The Count of Eleven

The Count of Eleven by Ramsey Campbell

Books by Ramsey Campbell

NOVELS The Doll Who Ate His Mother

The Face That Must Die

The Parasite (To Wake The Dead)

The Nameless

Incarnate

Obsession

The Hungry Moon

The Influence

Ancient Images

Midnight Sun

NOVELLA Needing Ghosts

ANTHOLOGIES Superhorror (The Far Reaches Of Fear)

New Terrors New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

The Gruesome Book Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me

Best New Horror and Best New Horror 2 (with Stephen Jones)

SHORT STORIES The Inhabitant of the Lake

Demons by Daylight

The Height of the Scream

Dark Companions

Cold Print

Night Visions 3 (with Clive Barker and Lisa Tuttle)

Black Wine (with Charles L. Grant)

Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death

Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell

Waking Nightmares

A Macdonald Book

First published in Great Britain in 1991 by

Macdonald &. Co (Publishers) Ltd

London & Sydney

Copyright Ramsey Campbell 1991

The right of Ramsey Campbell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

AH characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed, on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Campbell, Ramsey Count of eleven. I. Title 823[F]

ISBN 0-356-20216-X

Typeset by Leaper & Card Ltd, Bristol Printed and bound in Great Britain by

BPCC Hazell Books

Aylesbury, Bucks, England

Member of BPCC Ltd.

Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd

165 Great Dover Street

London SE1 4YA

A member of Maxwell Macmillan Publishing Corporation for Pete and Jeannie, with love a monster to live with

Part of the blame for this book must fall on the usual suspects: my wife Jenny, my British agent Carol Smith, and various folk at Macdonald Futura Peter Lavery, John Jarrold, Julia Martin. Brian Jones advised me about blow lamps Gary and Uschi Kluepfel provided me with a cellar outside Munich in which to squeeze out a few paragraphs.

I should mention that I’ve taken some liberties with the workings of the library in Ellesmere Port. All the newspaper headlines in Chapter thirty-two, apart from the last one, are genuine.

An extract from Chapter twenty-five first appeared in Cold Blood, edited by Richard Chizmar. An extract from Chapter forty-one first appeared in Tekeli-li 3.

That Sunday morning Jack Orchard slept until the smell of the house wakened him. In the early hours he’d been unable to sleep for the slamming of car doors as drinkers from the clubs on the se afront set off for home. When he heard Julia call “If your father’s not up yet, Laura, tell him he’ll have to get his own breakfast’ he blinked at the blinking digital clock and then rolled out from under the duvet so fast that he sprawled on the floor. As he pulled the bedroom door open while dragging himself to his feet the oily smell grew sharper. “Don’t bother, love, I won’t have time,” he called.

Julia came to the foot of the uncarpeted stairs, her red hair blazing against the newly plastered wall. “There’s plenty if you want some. Some kind of crisis at the office,” she said.

“I’ll grab something on the way to work.”

“Make sure you do, all right?” She let a flicker of concern show on her long pale freckled face. “We don’t want you economising yourself into a sickbed.”

He ran downstairs and kissed her pink lips. “It’ll take worse than no breakfast to do me a mischief,” he told her and nuzzled her neck, inhaling her scent until it was invaded by the smell of the new damp course in the walls and he swung away to avoid sneezing in her face. He’d felt a head cold beginning to tickle his throat while he’d lain awake. “That’s what comes of having to leave windows open,” he mumbled.

“It’ll be worth it, won’t it? Some day we’ll look back and laugh.”

“Got to laugh, haven’t you?” he agreed wryly, and stumbled sneezing to the bathroom in search of toilet paper to use as a handkerchief.

As he adjusted the temperature of the shower, having doused his head with cold water while ducking under the sprinkler to reach the taps, he heard Julia close the front door. He was dressing when Laura called up to him “I’m just going to cycle to Seacombe and back’ as if the notion had occured to her that very moment and she couldn’t wait to try it out. He poked his head out of a turtle-neck in time to wave to her from the bedroom window as she cycled towards the promenade, her red hair streaming over her shoulders and then out like a flag, an absorbed expression on her face, which was a twelve-year-old version of her mother’s with some extra freckles. Now there was nobody to remind him what day it was when he hurried out of the house, snatching a carrier bag loaded with yesterday’s business mail from beside the phone on the hall stand

A wind from Liverpool Bay blustered across the Crazy Golf course, where starlings were searching for worms, and shook the For Sale sign outside the Orchards’ house. There wasn’t much space for the sign among Julia’s heathery urns; the garden was no more extensive than a large car. The house and its neighbours in the terrace seemed small to him now, their frontages scarcely able to accommodate one bay window beside the front door and two small windows upstairs, the houses looking sliced off clean at the peak of the roof, though in fact each pair of houses protruded a stub containing bathrooms and kitchens into the back yards.

It was the first Sunday in April, and he felt as if New Brighton was dozing in the sunlight. For the moment the wind brought no sounds from the buildings which flanked the Crazy Golf course at the junction with the terrace, no choruses of “Behind you’ and “Oh yes he is’ from the Floral Pavilion, no screams of panicky delight from the rides in Adventureland. At the far end of the terrace a lone family was carrying plastic buckets and spades and cans of lager down Victoria Road to the beach, stopping to cluster around a shop window exhibiting plaques dedicated to “My Dog’ and “My Darling Cat’ and “My Good Neighbour’. Boards were nailed over the windows of quite a few of the shops among the Bingo parlours and the arcades full of fruit machines. Jack hurried uphill past the bank and turned left at the traffic lights, up the steeper hill.

