Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell

Author:Ramsey Campbell [Campbell, Ramsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Horror
ISBN: 9781428508415
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty

DISAPPEARING SITES

The monumental monarch appears to be ignoring the fugitive who dashes out of the law courts. I barely glimpse the figure, who’s clad from head to foot in shiny black and hooded too, before half a dozen policemen close around him, if it’s a man. They have so much trouble keeping hold of him that I can’t see their captive for the mass of them as they drag him back into the courts. “Slippery customer,” one remarks.

The white concrete building looks muddy under the storm cloud that has reared up from the sea. Behind the courts there’s a short cut past a rickety wire fence around a few acres of overgrown mud like a revival of the ancient marsh. As I dodge around a corner of the fence the mud begins to hiss and glisten and seethe. It’s enlivened by the latest downpour, and I sprint for the bus station where the first dock used to be.

It gives by no means enough cover, since the imaginative architects omitted a roof. Would-be passengers huddle at the backs of glass shelters, where the wind and rain easily find them. At least a bus I want is waiting in its bay. Some of the windows must have been open recently, since many of the seats upstairs are wet. The left-hand front seat isn’t, and as I sit down I take out my mobile. “This is Gavin Meadows. Any news of my father?”

“Gavin Meadows. Any news of his father.” Though this rouses no answer I’m able to hear, Wrigley or Maddock says “We can’t tell you where he is.”

“How is that possible? You’re the police.”

“Can’t work miracles. Either his phone’s dead or he’s somewhere there’s no signal. Him or it, all right?”

It’s far from that. “But you know where the message came from, surely.”

“Working on it.”

I should have accepted the Frugone salesman’s offer. “You’ll let me know as soon as you do, won’t you?”

“We’ll be telling somebody. You’re not the only one that’s interested.”

I could retort that I’m a damn or a stronger sight more than interested, but I need to say “Don’t try to reach my mother at the house. She’s staying with me.”

The bus moves forward with a jerk that unravels skeins of water on the window in front of me, and I end the call. As the bus swings into the triple carriageway at the mouth of the Pool I wipe greyness from the moist chill glass. Rain washes rain off the windows to replace rain with rain, so that the south docks—Albert, Wapping, Queens—are reduced to vast unstable hulks of brick or granite, and I can barely distinguish the grey conical tower like the gnome’s house my father once assured me it was—the policeman’s lodge at the Wapping gates. On the landward side the bus is paced by the reddish sandstone bulk of the Anglican cathedral on the ridge above a quarry that became a graveyard. The docks give way to a casino and a marina opposite a rank of small commercial buildings cut off at the pavement.

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