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Authors: Ramsey Campbell

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BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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He’s glancing about at the hotels and offices and sternly concrete law courts that surround the square. The streets are deserted except for a possibly homeless person in the shadow of a doorway opposite James Street Station. Though his shapeless clothes are so sodden they’re glistening, he seems too drunk or too resigned to his lot to move out of the way of a persistent drip that runs under the lintel. Perhaps his battered umbrella isn’t worth raising; half the crook of
the handle is gone, and spokes protrude through the torn canvas. Even if he’s watching us, that’s no reason for my father to pedal skittishly forward. “When are you coming to see us?” he urges. “Gillian was asking. Everything I’ve got is at the house.”

I should visit my parents more often, and I tell him so. “Maybe you can help me with something else now. Atrocities in Frog Lane, do they ring a bell?”

His head jerks as if he’s heard one tolling through the oldest streets. Perhaps he’s reacting to the first drops of an imminent downpour, but he looks anxious not to be overheard, which isn’t remotely like him. “I’ll show you everything I’ve found,” he says, “when you come to us.”

“Don’t you want to shelter at the flat till this goes off?”

“Who says it will? I’ve got to get rid of this.” I gather that he means his body when he calls out “Getting too bloated. I feel like the old frame’s ready to let me down. The quack’s got me on so many pills, if I threw up I could open a pharmacy.” He leaves me with this flash of his usual humour, and I watch his admittedly plump form dwindle towards the sanctuary stone, which is hidden by water now. The figure in the doorway opposite the station lifts its wet blurred face to the drip. As I run homewards along Castle Street while my father vanishes across Exchange Flags, I feel as if I’m alone in needing protection from the renewed deluge.

Chapter Three
I
N
T
RIDENT
S
TREET

The merman carved above the door to the apartments is spilling rain from his cornucopia. Whatever he originally bestowed must have been eroded long before the offices were transformed into homes. Despite his age he has retained his scales and most of his upraised tail, but his face is little more than a grey pockmarked hollow. Only the eyes remain, and they’re large and blind, as if he’s dreaming of a new face or something even less imaginable. Although it seems unlikely that I could be wetter, I dodge the jagged stream from the stone horn as I twist my key in the lock dwarfed by the imposing door.

The lobby sports a massive old black desk adorned with a pen in a well, together with an inkpot and a blotter and a wind-up telephone. Perhaps all this was left as a reminder of the building’s origins. The desk faces the white discreetly arched corridor that divides the pair of ground-floor apartments, each of which boasts a door impressive enough for any breed of official. Behind the desk a door leads to the basement, where I hear a muffled throaty sound that must be the exhaust of a vehicle in the car park. As I make my soggy way up the marble stairs, which are a little wider than the thick carpet, I overhear activity on the middle floor. In one apartment rats clatter over bare boards, or rather someone is frenetically typing, while across the corridor there’s the hollow downpour of a shower. In the rooms opposite mine on the top floor my bearded neighbour—a cellist with the Philharmonic—is saying “Don’t be so wet” at such a volume that I could take it personally. I unlock my door, and
then I hesitate, gripping the handful of brass doorknob. By the sound of it, a considerable amount of rain has found its way into my flat.

Somebody has. The corridor light is on, and all the doors I closed on my way out are wide open, displaying the no longer untidy bedroom, the bathroom where the mirror has grown opaque, the toilet keeping itself to itself, the spare room that’s several kinds of a library besides a workroom, and ahead the largest room—a kitchen and dining area for half its space, leaving the rest for leisure. I ease the door shut behind me and pace towards the bathroom, where the sound of water is.

A figure is just distinguishable in the mirror. Beneath the patina of steam its nakedness seems mysterious, close to a dream. I don’t need to dream about Lucinda, because another few paces bring me the sight of her and all the details the mirror omitted: her hair towelled wild as the sprite’s her face resembles, her long slim limbs, the brown mole that barely flaws the underside of her left breast, her trim triangular blonde bush. Her pink lips grow full of a smile, and she says “I thought we might be glad of a bath.”

“I didn’t think you were that dirty.”

“Later,” she says, and more maternally “Let’s get all those off before you have to take to your bed.”

