The Collected Short Fiction

Watch The Birdie (1984)

This piece was written over the last two days of April 1983, at the request of John Meakin, then the landlord of the Baltic Fleet, a pub on the dock road in Liverpool. He published an intermittent newspaper called The Daily Meak and was known to his friends as the Admiral. The account that follows was to be published in his newspaper. —Ramsey Campbell

I hope I shall not be blamed if a true story has no proper ending.

Let me start by explaining that I'm in the business of making Merseyside disappear. No, I'm not a town planner: I create horrors as a writer instead. Many of my tales have been set on Merseyside, and a disconcerting number of the settings no longer exist, rather as the model in the Poe story died as soon as the painter had achieved her likeness on canvas. For example, "The Companion" takes place in the old Tower fairground at New Brighton; "The Show Goes On" is set in the Hippodrome cinema, last seen in a series of skips; my novel The Face That Must Die shows Cantril Farm through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic, though it looks pretty much as it does to the rest of us, and now they've changed the name of Cantril Farm. And my first novel was set in Toxteth. You will appreciate that I have yet to write about the present government.

My novel To Wake The Dead (known in America as The Parasite, though I haven't room to explain why) contains a chapter set in the Grapes in Egerton Street, during the reign of the Meakins. That's how I came to be in the Baltic Fleet recently, to present a copy to the Admiral. The place was packed with office celebrations and planners discussing how many trees they could plant in the car parks next year, and so it wasn't until closing time that I had a chance to make the presentation. The Admiral locked the doors and offered me a coffee, and we settled down by the parrot for a chat.

The parrot had been dozing so soundly that nothing had roused it, not even the cries of anguish from the dock road as someone else discovered there was no way into the Baltic Fleet car park. Now it blinked at us with the balefulness of a Member of Parliament woken by question time, and croaked something that sounded vaguely Russian to me. "I don't know where he got that from," the Admiral said.

I had a momentary impression that I should know, but couldn't think why: something I'd seen in the pub? I glanced round at the deserted tables, smudgy now that clouds like sludge were flooding the sky outside, and wondered aloud if the pub had a resident ghost. "Could be," the Admiral said.

My interest quickened and so, I imagined, did the parrot's—listening for something worth repeating, I supposed. "You've seen it?"

"Heard it. That was enough."

He didn't seem to be joking. "Good places to hear ghosts, pubs," I suggested.

"That's all I'd been drinking," he assured me, tapping the coffee-mug and earning himself a slow reproving psittacine blink. The pub was growing dimmer.

"Tell me about it," I said, "and maybe I can write about it for your newspaper."

"I was sitting here one afternoon drinking coffee." The pub had been locked and deserted, the sun had dazzled the windows so that he couldn't see the deserted interior without moving from where he was sitting, and quite without warning he'd heard someone coming upstairs from below.

You must have seen the steps that lead down to the toilets and their famed graffiti, or if you haven't yet you're bound to: stone steps that look as if they might lead to a vault or a catacomb. He'd heard footsteps where he knew nobody could be, and so he didn't call out, just reached for a weapon. He was still hoping that he wouldn't have to find out if it would work under the circumstances, when the footsteps faltered and went back downstairs. When he made himself go down, of course there was nobody to be seen.

Again I felt there was something in the pub I should have noticed, again I couldn't think where. "What did the footsteps sound like?"

He pondered. "Not as heavy as they ought to have sounded," he said finally, frowning.

"Incomplete?" I suggested, trying to bring my description to life.

At last he said, "Big and slow, but as if they weren't quite there."

He didn't seem happy with that either. "And how was the parrot behaving while all this was going on?" I said.

"Nervous." Then he grinned. "Talking to himself, God knows what about."

Suddenly I thought I knew. "That Slavonic stuff he was repeating before?"

"Could well have been. How did you know?"

I wasn't sure yet, nor sure that I wanted to be. "Hang on while I have a wee," I said, as I've found one tends to say when one is the father of toddlers.

The steps to the basement were even dimmer than the pub. Somehow the dimness made my footsteps sound muffled, timid. I wished the Admiral would switch on the lights; I wished I hadn't found an excuse to go and look at what I thought I'd seen, instead of inviting him to look for himself. I couldn't help remembering that whatever he'd heard on the steps had come back down here, couldn't help remembering what I was almost sure I'd seen.

It had only been graffiti in the Gents: a few scrawled words among the collectible wit. I'd hardly noticed them except to wonder in passing what they said, for I'd been distracted by the creaking of one of the cubicle doors: I'd thought for a moment that someone had peered out at me, a large pale face which had made me think of a pig leaning out of a stall, in the moment before I'd seen there was nobody. I remembered that now, and suddenly the basement seemed colder. That must have been why I shivered as I went quickly into the Gents.

