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Authors: Ramsey Campbell

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BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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For a moment I share the hope, but I’m not making sense. “Here’s Frank from Old Swan,” the presenter says. “What’s your story, Frank?”

“They used to say the devil left his footprints in St Cuthbert’s down near the docks.”

“The devil they did. Did you see yourself?”

“Some of us thought we did. We were just kids. It was bombed in the blitz and we used to play there. We’d dare each other to stand in the footprints. Told the girls if you looked behind you while you were standing in them you’d see the devil creeping up.”

“Used to make your own amusement in the good old days, eh? What did these footprints of yours look like?”

“Nothing much. They got bigger and smaller as they went along, and you wouldn’t know what shape they were trying to be, except one looked like a man’s foot with the toes gone wrong. They must have been worn away, all the footprints. My granddad said that part of the floor was made out of mud so old it’d turned to stone. One kid swore he went in there one night and saw the devil wriggling out of a hole in the floor. Said it didn’t know what shape to be. He was always a bit peculiar, though. Got put away when he grew up. Is that the kind of thing you’re after?”

“Deryck might be. Are you out there, Deryck?”

I don’t know if my father heard. Did he follow up any leads the show provided? “Now here’s Mildred from Great Homer Street,” the presenter is saying. “Have you got a tale for us, Mil?”

“It’s another one out of the blitz.”

“Before my time, love. Part of our history, though. Were you there?”

“My dad was, and his mate Tommy Lawless. You’ll have heard of Tommy, will you?”

“I’d call a lot of folk lawless these days, but I don’t know about him.”

“They were in the papers and a book as well, and it wasn’t for doing anything bad. They found the man in the metal thingy, what do you call it, a cylinder. He must have crawled in and not been able to get out, that’s what the book said. We used to wonder what he was trying to crawl away from. It was in the 1880s, and then he stayed hid till a bomb dug him up. Thomas Cregeen Williams, his name was, and he had his own business in Leeds Street. And the coroner that did the inquest was a Mr Mort.”

“Mort the coroner, eh? Never heard that before. The old ones are the best. Next up is Beverley from Everton. Hiya, Bev from Ev. Is that what your friends call you?”

“Not to my face.”

“We can’t see that. We’ll use our imagination. You’re on about the blitz as well.”

“We never liked going down in the shelter because one boy kept saying he could hear somebody on the other side of the wall where there was nothing but earth. Funny, his name was Deryck as well. It wasn’t Deryck Meadows on before, was it? That was him.”

“A friend of his, are you? We’d never have guessed. Have you told your tale or is there more you’ve thought of?”

“I think he thought the blitz was stirring things up that shouldn’t be. If you call him back you could put him in touch. We’ve not spoken since he went off and got married.”

“You’re certainly full of—” The presenter coughs on the way to saying “You’re certainly full of surprises, Bev. Bev?”

Perhaps she’s tired of his increasingly blatant scepticism, but I wouldn’t mind sharing it so late at night when I’m already nervous about my father. Across the street the deserted office lit by the lamp at the intersection seems unsettlingly reminiscent of my childhood bedroom—the dim discoloured oblique light from outside, the long misshapen shadows that resemble dream versions of the furniture. I could almost imagine that one rounded blotch is a face that’s peering at me around the edge of the grubby window. I mustn’t be distracted from listening to calls my father may have followed up.

