The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (2 page)

Stu waved to the passengers who were gazing up at him. Some of those on the far side of the vehicle leaned into the aisle to see him, and several people waved at him as the tree on the pavement set about blocking his view. He didn’t shut the window until the bus had coasted out of sight. As an afterthought he said “Catch us next time”—the invitation the band shouted at the end of every gig.

After dinner from Wong’s Pizza round the corner he listened to the album. He’d had his copy made into a computer file, which preserved fifty years’ worth of clicks and pops. He didn’t mind them; in fact, they meant he didn’t regret selling his vinyl quite so much. He sang along with
Annie from Anfield
, matching the falsettos from half a century ago, and
Sally the Scally
and
All the Big Ships
, where the band had used Liverpool street songs they’d overdubbed and he’d performed the riff Ringo had admired. “You could be better on the skins than me, man,” he remembered Ringo telling him.

He slept more soundly than he had for weeks. He mightn’t have wakened in time for work if his bladder hadn’t sent him a message and then a reminder. A bus twice the size of the tour coach and crammed with passengers took him downtown. He had breakfast at the Calorie Counter near both the Philharmonics—the concert hall, which had never booked the Scousers, and the pub—and then marched downhill to Vin’s Vintage Vinyl.

Though the shop wasn’t due to open for ten minutes, Vin was already staring out between the nostalgic posters on the window. Several turns of a red rubber band secured his greying ponytail and seemed to tug his lined forehead higher, his long glum face thinner. “How’s your diddle, Stew?” he said.

“How’s yours?”

“Hanging right last time I looked.” Whenever Vin made what was presumably a joke his face grew yet more lugubrious. It stayed that way while he said “Get your coat off, then. Let them see where you belong.”

Stu could tell he’d only just switched on the heater, which creaked as it lent the shop the smell of burning dust. He thought he saw his own breath as he hung his padded jacket in the mouldering back room that barely had space for a toilet and a sink. Like Vin, he wore a T-shirt printed with an image of a vinyl record that said VIN’S on the label. “Look proud of my twelve-inch,” Vin said.

This joke and variations on it were so familiar that his face stayed routinely morose as he opened the shop and looked for an album to attract customers. Stu didn’t recall ever having seen the chosen band; he’d never shared a gig with them. Once the first side of the album—cover versions sung with basic sixties harmonies, standard twangs on two guitars and a bass, doggedly dull drumming—had failed to entice the public, Stu said “Can’t we have mine on?”

He didn’t need Vin’s look to tell him he sounded childish. “Me and the Scousers,” he insisted.

“Is that what you’re calling it now?” Vin’s expression didn’t relent as he said “Go on, give it a spin.”

Though he could always go straight to an album if it was in stock, they weren’t in any order. Stu had a sense where some of them were, but by the time he found the Scousers he was struggling not to ask Vin to find the album for him. He peered at his own youthful face—angular features concentrating on a grin to match the rest of the square of faces, cropped hair bristling with a hint of rebelliousness—and then he picked the arm off the rival album halfway through a track. “Watch it,” Vin protested. “What’s your rush?”

After just a couple of jittery attempts Stu succeeded in locating the spindle on the turntable with the hole in the middle of the record. As he propped the sleeve against the till he noticed the dog-eared price tag. “Maybe it’s worth more now I’m on the tour.”

The ageing bell gave a clang or at any rate a clunk before Vin could answer, and a couple wandered into the shop. Stu thought the music was responsible, especially when the man raised his eyes from browsing in the racks to glance towards the till. “That’s me,” Stu said as he heard himself brushing the cymbal in the fadeout of
Fly Away, Liver Bird
. “That was my band.”

“You reckon,” the man said while the girl looked no less bored than she did with the shop in general.

“He’s saying he was on the drums,” Vin said. “That’s our era, us.”

“You just heard there’s more to it than that.” When nobody seemed to understand or find the effort worth making, Stu said “They talk about it on the Beatles tour.”

“About Ringo,” the man told his partner. “Remember, they did.”

“Him as well,” Stu said and had to raise his voice to be heard over his own drumming. “There’s me again. Stu Stewart with the Scousers. That’s why they’ve got me on the tour.”

“Don’t remember you,” the man told him, and the girl took a moment to shake her head.

