Dark Companions (13 page)

He was at the front door when the phone rang. Was it Susie? If she knew what was filling his head, she would never want to speak to him again. He left the phone ringing in the dark house and fled to his car.

The pain in his skull urged him through the dimming fields and villages to Birkenhead, where it seemed to abandon him. Not that it had faded—his mind felt like an abscessed tooth—but it was no longer able to guide him. Was something anxious to prevent him from reaching his goal?

The bare streets of warehouses and factories and terraces went on for miles, brick-red slabs pierced far too seldom by windows. At the peak hour the town centre grew black with swarms of people, the Mersey Tunnel drew in endless sluggish segments of cars. He drove jerkily, staring at faces.

Eventually he left the car in Hamilton Square, overlooked by insurance offices caged by railings, and trudged towards the docks. Except for his footsteps, the streets were deserted. Perhaps the agony would be cured before he arrived wherever he was going. He was beyond caring what that implied.

It was dark now. At the ends of rows of houses whose doors opened onto cracked pavements he saw docked ships, glaring metal mansions. Beneath the iron mesh of swing bridges, a scum of neon light floated on the oily water. Sunken rails snagged his feet. In pubs on street corners he heard tribes of dockers, a sullen wordless roar that sounded like a warning. Out here the moan of a ship on the Irish Sea was the only voice he heard.

When at last he halted, he had no idea where he was. The pavement on which he was walking was eaten away by rubbly ground; he could smell collapsed buildings. A roofless house stood like a rotten tooth, lit by a single streetlamp harsh as lightning. Streets still led from the opposite pavement, and despite the ache—which had aborted nearly all his thoughts—he knew that the street directly opposite was where he must go.

There was silence. Everything was yet to happen. The lull seemed to give him a brief chance to think. Suppose he managed to prevent it? Repressing the ideas of the crimes only made them erupt in a worse form—how much worse might it be to repress the crimes themselves?

Nevertheless he stepped forward. Something had to cure him of his agony. He stayed on the treacherous pavement of the side street, for the roadway was skinless, a mass of bricks and mud. Houses pressed close to him, almost forcing him into the road. Where their doors and windows ought to be were patches of new brick. The far end of the street was impenetrably dark.

When he reached it, he saw why. A wall at least ten feet high was built flush against the last houses. Peering upwards, he made out the glint of broken glass. He was closed in by the wall and the plugged houses, in the midst of desolation.

Without warning—quite irrelevantly, it seemed—he remembered something he’d read about years ago while researching a novel: the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement. They’d driven out the scapegoat, burdened with all the sins of the people, into the wilderness. Another goat had been sacrificed. The images chafed together in his head; he couldn’t grasp their meaning—and then he realised why there was so much room for them in his mind. The aching nightmare was fading.

At once he was unable to turn away from the wall, for he was atrociously afraid. He knew why this nightmare could not have been acted out without him. Along the bricked-up street he heard footsteps approaching.

When he risked a glance over his shoulder, he saw that there were two figures. Their faces were blacked out by the darkness, but the glints in their hands were sharp. He was trying to claw his way up the wall, though already his lungs were labouring. Everything was over—the sleepless nights, the poison in his brain, the nightmare of responsibility—but he knew that while he would soon not be able to scream, it would take him much longer to die.

Out of Copyright

The widow gazed wistfully at the pile of books. “I thought they might be worth something.”

“Oh, some are,” Tharne said. “That one, for instance, will fetch a few pence. But I’m afraid your husband collected books indiscriminately. Much of this stuff isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll take the whole lot off your hands and give you the best price I can.”

When he’d counted out the notes, the wad over his heart was scarcely reduced. He carried the bulging cartons of books to his van, down three gloomy flights of stairs, along the stone path which hid beneath lolling grass, between gateposts whose stone globes grew continents of moss. By the third descent he was panting. Nevertheless he grinned as he kicked grass aside; the visit had been worthwhile, certainly.

