No End of Fun

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

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Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool and still lives on Mersey side with his wife, Jenny. He has been described by the London Times as “the nearest thing to an heir to M. R. James.” He was presented with the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and the World Horror Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in 1999. His most recent novels are The Darkest Part of the Woods and The Overnight, and his nonfiction is collected in Ramsey Campbell, Probably. An expanded edition of his erotic horror stories, Scared Stiff, was published in 2002, and he has a new short story collection, Told by the Dead, due this summer. He is working on two novels: Secret Stories and Spanked by Nuns.

“No End of Fun” is typically creepy Campbell at its best.

—E. D.

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You don’t mind, do you, Uncle Lionel? I’ve given you mother’s old room.“

“Why should I mind anything to do with Dorothy?”

“I expect you’ve got happy memories like us. Is it all right if Helen sees you up? Only we’ve got paying guests arriving any minute.”

“You really ought to let me pay something towards my keep.”

“You mustn’t think I meant that. Mother never let you and I’m not about to start. Just keep Helen amused like always and that’ll be more than enough. Helen, don’t let my uncle lug that case.”

“Are you helping with the luggage now, Helen? Will that be a bit much for you?”

“I’ve done bigger ones.”

“That sounds a bit cheeky, doesn’t it, Carol? The sort of thing the comics used to say at the Imperial. Is that old place still alive? That can be one of your treats then, Helen.”

“Say thank you. Helen, and will you please take up that case. Here are the boarders now.”

When the thirteen-year-old thrust her fingers through the handle, Lionel let it go. “You’re a treasure,” he murmured, but she was apparently too intent on stumping upstairs to give him his usual smile. Remarking “She’s a credit to you” brought him no more than a straight-lipped nod from her mother. He had to admit to himself that Helen’s new image—all her curls cropped into auburn turf, denim overalls so oversized he would have assumed they’d been handed down if she’d had an older sibling—had rather startled him. “So how have you been progressing at school?” he said as he caught up with her, and in an attempt to sound less dusty, “You can call me Lionel if you like.”

“Mum wouldn’t let me.”

“Better make it uncle, then, even if it’s not quite right. Great-uncle is a mouthful, isn’t it, though you liked it one year, didn’t you? You said I was the greatest one you had, not that there was any competition.”

All this, uttered slowly and with pauses inviting but obtaining no responses, brought them to the third floor, where he held onto the banister and regained his breath while Helen preceded him into the room. Dorothy’s sheets had been replaced by a duvet as innocently white, but otherwise the place seemed hardly to have changed since her girlhood, when children weren’t expected to personalize their rooms: the same hulking oaken wardrobe and chest of drawers she’d inherited at Helen’s age along with Dorothy’s grandmother’s room, the view of boarding-houses boasting of their fullness, the only mirror her grandmother’s on the windows!!!. As he stepped into the July sunlight that had gathered like an insubstantial faintly lavender-scented weight in the room, he thought he saw Dorothy in the mirror.

It was Helen, of course. She resembled Dorothy more than Carol ever had— elfin ears, full lower lip, nose as emphatic as an exclamation mark, eyes deep with secrets. As she dumped Lionel’s suitcase by the bed, the mirror wobbled with the impact. The oval glass was supported by two pairs of marble hands, each brace joined at the wrists; the lower of the left hands was missing its little finger. He lurched forward to steady the mirror, and his arm brushed the front of Helen’s overalls. He expected the material to yield, and the presence of two plump mounds of flesh came as more than a shock.

She twisted away from him, and her face reappeared in the mirror, grimacing. For a moment it exactly fitted the oval. The sight set his heart racing as though a knot of memories had squeezed it. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and “I’ll see you at dinner” as she slouched out of the room.

Laying his socks and underwear in Dorothy’s chest of drawers and dressing her padded hangers in his shirts and suits made him wonder if that was more intimate than she would have liked. By the time he’d finished he was oppressively hot. He donned the bathrobe that was waiting for him every year and hurried to the attic bathroom, to be confronted by a crowd of Carol’s and Helen’s tights pegged to a clothesline over the bath as though to demonstrate two stages of growth. Not caring to touch them, he retreated to his room and transferred the mirror to the chest of drawers so as to raise the sash as high as it would wobble. Hours of sunlight had left the marble hands not much less warm than flesh.

