Dark Companions (39 page)

Immediately the car trundled forward over the lip of an incline in the track and plunged through the Ghost Train doors into darkness.

As he swung round an unseen clattering curve, surrounded by noise and the dark, Stone felt as if he had suddenly become the victim of delirium. He remembered his storm-racked childhood bed and the teeming darkness pouring into him. Why on earth had he come on this ride? He’d never liked ghost trains as a child, and as he grew up he had instinctively avoided them. He’d allowed his panic to trap him. The boys might be waiting when he emerged. Well, in that case he would appeal to whoever was operating the ride. He sat back, gripping the wooden seat beneath him with both hands, and gave himself up to the straining of metal, the abrupt swoops of the car, and the darkness.

Then, as his anxiety about the outcome of the ride diminished, another impression began to trickle back. As the car had swung around the first curve he’d glimpsed an illuminated shape, two illuminated shapes, withdrawn so swiftly that he’d had no time to glance up at them. He had the impression that they had been the faces of a man and a woman, gazing down at him. At once they had vanished into the darkness or been swept away by it. It seemed to him for some reason very important to remember their expressions.

Before he could pursue this, he saw a greyish glow ahead of him. He felt an unreasoning hope that it would be a window, which might give him an idea of the extent of the darkness. But already he could see that its shape was too irregular. A little closer and he could make it out. It was a large stuffed grey rabbit with huge glass or plastic eyes, squatting upright in an alcove with its front paws extended before it. Not a dead rabbit, of course: a toy. Beneath him the car was clattering and shaking, yet he had the odd notion that this was a deliberate effect, that in fact the car had halted and the rabbit was approaching or growing. Rubbish, he thought. It was a pretty feeble ghost, anyway. Childish. His hands pulled at splinters on the wooden seat beneath him. The rabbit rushed towards him as the track descended a slight slope. One of its eyes was loose, and whitish stuffing hung down its cheek from the hole. The rabbit was at least four feet tall. As the car almost collided with it before whipping away around a curve, the rabbit toppled towards him and the light that illuminated it went out.

Stone gasped and clutched his chest. He’d twisted round to look behind him at the darkness where he judged the rabbit to have been, until a spasm wrenched him frontward again. Light tickling drifted over his face. He shuddered, then relaxed. Of course they always had threads hanging down for cobwebs, his friends had told him that. But no wonder the fairground was deserted, if this was the best they could do. Giant toys lit up, indeed. Not only cheap but liable to give children nightmares.

The car coursed up a slight incline and down again before shaking itself in a frenzy around several curves. Trying to soften you up before the next shock, Stone thought. Not me, thank you very much. He lay back in his seat and sighed loudly with boredom. The sound hung on his ears like muffs. Why did I do that? he wondered. It’s not as if the operator can hear me. Then who can?

Having spent its energy on the curves, the car was slowing. Stone peered ahead, trying to anticipate. Obviously he was meant to relax before the car startled him with a sudden jerk. As he peered, he found his eyes were adjusting to the darkness. At least he could make out a few feet ahead, at the side of the track, a squat and bulky grey shape. He squinted as the car coasted towards it. It was a large armchair.

The car came abreast of it and halted. Stone peered at the chair. In the dim hectic flecked light, which seemed to attract and outline all the restless discs on his eyes, the chair somehow looked larger than he. Perhaps it was farther away than he’d thought. Some clothes thrown over the back of the chair looked diminished by it, but they could be a child’s clothes. If nothing else, Stone thought, it’s instructive to watch my mind working. Now let’s get on.

Then he noticed that the almost invisible light was flickering. Either that, which was possible although he couldn’t determine the source of the light, or the clothes were shifting; very gradually but nonetheless definitely, as if something hidden by them was lifting them to peer out, perhaps preparatory to emerging. Stone leaned towards the chair. Let’s see what it is, let’s get it over with. But the light was far too dim, the chair too distant. Probably he would be unable to see it even when it emerged, the way the light had been allowed to run down, unless he left the car and went closer.