They’re all about tunnels. Someone whose grandfather was involved in digging Queensway, the first of the pair that take roads under the river, says attempts were made to block up the excavations. The bosses accused the workmen of trying to prolong the job, but some of her grandfather’s colleagues insisted the tunnel had been blocked from within. While I reflect that the digging began at the Old Haymarket, a square built on the highest reach of the Pool, the wife of a worker at the sorting office on Copperas Hill reveals that the postmen are loath to use the tunnel that links the office to Lime Street Station. Perhaps it’s a tale to frighten
new recruits, since the veterans say the lights in the tunnel sometimes fail, unless they’re switched off as a prank, at which point you may realise you have company that doesn’t need to see you to find you, because you’ll hear its whisper in your ear before you encounter its wet flabby touch. The construction of the offices unearthed coffins lined with lead, but the presenter is growing so openly cynical about the behaviour of workers that I wouldn’t blame his listeners if they kept any more anecdotes to themselves. A ticket collector rings to talk about the underground railway, a loop of which passes beneath the centre of Liverpool, starting and returning at the bottom of the street the Castle used to dominate. All the tunnels leak, and the loop has to be closed every spring while rails corroded by salt water are replaced. The employee says he’s been told by contractors that they’ve heard intruders running or rather sloshing ahead of them in the dark, even in sections of the tunnels where there’s no water underfoot. It occurs to me that the loop crosses the route of the Pool. The presenter bemoans attitudes to work again before conceding the air to an amateur historian who points out that the city below the ridges of Everton and Edge Hill is riddled with passages—sewers, old hydraulic systems, abandoned railway tunnels and others still in use. As I wonder if my father might feel driven to explore any of them, whatever his reasons, my mobile sets about performing its underwater song.

The call is from my parents’ house. As I pause the broadcast I think something like a prayer—an unspoken wish, at any rate. “Hello?” I say aloud.

“Have you heard?”

Both my mother’s question and her dull voice make me afraid to ask “What?”

She almost laughs. “No, I mean have you heard from him.”

“I haven’t. You haven’t either, obviously.”

“I haven’t.” Her silence suggests that our words have been
engulfed by the mire of repetition until she says “I suppose it must be time, then.”

She means for the police. “Would you like me to call them?”

“Oh, would you? Or do you think I better had? I was only thinking with him living here…” Perhaps she wants me to compete or at least to answer this, because some seconds take their time before she says “Maybe it would be best coming from you.”

I feel childish for observing that it’s ten minutes short of midnight. If her watch isn’t fast, her anxiety must be. I let a last hope turn my gaze on the street, but it’s deserted; even the shadow at the window of the office has vanished while I wasn’t looking. “I’ll phone them now then if you like.”

Of course liking doesn’t come into it, and I feel more childish still. “Go on, Gavin,” she says. “Tell them what I told you and give them my number.” This sounds like a preamble, and she adds “Tell them they can come and see me if they like. I won’t be sleeping till I know what’s happened. You have to stay there, promise me you will, but I wouldn’t mind not being on my own.”

Chapter Nine
W
HAT THE
N
IGHT SPAWNS

I wish I’d said it was an emergency, but I suspect the police wouldn’t think it was much of one. Instead of 999 I called the number for Merseyside Constabulary, where the operator put me through to a policeman who seemed frustratingly remote. He made it clear that he found this an odd time to report a missing person and wondered why I hadn’t waited until morning, so that I had to use my mother’s concern as an excuse. He was surprised I wasn’t with her, even once I’d explained about the landlines; if my father couldn’t contact us on one, wouldn’t he try the other? I described him and his bicycle and said he’d been researching local history for his web site. Since the policeman was as unfamiliar with its address as with mine and my mother’s, I gathered that he and his whereabouts were far from local. When I mentioned that my mother would appreciate a visit, I wasn’t sorry that it wouldn’t be from him.

He won’t be conducting the search. Having established that someone will contact me if there’s any news, I’m left with an occurrence number so protracted that it feels as if my father’s disappearance may be crushed into insignificance by the weight of the multitude of reports. I listen to the rest of the phone-in, which turns into an argument about workers’ rights and responsibilities. There are no more calls in response to my father’s, but should I have told the police about the earlier ones? I did say that when I last heard from him he was under a railway bridge, and that’s really all I know. I shut the computer down and head for the bathroom.

I leave the mobile and the landline receiver in the corridor.
There’s little space to keep them with me now that some of Lucinda’s toiletries have moved in, and the phones might be affected by the damp that sometimes seems to linger in the bathroom. In the midst of the buzz of the electric toothbrush I imagine that the mobile stirs on the floor, but it must be my nervous eagerness to hear, unless someone’s in the corridor between the apartments. Having finished foaming at the mouth, I send some water on a journey to its source and fill a glass from the bedewed tap before retrieving the phones on my way to bed.