He might have imagined he heard the screams of people drowning if he hadn’t recognized the waves as the swoops of a roller coaster. Soon he was able to hear the drowsing of the sea. Its long, slow breaths were soothing him when he saw a passerby remove her topmost head. She’d lifted her small daughter from her shoulders, but the realization came too late to prevent Lionel from remembering a figure that had parted into prancing segments. He lay down hastily and made himself breathe in time with the sea until the summons of the dinner gong resounded through the house.

Even in their early teens he and his cousin had squabbled over who sounded the gong, until Dorothy’s mother had kept the task for herself. While it was meant to call only the guests, it reminded him that he didn’t know when he was expected for dinner. He was changing, having resprayed his armpits, when a rap at the door arrested him with trousers halfway up his greying thighs. “Would you mind taking dinner with the others?” Carol called. “We’re not as organized as mother yet.”

“I’d be happy to wait till you have yours.”

“We eat on the trot at the moment. You’d be helping.”

In the dining room a table in the corner farthest from the window was set for one. All his fellow diners were married couples at least his age. A few bade him a wary good evening, but otherwise none of the muted conversations came anywhere near him. He felt like a teacher attempting to ignore a murmurous classroom, not that he ever would have. As soon as he’d finished dinner—thin soup, cold ham and salad, brown bread and butter, a rotund teapot harboring a single bag, a pair of cakes on a stand, everything Dorothy used to serve—he followed Helen into the kitchen. “Would you be terribly upset if we didn’t go anywhere tonight?” he said.

“Don’t suppose.”

“Only driving up from London isn’t the picnic it was.”

“She wouldn’t have been joining you anyway. It’s dirty sheet night,” Carol said, wrinkling her nose.

He did all the washing-up he could grab, and would have helped Helen trudge to the machine in the basement with armfuls of bedclothes if Carol hadn’t urged him to tell her his news. Now that he’d retired from teaching there wasn’t much besides the occasional encounter with an ex-pupil, and so he encouraged Carol to talk. When her patient responses betrayed that she regarded his advice about the multitude of petty problems she’d inherited with the boarding-house as at best uninformed, he pleaded tiredness and withdrew to his room.

At first exhaustion wouldn’t let him sleep. Though he left the window open, the heat insisted on sharing his bed, Dorothy’s ever since she was Helen’s age. He found himself wishing he hadn’t arrived for the funeral last December too late to see her. “We never said goodbye,” he whispered into the pillow and wrapped his arms around himself., covering his flaccid hairy dugs.

He wakened in the middle of the night and also of the heat with the notion that Dorothy had grown an unreasonable number of legs. He raised himself on his elbows to peer sleepily about, and realized she was staring at him. Of course it was her oval photograph, except that there was no picture of her in the room. As he jerked upright he saw her face balanced on the marble hands, crammed into the mirror. She looked outraged, unable to believe her fate.

Lionel snatched at the overhead cord to drag light into the room. The mirror was deserted apart from a patch of wallpaper whose barely discernible pattern gave him the impression of gazing straight through the frame at the wall. When the illusion refused to be dispelled he turned the light off, trying not to feel he’d used it to drive Dorothy into the dark. She was gone wherever everyone would end up, that was all; how could dreaming summon her back? Nevertheless he felt as guilty as the only other time he’d seen her in the mirror.

It had been the year when she’d kept being late for dinner. One evening her mother had sent him to fetch her. He’d swaggered into Dorothy’s room without knocking; they’d never knocked at each other’s doors. Although it wasn’t dark the curtains had been drawn, and at first he’d been unsure what he saw— Dorothy stooping to watch her face in the oval mirror as she’d squeezed her budding breasts. While she hadn’t been naked, her white slip had let the muted light glow between her legs. The smile of pride and quiet astonishment she had been sharing with herself had transformed itself into an accusing glare as she’d caught sight of him in the mirror. “Go away,” she’d cried, “this is my room.,” as Lionel fled, his entire body pounding like an exposed heart. He hadn’t dared venture downstairs until he’d heard her precede him.

The breakfast gong quieted his memories at last. In the bathroom he was relieved to find the tights had flown. He showered away most of his coating of mugginess. and thought he was ready for the day until he opened the kitchen door to hear Carol tell Helen “You’re not to go anywhere near him, is that understood?”