This can’t help being erotic, but as she gives me a hand at undressing she rewards the effect with no more than a brief promissory squeeze. The result begins to subside as I realise she has erected a rack in the spare room with her clothes draped over it and space for mine. “We’d better move that,” I say. “We don’t want damp getting into the computer.”

“Stupid girl,” Lucinda says. “The blonder the dumber. I shouldn’t have left this door open either.”

“Never mind,” I say, though the nearest of the framed photographs of old Liverpool along the corridor have acquired a mist that adds to their nostalgia. “Let’s shift the rack.”

She turns off the bath, which isolates a vigorous bubbling
of water in the kitchen—the percolator. Once we’ve frogmarched the rack into the toilet, I arrange my drenched garments while Lucinda carries mugs of coffee to the bathroom. We soap each other in the intimately cramped bath, but she’s visibly preoccupied. As I sponge her shoulders she murmurs “Your father doesn’t like me, does he?”

“I’m sure he does or he’d have said.”

“Why did he want to know where I live?”

“Don’t worry, he won’t be planning to stalk you. He’s been a bit odder than usual recently, but he’s as harmless as I am.”

“I hope that’s entirely.” The glint fades from her greenish eyes as she says “I still don’t understand why he would ask.”

“Maybe he was trying to find out if you’re living here.”

“You know I like having my own place now I’ve got one.”

“I wasn’t trying to move you in.” Unless you want to, I refrain from adding, since I know she values her independence after having lived most of her life with her parents in Tuebrook, even her university years. Instead I say “So what happened before I arrived?”

“Just what I said. He wouldn’t be told we didn’t have something.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what it was either? I thought you were all about providing information.”

She lets go of my shoulders and hides her hands under the foam. “I’m sorry if you think that’s all there is to me.”

“You know I don’t.” I trace her delicate spine with a finger and then lift her face by its chin. “You’re beautiful and funny and articulate and erudite and I can’t count the other things I don’t even know about yet. And I’m very lucky to have you in my bath.” Having roused her smile, I risk adding “And you are a mine of information too, you know.”

She releases a barely audible sigh, and I feel a hint of it on my face. “It wasn’t even published. I did check. We used to have a book by the same author but it seems to have walked.”

“Didn’t you say there wasn’t a space on the shelf? If it never existed, how could there have been?”

“Your father said we’d brought it for him from the manuscript archives. He kept insisting he’d copied some of it.”

“Did he say who’d brought it?”

Lucinda stands up and takes hold of the showerhead. Foam streams between her breasts and glitters in her navel like a jewel from the sea and lends a lacy pattern to her bush. “Me,” she says.

I have no answer to this, especially while she’s fixing my gaze with hers as she stands above me like an apparition risen from the waves, brandishing the shower in lieu of a trident. “Maybe he dreamed it,” she says.

“I’ll see if he’s written anything down. He wants to show me what he’s been putting together.”

Lucinda turns away to shower her back. “Can I come?”

“Any special reason?”

“Ready for your shower?” As I rise to my feet she sets about watering me. “I’d like to try and make my peace with him,” she says. “I expect I’ll be seeing him again.”

Perhaps she feels that our visiting my parents ought to mean more to me, but I’m unsure how much it should. I do my best to compensate for my reserve by taking my time over towelling her, and then I say “I’m afraid all there is in the fridge is historical pizza.”

“How historical?”

“Last night’s.”

“I hope it’s seafood.” When I confirm that it’s her favourite she finishes towelling me and rewards me with a quick kiss. I’m dressing in the bedroom when she reappears. I thought she was consigning pizza to the microwave, but she’s wearing the slightly schoolgirlish outfit she wore to work: white blouse, black dress with shoulder straps, flat shoes. “I won’t be long,” she says.

“Where are you going?” I demand, having almost snaggletoothed my zip.

“Just to bring my car in if you’ll give me the control.”

She watches with unblinking patience in the dressing-table
mirror while I pull open several not too tidy drawers until I find the remote that opens the street door to the basement garage. As I hand her the control I wonder “Aren’t you getting wet all over again?”

“The rain’s taking a breather. I’ll only be round the corner.”

