Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell

Author:Ramsey Campbell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2011-10-03T23:00:00+00:00

The Show Goes On

The nails were worse than rusty; they had snapped. Under cover of several coats of paint, both the door and its frame had rotted. As Lee tugged at the door it collapsed towards him with a sound like that of an old cork leaving a bottle.

He hadn’t used the storeroom since his father had nailed the door shut to keep the rats out of the shop. Both the shelves and the few items that had been left in the room—an open tin of paint, a broken-necked brush—looked merged into a single mass composed of grime and dust.

He was turning away, having vaguely noticed a dark patch that covered much of the dim wall at the back of the room, when he saw that it wasn’t dampness. Beyond it he could just make out rows of regular outlines like teeth in a gaping mouth: seats in the old cinema.

He hadn’t thought of the cinema for years. Old resurrected films on television, shrunken and packaged and robbed of flavour, never reminded him. It wasn’t only that Cagney and Bogart and the rest had been larger than life, huge hovering faces like ancient idols; the cinema itself had had a personality—the screen framed by twin theatre boxes from the days of the music-hall, the faint smell and muttering of gaslights on the walls, the manager’s wife and daughter serving in the auditorium and singing along with the musicals. In the years after the war you could get in for an armful of lemonade bottles, or a bag of vegetables if you owned one of the nearby allotments; there had been a greengrocer’s old weighing machine inside the pay-box. These days you had to watch films in concrete warrens, if you could afford to go at all.

Still, there was no point in reminiscing, for the old cinema was now a back entry for thieves. He was sure that was how they had robbed other shops on the block. At times he’d thought he heard them in the cinema; they sounded too large for rats. And now, by the look of the wall, they’d made themselves a secret entrance to his shop.

Mrs Entwistle was waiting at the counter. These days she shopped here less from need than from loyalty, remembering when his mother used to bake bread at home to sell in the shop. “Just a sliced loaf,” she said apologetically.

“Will you be going past Frank’s yard?” Within its slippery wrapping the loaf felt ready to deflate, not like his mother’s bread at all. “Could you tell him that my wall needs repairing urgently? I can’t leave the shop.”

Buses were carrying stragglers to work or to school. Ninety minutes later—he could tell the time by the passengers, which meant he needn’t have his watch repaired—the buses were ferrying shoppers down to Liverpool city centre, and Frank still hadn’t come. Grumbling to himself, Lee closed the shop for ten minutes.

The February wind came slashing up the hill from the Mersey, trailing smoke like ghosts of the factory chimneys.

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