The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Read online

  Ringo was parked behind Church Street, by the Bluecoat Chambers. Birds in trees shouted above the cobbled courtyard; a traffic warden had trapped a motorist and was lecturing him ponderously before issuing a ticket, confidently dictatorial in her uniform. Clare resented the woman, and resented the way Chris was making her hurry to keep up with him.

  When he saw Ringo he said, “That’s a sweet little car.”

  “That’s about the word for it,” she said. “A Noddy car.”

  Her tone made him glance at her. Although he was a head taller, she didn’t feel he was looking down. “Don’t you like your car?” he said.

  “I don’t like me.”

  She fastened her seat belt, started the engine, and swung rapidly away through the side streets, up a hill of warehouses and nightclubs. “What don’t you like?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Dwarfs are all right in Walt Disney.” She didn’t bother to make it sound like a joke.

  “Who’s a dwarf? You’re small, but you’re no dwarf.”

  “Small, and out of proportion.”

  “What’s this out-of-proportion shit? You don’t look deformed to me.”

  “Well, I feel it.”

  “Fu-uck! Listen, last year we had a girl in TTG. The kids wouldn’t go home when she was there; we had to throw them out. She’d play with them all day; they loved her. And then she’d help us in the evening. We’d work out parts for her to play because she asked for them. It got so people came just to see her. Right? She was a spastic. Couldn’t even hold a cup without spilling it. She’s gone to London now, doing a one-girl show in an arts theatre. She could do all that, and you’re kidding yourself you’ve got problems? She hadn’t even got a pretty face like you.”

  She frowned at the road ahead. “You’re just saying that to have your way with me,” she said.

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t mind, either.”

  She felt as if she’d lit up red as the lights ahead on Canning Street. Yet the feeling in her stomach wasn’t embarrassment, wasn’t fear. Apprehension, anticipation? She should be anticipating the road. She frowned ahead.

  They passed the flats of Canning Street, the blackened columns and iron balconies; vague patches of music tossed on the car’s wind. She swung widely right at the lights, through more lights at Upper Parliament, and past a cinema which now offered HALF A MILE OF FURNITURE. “Hey, it’s good to be with someone who can drive,” Chris said. “The guy who drives our van, they should never have let him see Bullitt.”

  William Huskisson shone green in the sunlight, except where the birds had given him leprosy. “For a while I thought I wouldn’t be able to drive,” she said.

  “Passing your test, you mean?”

  “No, I mean after my brother was killed.”

  “Oh, right. I can imagine.”

  She didn’t want him to stop her talking. “I felt responsible,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  He sounded indifferent, but she went on: “I was driving with faulty brakes. I knew they were faulty before I had the accident.”

  “Well, it’s good you can still drive.”

  He still hadn’t said what she wanted to hear. “I’m not so sure now it was my fault,” she said. “Now I know that the man who caused the accident was insane.”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t blame yourself.” She relaxed gratefully, and he said, “I live on the other side there, on Princes Road. It’s weird, right? You don’t know how close I might be to the guy who’s doing these things.”

  “Yes, you should be careful,” she said anxiously. “Especially at night.”

  Children were playing ball against the church; Christ held up his arms for a catch. “This is where it happened, the accident,” Clare said. “I have to drive along here to school. That was one reason why I thought I couldn’t drive.”

  “Where do you teach?”

  “Durning Road.”

  “Where, the other side of Lodge Lane? You don’t have to come along here.”

  “You do now. They’ve blocked off all the shortcuts.”

  “No, you could go down Upper Parly.”

  She gaped at him. “You’re right,” she said. That was a more direct route than this. “Why couldn’t I see that?” she said, bewildered.

  “Maybe your head wouldn’t let you. I mean, things can screw you up half your life if you look at them the wrong way. You feel better now, right?”

  By God, she did. She swung Ringo into Lodge Lane, hooting at a man laden with a typewriter, a Richard Strauss opera, and an armful of bottles of hock. She felt ready for anything. “Let’s go and grill this woman,” she said.