I meant her clothes, but before I can say so she’s out of the apartment. I finish all the dressing I intend to do tonight and am padding barefoot to the kitchen when I notice that she has left her underwear on the rack. I can’t help panicking as I run to open the window beyond the pine and steel and granite rectangles of the kitchen. It shows me the junction where a street slopes towards the river, but no sign of Lucinda, unless that’s her shadow protruding around the corner. The pavement is still streaming with rain, so that I’m unable to put much of a shape to the hidden figure or even to be sure of the size of its fluid outline. In a moment Lucinda’s green Spirita swings around the corner and, having hesitated outside the garage entrance, vanishes underground. When I glance back at the intersection the shadow has been washed away—has retreated out of sight, at any rate. I shut the window and lay slices of pizza on plates, and then I seem to wait an unnecessarily long time for the sound of a key in the lock. Eventually I open the door to the outer corridor and hold my breath until I hear soft footsteps on the stairs.

Chapter Four
A S
PRINGHEEL
L
EGEND

“Look at the masts,” says Lucinda.

I’m put in mind of the skeletal towers the landscape is sprouting to unite us all through mobile phones, and then I realise she means the windmills bristling in the sea. We’re on the ridge of Everton, which overlooks the mouth of the river. I should have thought of the past; that’s my job. We would indeed have seen the masts of ships on the Mersey even before the first dock was built at the narrowed entrance to the drained Pool, and in time the riverbank would have been strewn with the rib cages of ships under construction. The slopes below us would be scattered with the towers of mills and the smoking stumpy conical chimneys of potteries and limekilns. They stood beside rudimentary roads up which horses and carts laboured, together with the occasional carriage and stagecoach to London. Most of the streets were still crammed between or around the first seven thoroughfares that grew up near the Castle, but as the town spread towards Everton and the neighbouring ridge of Edge Hill, the streets multiplied without growing much straighter or wider. The burgeoning streets were pinned by more than a dozen church spires. Towards the edge of the settlement we might see women trudging the ropewalks, which were longer than many of the streets, as they twined hemp to make ropes for ships. I have a sudden image of humanity breeding on the surface of the buried Pool and the drained marshes, increasing faster than the maze of cramped streets ought to be expected to contain—in the last three decades of the nineteenth century the population of Liverpool increased
by two hundred thousand—until whole families were packed into each unsanitary house little better than a prison and eventually into the cellar too. Up here the gentry hunted along the ridge on horseback, which might suggest a more refined form of savagery that presumed to rise above the sort that infested the diseased streets. I’m reminded that the mysterious Joseph Williamson of Edge Hill turned up at his wedding in hunter’s attire and rode off to the hunt as soon as the ceremony was over. I’m distracted, which must be why my brain is seething with the past when it doesn’t need to be. We’ve just parked outside my parents’ house, and I’m disconcerted to find it’s for sale.

It belonged to my father’s parents. It was where he spent his youth. When they died he persuaded my mother to move into it and sell the Kensington semi where they’d brought me up. They didn’t need the space now that I was at university in Durham and wouldn’t be moving back into our old home. He was able to cycle downtown to the art gallery where he worked until retiring last year, after which he seemed happy just to be close to the heart of the city. My mother found she liked this too, all of which is why I’m thrown by the sale board standing guard in the small neat garden. The house is the end of a terrace of six that survive from a longer Victorian stretch. Lucinda gazes past it at the latest threat of a storm, which darkens the bay as if it’s muddying the water, and says “Aren’t we going in?”

By now she may think she’s the problem. “Of course we are,” I say and climb out of the Spirita.

The small two-storey house is painted as red as a university. The front door and windows are bright yellow. Between the gathered orange curtains the windows display enough nets for a fishing expedition. When I open the gate the latch emits a clang that calls my mother to the front door as Lucinda follows me along the short path between rockeries. My mother’s large reddish face framed by cropped greying hair seems to grow even rounder with a smile as she holds
out her arms from the dress I always call her floral wallpaper outfit, if only to myself. Her arms are still plump and surely no more wrinkled than last time I saw them. She keeps up the smile and the gesture when she notices I’m not alone. “Who’s this?” she cries.

BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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