‘But,’ her husband remonstrated, ‘you know that I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘No, but your aunt Cecilia does; and she is such a clever woman. By the way, she called in this morning and left you a book to look at.’
‘A book?’
‘Yes, the collected ghost stories of M. R. James.’
‘But the stupid old dear knows that I have them all in the original editions.’
‘So she said: but she wants you to read the author’s epilogue to the collection which, she says, is most entertaining. It’s entitled “Stories I have tried to write.” She said that she’d side-lined a passage that might interest you. The book’s on that table by you. No, not that: the one with the black cover.’
Dreyton picked it up, found the marked passage and read it aloud.
‘There may be possibilities too in the Christmas cracker if the right people pull it and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse.’
‘There is certainly,’ Dreyton commented, ‘some resemblance between James’s idea and our recent experience. But he could have made a perfectly good yarn out of that theme without introducing ghosts.’
His wife’s mood at that moment was for compromise rather than controversy.
‘Well, darling,’ she temporized, ‘perhaps not exactly ghosts.’
THIS TIME
Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell’s first published stories appeared in the 1960s, when he was still a teenager. In those days he was a keen imitator of H. P. Lovecraft, but he quickly gained sufficient confidence to develop his own distinctive style. A full-time professional writer now for over ten years, his novels and short story collections include Demons by Daylight, Dark Companions, The Doll Who Ate His Mother, and The Parasite. Many of his most memorable tales, such as ‘Mackintosh Willy’, ‘The Sentinels’, and ‘This Time’, make subtle use of Jamesian techniques in very modern and usually urban settings—often in his own native Liverpool. ‘This Time’ is one of his personal favourites.
As Crosby emerged from the dentist’s he almost tripped over a dog, which vanished behind the bushes. He took more care while crossing the road to the park, for he felt unreal, dreamy. He tongued the hole in his stony jaw and tried to recall what he’d dreamed.
People were walking dogs in Birkenhead Park, or being run by them. A man was training an Alsatian called Winston. On the fish-pond the white ducks looked moulded out of the reflections of clouds. He had been counting backwards from thirty; he’d reached fourteen before the anaesthetic worked, and then he’d seemed to begin counting an altogether different set of numbers backwards, on and on into the dark. He felt he had arrived eventually, but where?
He walked through the short cut from the pond to his street. On the playing-field beside him, rugby posts were panting in the August heat: H H H. As he opened his front door, pushing back a couple of letters, spacious echoes greeted him.
His face no longer felt stony. The gap in his jaw was plugged with an ache. He was glad he’d drawn today’s stint before he had gone to the dentist’s—but nevertheless he was anxious not to lose the impressions he had gathered in the waiting-room: a mother holding her child like a ventriloquist’s dummy from which she was determined to coax a brave smile, a teenager who had tried to pretend that the bulge in his cheek was nothing worth noticing, just a sweet. Perhaps Crosby could sketch something for his exhibition.
He gazed across his drawing-board, out of the window. Beyond the long garden, the pond blazed among the trees. The head of the little girl next door kept popping over the seven-foot hedge like a Jack-in-the-box; the seat of her swing was concealed by the hedge. She made him feel all the more unreal, and incapable of sketching the impressions he wanted to fix. When at last he began to sketch he was hardly aware of doing so.
Ten minutes later he had finished. The man’s face stared up at him. It was hairless, and looked smooth as a baby’s face, as though it had never been spoiled. Was it a face or a mask? It looked too good to be true, especially the eyes.
Was it even worth preserving? It meant nothing at all to him—yet that was why he filed it away, in the hope that he would remember where the impression had come from. His thoughts were dodging aimlessly about his mind, like the echoes in the house.
Never mind: he was visiting Giulia. He would have waited for her in the art gallery, except that he might disturb her at work. Instead he wandered about the park before catching the train, then strolled through Port Sunlight for a while. Along the vistas of The Causeway and The Diamond, the trees were dark and velvety, unrolling their long shadows on the plots of grass. Everything was steeped in evening light: the columns and domes of the Lady Lever Gallery, the half-timbered cottages that looked outlined and latticed in charcoal, their gardens trim as carpet tiles. Even the factories beyond the estate looked to be pouring forth gold smoke, like a lyrical advertisement for cigarettes.
Giulia was wearing her grandmother’s apron. ‘How do you feel?’ she said.
‘Cut off from everything.’
She gave him a wry smile. ‘That’s hardly new, is it?’
He followed her into the kitchen of the cottage; he’d found that he wanted to talk. ‘I hope you’ll be able to eat,’ she said anxiously.
‘Certainly.’ She was making several of his favourite dishes. They were too old, and had known each other for too long, to express their affection in words.
She emerged from the pantry bearing spices. ‘So may I take it that your air of gloom is an after-effect of the surgery?’
‘No, not really. My book has been out for a month, without a single review. What makes it worse is the trash that gets reviewed—three notices this week for a collection of pornographic comics.’
‘That’s exactly why you shouldn’t mind that they don’t appreciate you. Few things of any worth are appreciated in their own time, I’ve told you that before.’ She frowned exaggeratedly at him. ‘Now, Thom, you just enjoy being depressed. Some of your work satisfies you, doesn’t it? That’s all that any genuine artist can hope for.’
‘I suppose so.’ He sighed, to make her chide him further. ‘I wish I had more time to do something special for the exhibition. Instead I’ll be wasting a day on this damn television show.’
‘You’ll be reaching a new audience direct rather than via the reviewers. How can that be wasted time?’ She said almost wistfully: ‘If I had a television I’d watch you.’
They ate in the kitchen, then carried the rest of the wine into the parlour and played chess. One of Crosby’s sketches hung above the mantelpiece: an enormous man whose round head resembled a pudding balanced on a larger one, and who was devouring a pudding which looked like him. Secretly he felt that Giulia’s appreciation was worth all the gushing of reviewers.
When each of them had won a game, they stood close together in the small porch, not quite touching, and lingered over their goodbyes. The rocking of the dim train lulled him, made him feel he might be able to meet all his commitments, after all. As he reached home, close to midnight, someone was walking an off-white dog in the park.
He woke convinced that he had been counting backwards. The series of numbers had seemed very long. He felt frustrated by his inability to concentrate or to trust himself to his intuition; he had no time now to add to the exhibition, when the private view was only two days hence.