Surely she couldn’t mean Lionel, but he would have been tempted to sidle out of reach of the idea if she hadn’t given him a wink behind Helen’s eloquently sulky back. “A boyfriend she’s too young to have,” she said. “Do you mind sitting where you did again?”

Lionel had hoped they could have breakfast together, but tried to seem happy to head for the dining room. “Morning all,” he declared, and when that stirred no more than muted echoes “I’m her uncle, should anyone be wondering.”

Did explaining his presence only render it more questionable or suggest he thought it was? He restrained himself from explaining that Carol had divorced her husband once she’d resolved to move in with her aging mother. He made rather shorter work of his breakfast than his innards found ideal so that he could escape to the kitchen. “Are we going for a roam?” he asked Helen as he set about washing up.

“Too many rooms to change,” Carol said at once. “Maybe we can let her out this evening if you can think how to occupy her.”

He strolled up to the elongated Victorian garden that was the promenade and clambered down a set of thick hot stone steps to the beach. The sand was beginning to sprout turrets around families who’d staked out their territories with buckets and spades the colors of lollipops. He paced alongside the subdued withdrawn waves until screams rose from the amusement park ahead, and then he labored up another block of steps to the Imperial.

The theater was displaying posters for the kind of summer show it always had: comedians, singers, dancers, a magician. It took the mostly blonde girl in the ticket booth some moments to pause her chewing gum and see off a section of her handful of paperback, which was proportionately almost as stout as its reader. When she said “Can I help you?” she sounded close to refusing in advance.

“Could you tell me whether there are any, you won’t take offense if I call them dwarfs?”

She met that with a grimace she supplemented by bulging her cheek with her tongue. “Any…”

“Small performers. You know, a troupe of dinky fellows. They used to perform here when I was a child. I don’t know if you’d have anything like them these days.” When she only tongued her cheek more fiercely he grew desperate. “Tiny Tumblers, one lot were called,” he insisted. “Squat little chaps.”

“The only little people we’ve got are Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”

“That’s fine, then,” Lionel said with an alacrity she appeared to find suspicious. “Any chance of a pair of your best seats for tomorrow night?”

“Best for what?”

For persuading Carol to give Helen an evening off. he hoped: she was working the child harder than Dorothy had ever worked her. “For watching, I should think,” he said.

From the theater he wandered inland. Behind the large hotels facing the sea a parallel row of bed and breakfast houses kept to themselves. Victorian shopping arcades led between them to the main street, which was clinging to its elegance. Among the tea shops and extravagant department stores, not a pub nor an amusement arcade was to be seen. Crowds of the superannuated were taking all the time they could to progress from one end of the street to the other, while those that were wheeling or being wheeled traversed the wide pavements more slowly still. When Lionel discovered that matching the speed of the walkers made him feel prematurely old, or perhaps not so prematurely, he turned aside into the park that stretched opposite half the shops.

Folding chairs could be hired from a spindly lugubrious youth decorated with a moustache like two transplanted eyebrows. Lionel plumped himself and the swelling that was breakfast onto a chair close to the bandstand. The afternoon concert was preceded by an open-air theater of toddlers on the lawns and secretaries with lunch-boxes, a spectacle he found soporific. By the time the elderly musicians in their dinner jackets assembled on the bandstand, he was dozing off.

A medley of Viennese waltzes failed to rouse him, as did portions of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was past being able to raise his head when the orchestra struck up a piece he would have thought too brash to win the applause, much of it gloved, of the pensioned audience. Though he couldn’t name the opera responsible, he recognized the music. It was the Dance of the Tumblers. Far from wakening him, it let a memory at him.

A few days after he’d seen Dorothy at the mirror, her mother had taken her and Lionel to the Imperial. She’d made them sit together as if that might crush whatever had come between them, but Dorothy had sat aside from him, knees protruding into the aisle. She had seemed to take half the evening to eat a tub of ice cream, until the scraping of the wooden spoon had started to grate on his nerves. As she’d lifted yet another delicate mouthful to her lips, the master of ceremonies had announced the Tiny Tumblers, and then her spoon had halted in mid-air. Two giant women had waddled onstage from the wings.

He’d never known if Dorothy had cowered against her seat because of their size or from guessing what was imminent. The long-haired square-faced figures had swayed to the footlights before the flowered ankle-length dresses had split open, each of them disgorging a totem-pole composed of three dwarfs in babies’ frilly outfits. The dwarfs had sprung from one another’s shoulders, leaving the dresses to collapse under the weight of the wigs, and piled down the stairs that flanked the stage. “Who’s coming for a tumble?” they’d croaked.

