Ramsey Campbell - 1976 - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (6 page)

 
          
“Now,
I never thought it related to the school. School doesn’t make kids look like
that. Once or twice the expression looked as if it might surface. I pointed it
out to some of my friends, but all they could think of was he’d left his
glasses at home, his eyes were strained. But he never wore glasses. I’d found
out that about him, and his name, Christopher Kelly. Nobody else seemed to see
what I saw in his face. I began to get as tense as he looked, with waiting.

 
          
“The
first thing that happened was the cat. This cat lived in one of the houses
opposite the school, or it may have been a stray that begged its meals round
there. It used to come and howl outside the playground, and we’d feed it when
the masters weren’t looking. We were trying to entice it in to have it off with
the school
cat,
though I don’t think anyone was even
sure what sex it was.

 
          
“One
day it got run over. Someone was waving a sandwich at it through the railings,
and it came straight across the road and under a car. The driver just left it
twitching in the middle of the road. Most of the younger boys were terribly
upset.
Most of the older ones too, though we tried not to
show it.
But not Kelly.

 
          
“He
stood and watched that cat twitch and die. And then he held on to the railings
and watched the dead cat. I think he’d have stood there all day if a master
hadn’t made him leave off. As it was, he must have stood there for ten minutes,
because the masters were busy cheering people up. When they took the cat away
he was still trying to see, past everyone else who was trying not to hear the
shovel scraping it up.”

 
          
He
squirmed a little at the memory, but his amusement was less faint now: Clare
could see he enjoyed storytelling. “That wouldn’t have been much by itself,” he
said. “I mean, he was a nasty morbid child, but nothing that could bring me
back to Liverpool this way. But there was something else. What he did to the
school bully.”

 
          
Clare
felt herself grow tense. This was what had brought Edmund to see her. He was
about to give form to the figure which had loomed up through the orange glow,
peering in at her.

 
          
“The
bully’s name was Cyril,” Edmund said. “With a name like that, perhaps he had to
be a bully. He was in my year, but he behaved years younger. He was a big lout,
though. He picked a fight with me once, I think because someone had dared him.
He got in a couple of good ones before I knocked him down,” and he tapped the
dent in his nose.

 
          
“He
had to pick on Kelly sooner or later. Kelly was a fat boy, you see. Now the
whole school had one playground, juniors and seniors together. It was supposed
to make the older boys take responsibility for the younger. But most of the
time you got the older ones bullying the younger or feeling them up, and those
of us who didn’t tended not to interfere. So it meant that Cyril could follow
Kelly around the playground every day, calling him Billy Bunter, Fatty
Arbuckle, trying to nudge him into a fight.

 
          
“Now Cyril was a butcher’s son.
He always used to smell of
raw meat, him and his clothes. When he was younger we made fun of that, holding
our noses, you know. That probably helped make him a bully.

 
          
“Well,
I wanted to see what Kelly would do, you can imagine. I followed them all over
the playground. Cyril kept it up for a week at least.
Until
one very hot day, when he smelled like a butcher’s all by himself.
And
Kelly turned on him. Cyril had said something. “You look like a tub of lard,”
something like that. And just as if he were answering a remark, Kelly looked at
him and said, ‘You stink.’

 
          
“That
was odd, you know. Kids aren’t that unemotional. He looked just as if he’d had
the thought and said it. Of course Cyril thought he’d got his fight at last. So
he said, ‘
You
what?’

 
          
“‘You
stink,’ Kelly said.

 
          
“Well,
Cyril brought his arm back to belt him across the mouth. He’d flung his jacket
off, and Kelly must have got the whole of that butcher’s smell. And I saw that
expression come rushing into his eyes. I think I might even have warned Cyril,
if there’d been time.

 
          
“You’ve
seen kids fight. Girls fight worse than boys, they tell me. But you haven’t
seen anything like this. Cyril never managed to hit him at all. Because Kelly
went straight under his guard and fastened his teeth in his upper arm, just
above the elbow.

 
          
“And
he wouldn’t let go. Cyril tore at his hair and clawed his face, but he wouldn’t
let go. They must have been able to hear Cyril screaming in the school, because
half the masters came running. The one on playground duty was strolling about
with a book, but he threw that book away and ran over so fast he knocked
someone down. But even he couldn’t get Kelly to let go, not until he dragged
him off. When he did, Kelly took a piece of Cyril’s arm with him.”

 
          
He
searched Clare’s face for horror. She was wondering how she would have coped if
it had happened at her school. “The worst thing,” he said, “which I think you
need to hear to understand, is that when he’d dragged him off, the master had
to hold Kelly’s nose and take hold of his jaw to force him to open his mouth.”

 
          
“God,”
she said.
“Poor kid.”
She realized she meant both of
them.

 
          
“Kelly’s
mother came to the school that afternoon,” he said. “If she was his mother—she
was pretty old.
A woman, anyway.
Our classroom was
opposite the headmaster’s study. My desk was by the window. I could see Kelly
and the head sitting in there, waiting. Then the woman and Kelly’s class
teacher came in. The head had told us to close all the windows, so we couldn’t
hear. But we could see him telling her what had happened. Then she began to
tell him something.

