Ramsey Campbell - The Face That Must Die

Eventually he realised that it was the sound of water in the pipes. It still didn’t sound any less like a voice. Even when he closed his bedroom door he could hear the mumbling, as though an idiot were talking in his sleep.

Over the years he’d learned the source of every sound in his old home. The sounds had been familiar and comforting. He still didn’t know where half the sounds here came from. It would take a damn sight more than that to scare him. As soon as he’d slipped the razor beneath his pillow he felt less vulnerable.

He lay in the dark, which robbed him of all sense of the size of his bedroom. He wished he could afford a new clock; the dark allowed the ticking to grow louder, louder. The sound was a four-beat rocking, too quick and harsh to be a lullaby. Roy Craig, kill-er. Roy Craig, kill-er. Couldn’t it stop, just for a moment? Couldn’t it at least slow down? Wouldn’t it give him even a second of silence during which he might fall asleep?

He had no idea when it stopped: perhaps hours later. He was in the alley, among the stuffed dustbins. The girls surrounded him. As he backed against the wall, the rough stone plucked at his clothes. The bricks were hard and harsh; they felt like his fever dream, when his brain had seemed composed of chunks of rubble that ground together.

“ Make it stand up,” the girls were saying. The icy wall pressed against him. He was shivering; they must think he was afraid – and he was, for once his father had beaten him for handling himself. His body shook and throbbed, at the mercy of his panic. He stood helpless as he was seized by a painful orgasm.

He woke terrified, and pressed himself against the wall through the blankets, recoiling from the stain in the bed. For the love of God, why had that happened? It hadn’t happened in the alley; he had been far too scared to achieve an erection. “Don’t you be going with those girls,” his father had used to say ominously, and Horridge hadn’t wanted to; they had tricked and trapped him. Beyond the alley walls, frost had grown like lichen on the roofs of the outside toilets. “He can’t make it stand up. He must be queer,” the girls had said, and he’d listened appalled while they explained what that meant.

He felt as though he had been possessed in his sleep. He couldn’t be blamed for that – but his bed felt invaded. Only once in his life had he masturbated, alone in his old home after his parents had died, his willpower enfeebled by dozing. The experience had been wholly unpleasant, pumping away as though to make a reluctant toilet work, to achieve the sudden uncontrollable flushing. How could people waste their time wallowing in sex? It wasn’t as though it took much self-control to refrain. After all, one seldom had erections, and then only while asleep.

He was growing calmer, the side of the bed on which he’d taken refuge was beginning to feel safe, sleep was slowing down his thoughts – when, amid the ticking of the clock, he heard another sound.

Though his head was loud with blood, he raised it gently from the pillow. His hand slid directly and silently to grasp the handle of the razor. He managed to hold his body still as he listened.

There was no sound. Nor could he recall exactly what he had heard before. Perhaps it hadn’t been a sound that he had sensed – but something had warned him that an intruder was creeping about nearby. Perhaps that had made him dream that he was helpless.

But he was not, even if Craig had come to silence him. He inched himself free of the blankets. Though his heel touched the stain, chill and slimy in the dark, he succeeded in setting his feet down noiselessly on the carpet. As he stood up, he felt for the blade. It emerged from the handle with a slight click.

He paced stealthily to the door. His fingerprints roamed its cold surface, and found the colder handle, which he turned minutely. It would be just like this place to betray him with an unexpected creak – but the door edged wide silently. He reached into the darkness, holding the blade in his other hand before his face, and twitched the light on.

The light surprised only the empty room. There was nowhere an intruder could hide; his furniture was sparse. He switched off the light at once. He wasn’t satisfied. Somebody was up to no good nearby. He groped his way among the furniture, and peered between the curtains.

Outside, on the walk which passed his apology for a yard, was a light where no light should be. It was feeling its way along the fence on the opposite side of the walk. The figure that carried the torch was patting an object on the fence: a notice, where none had been when Horridge had come home.

What the devil was the fellow doing? What did the notice say? Surely it couldn’t be Craig, not unless he had some mad plan to scare Horridge. But Horridge meant to find out what the man was up to. He felt his way back to the bedroom, and groped into his overcoat and shoes.

He eased open the outer door. His L-shaped flat walled off two sides of his meagre yard: hardly even a yard, more a stray patch of concrete onto which the door opened. Over his door, stone steps led from the yard to the upstairs flat. He couldn’t be brought any lower in the world than living below stairs.

Now, for once, he welcomed the stairs. They concealed him while he peered out. In his pocket he held the razor ajar and ready. He was nervously eager for action.

At first he could see nothing. All around him, concrete made the night massive and claustrophobic. Then he glimpsed a flickering. A passage led the walk past his outer wall and beneath the bridging upper floor. The torchlight was in that passage.

He limped rapidly yet stealthily to the end of his wall. The man was sticking a notice to the wall of the passage. Horridge gripped the handle in his pocket. “What are you doing?” he said loudly.

The man whirled; his hand dragged the notice awry. The torch-beam poked at Horridge’s face, dazzling him. Then the man relaxed, or decided not to be intimidated. “You aren’t blind, are you?” he demanded and gestured at the notice with the light.

Above a caricature of a Negro family, the notice said SAY NO TO A BLACK BRITAIN! As Horridge squinted at him, the man’s face emerged from the dazzle: eyes swollen out of proportion by thick spectacles, a withdrawn chin. He’d seen this man sometimes, reading the newspapers in Cantril Farm Library.

The man must have observed his approval of the notice, for he said “Don’t you think we should get rid of all these foreigners?”

Horridge nodded curtly. It wasn’t the man’s place to interrogate him. But the man continued “Don’t you think we ought to do something about all these layabouts sponging on the welfare state?”

Horridge didn’t quite trust him. It was like brainwashing, this rapid stream of questions that demanded only agreement. They didn’t sound like the man’s own questions; Horridge suspected he’d learned them by rote. He couldn’t think for himself.

A cold breeze made the cuffs of Horridge’s pyjama trousers shiver. All this was getting him nowhere. Why couldn’t the fellow stand up and say what he knew was right, instead of skulking about under cover of darkness? Before the man could interrogate him further, Horridge demanded “And what about homosexuals?”

The man’s enormous eyes fluttered in their glass bowls, like startled fish. “I don’t like them,” he said.

Horridge pointed at the notice. “How is that sort of thing going to get rid of them?”

“ Have you got a better way?”

Horridge had trapped himself. Though the man’s triumphant stare enraged him, he couldn’t reply. The man said “Shall I take your name and address for some of our literature?”

“ No, thank you. I’m quite capable of thinking for myself.”