Lionel had felt Dorothy flinch away from the aisle, pressing against him. If she’d asked he would have changed places with her, but he’d thought he sensed how loath she was to touch him after his glimpse in her room. As two dwarfs had scurried towards her, swivelling their blocky heads and widening their eyes, he’d dealt her a covert shove. Her lurch and her squeak had attracted the attention of the foremost dwarf, who’d shambled fast at her. She’d jumped up, spilling ice cream over the lap of her skirt, and fled to the sanctuary of the Ladies‘. Her mother had needed to ask Lionel more than once to let her past to follow, he remembered with dismay. Part of him had wanted to find out what would happen if the dwarfs caught his cousin.

He came back to himself before the thought could reach deeper. He’d grown unaware of the music in the park, and now there was only clapping. He was awakened less by the discreet peal than by a sense that his body was about to expel some element it was no longer able to contain. His midriff strained itself up from the chair as the secret escaped him—a protracted vibrant belch that the applause faded just in time to isolate.

He excused himself as quickly and as blindly as he could—he had a childish half-awake notion that if he didn’t see he wouldn’t be seen either—but not before he glimpsed couples staring as if he’d strayed from the Imperial, which they barely tolerated for its appeal to tourists. Several pensioners on the main street frowned at his excessively boisterous progress, but he was anxious to take refuge in his room. Since Carol and Helen were busy in the kitchen, only shortness of breath delayed him on the stairs. He manhandled the door open and slumped against it, but took just one step towards the bed.

Whoever had tidied up had returned the mirror to the windowsill. It must be himself he could see in the oval glass, even if the face appeared to recede faster than he stumbled forward. Presumably his having rushed back to the hotel made him see the face dwindle beyond sight, carried helplessly into a blackness that had no basis in the room. He rubbed his eyes hard, and once the fog cleared he saw nothing in the mirror except his own confused face.

The marble hands had stored up warmth. They brought back the touch of flesh, which he’d avoided since losing his parents, not that he’d encountered much of it while they were alive. He planted the hands on the chest of drawers and turned the glass to the wall, then lay on top of the duvet, trying harder and more unsuccessfully to relax than he ever had after a day’s teaching, until the gong sent its vibrations through his nerves.

He didn’t eat much. Besides being wary of conjuring another belch, he felt though someone who knew more about him than he realized was observing him. When he took the last of his plates into the kitchen, Carol gave him a harassed disappointed blink. “Dinner was excellent,” he assured her, though it had been something of a repeat performance of last night’s, with cold beef understudying ham. “I’m just not very peckish. I expect I’m too excited at the prospect of a date with my favorite young lady.”

“Do you still want to go out with my uncle tonight?”

Helen had kept her back to his comment, but turned with a quick bright smile. “Yes please, Uncle Lionel.”

That was more like the girl he remembered. It lasted as far as the street, where he said “Shall we just go for an amble?”

“To the rides.”

“Best save those till I’ve been to the bank.”

“I’ve got some money. If we aren’t going to the rides I don’t want to go.”

He felt as if she knew he’d manufactured his excuse. “It’s your treat,” he said.

All the way along the promenade he had to remind himself that the screams from the tracks etched high on the glassy sunset expressed pleasure. The sight beyond the entrance to the amusement park of painted horses bobbing like flotsam on an ebb tide provided some relief. He halted by the old roundabout to regain his breath. “Shall we,” he said, and “go on here?”

Helen squashed her lower lip flat with its twin. “That’s for babies.”

He might have retorted that she hadn’t seemed to think so last year, but said “What shall it be, then?”

“The Cannonball.”

“I thought you didn’t care for roller coasters any more than I do.”

“That was when I was little. I like it now, and the Plunge of Peril, and Annihilation.”

“Will you be awfully offended if I watch?”

“No.” The starkness of the word appeared to rouse her pity for him, since she added “You can win me something, Uncle Lionel.”

He felt obliged to see her safely onto the roller coaster. Once she was installed in the middle carriage, next to a boy with an increasingly red face and the barest vestige of hair, Lionel headed for the sideshows. Too many of the prizes were composed of puffed-up rubber for his taste—he remembered a pink horse whose midriff had burst between his adolescent legs, dumping him in the sea—but they were out of reach of his skill. He had yet to ring a single bell or cast a quoit onto a hook when Helen indicated she was bound for the Plunge of Peril.

