The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

THE SHOW GOES ON by Ramsey Campbell

Born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, Ramsey Campbell has devoted twenty years of writing to convincing readers to stay far away from that city. “The Show Goes On,” set in Campbell’s favorite boyhood cinema (since knocked down), is not due to result in any influx of tourism, either. The fact that Campbell has now moved across the river to Merseyside may well mean that all those horrors were coming home to roost.

Ramsey Campbell was sixteen when he wrote his first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake & Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964)—thereby becoming both an inspiration and an object of envy for every fledgling horror writer. Recovering from this adolescent infatuation with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Campbell moved rapidly to develop his own brand of horror fiction. He has published three subsequent collections of short fiction: Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, and, last year, Dark Companions, from which this story is taken. For collectors, the British edition of Dark Companions contains four stories not in the U.S. edition, and vice versa. Campbell has lately come on as one of the major horror novelists as well, with the publication of The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, To Wake the Dead (revised and retitled for the U.S. edition as The Parasite), and The Nameless. Just now he is completing work on The Incarnate and preparing to write For the Rest of Their Lives. Campbell somehow finds time to edit anthologies as well, with Superhorror (retitled The Far Reaches of Fear), New Terrors (two volumes), New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and now The Gruesome Book. This last contains the stories that frightened Ramsey Campbell as a child. Buy one for your kid.

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 toward 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 which 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 flavor, 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 theater 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 paybox. 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 center, 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. Down the slope a yellow machine clawed at the remains of houses. The Liver Buildings looked like a monument in a graveyard of concrete and stone.

Beyond Kiddiegear and The Wholefood Shop, Frank’s yard was a maze of new timber. Frank was feeding the edge of a door to a shrieking circular blade. He gazed at Lee as though nobody had told him anything. When Lee kept his temper and explained, Frank said, “No problem. Just give a moan when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now,”

“Ah, well. As soon as I’ve finished this job I’ll whiz around.” Lee had reached the exit when Frank said, “I’ll tell you something that’ll amuse you…”

Fifteen minutes later Lee arrived back, panting, at his shop. It was intact. He hurried around the outside of the cinema, but all the doors seemed immovable, and he couldn’t find a secret entrance. Nevertheless he was sure that the thieves—children, probably—were sneaking in somehow.

The buses were full of old people now, sitting stiffly as china. The lunchtime trade trickled into the shop: men who couldn’t buy their brand of cigarettes in the pub across the road, children sent on errands while their lunches went cold on tables or dried in ovens. An empty bus raced along the deserted street, and a scrawny youth in a leather jacket came into the shop, while his companion loitered in the doorway. Would Lee have a chance to defend himself, or at least to shout for help? But they weren’t planning theft, only making sure they didn’t miss a bus. Lee’s heart felt both violent and fragile. Since the robberies had begun he’d felt that way too often.

The shop was still worth it. “Don’t keep it up if you don’t want to,” his father had said, but it would have been admitting defeat to do anything else. Besides, he and his parents had been even closer here than at home. Since their death, he’d had to base his stock on items people wanted in a hurry or after the other shops had closed: flashlights, canned food, light bulbs, cigarettes. Lee’s Home-Baked Bread was a thing of the past, but it was still Lee’s shop.

Packs of buses climbed the hill, carrying home the rush-hour crowds. When the newspaper van dumped a stack of the evening’s Liverpool Echo on the doorstep, he knew Frank wasn’t coming. He stormed round to the yard, but it was locked and deserted.

Well then, he would stay in the shop overnight; he’d nobody to go home for. Why, he had even made the thieves’ job easier by helping the door to collapse. The sight of him in the lighted shop ought to deter thieves—it better had, for their sakes.

He bought two pork pies and some bottles of beer from the pub. Empty buses moved off from the stop like a series of cars on a fairground ride. He drank from his mother’s Coronation mug, which always stood by the electric kettle.

He might as well have closed the shop at eight o’clock; apart from an old lady who didn’t like his stock of cat food, nobody came. Eventually he locked the door and sat reading the paper, which seemed almost to be written in a new language: Head Raps Shock Axe, said a headline about the sudden closing of a school.

Should he prop the storeroom door in place, lest he fall asleep? No, he ought to stay visible from the cinema, in the hope of scaring off the thieves. In his childhood they would hardly have dared sneak into the cinema, let alone steal—not in the last days of the cinema, when the old man had been roaming the aisles.

Everyone, perhaps even the manager, had been scared of him. Nobody Lee knew had ever seen his face. You would see him fumbling at the dim gaslights to turn them lower, then he’d begin to make sounds in the dark as though he was both muttering to himself and chewing something soft. He would creep up on talkative children and shine his flashlight into their eyes. As he hissed at them, a pale substance would spill from his mouth.