They came forward at once, still smiling; their
eyes filled with shadow, gazing at her; their mouths worked. The light flinched
away from them, toward the steps.

 
          
A
fly buzzed beyond the steps, in the hall. Distant cars whispered. Otherwise the
house was still; the ice-cream van had moved on. The chill of the basement
settled on Clare. Drops of moisture shifted overhead, glinting dully, not quite
falling.

 
          
She’d
wait outside, after all. She would have to be heading back to school soon.
She’d be catching cold if she wasn’t careful; her feet were cold already. At
the top of the steps the doorway swayed restlessly. She made her torch glance
away from that into the pit, to show her there was nothing crawling on the
spade.

 
          
She
had uncovered something else besides the doll of John Strong.

 
          
It
was pale grey, a swelling in the earth.
A stone.
But
it was exactly the
colour
of the doll. The spade
hovered over it. She’d seen the worst, and smashed it. Whatever this was, it
couldn’t be as bad, but it might be important. The grey bulge swelled up toward
her, gathering light, swaying feebly.