He was determined to win her a present. Eventually rolling several pounds’ worth of balls down a chute towards holes intermittently exposed by a perforated strip of wood gained him an owl of shaggy orange cloth. He would have felt more triumphant if he hadn’t realized he’d betrayed that he wouldn’t have needed to go to the bank. He was just in time to see Helen leave the Plunge of Peril

She glanced about but didn’t notice him behind a bunch of teddy bears pegged by their cauliflower ears. As he watched through the tangle of legs she shared a swift kiss with her companion, the red-faced boy crowned with grey skin, and tugged him in the direction of a virtually vertical roller coaster. Lionel didn’t intervene., not even when they staggered off the ride, though he was unsure whether he was being discreet or spying on them or at a loss how to approach them. He was pursuing them through the crowds when their way was blocked by two figures with the night gaping where their faces ought to be.

They were life-size cartoons of a man and a woman sufficiently ill-dressed to be homeless, painted on a flat with their faces cut out for the public to insert their own. Lionel saw Helen scamper to poke hers out above the woman’s body. Her grimace was meant to be funny—she was protruding at the boy the tongue she’d recently shared with him—but Lionel realized that too late to keep quiet. “Don’t,” he cried.

For a moment Helen’s face looked trapped by the oval. Perhaps her eyes were lolling leftward to send the boy that way, since that was the direction in which he absented himself. She emerged so innocently it angered Lionel. “I think it’s time we went back to your mother,” he said, and thrust the owl at Helen as she mooched after him. “This was for you.”

“Thanks.” On the promenade she lowered a mournful gaze to the dwarfish button-eyed rag-beaked soft-clawed orange lump, and then she risked saying, “Are you going to tell Mum?”

“Can you offer me any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Because she’d never let me see Brandon again.”

“I thought that was already supposed to be the arrangement.”

“But I love him,” Helen protested, and began to weep.

“Good heavens now, no need for that. You can’t be in love at your age.” The trouble was that he had no idea when it was meant to start; it never had for him. “Do stop it, there’s a good girl,” he pleaded as couples bound for the amusement park began to frown more at him than Helen, and applied himself to taking some control. “I really don’t like being used when I haven’t even been consulted.”

“I won’t ever again, I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to it. Now can we make that the end of the tears? I shouldn’t think you’d like your mother wondering what the tragedy is.”

“I’ll stop if you promise not to tell.”

“We’ll see.”

He was ashamed to recognize that he might have undertaken more if she hadn’t dabbed her eyes dry with the owl, leaving a wet patch suggesting that the bird had disgraced itself; should Carol learn of Helen’s subterfuge she would also know he’d neglected to supervise her. Carol proved to be so intent on her business accounts that she simply transferred her glance of surprise from the clock to him. “I’ve a job for you as long as you’re here,” she told Helen, and Lionel took his sudden weariness to his room.

As he fumbled for the light switch he heard a scream. It sounded muffled., presumably by glass—by the window. He couldn’t tell whether it signified delight or dismay or a confusion of both, but he would have preferred not to be greeted by it. A memory was waiting to claim him once he huddled under the quilt in the dark.

Yet had he done anything so dreadful? Days after the incident at the Imperial, her mother had taken him and Dorothy to the amusement park. On the Ghost Train his cousin had sat as far from him as the bench would allow, though when the skull-faced car had blundered into the daylight they’d pretended to be chums for her mother’s camera. For her benefit they’d lent their faces to the painted couple, ancestors of the pair behind which Helen had posed. Lionel had been growing impatient with the pretense and with Dorothy’s covert hostility when he’d seen all six dwarfs, dapper in suits and disproportionately generous ties, strutting towards them.

He must have been too young to imagine how she might feel, otherwise he would surely have restrained himself. He’d grabbed her shoulders, wedging her head in the oval. “Look, Dorothy,” he’d whispered hotly in her ear, “they’re coming for you.” In what had seemed to him mere seconds he’d released her, though not before her struggles had caused her dress to ride up, exposing more of her thighs than he’d glimpsed in her room. As she’d dashed into the darkness behind the cartoon he’d heard her mother calling “Where’s Lionel? Where are you going, Dorothy? What’s up now?”