  She manoeuvred the car along the narrow swarming street. Cars squeezed past parked cars, vans hung open outside shops, buses muttered impatiently. Litter flapped across the road, apples rolled from stalls to be kicked by children, a dog darted through the traffic, a cat watched superciliously from a hill of onions. Clare braked as children were chased out of the library by a red-faced man in uniform. On the next block was the launderette.

  They parked in an alley; two men sat in a doorway, sucking bottles wrapped in newspaper. As Chris reached the launderette a woman in a pink-checked overall, her hair like a rusty poodle’s, glared through the window at him. “Someone doesn’t like you,” Clare said.

  “Right. Bet she thinks I’m gay.”

  “She doesn’t like me either.” The woman glared at her over a row of infants, like reluctant ornaments on the window ledge. “It doesn’t look worth trying, does it?”

  “Hey, anything’s worth trying. If she thinks I’m gay then that’s what I’ll be,” he said, smoothing his hair, limp-wristed.

  “Oh, Chris,” she said, snorting. But he’d gone in; she could only follow.

  The launderette felt overcast; the heat was heavy with the smells of soap and hot cloth. A shirt reared up almost shapelessly at a porthole, flapping empty arms; vortices of clothes pressed against glass. A young man filled his plastic sack from a dryer, feeling a girl’s underwear furtively for damp, like a fetishist hastily fingering the contents of a chest of drawers. A child went out dragging a sack, an early Christmas gnome. “Leave the door, will you,” the overalled woman shouted as the child slammed it.

  “Ex-_cuse_ me,” Chris said, bowing limply toward her. “Are you the friend of Christopher Kelly’s granny?”

  Oh my God, Clare thought, disguising her mirth as a sneeze. Women turned to stare at Chris; their children scrambled over the machines. “Eh?” the woman said, as if that were all she intended to say.

  “Christopher’s a dear friend of mine. I promised I’d visit his old granny if I was ever in town.”

  “He doesn’t live there now,” the woman muttered. Next to her, a pair of knickers sailed up and were snatched back.

  “Oh, I know. That’s why he asked me to look her up. He tells me she’s a lovely lady.”

  “She doesn’t like strangers. Doesn’t trust them.” She stared at him.

  Clare knew he’d failed. Kelly would never have called his grandmother a lovely lady, not if the way she’d behaved at St. Joseph’s was typical. Nor would he have asked Chris to look her up. They’d betrayed themselves and Edmund. She looked away, at the young man with the sack, who had retrieved a loose button and was gazing at it as if it were a miserly tip.

  “He wasn’t any friend of hers. She wouldn’t have taken him in, except he was her daughter’s boy. I wouldn’t have taken him, not after what his mother done.” Her tone had changed; something about it walled Clare in, away from the sunlight. “There’s no wonder he was what he was, not after what his mother was, the things she was mixed up with. He wasn’t born human.” She ducked quickly and kissed a saint’s medal sewn inside her overall. “It’s no use you going round there,” she said, having conjured back her old tone. “She wouldn’t want to see you.”

  “Oh, she would. All the things I could tell her—she’d want to hear them, I just know she would.” His voice rose hysterically; Clare could
hear his frustrations. “You wouldn’t want to upset him. Did you ever know him? Do you know what a sensitive boy he is?”

  “That wouldn’t be my word for him. Now go on, stop bothering me. I won’t tell you, whatever you say.”

  “Oh God. I don’t mean to upset you, but I promised. You do look ill.”

  Clare suspected he was simply playing now, as he had with the kids. “It’s you that’s made me ill, then,” the woman said; Clare saw her in a porthole, looking for help from the audience, but the women had returned to their washing. “I’ve got a weak heart,” the woman said. “I mustn’t be upset. The doctor said so.”

  “Oh God. Me too, I need treatment. Is he good, your doctor?”

  “He’s the best there is. I’ve known him all my life. You can trust him, not like some people I know.”

