Free Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell Page A

unlit buildings. I hurry into Matthew Street, the lane where a cellar produced the Beatles and other Mersey sounds. The cellar used to resound with screams, but the ones I’m hearing aren’t down there. They’re to my left, beyond a bend of the lane. They’re in Whitechapel.
    They sound raw and weary, yearning for an end. The lane seems to channel them towards me as I venture to the corner. Figures dressed in very little confront me across Whitechapel—women as still as the stone that frames them. They’re dummies in the window of a sex shop. The screams are to their left, but my view is blocked by a cage around roadworks. Ihave to force myself to head that way, not least because the screams aren’t the only sounds I can hear.
    Beyond the roadworks Whitechapel leads to the Old Haymarket. Even the taxi rank outside a shopping mall is deserted. The only object anywhere on the pavements is lying at the intersection with Richmond Street, which leads to the theatre square. The object is a body, and it’s naked.
    If it’s male, it’s horribly incomplete. That would explain the screams, but not the chorus of croaking. The legs are splayed towards me, and a glistening shape lies between them, separate from the body. The abdomen is heaped with items, wet with them. The mouth is as wide as lockjaw, but the shrieks are growing feebler, and the victim appears incapable of any movement other than an uncontrollable twitching of the stomach. I stumble forward, groping for my mobile with a shaky hand.
    I shouldn’t have moved. The torso jerks, or the mass that’s strewn over it does. Perhaps this was all I saw twitching. The creature between the legs hops towards me with a croak, and another springs over the victim’s chest to land in the gaping mouth as if the cries have served their purpose. I’m hardly aware of lurching forward to determine whether the horde of creatures is on top of the body or inside it or both.
    I’m so anxious to see and equally to avoid seeing that I barely hear a rush at my back. It sounds like water, and my assailant doesn’t seem a great deal more solid. All the same, the pavement thumps my forehead before I’ve time to catch my balance. Is the stain that spreads around my vision more than a shadow? I’ve hardly glimpsed it when I’m engulfed by my personal dark.

Chapter Ten
R EPRESENTING THE L AW
    It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. That’s the message my head is repeating, verbally and otherwise, while various parts of my body throb in agreement. The waves of light flicker so much that they could just be pain made visible. I can see little more when my eyes falter open, because my face is pressed against a dark unyielding blur. That’s the pavement, but is it so dark at the edge of my vision because whoever attacked me is standing over me? Perhaps I’m next for the treatment that was dealt to the screaming victim. My body prickles, aggravating the roughness of the pavement and discovering a sweaty trace of rain on my back. The world rolls upside down, or at least I do, confronting the attacker.
    There’s nobody above me. When I plant my hands on the damp pavement and waver into a sitting position, the huge soft drum that’s my head barely lets me determine that nobody is to be seen anywhere around me—nobody, not even the screaming victim. The city seems as quiet as stone, and straining my ears until my head redoubles its painful pulse only brings an undercurrent of sound, the omnipresent urban murmur. I rise or rather wobble to my feet and dodge unsteadily around the enclosed roadworks before stumbling to the lane I came along and then to the one that leads to Williamson Square. Neither of them shows me a corpse, and across the road Sir Thomas Street is just as innocent of any, like the entire length of Whitechapel with its patina of rain. Why am I wasting time? I drag out my mobile so hastily that it almost ends up in the gutter, a prospect that leaves me nearly blind with pain.
    A few