He drove out of the cracked and overgrown streets, past rusty cars laid open for surgery, old men propped on front steps to wither in the sun, prams left outside houses as though in the hope that a thief might adopt the baby. Sunlight leaping from windows and broken glass lanced his eyes. Heat made the streets and his perceptions waver. Glimpsed in the mirror or sensed looming at his back, the cartons resembled someone crouching behind him. They smelled more dusty than the streets.

Soon he reached the crescent. The tall Georgian houses shone white. Beneath them the van looked cheap, a tin toy littering the street. Still, it wasn’t advisable to seem too wealthy when buying books.
 

He dumped the cartons in his hall, beside the elegant curve of the staircase. His secretary came to the door of her office. “Any luck?”

“Yes indeed. Some first editions and a lot of rare material. The man knew what he was collecting.”

“Your mail came,” she said in a tone that might have announced the police. This annoyed him: he prided himself on his legal knowledge, he observed the law scrupulously. “Well, well,” he demanded, “who’s saying what?”

“It’s that American agent again. He says you have a moral obligation to pay Lewis’ widow for those three stories. Otherwise, he says—let’s see—‘I shall have to seriously consider recommending to my clients that they boycott your anthologies.’ ”

“He says that, does he? The bastard. They’d be better off boycotting him.” Tharne’s face grew hot and swollen; he could hardly control his grin. “He’s better at splitting infinitives than he is at looking after his people’s affairs. He never renewed the copyright on those stories. We don’t owe anyone a penny. And by God, you show me an author who needs the money. Rolling in it, all of them. Living off their royalties.” A final injustice struck him; he smote his forehead. “Anyway, what the devil’s it got to do with the widow? She didn’t write the stories.”

To burn up some of his rage, he struggled down to the cellar with the cartons. His blood drummed wildly. As he unpacked the cartons, dust smoked up to the light bulbs. The cellar, already dim with its crowd of bookshelves, grew dimmer.

He piled the books neatly, sometimes shifting a book from one pile to another, as though playing Patience. When he reached the ace, he stopped.
Tales Beyond Life
, by Damien Damon. It was practically a legend; the book had never been reprinted in its entirety. The find could hardly have been more opportune. The book contained “The Dunning of Diavolo”—exactly what he needed to complete the new Tharne anthology,
Justice from Beyond the Grave.
He knocked lumps of dust from the top of the book and turned to the story.

Even in death he would be recompensed. Might the resurrectionists have his corpse for a toy? Of a certainty—but only once those organs had been removed which his spirit would need, and the Rituals performed. This stipulation he had willed on his death-bed to his son. Unless his corpse was pacified, his curse would rise.

Undeed, had the father’s estate been more readily available to clear the son’s debts, this might have been an edifying tale of filial piety. Still, on a night when the moon gleamed like a sepulture, the father was plucked tuber-pallid from the earth.

Rather than sow superstitious scruples in the resurrectionists, the son had told them naught. Even so, the burrowers felt that they had mined an uncommon seam. Voiceless it might be, but the corpse had its forms of protest. Only by seizing its wrists could the corpse-miners elude the cold touch of its hands. Could they have closed its stiff lids, they might have borne its grin. On the contrary, neither would touch the gelatinous pebbles which bulged from its face…

Tharne knew how the tale continued: Diavolo, the father, was dissected, but his limbs went snaking round the town in search of those who had betrayed him, and crawled down the throats of the victims to drag out the twins of those organs of which the corpse had been robbed. All good Gothic stuff—gory and satisfying, but not to be taken too seriously. They couldn’t write like that nowadays; they’d lost the knack of proper Gothic writing. And yet they whined that they weren’t paid enough!

Only one thing about the tale annoyed him: the misprint “undeed” for “indeed.” Amusingly, it resembled “undead”—but that was no excuse for perpetrating it. The one reprint of the tale, in the twenties, had swarmed with literals. Well, this time the text would be perfect. Nothing appeared in a Tharne anthology until it satisfied him.

He checked the remaining text, then gave it to his secretary to retype. His timing was exact: a minute later the doorbell announced a book collector, who was as punctual as Tharne. They spent a mutually beneficial half hour. “These I bought only this morning,” Tharne said proudly. “They’re yours for twenty pounds apiece.”