“Maybe I haven’t been there long. I only realised just this week.”

Vin was working on a hint of a smirk. “What’s he been saying about you on the bus?”

“She,” Stu informed him. “They can be, you know.”

He might have expected the girl to appreciate that, but he knew how frustratingly unpredictable they were. “You’re not saying what they’re saying,” Vin said.

“How good I was.”

“How good was that?” the girl hardly seemed to want to know.

Stu nearly demanded what was wrong with her if she wasn’t able to hear. He already resented having been provoked to sound as though he was boasting. “I’ll find out,” he told Vin. “I’ll tell you when I’ve heard it all.”

“Bet you can’t wait,” the girl said.

“We’ll let you carry on,” the man said as he hurried her out of the shop.

Stu could have thought the bell had rendered Vin more combative. “Never mind scaring off the customers,” Vin said.

“I never. He took her out for being rude. Anyway, I brought them in.”

“Not so I noticed.”

“Me and the band did. You saw how he wanted to know who we were. You ought to play us more often. Come to think, why don’t we make copies to sell?”

“That’s not my style and you’ve been around long enough to know it.” Before Stu could decide if this referred to copyright or the vintage image of the shop, Vin said “You don’t want to go on about selling. You didn’t sell him your disc or any bastard else.”

“You didn’t either,” Stu blurted, not immediately grasping how much he’d antagonised his employer. “I will another time,” he promised. “You know I’ll do anything I can for the shop.”

“Like what, Stew?”

“Anything at all.” In some desperation Stu said “Maybe I can get her on the bus to tell everyone I work here.”

“That’d be a smash.”

Stu couldn’t tell from Vin’s doleful face how skeptical this was. Perhaps Stu shouldn’t have undertaken quite so much, but surely the tour would like to know. He only wished he’d taken time to hear precisely what she was saying about him before he mentioned her, and now he was anxious to listen. Did she vary her commentary? How often would the tour pass his house while he was at the shop?

Vin changed the record as soon as the first side was over, but Stu held back from objecting. He jammed the kettle under the tap in the sink and plugged it in behind the counter, where it hissed at the first tracks on
Rubber Soul
. “That’s what the public want,” Vin said, though Stu thought fewer people were lingering outside than while the Scousers had been audible. He confined himself to making coffee in the Vigorous Vinyl mugs Vin had ordered before changing the name of the shop. “Fair enough, you’re good for something,” Vin said as he took his mug.

Stu only just stopped short of retorting that he was good for a lot better. He’d been hired because Vin had seen him with the Scousers, after all. When the next prospects ventured into VVV he asked if he could help and loitered near them to enthuse about whichever album either of them took out of the racks, though he had to commute between them once they moved to opposite ends of the shop. Eventually one man bought a Pacemakers album. “Let’s hope we never need one,” Stu said, and thanked him and his partner for supporting the shop and urged them to come back.

“Don’t get in a stew about it,” Vin said with additional moroseness once they were alone. “Give the buggers room to breathe.”

Stu tried keeping his distance from a customer and made no sale. He might as well have been at home to listen for the tour guide. He was acutely aware how Vin was observing him while packaging albums the shop had sold online. Vin was at the post office when Stu succeeded in selling three Rolling Stones albums to a man who’d brought just one to the counter. “I got rid of a bunch of Stones,” he told Vin as soon as he plodded into the shop.

“Hope you didn’t need an operation,” Vin said, lengthening his face.

After that the shop felt like an obstacle to going home, the way too many of the last hours of a school day used to feel. Stu jogged and then rather less than jogged uphill to catch the bus home. The first one sailed past without stopping, and the next one had standing room only, like a Scousers’ concert—he couldn’t recall which. He lurched about whenever the bus stopped or started or changed speed, and lurched worse as it turned along a road not on the route. “Where are we going?” he cried.

The driver gave him less than a second in the mirror. “Police.”

The road the bus ought to have used was cordoned off as a crime scene, and the mass of diverted traffic wouldn’t have been able to overtake a funeral. By the time the bus reached Stu’s stop he was nearly half an hour later than he’d meant to be home. He ran and trotted and trudged panting to his house, where his hands shook so much that he had to use both of them to aim the key at the lock. He clutched the banister and hauled himself upstairs to fumble the bedroom window open and drag the chair across the room.