In time nothing much was, Lionel reassured himself: otherwise Dorothy wouldn’t have invited him to spend summers at the boarding-house after she’d inherited it. Or was it quite so straight-forward? He’d always thought that, having forgotten their contentious summer, she had both taken pity on his solitariness and looked to him for company once Carol had married and Dorothy’s husband had succumbed to an early heart attack, but now it occurred to him that she had kept him away from her daughter. He withdrew beneath the covers as if they could hide him from his undefined guilt, and eventually sleep joined him.

He thought walking by the sea might clear his head of whatever was troubling him. There was just one family on the beach. He assumed they were quite distant until he noticed the parents were dwarfs and the children pocket versions of them. They must work in a circus, for all of their faces were painted with grins wider than their mouths, even the face of the baby that was knocking down sandcastles as it crawled about. Lionel had to toil closer., dragging his inflated toy, before he understood that the family was laughing at him. When he followed their gazes he found he was clutching by one breast the life-size naked rubber woman he’d brought to the beach.

He writhed himself awake, feeling that his mind had only started to reveal its depths. As he tried to rediscover sleep he heard a scratching at the window. It must be a bird, though it sounded like fingernails on glass, not even in that part of the room. When it wasn’t repeated he managed to find his way back to sleep.

He felt he hadn’t by breakfast time. Being glanced at by more people than bade him good morning left him with the impression that he looked guilty of his dream. There wasn’t much more of a welcome in the kitchen, where a disagreement had evidently occurred. When Carol met his eyes while Helen didn’t, he said “She’ll be all right for this evening, won’t she?”

“Quite a few things aren’t all right. I’m afraid. Torn serviettes, for a start, and tablecloths not clean that should be.” She was aiming her voice upwards as if to have it fall more heavily on Helen. “We’ve standards to keep up,” she said.

“I think they’re as high as your mother’s ever were, so don’t drive yourself so hard. You deserve a night or two off. Is the show at the Imperial your kind of diversion?”

“More like my idea of hell.”

“Then you won’t be jealous if I take Helen tonight? I’ve got tickets.”

“You might have said sooner.”

“You were busy.”

“Exactly.”

“I think you could both benefit from taking it easier. You and your mother managed., didn’t you?”

Carol unloaded a tray into the sink with a furious clatter and twisted to face him. “You’ve no idea what she was like when you weren’t here. Used me harder than this one ever is, and my dad as well, poor little man. No wonder he had a heart attack.”

Lionel had forgotten how diminutive Dorothy’s husband had been, and hadn’t time to brood about it now. “Let me hold the fort while you two have an evening out,” he said.

“Thanks for the offer, but this place is our responsibility. Make that mine.” Carol sighed at this or as a preamble to muttering “Take her as long as you’ve bought tickets. As you say, I’ll just have to manage.”

He thought it best to respond to that with no more than a sympathetic grimace and to keep clear of her and Helen for a while. He stayed in his room no longer than was necessary to determine he had nothing to wear that would establish a holiday mood. He bought a defiantly luxuriant shirt from a shop in a narrow back street to which the town seemed reluctant to own up, and wandered with the package to the park, where he found a bench well away from the bandstand in case any of the musicians identified him as yesterday’s eructating spectator. The eventual concert repeated its predecessor, which might have allowed him to catch up on his sleep if he hadn’t been nervous of dreaming—of learning what his mind required unconsciousness to acknowledge it contained.

It was close to dinnertime when he ventured back to his room. Rather than examine his appearance, he left the mirror with its back to him. His new shirt raised eyebrows and lowered voices in the dining room. At least Carol said “You’re looking bright.” which would have heartened him more if she hadn’t rebuked Helen: “I hope you’ll be dressing for the occasion as well.”

Perhaps Helen had changed her black T-shirt and denim overalls and chubby shoes when he found her waiting on the pavement outside; he couldn’t judge. He told her she looked a picture, and thought she was responding when she mumbled “Uncle Lionel?”

“At your service.”

She peered sideways at him. “Will you be sad if I don’t come with you?”

“I would indeed.”

“I told Brandon last night I’d meet him. I wouldn’t have if you’d said you’d got tickets.”

“But you’ve known all day.”

“I couldn’t call him. Mum might have heard.”

