Dead Letters Anthology (13 page)

I couldn’t find his name, and the address didn’t exist in the form that was on the envelope. While there is a Harvell Crescent in SE2, West Heath is in Birmingham. That district does include a Horwell Crescent, however. After more research and some expenditure I managed to obtain the names and phone numbers of the occupier of the London house and of 1 Horwell Crescent as well. Neither name was Malleson. The London number didn’t answer, and so I tried the one in Birmingham, where the phone rang eight times before a woman said “Yes?”

She sounded less affirmative than the word did. I was about to begin explaining my call when it occurred to me to say just “Malleson.”

After a silence she spoke, but not to me. “Someone’s saying Malleson.”

“I’ll speak to them.” In a moment the man’s voice came as close as my ear and grew sharper. “Hello, what do you want?”

“Whatever you can tell me about Roland Malleson.”

“Who wants to know?”

“I believe you sent me a package that was meant for him.”

“Right.” Though the man seemed reluctant to admit this made any difference, his Midland accent had turned shriller. “It’s, don’t tell me,” he said to me or his companion. “It’s, I’ll have it in a sec. Ramsay somebody. Ramsay MacDonald, that’s who you are, right?”

“He’s dead.” It was by no means the first time someone had tried to give me the name; I’ve even been introduced that way as a speaker. “I’m from the other clan,” I said. “Ramsey Campbell.”

“So I wasn’t too far off, right.”

He sounded as if he thought I was being unreasonable, which provoked me to retort “You managed to get it right when you sent the package.”

“That was her.” Without discovering any enthusiasm he said “So what are you after now?”

“For a start I’d like to know why you sent it to me.”

“Roland said he played with you.”

My memory had let me down a few times, but for some reason I hoped this wasn’t such a case. “When?”

“When he saw some of your books in the shops. That was years back.”

I didn’t need to be told that, however resigned to the situation I’ve grown. “I’m asking when I’m meant to have played whatever I’m supposed to have played. I certainly don’t remember.”

“Cards.” If it’s possible for triumph to be apathetic, the man brought off the trick by saying “Mally said it was a long time back, before you ever got yourself in the shops.”

I seemed to experience the faintest stirring of memory, like a glimpse of movement in a virtually lightless place. I won’t pretend it was welcome, but I was going to ask for more detail until another question jumped the queue. “Who opened the envelope? I’m guessing it wasn’t him.”

“He couldn’t have even when he was here.” Before I could pursue this the man said “We did, right? We needed to find out why we were still getting post for him.”

“And was there anything else in the envelope?”

“Just what you’ve got. Don’t you think we’d have sent you anything there was?”

His tone seemed so inappropriate that I almost laughed. “I still don’t understand why you sent it at all.”

“Because he said he helped you with the cards.”

“Helped me do what with them?”

“No, I’m saying he said they helped you, right?” As I prepared to enquire into this if not simply to deny it the man said “Can we leave it now? She’s getting upset with all this talking about her brother.”

“I’m sorry, but I’d like this to make more sense. Who sent him the cards? I hope you don’t imagine I did.”

“You could have.” More magnanimously than he had any right to sound the man conceded “If it wasn’t you, maybe it was someone who didn’t like how Mally played cards.”

Something like a memory seemed to loom in my mind, but the man disrupted it. “I’m putting this down now, right,” he said. “We’ve resurrected him enough.”

“Don’t say that,” I heard the woman cry, and that was the end of the call. I sat here at my desk and gazed out at the river, where a stubborn length of fog stood for the condition of my brain. I could only examine the cards once more. Though their backs showed an identical picture, they might not have belonged to the same pack, since the two was red as blood while the heart was a pallid amalgam of blue and green, a colour I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere in life. Each bore a slim female silhouette that was leaning against a palm tree beneath a supine crescent moon. The figure might have been dressed in a grass skirt – the tendrils dangling from one bent leg resembled the tufts that sprouted from the black earth – and she was playing with a necklace. Why should I have thought the object at the end of the necklace was an amulet rather than a locket? The entire image brought a phrase to mind, and I didn’t know why. “There’s magic underneath.”