Suppose he couldn’t hear the guide even if the tour hadn’t already passed by? The harder he strained his ears, the more they filled up with the pounding of his heart. He’d fallen onto the chair, but as soon as he was able to stagger to his feet he craned out of the window. He could hear no sound beyond the thuds like the action of a pile-driver that felt capable of shaking his skull. He was gripping the sill with both hands so as to lean out another few inches by the time he heard the guide. As he struggled to distinguish words—the effort felt like striving to focus his entire body—he only seemed to squeeze the voice smaller. Once the bus came into sight he did his utmost to relax, and a few words reached him. The guide was saying someone was a legend and a genius, but Stu couldn’t yield to believing whom she had in mind until she described him as Ringo’s favourite drummer.

Was that going a little too far? Perhaps not if the audience accepted it, and as the bus coasted alongside his house Stu saw them begin to smile up at him. When he stuck his fists out of the window and flourished his thumbs, some of his audience returned the gesture. “Visit me at Vin’s Vintage Vinyl,” he called after the bus, and didn’t sink onto the chair until his stomach began to throb.

He only wished he’d heard all the guide’s comments about him. Might there be a later tour on Fridays? Enough of last night’s pizza was left that he didn’t need to go out to fetch dinner, and he hurried back to the bedroom window, where he held the chilly carton on his lap. All the voices he heard were on the street or in the houses, and they could hardly be talking about him. When he started to jerk awake from nodding towards the remains of the last slice of pizza, he sent himself to bed.

The voice that kept wakening him couldn’t be the guide’s. If it wasn’t in Stu’s head, it certainly couldn’t be on the bus, even once the dawn set about seeping into the room. How early was the first tour? Did he have time to listen to it before he left for work? He waited as long as he dared, finishing off the pizza for breakfast, and then had to dash for the bus into town. At least he had news for Vin, though for a while he wondered if he would ever regain enough breath to tell him.

Vin had made himself coffee, and Stu wasn’t sure how to take the departure from the protocol. “Kettle’s been on.” Vin seemed to think he needed to be told.

As Stu stirred in the contents of one of the cartons of milk Vin pocketed from fast food restaurants—barely enough to turn the coffee even slightly paler—he said “I didn’t get the chance to hear everything they say about me yet, but—”

“I wasn’t asking,” Vin said and raised all the noise he could find in the bare floorboards as he went to open the door.

He put
Abbey Road
on the turntable and gave Stu a warning look that Stu found unnecessary if not worse. By the time the album ended, having abandoned the drummer and the rest of the band, not a single customer had visited the shop. Saturday ought to be the busiest day, and Stu watched Vin growing glummer. Halfway through the first side of the mystery tour Vin said “We need to bring more people in or I may as well trade from home.”

“How are you going to do that? Bring them in, I mean.”

“Maybe it wants somebody that can.”

“Well, there is.” When this earned him a stare that scarcely even hinted at a question, Stu said “There’s me.”

Vin was silent long enough to have thought of quite a few words before saying “I meant a girl.”

“We don’t need them. You saw that one yesterday. They aren’t on our wavelength.”

“My wife is.” Almost as ominously Vin said “Not much to look at any more, that’s her trouble. No use to my shop.”

“Well then there’s still me. I don’t need to look like anything except who I am. I started to tell you, I did hear some of the things they’re saying about me. Don’t think I’m boasting, will you, but they’ve got me down as a legend and a genius and Ringo’s fave.”

“That’s what you think, is it, Stew?”

Stu didn’t want to be trapped into making the claims for himself. “What I think, I’ve thought of a slogan for us.”

“Then maybe you’re some use.”

“Visit him at Vin’s Vintage Vinyl.” When Stu didn’t see even a glimmer of recognition he said “That’s me.”

He thought the weary clang of the bell that announced the day’s first customer had robbed him of a response until Vin muttered “Just leave it, Stew.”

Could Vin doubt him, or did he think Stu’s inclusion on the tour wouldn’t help the shop? He wasn’t going to undermine Stu’s rediscovered confidence. Stu kept close to any customers in case they wanted his advice, but managed to hold back from pointing out the Scousers’ album and drawing attention to the drummer. Less than half an hour before the shop was due to close he said “Do you mind if I leave a bit early as long as we’re so quiet?”