“You mustn’t expect me to keep covering up for you.” Lionel supposed he sounded unreasonable, having previously complained of not being let into the secret. “Very well, just this once,” he said to forestall the moisture that had gathered in her eyes. “You two go and I’ll meet you at the end of the performance.”

“No, you. You like it.”

It was clear she no longer did. “Where will you be?” he said, and immediately “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Just make certain you’re waiting at the end.”

“I will.”

She might have kissed him, but instead ran across the promenade to her boyfriend. Lionel watched them clasp hands and hurry down a ramp to the beach. He stayed on the far side of the road so as not to glimpse them as he made for the Imperial.

The stout girl in the booth seemed even more suspicious of his returning a ticket than she had been of the purchase. At last she allowed him to leave it in case it could be resold. In the auditorium he had to sidle past a family with three daughters, loud in inverse proportion to their size. He was flattening a hand beside his cheek to ward off some of the clamor of his neighbor, the youngest, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Seated behind him were two of Carol’s guests: a woman with a small face drawn tight and pale by her sharp nose, her husband whose droopy empurpled features had yet more skin to spare underneath. “Will you be stopping this show too?” the woman said.

Could she have seen Dorothy chased by the dwarfs? “I don’t,” Lionel said warily, “ah…”

“We saw you at the concert yesterday.”

“Heard me. you mean.” When that fell short of earning him even a hint of a grin, Lionel said “I expect I’ll be able to contain myself.”

The man jabbed a stubby finger at the empty seat. “On your own?”

“Like yourselves.”

“Our granddaughter’s one of Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”

His tone was more accusing than Lionel cared to understand. “Good luck to her,” he said, indifferent to whether he sounded sarcastic., and turned his back.

As the curtains parted, the child beside him turned her volume up. He put the empty seat between them, only to hear the sharp-nosed woman cough with displeasure and change seats with her husband. Before long Lionel’s head began to ache with trying not to wonder how Helen and her boyfriend were behaving, and he couldn’t enjoy the show. He squirmed in his seat as the moppets in their white tutus pranced onstage. At least they weren’t dwarfs, he thought and squirmed again, growing red-faced as another cough was aimed at him.

He had no wish to face the couple at the end of the show. He remained seated until he realized they might see Helen outside and mention it to Carol. He struggled up the packed aisle and succeeded in leaving the theater before they did. Helen was waiting on the chipped marble steps. She half turned, and he saw she was in tears. “Oh dear,” he murmured, “what now?”

“We had a fight.”

“An argument, I trust you mean.” When she nodded or her head slumped, he said “I’m sure it’ll turn out to be just a hiccup.” She only turned away, leaving him to whisper “Shall we hurry home? We don’t want anybody knowing you were meant to be with me.”

They were opposite the ramp down which she’d vanished with her boyfriend when she began to sob. Lionel urged her over to the far corner of her street while Carol’s guests passed by. Once they’d had ample time to reach their room and Helen’s sobs had faltered into silence he said “Will you be up to going in now, do you think?”

“I’ll have to be, won’t I?”

Her maturity both impressed and disconcerted him. Each of them pulled out a key, and he would have made a joke of it if he’d been sure she would respond. He let her open the front door and followed her in, only to flinch from bumping into her. Carol and the couple from the theater were talking in the hall.

They fell silent and gazed at the newcomers. As Lionel struggled to decide whether he should hurry upstairs or think of a comment it would be crucial for him to make, the sharp-nosed woman said “I see you found yourself a young companion after all.”

Her husband cleared his throat. Presumably he thought it helpful to tell Carol “My wife means he was on his own at the show.”

Carol stared at Helen and then shifted her disapproval to Lionel. Her face grew blank before she told them “I think you should both go to bed. I’ll have plenty to say in the morning.”

“Mummy…”

“Don’t,” Carol said, even more harshly when Lionel tried to intervene.

“I think we’d better do as we’re told,” he advised Helen, and trudged upstairs ahead of her. Just now his room offered more asylum than anywhere else in the house., and he attempted to hide in his bed and the dark. His guilt was lying in wait for him—his realization that rather than make up for anything he might have done to Dorothy, he’d let down both Carol and Helen. He heard Helen shut her door with a dull suppressed thud and listened apprehensively for her mother’s footfall on the stairs. He’d heard nothing further when exhaustion allowed sleep to overtake him.