  Come on, Chris, give it up. But he said, “What’s his name? Where’s his surgery?”

  “Dr. Miller in Boswell Street. But he won’t have you. He only has local people.”

  “He should have Christopher’s granny. Then there’d be someone she could trust.”

  “He has got her.”

  “I thought he might have,” he said, gaily but no longer gay. “Well, thank you. You’ve been really helpful.”

  Her face closed, trapping her with the truth. She stood up, shaking, but Chris dodged her. In the doorway he swung his hips as a farewell. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since I saw Lauren Bacall,” he told Clare as they fled to Ringo.

  “How did you know about the doctor?” she demanded, snagging the key in the ignition.

  “Well, it made sense, right? For that woman to collect him from school she must have lived near them.

  So it sounded like they’d have the same doctor.”

  The car shuddered out of the alley. “You could act your way through anything, couldn’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah. But it sounds like you did pretty well at St. Joseph’s.”

  “I suppose I did.” She felt rather pleased with both of them. Edmund couldn’t do without them now.

  As she drove past the launderette toward Upper Parliament Street, she saw the woman glaring out. What had she meant about Kelly, about what his mother had done? Clare was suddenly all the more glad to be with Chris. For a moment she’d wondered what their prey might do if he realized they were hunting him.

  Wednesday,

  September 10

  It’s only a mound, he told himself. Only earth. But the mound was rising, slowly as a sleeping breath. It split lethargically open, and what had pushed it up emerged with a maggot’s gropings, its unsteady head nodding. He was surrounded by the mounds. Several pale shapes were already crawling feebly, lopsidedly toward him. They were babies, scaly with earth.

  When he opened his eyes the darkness piled on them. That, and his terror, trapped him in himself. He lay trying to gaze out. Sounds of cars, infrequent waves on the distant beach of the road. The dark was too huge for him to dare making for the light switch.

  He burrowed under the blankets. At least his own warmth was down there, instead of the dull suffocating heat of the darkness. His breath was huge, trapped. The dream had brought back more than terror. It had brought back his grandmother’s voice, unmuffled.

  “I was never going to tell you what you are,” she said. “But you’ve shown your true colours today. You’re a child of the Devil. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Then let me tell you something. Your mother promised you to the Devil before you were even born.”

  She went on, and on. The past was dragging him down, like exhausted sleep. He tried to snatch himself back, and for a moment was lying not beneath blankets but in the earth, lying contented and waiting.

  He writhed. The feel of his skin, the taste in his mouth were hideous. He forced himself to relax. There was no use struggling. He had come through the horror before. He had only to remember how. He let himself down into the past.

  He remembered his grandmother, remembered her telling the headmaster, the doctor; he remembered the slow thick shame swelling him, until he’d thought he would burst. At night he had lain awake, shrinking away from the loathsome horror in his bed, himself. The house had echoed with his grandmother’s voice, praying for him. He had buried himself under the blankets, but a memory had always crept into his hiding place: the way he’d grinned to feel the piece of Cyril’s arm inside his grin.

  Only a child of the Devil could have enjoyed that. He would clench himself tightly, as if to squeeze out the poison of what he was. He would grind his teeth in self-disgust until, insidious and tempting, there had come the taste of blood.

  Then, one night, he had realized there was no God.

  He’d been suspicious for a while. He had been noticing things: the boy who passed around nude photographs during school mass and who had somehow not been struck down by Heaven; Mr. Nicholas, who prayed ringingly, and who spread-eagled naughty boys against the classroom cupboard, so that he could watch them while teaching. There had been books on biblical archaeology, films by Bunuel, the way the masters condemned communist persecutions but didn’t want to discuss the Spanish Inquisition. “No book has caused more torture and murder than the Bible.” All of this accumulated in him, until the night it had flooded out.

  He had been listening to his grandmother’s hollow prayers, to stop himself remembering Cyril. All at once, as he heard the echoes stretch out her prayers only to drop them into reverberating silence, he’d realized she was praying not out of love but out of fear. She was trying to fill the vast waiting silence. She was holding back her awareness of death. She couldn’t risk being alone with herself in case, fatally, there might be a moment during which she failed to believe.