Although I’ve shared it with Lucinda just a few times, it feels deserted. I lay the phones next to the clock on the bedside table, where the colon between digits almost an hour past midnight blinks insistently as I tug the cord above the pillows. Darkness swallows me, but it contains no sleep. I’m lying with my face towards the table and the window, and soon I hear a whisper that becomes a liquid chorus. The rain sounds torrential, almost blotting out the uneven sluggish tread of someone in the street. At last the presumably drunken wanderer grows inaudible, and at some point the rain does, because I’m asleep.

I would rather not be. I’m in utter darkness and wet with it too. Am I swimming blindly or groping my way along a tunnel? I’m being drawn towards a presence so unimaginably vast that I can sense its eager awareness of me. I’ve no idea how close it is or where. I’ll find out by touching it, because it apparently has no need to breathe, unless its breaths are too immense and slow for me to identify them as such. I would very much prefer not to encounter it—to learn anything about its shape or nature—and I struggle to cry out, to dredge myself up from the dream. While it seems to take not much less than forever, I succeed in projecting a feeble shriek into the darkness.

At once I’m afraid that it will attract some part of the presence to reach for me. Dreams have no logic, or perhaps panic doesn’t, because the thought raises another cry. It
manages to travel beyond the dark, and I flounder in pursuit until I see the darkness of my room. I would be reassured by its dim but familiar outlines and the amicable winking of the colon of the clock if the cries hadn’t followed me out of the dream. They’re no longer mine.

It’s past three o’clock. No doubt everyone is asleep except me and whoever is uttering scream after scream, but how can anybody sleep through that? I kick off the quilt and lurch to the window, where I fumble at the lock. The sash slides up, spattering the sill with traces of rain. The cries sound as if they’re streets away. I want to believe they’re the natural call of some animal—an urban fox, perhaps—but they’re all too recognisably human, even if I can’t tell the gender. They seem close to exhaustion by terror or agony or both. If anyone besides me can hear, how can they bear not to find out what’s wrong? Are they too afraid to see? That’s how I’m behaving, which is almost as awful as the screams. I blunder away from the window to switch on both lights in the room.

They provide no relief. They simply make the screams more real. I’m dragging yesterday’s clothes on when the cries falter, and I can’t help hoping they’ve come to an end. Their source must have been drawing breath, because in a few seconds they recommence, sounding more outraged and agonised than ever. I shove my feet into socks and shoes and almost forget to lock the window before dashing out of the apartment and slamming the door.

If the slam awakens any of my neighbours, they aren’t apparent as I run downstairs. Apart from my footfalls the building is silent, and I’m able to hope that someone more qualified than I feel has dealt with the problem outside. When I emerge into the temporarily rainless street, however, the cries are just as atrocious, and my whole being shrinks from imagining what they express.

They’re behind the building, away from the river. They aren’t in Castle Street, which is deserted except for a few empty cars. The street is staked out by pairs of traffic lights
mindlessly juggling colours and staining the drowned sanctuary stone, which glows like luminous moss before it turns the colour of a false daylight and then flares a warning red. As I sprint down Cook Street I hear the baying of a police car. I’m willing it to head for the scene of the crime when the siren shrinks into the distance and is gone.

Why haven’t I called the police? I might feel absurd for calling them twice in a night, especially if the same policeman answered, but the truth is that the screams haven’t let me think. I even forgot that I was meant to be waiting at home in case my father rang the landline. The doormen who bar undesirables from the restaurants on Victoria Street have left their posts, and the deserted road stretches to the site of the Old Haymarket, where a car with its roof lights flashing swings around the roundabout at the tunnel entrance. “Police,” I yell despite the distance, “police,” and then I realise that the lights are reflections of streetlamps. As I leave Victoria Street for the narrow lane of Temple Court I hear the rattle of a window behind me. “Shut your row,” a man bellows, and the window slams like a lid.

How can anyone respond that way? He sounded as if he thinks he owns the night as well as wherever he lives. He has left me feeling more alone than ever between the shuttered shops that occupy the lowest floor of the unlit buildings. I hurry into Matthew Street, the lane where a cellar produced the Beatles and other Mersey sounds. The cellar used to resound with screams, but the ones I’m hearing aren’t down there. They’re to my left, beyond a bend of the lane. They’re in Whitechapel.

BOOK: Creatures of the Pool
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