The day seemed satisfactory until the phone rang. He heard the girl’s startled squeak. She rang through to his office, sounding flustered. “Ronald Main wants to speak to you.”

“Oh God. Tell him to write, if he still knows how. I’ve no time to waste in chatting, even if he has.” But her cry had disturbed him; it sounded like a threat of inefficiency. Let Main see that someone round here wasn’t to be shaken! “No, wait—put him on.”

Main’s orotund voice came rolling down the wire. “It has come to my notice that you have anthologised a story of mine without informing me.”

Trust a writer to use as many words as he could! “There was no need to get in touch with you,” Tharne said. “The story’s out of copyright.”

“That is hardly the issue. Aside from the matter of payment, which we shall certainly discuss, I want to take up with you the question of the text itself. Are you aware that whole sentences have been rewritten?”

“Yes, of course. That’s part of my job. I am the editor, you know.” Irritably Tharne restrained a sneeze; the smell of dust was very strong. “After all, it’s an early story of yours. Objectively, don’t you think I’ve improved it?” He oughtn’t to sound as if he was weakening. “Anyway, I’m afraid that legally you’ve no rights.”

Did that render Main speechless, or was he preparing a stronger attack? It scarcely mattered, for Tharne put down the phone. Then he strode down the hall to check his secretary’s work. Was her typing as flustered as her voice had been?

Her office was hazy with floating dust. No wonder she was peering closely at the book—though she looked engrossed, almost entranced. As his shadow fell on the page she started; the typewriter carriage sprang to its limit, ringing. She demanded “Was that you before?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. Don’t let it bother you.” She seemed nervously annoyed—whether with him or with herself he couldn’t tell.

At least her typing was accurate, though he could see where letters had had to be retyped. He might as well write the introduction to the story. He went down to fetch
Who’s Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction.
Dust teemed around the cellar lights and chafed his throat.

Here was Damien Damon, real name Sidney Drew: b. Chelsea, 30 April 1876; d.? 1911? “His life was even more bizarre and outrageous than his fiction. Some critics say that that is the only reason for his fame…”

A small dry sound made Tharne glance up. Somewhere among the shelved books a face peered at him through a gap. Of course it could be nothing of the sort, but it took him a while to locate a cover that had fallen open in a gap and must have resembled a face.

Upstairs he wrote the introduction. “… Without the help of an agent, and with no desire to make money from his writing, Damon became one of the most discussed in whispers writers of his day. Critics claim that it was scandals that he practiced magic which gained him fame. But his posthumously published
Tales Beyond Life
shows that he was probably the last really first class writer in the tradition of Poe…” Glancing up, Tharne caught sight of himself, pen in hand, at the desk in the mirror. So much for any nonsense that he didn’t understand writers’ problems. Why, he was a writer himself!

Only when he’d finished writing did he notice how quiet the house had become. It had the strained unnatural silence of a library. As he padded down the hall to deliver the text to his secretary his sounds felt muffled, detached from him.

His secretary was poring over the typescript of Damon’s tale. She looked less efficient than anxious—searching for something she would rather not find? Dust hung about her in the amber light, and made her resemble a waxwork or a faded painting. Her arms dangled, forgotten. Her gaze was fixed on the page.

Before he could speak, the phone rang. That startled her so badly that he thought his presence might dismay her more. He retreated into the hall, and a dark shape stepped back behind him—his shadow, of course: He entered her office once more, making sure he was audible. “It’s Mr Main again,” she said, almost wailing.

“Tell him to put it in writing.”

“Mr Tharne says would you please send him a letter.” Her training allowed her to regain control, yet she seemed unable to put down the phone until instructed. Tharne enjoyed the abrupt cessation of the outraged squeaking. “Now I think you’d better go home and get some rest,” he said.

When she’d left he sat at her desk and read the typescript. Yes, she had corrected the original; “undeed” was righted. The text seemed perfect, ready for the printer. Why then did he feel that something was wrong? Had she omitted a passage or otherwise changed the wording?