Ghosts and Grisly Things by Ramsey Campbell

Author:Ramsey Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

WHERE THEY LIVED

THE HATCHARDS HAD JUST CROSSED Ataturk Bulvari when a shoeshine boy commenced rubbing the straps of Don’s sandals with a cloth. “Your shoes very dirty, sir.”

“All right, son, they’re only sandals. He’ll be polishing my feet next, Maggie. Not the kind of feet you’d want in bed with you.” As he walked faster towards the sun-bleached concrete seafront the boy pursued him like a terrier, and Don felt the cloth catch the nail of one big toe. “That’s all, son, would you mind? They’re going in the sea, so you might as well not bother.”

“He has to make a living somehow, Don. If he was a beggar you’d only look away from him.”

“You know I hadn’t any Turkish money until we went to the bank. What did you want me to give that woman, a travellers’ cheque?” He dug in the pocket of his shorts for change, muttering “Have this if it’ll help you mind your own business,” and jangled the coins for Maggie’s benefit before he dropped them into the small thin grubby hand. “I hope you heard that,” he said as he tramped puffing after her.

She pulled her sun-hat lower, netting her forehead with shadows. “Oh yes, I’m getting expert at hearing what you don’t want me to hear.”

“I meant the donation, and you know I — We’ll look for her on the way back to the hotel if you like.” He was reaching out a hand for one of Maggie’s, and about to say “Let’s start again like we said we would” when a man shouted at his back “Hey, English.”

Only a policeman took that tone, Don thought — one of the policemen he’d seen strolling through the town as if all they needed to keep order were the guns they wore. This one must have observed Don appearing to taunt the shoeshine boy, or assumed he was pestering Maggie, and if Don couldn’t clarify the situation, where might he end up? “Wait,” he called, images of a communal jail-cell with plumbing even worse than the hotel provided crowding into his overheated head. When he turned, however, he saw two tourists bearing down on him.

They might have spent their marriage growing more alike. They looked like body-builders who had settled at some point for plumpness. They had identical pale blue eyes and marble grins, and over their swimwear both wore open buttonless shirts printed with cartoon figures brandishing bubbling cocktails. Their peeling skins were all the colours of new plaster, and oily with lotion. The woman’s cropped hair was the same greying red as the strips under the man’s nose and above his ears. Cameras bounced on their stomachs as they overtook the Hatchards. “Thank all the saints for someone who speaks English like a native,” the woman said in a voice that would have carried across the street. “We were beginning to think we were the only people in town.”

Her husband’s shout had expressed enthusiasm, Don gathered now, because the man said in the same tone “Gareth and Trixie Lunt.

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