Spring

Dear Diary,

As I watched the milk frost over my cereals like crows knitting a sheet of steel for a coffin, my mobile phone muttered bleakly with its high-pitched muffle. I put the spoon to my ear.

"Hello? Is it me you're looking for?"

Angrily the piece of technological design kept hissing its disco lament. Sugar puffs dribbled down my jowl likes theatre curtains in a proscenium. Then I realised that it was That Man dialling me, and that he had purposely beguiled me into speaking into the wrong receptacle. I threw the spoon across into the sink, and as it arced through the night sky of morning like mushrooms all glittering in a ray of torchlight when the batteries are half dead, I completely forgot what my name was.

I went out into the hall and took my duffle coat off of the peg. It glared at me a like a malevolent entity. The coat peg, I mean, not the whatchamacallit, because it was brass effect and not the real thing, two tiny scratches to the enamel paint creating the impression that it was staring at me. I closely examined the garment and finally discovered what I was looking for, a label, printed in savage gothic text, betraying the legend "RAMSEY CAMPBELL".

So it was true.

I reminded myself that the trees outside weren't slowly chugging passed like a train from a Shaun Hutson novel and took out a small, well-worn map in which was written the way to my study. I had no need of a compass because it was broken. I made my way to the room marked 'Lounge'. It was next door. Inside the boxed-shaped place I found a desk and sat down to work on words that streamed from my mind like bricks in sludge. As I sat gazing out of the window a reflection appeared to confuse me, frowning as I frowned, shaking its fist angrily from time to time like one possessed. I decided to ignore this inconvenient digression and turned on my computer with a switch I plugged in. The machine coughed and grinned into life.

"You have email," a voice said. I jumped and looked under the desk, finding two paperclips that had become entwined like mice. Then I remembered that some machines had voices so banging my head twice I got back up and clicked the buttons marked click. I had been sent some virtuous letters which I cogitated about whether to print, file or read. The first was from my part-time employer Christopher Stalin.

"Thank you for doing that extra round last week. Thanks especially for dropping Barker's Guardian in the puddle as we asked. Paperboys are two-a-penny, but it's such a pleasure to work with a real professional. Love, Chris."

The third email was from John Urko, my friend at the Salford Hitler Youth group.

"Oh Great Leader and Guru-Mufti of all that will be mine, are you game for pushing a dead sheep carcass down Barker's chimney when he's not looking? It would sure stink the place out and hopefully his family will choke to death on the fumes. Ha ha ha ha!"

Sheep dressed as mutton I reflected in the window, watching as the trees marched passed like trains looking for a stable for the night. Why is that we always hurt those we wish to eat? I flipped through my address spinny thing and stopped at the letter marked B. I paused pregnantly. No, A, I wanted A. That Damn Man was once again mind-messing with my tranquil inner plateau. I found A, next to B, but oddly, also next to Z. No, that couldn't be right: sabotage! But who was the prototype? Hutson? Barker? The neighbour with the listening device?

I calmed myself with my chillum and put a DVD of Alvin Stardust on the record player. Even that had been ruined for me by the forces beyond my comprehension. The needle cut through the granite surface of the plastic music keeper like a knife through frozen treacle. Never again would I hear My Coo-Ca-Choo. I rose and selected an old fashionned DVD shaped like a vinyl record and that worked, so I listened to My Coo-Ca-Choo, wondering how it was that leather trousers were so difficult to iron. Then I remembered the letter A and called the abbatoir.

"Hullo, Fry's Abbatoir. Can I slaughter you?"

Followed by a malevolent cackle. I dropped the phone as though it were a grinning bear. The headpiece lay juggling on the floor, motionless. What was this craziness? I only wanted a dead sheep, and here was malevolency at its most impotent. I stood upon my knees and prodded the demonic circle of speaking with one of the fingers which existed on my hand.

"Who is this?" I speaked blinkingly. "Is it thee, Beelzebub?"

Just then I heard the Santanac voice utter a profanity which rhymed with "losser" and knew it to be a corporeal quantity. I stamped on the phone with my hand and kicked it out of harm's way. As I returned to my desk I tripped over it, this time smashing its glutinous pulpy body into tiny shards of plastic recyclables.

A swinging bang heralded the imminence of dinner, we being Northerners who dine at lunchtime. The gong resonated throughout the house endlessly, until it stopped a few moments later, the life crushed out of the eerie sound like a bubble on an obelisk. As I lay my pen down upon the high shelf up there, I wonder if this diary is helping me.