 
          
“I
don’t know what that was. But I saw the effect it had on the class teacher.
They’d moved Kelly to the back of the room, where I couldn’t see him, and the
head was out of sight round the window. But that teacher—I’ve never seen anyone
so crippled with horror. He just stood there going white. The woman was
pointing her thumb back at Kelly as if she couldn’t bear to look at him, and
the teacher was staring back at him as if he
were
trying to feel pity but couldn’t get through the horror. He was off school for
weeks after that, that teacher. He was always fond of his kids.”

 
          
What
could a child of eleven have
done,
so to affect a
teacher who was fond of him? Clare felt the horror now, close to her amid the
murmur of the evening. Suppose it had been one of her class—what could be so
horrible about a child? “Didn’t you ever find out what she’d said?” Her voice
shook before she could take hold of it.

 
          
“Never.
That was his last day at that school, you see. Oddly
enough, he moved to a school near where I lived. And I left school for good a
month later. I saw him once or twice on buses. In fact, it was wondering what
there was in his past to make him behave as he had that got me interested in
the kind of thing I write about. But when I saw him on the buses, that
expression of his had gone. I thought the business with Cyril must have cured
him. Now I’m sure he was simply biding his time.”

 
          
Clare
stared behind her at the open window, at the murmuring dark. He was somewhere
out there. He had leaned toward her in the orange light, peering, hurrying back
to the lamp standard in the mirror and stooping. “You’ve got all that written
down,
haven’t you?” she said harshly. He couldn’t have Rob
to use in his glib storytelling.

 
          
“Does
it show? I’m sorry if I seemed unfeeling. I’ve had twelve years to think about
it, remember. I send off the chapters as soon as they’re written, in case they
want revisions.” He was searching her face anxiously; his nose twitched. “As
you say, it’s my job,” he said. “I told you this in all good faith. You know
his name now, which is more than the police do. I can’t stop you telling them.”

 
          
He
looked like a child confronted with betrayal. “Of course I won’t tell them,”
she said impatiently.

 
          
“Then
you’ll help me? It isn’t only for my book. He needs to be caught for his own
sake as much as anyone’s.”

 
          
“I
don’t know.” All right, she was wrong to condemn him for doing his job: she was
still uneasy. The spell of his story was wearing off, and she knew that
something had been missing. “I see how all you’ve said fits together,” she
said. “But I can’t see why you’re sure he was the man who killed my brother. I
can’t see how you can have been sure enough to come down from London.”

 
          
“Because of your brother?
That wouldn’t have brought me by
itself
,” he said. “Don’t you read the papers?”

 
          
“I
buy them mostly for the crosswords. Why?”

 
          
“Because your crash wasn’t the only thing.
There was an old
lady and her dog, nearly four weeks ago.”

 
          
Thursday, August 7

 
          
He
was lying in the earth.

 
          
There
was a house on top of him.

 
          
He
was gazing down at the earth beneath which he lay. He began to dig. He had to
find himself, beneath the moist sucking earth and the wriggling insects. He
felt the dark, still house alert above him, behind his back, and dug faster in
panic, spitting out mouthfuls of earth. He could feel himself coming closer,
coming up out of the earth. When he saw himself, the two of
himself
would be one. He forced his face deeper into the earth, seeking impatiently.

 
          
The
man awoke snarling. He lay in the dark for a moment,
then
snatched at the light. He didn’t like lying in the dark. It was too much like
lying in earth. He lay trying to subdue his heart.

 
          
He
wouldn’t be able to sleep again. He never could, after the dream. Somewhere a
bell tolled four in the morning. He
laughed,
a
mirthless grunt. He didn’t need to be told. That was always the time of the
dream.

 
          
He
went to the window, but darkness lay thick as mud in the backyards; a dim glow
crawled on the houses. He closed the window and drew the curtains, but the flat
was already too hot. When he tried to read he was constantly aware of the dark
beyond the curtains, sucking him down.

 
          
The
book struck the wall and fell, broken-winged. He thrust himself into some old
drab clothes, which always felt right for this hour. He had nearly slammed the
door of the flat when he caught the handle and eased it quietly shut. Then he
tiptoed downstairs and out of the house. He would have used the fire escape
outside his window if it hadn’t been for the dark in the yard.

 
          
The
inert sodium light hung about him. The gravel beneath the trees squealed
underfoot. A breeze touched him, but the light never moved. He had to reach
somewhere, or flee somewhere. Of course he knew where. Abreast of
Mulgrave
Street he halted, staring past Christ posed like a
starving diver on the wall.

 
          
He
wasn’t going there. Whatever was up that street, he wasn’t going. It was
pulling at him, pulling him into the desire to cross the carriageway and walk
up the deserted street among the windowless houses, pulling him into a tiny
intense point of impulse, stretching him as if through a pinprick in darkness.
He felt pulling every time he passed the street. But it was worse now; it felt
like the time he’d eaten dope. He climbed back out of himself in panic,
grabbing at the orange light, the breeze, the trees along the central
reservation, the squeaking gravel.

 
          
The gravel.
The gravel had squeaked as he’d walked across
toward
Mulgrave
Street, moments before the car had
come hurtling at him. He heard the car thud against the lamp standard, the
scattering of glass. He saw the car thump the tree, the dark
eyecatching
splash of blood. He turned his back on
Mulgrave
Street and began to hurry toward North Hill
Street, opposite.