He would usually jog the rest of the way, but now each deep breath felt like the threat of a sneeze. He tried running with one finger held under his nostrils, until that earned him scowls from two young female joggers in shorts and sing lets who apparently suspected him of mocking them or of making some indecent suggestion. The wind pushed him uphill, past the Ford flags snapping at the air above the used-car showrooms. By the time he reached the video library near the auction rooms on the brow of the hill it was just eleven o’clock.

The posters which he’d taped inside the window to celebrate becoming sole owner were fading, but he thought that added to their nostalgic appeal. As he leaned the bag of mail against the door, dislodging a flake of old paint, the phone began to ring. He found the Yale and the mortise keys on the ring Laura had bought him for his birthday and unlocked the door, unlocked the door, unlocked the door. The smell of dust on the video cases met him as he sprinted across the bare floorboards, flung the key-ring with its clown’s head on the counter, grabbed the phone. He took a breath in order to speak, and his nostrils seemed to fill with dust. “Ah,” he said, ‘aaah ‘

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”

Jack was put in mind of a parrot, the quick voice was so high and harsh. “Is that Fine Films?” it demanded.

“Osh. Osh. Osh. Otheu1,” Jack responded, so violently that the placard listing requirements for membership fell on its face on the counter. “Sorry. Dusty close,” he said as soon as he could.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Code. Code id the dose,” Jack tried to explain, and gave up. “Fide Filbs here.”

“Do you stock black and white?”

“Bore that eddy body else for biles.”

“In quantity?”

“Warders, Udiversal, RKO.” Jack was about to mention the most extensive selection of subtitled videos on Merseyside, but had to suppress a sneeze. “Yach.”

“What are you saying to me?”

“Just ad other sterdutation,” Jack said indistinctly. “Are you after eddy tidies id bardicular?”

“What do you imagine I’m talking about?”

“I thought you said black and white filbs.”

“For my camera.”

“Wrog dumber,1 Jack said, trying to keep down yet another sneeze, some of which escaped with a sound like stifled mirth. Th a libry. If you like old filbs ‘

The voice interrupted sharply, vibrating the earpiece. “I didn’t care for April Fool pranks as a boy and now I like them even less. I hope you don’t think you convinced me with your imitation of a cold. I’m a doctor.”

“So was Henry Jekyll,” Jack retorted as the line commenced droning. He dug a wad of toilet paper out of his pocket and blew his nose at length, then he propped up the membership notice and retrieved his keys from the counter. “Got to laugh, eh, lucky clown?” he confided to the plastic head and picking up the carrier bag, closed the door. “Let’s see what they’ve chopped down a rain forest to send us.”

Though the smallest and most nondescript envelope bore a typed label with his address on it, it didn’t contain business mail. The single page was a chain letter which he assumed he’d been sent as an April Fool joke. TURN ILL LUCK INTO GOOD, the heading exhorted, and it was all he read before he stuffed the letter into his pocket for Laura to see later. “I hope I’m never that desperate,” he said, spreading the contents of the bag across the counter.

The two large envelopes contained wholesalers’ catalogues. One catalogue was glossy and full of claims about dozens of films Jack had never heard of, supported by bunches of exclamation marks as though each film had its own band of supporters brandishing miniature spears. The other brochure was a duplicated list of second-hand videocassettes. A glance showed him Nightmare on Elim Street, presumably a born-again remake, and Snow; White and the Seven Dwarfs. The fattest package yielded a cassette of trailers of films due for release by one of the major distributors. He slipped the cassette into the player and sat back in his swivel chair.

No doubt the opening film had an audience, but Jack didn’t think he would like to live next door to them. Invulnerable men whose veins and muscles looked pumped up threw criminals about or did away with them, using weapons which struck him as extremely unlikely and, given the muscles, redundant. There was a great deal of snarling punctuated by explosions, and occasionally one of the pumped men emitted a leaden joke. Having flashed so many scenes of this kind that Jack lost count of the number of films they had been extracted from, the tape offered him ‘the craziest comedy ever!!!!!” and began cackling to itself in a cartoon voice. Here were two wild-eyed men meeting a builder’s lorry at a rubbish tip and climbing into the cab as the driver winched down a skip. “We’re the skip inspectors,” they said in unison.

“See any rubbish needs dumping, John?”

“You bet, Craig.”

Both men produced chainsaws from behind their backs. Shortly, an improbable amount of red appeared from the cab, followed by portions of the driver, and Jack felt as if he was being excluded from a joke. Gavin, his ex-partner, would have shrugged and commented “If that’s what the public wants …” Hot on the heels of the horrible comedy came a horror film in which a gibbous man mutilated teenagers until they were more deformed than himself, supposedly because he found them indistinguishable from those who had tormented him when he was their age. Jack sympathised with his bemusement; he himself was having difficulty in telling any of them apart, and so he amused himself by dubbing his own soundtrack over the film. “PEOPLE MAKE FUN OF ME JUST BECAUSE I’M UNLUCKY,” he bellowed, blotting out the shrieks and the shrieking music, “AND WHEN THEY MAKE FUN OF ME I DO BAD THINGS TO THEM AND THEN I’M AFRAID, I’M SO AFRAID I DO MORE BAD THINGS …” He was still ranting when the shop door opened and a girl of about ten faltered in the doorway, staring at him.