  He’d lain gazing at the dark, allowing the implications to flow through him. He had known them already; only his grandmother’s apparent absolute faith had made him deny them uneasily. If there was no God, there could hardly be a Devil. But then he wasn’t a child of the Devil. He wasn’t a monster at all.

  The horror was fading, the past was losing its hold on him. Why had he thought he was a monster? He reached for the memory, happy now with the past. Because of what he’d done to Cyril? It hadn’t been much worse than what Cyril had done to him. As for the other thing his grandmother had said he’d done—well, he hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d made it sound worse than the Spanish Inquisition. He’d thrust his head out of the sheets, grinning at the dark. Cyril had got what he deserved. He’d grinned at the desperate voice surrounded by its own echoes.

  He’d needed no more reassurance until he had begun to dream of lying in the earth.

  It was a childhood dream; he had had it many times. But once he’d left home it had vanished—only to return without warning a few months ago. He had figured out why. Since returning to Liverpool he had become increasingly restless; he’d moved several times, usually away from landlords who seemed too inquisitive. He had been moving always nearer Mulgrave Street.

  At least that explained the dream. Probably the last traces of his childhood guilt were luring him back toward the school. It was disturbing, but bearable. The dream must be returning along with the memories Mulgrave Street prompted. He didn’t know what the dream meant, but that didn’t matter. His guilt and its source were past.

  But the pull of Mulgrave Street had increased. At night it was worst; he couldn’t go into that dark. During the day he’d considered visiting the street, to be done with it. But he didn’t want the staff at the school to recognize him. He’d begun to wake at four in the morning, his nerves jagged with the problem. He’d been trying to walk it off when there was the car hurtling at him, the car slewed against the tree, the orange-painted meat on its bed of blood and gravel.

  He had felt no guilt. It was only the same as Cyril. When the man had chased him he had been annoyed. He’d been uneasy when the man had forced him to dodge into Mulgrave Street, but he hadn’t had to stay there long. Half an hour later he’d returned to his flat and had fallen asleep at once.

&
nbsp; Afterward he hadn’t quite known how he felt, until he saw the newspaper reports. They were enormously reassuring. They had the tone of schoolgirls whispering in a haunted house; none dared mention what he’d done. As if it were so unspeakable! Why, it had been more the driver’s fault than his.

  The cat hadn’t upset him. It had been lying there dead in the alley, after all. He had kept remembering the man chasing him; he’d felt vulnerable. The cat should have given him back his freedom.

  As for Mrs. Pugh—well, he shouldn’t have gone near Mulgrave Street at night. But the newspapers had made him laugh again, with their screams of horror—WHAT MAKES A MAN A MONSTER? He’d felt happy: Mrs. Pugh had been so easy that it seemed to have left him completely satisfied.

  He slid up through the sheets, stretching comfortably. He felt refreshed—he grinned: reborn. He only wondered why he had had the dream about the babies. He’d had it a couple of times after his grandmother’s outburst, then it had faded away. Still, if it had come back he could deal with it. He felt ready for anything.

  He bared his teeth at the dark. Most of all he felt ready for this writer who was hunting him.

  It reminded him of the cat he’d stalked in the playground that day. No doubt the cat had been proud of its hunting, yet it had never noticed him behind it, stealthily following. Only the master at the window had saved it. He grinned, and chewed his tongue to taste blood. There would be nobody to warn Edmund Hall, nor anyone who was helping him hunt.

  Saturday,

  September 13

  “Oh God,” Clare said. “I forgot to tell George you were vegetarian.”

  She was driving along Prescot Road toward Newsham Park, the far side from the cinema. It was nearly six o’clock. Beyond the wire fences at the edge of the pavement, people emerged from small shops with the evening newspaper. Buses honked; ducks flew over them back to the park, honking. Children watched a large green maggot writhing in televisions.