He had one hand on the side of the car when he realised that if the car moved off while he was out of it he would be left to grope his way through the darkness. He slumped back, and as he did so he glimpsed a violent movement among the clothes near the seat of the chair. He glanced towards it. Before his eyes could focus, the dim grey light was extinguished.

Stone sat for a moment, all of him concentrating on the silence, the blind darkness. Then he began to kick frantically at the nose of the car. The car shook a little with his attack, but stayed where it was. By the time it decided to move forward, the pressure of his blood seemed to be turning the darkness red.

When the car nosed its way around the next curve, slowing as if sniffing the track ahead, Stone heard a muted thud and creak of wood above the noise of the wheels. It came from in front of him. The sort of thing you hear in a house at night, he thought. Soon be out now.

Without warning a face came rushing towards him out of the darkness a few feet ahead. It jerked forward as he did. Of course it would, he thought with a grimace, sinking back and watching his face sink briefly into the mirror. Now he could see that he and the car were surrounded by a faint light that extended as far as the wooden frame of the mirror. Must be the end of the ride. They can’t get any more obvious than that. Effective in its way, I suppose.

He watched himself in the mirror as the car followed the curve past. His silhouette loomed on the greyish light, which had fallen behind. Suddenly he frowned. His silhouette was moving independent of the movement of the car. It was beginning to swing out of the limits of the mirror. Then he remembered the wardrobe that had stood at the foot of his childhood bed, and realised what was happening. The mirror was set in a door, which was opening.

Stone pressed himself against the opposite side of the car, which had slowed almost to a halt. No no, he thought, it mustn’t. Don’t. He heard a grinding of gears beneath him; unmeshed metal shrieked. He threw his body forward, against the nose of the car. In the darkness to his left he heard the creak of the door and a soft thud. The car moved a little, then caught the gears and ground forward.

As the light went out behind him, Stone felt a weight fall beside him on the seat.

He cried out. Or tried to, for as he gulped in air it seemed to draw darkness into his lungs, darkness that swelled and poured into his heart and brain. There was a moment in which he knew nothing, as if he’d become darkness and silence and the memory of suffering. Then the car was rattling on, the darkness was sweeping over him and by, and the nose of the car banged open the doors and plunged out into the night.

As the car swung onto the length of track outside the Ghost Train, Stone caught sight of the gap between the stalls where he had thought he’d seen the stallholders. A welling moonlight showed him that between the stalls stood a pile of sacks, nodding and gesticulating in the wind. Then the seat beside him emerged from the shadow, and he looked down.

Next to him on the seat was a shrunken hooded figure. It wore a faded jacket and trousers striped and patched in various colours, indistinguishable in the receding moonlight. The head almost reached his shoulder. Its arms hung slack at its sides, and its feet drummed laxly on the metal beneath the seat. Shrinking away, Stone reached for the front of the car to pull himself to his feet, and the figure’s head fell back.

Stone closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw within the hood an oval of white cloth upon which—black crosses for eyes, a barred crescent for a mouth—a grinning face was stitched.

As he had suddenly realised that the car hadn’t halted nor even slowed before plunging down the incline back into the Ghost Train, Stone did not immediately notice that the figure had taken his hand.

Afterword

This was my fourth collection to see print, and the first not to appear through the eldritch portals of Arkham House. After imitating Lovecraft in
The Inhabitant of the Lake
I’d spent five years developing my own approach, which was loosed upon the world at book length in
Demons by Daylight
.
The Height of the Scream
was more experimental, too often wilfully so, and less sure of itself. I’d say
Dark Companions
leaves those problems behind. Only the title was a compromise: I’d meant to call it
Just Behind You
until I learned that my old friend Manly Wade Wellman had that in mind for a book of his own. In fact he never used the title, and so I did just a couple of years back.