You've seen the graffiti for yourself, or you've been told about them. No wonder customers come upstairs with a smile on their faces and their heads full of quotes. But all I could see just then were the words in a language I recognized now, scrawled in the midst of the jokes. I'd heard those words more than once, I realized, and I had a good idea of what they meant and what they could do. I started forward to the nearest cubicle, for a handful of paper to wipe them out. I was nearly at the cubicle door when it creaked open and something squeezed out to take hold of me.

If I'm ever tempted not to trust my instincts I shall remember that moment. Instinct made me close my eyes tight while I lurched out of reach, toward the scrawled words. I kept my eyes on the words as I rubbed at them frantically, with my hands, since that was the quickest way. At the edge of my vision I had the impression of a figure so swollen it filled the doorway through which it was trying to struggle, arms that seemed to be lengthening as they groped toward me, groped then rose toward the large flat face that appeared to have no features. They poked at it, and then it had eyes—holes, at any rate. Then I'd rubbed out the last traces of the words, and I was alone but for the creaking of the door of the empty cubicle.

I admit it didn't take me long to climb the steps, yet by the time I reached the top I'd managed to persuade myself that I couldn't have seen all that, couldn't have seen anything like it. The pub looked as dim as the steps now. I might have asked the Admiral to put on the lights, but just then I wanted to ask my questions and get out of there. "Have you been crossing any Russians lately?" I said, as lightly as I could.

"Not unless you count selling Vladivar, no."

He thought I wasn't serious. "Just think about it. You haven't had trouble with anyone Slavonic?"

"Not in the pub, no."

I could tell he was remembering. "Outside?"

"Might have been. They could have been Slavs. A couple of sailors pulled knives on each other in the car park one night, and we had to sort them out, that's all."

"They couldn't have sneaked in here afterward, could they?"

"Not a chance."

"That makes sense."

He stood up to switch on the lights. "Going to tell me about it?" he said.

"When I've told you how I know." Both his gaze and the parrot's were making me uncomfortable. "You see," I said, "I once did some research for a novel about the basis of all the vampire legends, until I found someone else had already written it. One thing I did was talk to a specialist in Slavonic languages who told me some of the old Slavonic incantations. There were a couple I wouldn't have used even if I'd written the book; not once he told me what they were supposed to call up. Well," I said, glad to get it over with, "one of them was written on the wall in your Gents."

He jumped up. "It's there now?"

"It was until I rubbed it out."

He sat down again and gave me a doubtful look. I could see he thought I was making up the story for his newspaper. "How come you can read Slavonic writing?" he said suspiciously.

"I can't. I copied the stuff I researched down phonetically, and that's what whoever wrote it in the Gents did. Don't you see, whichever sailor wanted to get his own back on you sent someone in to write it for him, told him what to write. And that's not all they did—"

But there was no need for me to go on, for the parrot had started croaking—croaking the words it had already tried to pronounce. I pointed nervously at it while the Admiral frowned at me, then I punched its cage to interrupt the bird before it could finish.

The Admiral's frown was no longer puzzled but dangerous. "What did you want to do that for?" he demanded.

"Didn't you hear what it was saying? Whoever was sent in here didn't just write the words on the wall, they must have spoken them as well when there was nobody to hear—nobody but him," I said, nodding at the parrot, which glared at me. "Couldn't you tell it was Slavonic?"

The Admiral wasn't convinced. "You haven't told me yet," he growled, "what it was supposed to do."

I couldn't go into that, not then, not there. "Let's just say that if you used the invocation in a graveyard, what it called up would be dreadful enough, but if you weren't in a graveyard it would be something even less human," I said, but my last few words might well have been inaudible, for he was turning his head toward the steps. I saw his face change, and knew what he was hearing before I heard it myself.

I should have known that the footsteps would be terribly slow. "They're bigger," the Admiral whispered, and I could hear what he meant, though I was hearing them for the first time: they sounded as if they were growing as they lumbered up the stairs—as if they were putting on more substance. I had disliked the dimness, but now I wished desperately that he hadn't turned on the lights: at least then we would have been spared seeing. The footsteps came up halfway, unsteadily but purposefully, and I saw what might have been the top of a head, something white and rounded that seemed to be having trouble in keeping its shape. I was praying to be able to look away, to be able not to see any more, when the white dome jerked downward, the footsteps plodded back to the basement. Interrupting had achieved something after all.

Well, I told you at the outset that I couldn't promise you a proper ending. I still visit the Baltic Fleet, for the food as much as anything, but not after dark. I admit I keep a sharp eye on the parrot and the graffiti, and sometimes I need to be spoken to twice. I know the Admiral doesn't take kindly to people hitting the parrot's cage, and so I can only suggest that if you hear the bird speaking what sounds like Slavonic you do your best to interest it in something else. Quickly.

I delivered the story to John Meakin at the beginning of May 1983. I visited the pub several times during that year, but the newspaper hadn't yet been published. Close to Christmas 1983 I arrived at the pub to find it locked and shuttered. It reopened under new management this year. Nobody seems to know where John Meakin is.