I hadn’t time to ponder it. I’d been overtaken by the nervousness I’m prone to suffer when I have to speak in public on a topic I haven’t previously addressed – in this case the generation of ideas and how to develop them. Much of the time I’ve no idea where they come from, but months earlier I’d agreed to talk on the subject at the Bournemouth Festival of Book and Film, and all of a sudden – that’s always how it happens – the date of the booking was tomorrow. As usual I felt disgracefully unprepared, and I still did next morning as I rehearsed some of my speech in the shower. I was leaving the house when I decided to take the Malleson package with me, telling myself I might be able to work it into my talk.

I didn’t have much of a chance to think how on the drive down to Bournemouth. That took most of Sunday, starting at dawn. Once I’d checked into my hotel room I had time for just a quick shower before I had to hurry to the evening’s venue, a hall with far more seats in it than audience. The organisers delayed the event for several minutes, nearly always an ominous sign, but eventually they put me on for the benefit of a dozen listeners. At least the lady who announced me got my name right and wasn’t too inaccurate about my career. I read a couple of extracts from tales of mine and went some way towards analysing how the stories came to be, after which I took half a dozen questions from the audience. Throughout the talk the Malleson business had been loitering in my brain, and the session still had more than ten minutes to run. On an impulse I took the package out of the laptop case that serves me as a briefcase and produced the cards, feeling like a magician who’d neglected to plan a trick. “Sometimes something ought to give you an idea,” I said, “but you can’t think what it might be. Someone sent me these the other day. What do we think they could mean?”

Everyone looked wary, perhaps just of being singled out. After quite a pause a man said “Did that really happen or are you saying it did?”

“Both. There’s no difference.” I might have said more to prove I can distinguish reality from my own imaginings if I hadn’t been driven to ask “Why would you send anyone a couple of old cards?”

“Maybe—” A woman seemed to wish she hadn’t spoken, and cleared her throat twice before saying “Maybe they’re meant for your fortune.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Maybe they’re trying to tell you.”

I could have said this was impossible, since they hadn’t been sent to me in the first place, but it would have called for too much explanation. More disconcertingly, I felt as if she’d let me glimpse some kind of truth. An impression had lodged in my head – the image of a figure watching me across a table spread with cards. The figure wasn’t just indistinct but unstable, as if it was composed of the kind of restless darkness you may see where there’s no source of illumination. The idea bewildered me much more than it inspired me; in fact, I couldn’t say it appealed to me at all. All the same, I told the woman that there might be a story in it and thanked her, and asked for any last questions. When nobody obliged, the organisers brought the event to an end.

I autographed a handful of books and then dined with some of the festival folk, but had difficulty concentrating on the table talk or even savouring the Cantonese banquet. The image of a figure at a table surrounded by oppressive darkness had begun to feel like a memory or a distortion of one, but did this simply mean I was recalling the moment when it had entered my mind at the festival event? As soon as I politely could I said goodnight to my hosts and went back to the hotel, where I felt the need for yet another shower. After that I would have gone to bed if I hadn’t been troubled by wondering where to put the Malleson package. I stowed it in the drawer that contained the obligatory Bible, in a chest some distance from the bed.

I must have dozed despite the image that wouldn’t leave my mind or grow clearer, because I awoke at a few minutes past two. I had a sense that I’d heard something not especially substantial on the move in the dark. The only light came from the scrawny digits of the bedside clock, which aggravated the darkness. As I groped for the cord above the bed I felt as if the gloom was gathering like soot on my fingers. By the time I located the cord I’d begun rubbing them together. The light showed that I hadn’t closed the drawer of the chest as tight as I’d imagined, since it displayed a shadow like a thin strip of earth. Surely it was just because I hadn’t fully wakened that the sliver of blackness looked restive. Lurching out of bed, I slammed the drawer and found myself staring at the room. What should it remind me of? Then I knew, and rather more than that. It brought to mind the first time I’d stayed by myself at a hotel.