Let me reminisce as best I can about these tales, written by the long-haired genial freak who appears in a zippered suede shirt on the back flap of the first edition. I’ll go at them in the order they appear herein. “Mackintosh Willy” was written in 1977—to be precise, the first draft was begun on 22 August and completed six days later. In those days I kept a diary in a ledger and recorded the progress of my first drafts, though not of the rewriting. Charlie Grant bought the tale for one of his
Shadows
anthologies but found the punch line understated, even for his taste, and so I substituted the last line we have here. As for the story behind the story, there isn’t much to tell. For several years Jenny and I did indeed live across West Derby Road from Newsham Park, where I often took a hashish-eater’s stroll. One day I misread the graffiti in a shelter as the narrator does, and noticed footprints set in new concrete around the nearby pond. This was all my imagination needed. Alas, when I took J. K. Potter on a tour of my locations years later, the shelter had been demolished. The tale brought me a World Fantasy Award in the short story category, which I shared with Elizabeth Lynn, and we hugged onstage in Baltimore.

“Napier Court” was the last tale I wrote in 1967, in the midst of the
Demons by Daylight
bunch. Like several of those stories, it was a radical rewrite of a first draft. The 1965 version had a male protagonist laid up in bed, but Alma Napier is based on my solitary ex-fiancée, from whom I’d parted several months before writing this version. Along with “Concussion” it’s among my most nakedly autobiographical tales. Before August Derleth bought it I sent a copy to Kirby McCauley, then a friend and later also my agent. Kirby showed the typescript to J. Vernon Shea, who commented that if I was like Peter in the tale I couldn’t be much of a catch. Indeed, and I knew it, which was why I tried to depict myself as honestly as possible: perhaps it was a means of outgrowing that personality as well. Basing the tale on my experience was also certainly a way of bringing it to life.

I’ve a confession to make about “Down There”. It was begun on 9 September 1978, less than three weeks after our daughter’s birth. Indeed, four days after she was born I set about writing another tale, “This Time”, completed a week later. I may have been afraid that the change in my life might hinder my writing, but was this really an excuse to devote so much time to proving the reverse? The first draft of “Down There” took seven days and is described in the diary as “laboured”—serve me right, you may think. As I often do, I reassured myself that it could be rewritten, and so it was. It certainly needed it, which I can demonstrate with the opening of the first draft:

“Hurry along there,” Steve called as the girls trooped down the office. “Last one tonight. Mind the doors.”

The girls smiled at Elaine as they passed her desk, but their smiles meant different things: just like you to make things more difficult for the rest of us, looks like you’ve been kept in after school, suppose you’ve nothing better to do, fancy having to put up with him by yourself. She didn’t give a damn what they thought of her, which was part of what irked them, and she was quite content to be alone with Steve—if only he wouldn’t make a joke of everything.

Even the lifts, one of which had sunk to the sub-basement every time it was called today. Presumably the sub-basement was no longer so disgusting, but Elaine was glad she hadn’t had to go down there, even momentarily. Glancing back through the window that sealed her off from the lobby, she saw that the lift was out of order now. Its twin was stuffing people into itself, closing its doors whether or not they were ready, leaving the girls behind. They loitered near the other lift as though by pretending not to notice it they might persuade it to relent. When one of them caught her eye, Elaine looked away. She wasn’t about to let them think she was envying them.

There was nothing to envy, especially when they would have to face the November night, the downpour. Around the office building the warehouses looked like melting chocolate; the river and the canals were opaque with tangled ripples that almost extinguished the reflections of streetlamps. Cottages and terraces, some of them derelict, crowded up the steep hills towards the disused mines. Through the skeins of water on the glass their infrequent lights looked shaky as the flames of candles.

“Goodnight comrade,” Steve said like the title of a song as Mr Williams went by, and Elaine had to stifle a grin. Mr Williams had tried to dissuade Elaine from working tonight, from being exploited as he’d called it, long after the rest of them had desisted. It was all very well for him: his father wasn’t an invalid, he earned enough to keep his parents without working overtime. He had only annoyed her by harping on the things that were wrong with the place: she had to work overtime—how could it help to remember what might go wrong?