A muffled cry roused him. Heat and darkness made him feel afloat in a stagnant bath. As he strained his ears for a repetition of the cry he was afraid that it might have been Helen’s—that he’d caused her mother to mistreat her in some way he winced from imagining. When he heard another sound he had to raise his shaky head before he could identify it. Some object was bumping rhythmically against glass.

He kicked off the quilt and stumbled to drag the curtains apart. There was nothing at the window, nothing to be seen through it except guest-houses slumbering beyond a streetlamp. He hauled the sash all the way up and leaned across the sill, but the street was deserted. He was peering along it when the muffled thumping recommenced behind him.

As he stalked towards it he refused to believe where it was coming from. He took hold of the mirror by its bunch of wrists, which not only felt unhealthily warm but also seemed to be vibrating slightly in time with the sound. He gripped them with both hands and turned the glass towards him. It was full of Dorothy’s outraged face, glaring straight at him.

She was so intensely present that he could have thought there was no mirror, just her young woman’s face balanced on the doubly paralyzed hands. More and worse than shock made his arms tremble, but he was unable to drop the mirror. In a moment Dorothy’s forehead ceased thudding against the glass and shrank into it as though she was being hauled backwards. The ankle-length white dress she wore—the kind of garment in which he imagined she’d been buried—was bulging vigorously in several places. He knew why before a dwarf’s head poked up through the collar, ripping the fabric, to fasten on Dorothy’s mouth. His outline made it clear that he’d shinnied up by holding onto her breasts. Her left sleeve tore, revealing the squarish foot of a dwarf who was inverted somewhere under the dress. Then she was borne away into darkness so complete she oughtn’t to be visible, even for Lionel’s benefit. He saw a confusion of feet scurrying beneath the hem. One pair vanished up the dress, and her body set about jerking in the rhythm of the dwarf who had clambered her back.

The worst thing was that Lionel recognized it all. It had lived in his mind for however many years, too deep for thought and so yet more powerful, and now Dorothy had become the puppet of his fantasy. He supposed that to be at his mercy the dwarfs were dead too. He didn’t know if he was desperate to repudiate the spectacle or release the participants as he flung the mirror away from him.

It was toppling over the windowsill when he tried to snatch it back. He saw Dorothy’s face plummeting out of reach as though he’d doubled her helplessness. As he craned over the sill, the button at the waist of his pyjamas snapped its thread. The mirror struck the roof of his Mini, which responded like a bass drum. One marble finger split off and skittered across the dent the impact had produced. The mirror tottered on the metal roof, and Lionel dashed out of the room.

He was scrabbling at the front-door latch while he clutched his trousers shut when he heard the mirror slide off the car and shatter. The chill of the concrete seized his bare feet like a premonition of how cold they would end up. The marble hands had been smashed into elegant slivers surrounded by fragments of glass, but the oval that had contained the mirror was intact. He hardly knew why he stooped to collect the glass in it. When his trousers sagged around his ankles he had no means of holding them up. Not until lights blazed between curtains above him did he realize that several of Carol’s guests were gazing down at him.

==========

In the morning Carol said very little to him beyond “I’m sorry you’re leaving, but I won’t have anyone in my house going behind my back.”

This reminded him of his last glimpse of Dorothy, and he had to repress a hysterical laugh. He bumped his suitcase all the way downstairs in the hope that would bring Helen out of her room, but to no avail. “Shall I just go up and say goodbye?” he almost pleaded.

“Madam isn’t receiving visitors at the moment.”

He couldn’t tell if that was Helen’s decision or her mother’s. He lugged the suitcase to the Mini and dumped it in the boot. “You’re sure you don’t mind if I take the mirror,” he said.

“If you want to try and mend it, be my guest. I’ve never had any use for it,” Carol said, doling him a token wave to speed him on his way before she shut herself in the house.

As the Mini backed onto the street he muttered “Here you go, old bones,” crouching his lanky frame lower so that the dent in the roof didn’t touch his scalp. On the seat beside him shards of glass stirred in the marble frame, but he could see nothing other than the underside of the roof in even the largest piece of mirror. He scarcely knew why he was taking the mirror with him; could it somehow help him gain control of the depths of his mind and let Dorothy go? The boarding-house swung away behind him, and he wondered what the people in it might be thinking about him—worse, what they might be storing up about him unexamined in their minds. For the first time in all his years he dreaded living after death.

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