I’d been in Harrogate, at a science fiction convention more than half a century ago. For decades I’d gone almost every Easter, wherever in Britain the annual convention might be. I would pass these weekends listening to programme items and meeting increasingly old friends, usually in the bar. After the programme was done for the day there would be parties in the bedrooms and often a card game somewhere in the hotel. Recalling this unlocked my memory, and with a shock that felt as if a dark part of my mind had given way I realised I had indeed met Malleson at one such Easter weekend. The people I’d phoned about him had been right after all.

He didn’t go by that name at the convention. When he turned up at the poker game he was Malleficus on his badge. “Just call me Mally,” he said, having peered at everybody else’s badges, and shouldn’t I have recognised the nickname when I heard it over the phone? Perhaps the memory was blurred by how he’d seemed to feel I should appreciate the word on his badge. As he sat opposite me across the large round table he caught my eye and indicated the name with his left little finger, which was as pale and thick as his lips and didn’t look much firmer. With its cobweb strands of greying hair his big-eyed long-nosed oval face put me in mind of an egg well past its best. He kept up a loose-lipped grin at me until the dealer began laying out the cards. In those days I was only starting to manufacture the personality I use as armour for shyness, and so I tried to ignore Malleson.

I don’t think his playing style went down too well. Whenever it was his turn to open he would say “What the prince wears,” a joke that soon grew tedious and then irritating. It meant half a crown, not a negligible amount of money at the time. When he followed someone else’s bid he would wave his hand over the cards in his left one, a gesture that might have signified indecision or a silent wish. “Waving goodbye to your money?” an opponent fell to saying, which didn’t deter Malleson, especially once it became clear that he was winning many of the pots and losing only the smaller ones. By midnight several players had thrown in their hands and gone in search of other diversions, and soon an especially competitive round gave Malleson his most substantial win with a full house. This proved too much for the owner of the pack of cards, who took them and himself off. As the other players wandered away, Malleson detained me by saying “Aren’t you a writer?”

I hadn’t much to show for it compared to the authors on the convention programme – Moorcock, Brunner, Bulmer, Tubb. I had just a single book and a few short stories to my name, and so I couldn’t help feeling flattered when Malleson said “I’ve been looking for someone like you.”

“There’s a few here this weekend.”

“Not like you.” As I prepared to feel more acclaimed he said “They’re here for science fiction, not the occult.”

I did feel somewhat outcast at the convention. I’d found one book dealer who stocked fantasy as well as science fiction – Sci Fi Fo Fum – but he scarcely touched horror. It would be years before an Eastercon saw its first dealer in my field, the Horrid Variorum, sadly short-lived even once it changed its name to Rarum Scarum. All the same, I was about to establish that I never mistook my fiction for reality when Malleson pointed at his badge. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sufficiently sure of myself to tell him the word was misspelled. “Wasn’t it some kind of criminal in Latin?”

“That’s been dead a long time. I thought you’d know better.” Having stared at me as though to give me a chance to redeem myself, he said “What’s
malefica
mean?”

In those days it was easy to make me feel I was being quizzed by a schoolteacher, and I was forced to guess. “A witch?”

“That’s it, a sorceress. I knew you’d know your occult history. It’s where they got the title of that vile book from, the
Malleus Maleficarum
. As you see, I’ve taken the word back.”

All I could produce in the way of an answer was “Well, good.”

“I knew you’d think so. Our type need to stick together.”

This struck me as ominous, especially in a dimly illuminated lounge late at night with nobody else nearby. “Anyway,” I said, “if you’ll excuse me—”

“Wait there.” Malleson stood up, pushing the table towards me so that it came close to pinning me against the shabby upholstered chair. “I want to do something for you,” he said.

His approach shook the floorboards and seemed to do that to his lips, which quivered into an ingratiating smile. “What?” I demanded and caught hold of the edge of the table, ready to shove myself back.

“Only to show you what you ought to see.” Malleson rested his hands on the table as he sat next to me, extracting a creak from his chair. He dragged the chair around so that he was facing me and lifted his hands with a flourish. “Those are yours,” he said.