Free The Count of Eleven by Ramsey Campbell Page A

Time to be solemn when I’m in the bank manager’s lair, though he always seems to me to need some jollying.”
    “I’m not nervous,” he told the bathroom mirror as he picked up his razor. “Bank managers are human like the rest of us. I’m not going to cut myself, ow. I’m not going to cut myself again.” He stayed upstairs until he’d dabbed away the last crimson bead so that Julia wouldn’t see, and was dressing in the bedroom when she called “Will you ring me at Luke’s to tell me how it went?”
    “The moment I know.”
    “Good luck,” she called, and the front door closed at once.
    Her leaving so quickly made Jack feel as if he was going to be late for his appointment, whereas in fact he wasn’t due at the bank until half an hour after it opened. He walked himself to the kitchen, where he would have had time for a leisurely cup of coffee if he’d remembered to switch on the percolator. He strolled to the bank instead. Last night’s fish-and-chip papers chased one another around the benches by the bus stops outside Adventureland; a container ship appeared to be grounded among the mounds of the Crazy Golf course, but then it glided out into the bay as Jack turned along the side street which led to the bank.
    The building was on the corner where the street met Victoria Road. As Jack reached the entrance an old lady in an ancient raincoat held out a hand palm upwards to him. She’d had no luck at the bank, he thought, groping automatically in his pocket for change. He was placing a pound coin in her hand when he realised she wasn’t begging, only feeling for rain. “Just, er, just, just…” he tried to explain, and was through the doors. “That’s enough pratfalls for one day,” he told himself, so loudly that everyone in the small bank -three tellers and five members of the public stared at him.
    As he strode to the enquiry window and pressed the bell-push everyone lost interest in him, apart from a girl of about ten, who looked familiar. A teller appeared from behind the scenes and came to the window. “Jack Orchard of Fine Films for Mr. Hardy,” Jack said.
    The girl nudged her mother. Just as the manager approached the window, Jack recognised the girl. She’d returned Body Heat to Fine Films on the day of the fire, and what had he said to her about his bank manager? She opened her mouth as the manager unlocked the door beside the window, and Jack wanted to clap a hand over his own face even before she spoke. “He said that man’s deaf,” she said, it seemed at the top of her voice.
    What timing, Jack thought. He had already been suppressing a nervous compulsion to crack jokes. It didn’t help that the manager had gained weight, at least from the waist down, since Jack had last seen him, a condition which made Mr. Hardy’s round balding thick-lipped head appear to have shrunk. Surely he’d missed the girl’s comment or at any rate its significance, because he ignored her as he opened the door of the interview room. “Step in,” he said heavily to Jack.
    “Step in what?” I didn’t say that, Jack told himself, nor “I’ll watch my step’; he hadn’t yet spoken aloud. “I’m stepping,” he said.
    That didn’t seem to go down especially well. When the manager had closed the door and lowered himself into the chair on the expensive side of the desk, on top of which a gilded pen and pencil standing in gilded sockets craned over a green blotter, he gazed at Jack for some time before speaking long enough for Jack to be unable not to reflect that sitting down had increased Mr. Hardy’s resemblance to one of those legless round-bottomed pot-bellied dolls which rolled upright whenever they were knocked down. When he sat forwards Jack almost expected him to bob upright immediately, sprung by his paunch. “So, Mr. Orchard,” the manager said.
    “Well, yes.”
    “Family well?”
    “Fine.” Either Jack left it at that or he risked halting the conversation with a flood of