(To be continued....)


(Diary resumed).

Well, it's the next afternoon now so I decided to mow the lawn. I meambled down to the garden shed which glared at me like an iron spider made of wood. The trees are still dashing about like cars scurrying up and down threads. A crisp packet is picked up by the sunlight and plays for a little in the gloom, suggesting an air of sinister menace each time it gawps at me like a simpleton posing for a reference book photograph. I disingenuously yield the padlock open to enter the shed via the upright entry hole and as it silently creaks open I grow frightened at an inexpressible fear.

The lawn mower is out of petrol. That Hateful Man must have crept in under cover of daylight to syphon off the engine's blood.

Clutching my drawers in panic, I throw myself back upon the open doorway and cascade in tumbles down onto the muddy wet clods. I see stars matted in my vision like hooks of asphalt. Then strange voices bleating out of unison.

My god, no; not the voices, not again!

I will not smoke paranoia I will not smoke paranoia I WILL NOT SMOKE PARANOIA!

Oh. It's the mobile telephony thing. The jive music trills like a dead budgie.

"Yes, who am I?"

I realise my mistake as the blood starts to trickle across my face like molten lava fleeing a cave. I had answered the garden trowel. Damn that Hateful Man! I correct my mistake just as the purple sun. The telephone unit fumbles upwards into my hand as though magically alert. I click the shiny button to access the small person inside. Who could be hiding in my landline?

"Arsey, it's me, Steve. I think the jig's up. The Inland Revenue's been sniffin' around so I'm off to LA to flog Hellraiser cubes at yard sales. I'd keep away from the BFS 'ead office for a while, it's being cased by the rozzers."

I fling the electric box down to the ground where it sits smugly smiling up at me. Who had squealed? Could it be that dirty rat Bar--

Suddenly I remember the wheelie thing so its out round the front. Too late. The car's on bricks, 'Tightwad' scrawled on the windsreen by an unseeing hand. Then I remember the lawn cutter and I return through the squally windbreak into the detached rear garden. The telephone looks up at me with reproach. I cross the grass and enter the shed, eyes wide upwards and sideways to ensure that the trees haven't been following me in through the hook of the sun.

It's up there in the corner, disgorging its web like a sailor on fish night. It follows me around with its ears. I contemplate catching it but can't bear the proximity which would. Instead I check the lawn flyer for helium and decide that there might be enough for just one cut. But again that man Barker thwarts me - he's hidden the electric lead so I can't plug it in!

The spider follows me out with its tentacles of hate. The key jiggles its way into my lock and I twist the hole accordingly. Suddenly the tea gong bongs so I rush in for a quick pipe before breakfast. Culminating over my bowl of Scouse Skag I reflect in the window that it is high time to pull the curtains, but not before entrancing myself with a quick assessorizing of my message board. I tap the computer's television hopelessly but no yellow Post-It notes fall out. No messages today.

Well, it's off to bed after tea but not before an evening watching handfuls of Japanese manga. How do they squeeze those mobile young bodies into such space-age outfits? I am starting to suspect they use cartoons. Nighty-night diary, I'll see you tomorrow.

Dear Diary,

A new day. Mushroom time again, I reflect perplexingly, staring at the bubbling fronds of Cthulhu-like matter that tentaculizes lysergically in my frying pan. The smell reminds me of freshly mown billiard tables and I travel backwards in my mind to those muted days spent at the village library where I learned my trade when still but a lad. Weekly bus ticket seven-and-six, thrupence for a Dandy, and a penny over for the airmail postcard to Mr August in Disney World.

Suddenly the protein mush spits at me like a wasp in a vortex. Damn that Hateful Man! I've burnt my brekkie and there’s nowt else till tea.

I rush off to the television's cousin in my study to write down this fine rhyme but lose my way in the sinister chasms of spiralling darkness. Even here He thwarts me with his light-switch hiding tricks! I find myself hopeless in a squat chamber full of erect grinning linen. The overpowering smell of freshly minted lemon is.  In my urgency to fly I cascade a tumble of phantoms onto the floor and into the air like mice swirling upwards in a zephyr of invention, and I cry out in fear and pregnancy as I become unfathomably enshrived in the flapping cloth ghosts. Doom, doom has come, and it is all that Hateful Man's fault!

My pitiable wall cries are heard from the floor by the strange capped man who delivers white bottles to my doormat most days when the church bells aren't ringing, sometimes eggs too. He cheerios his way into my dilemma and usurps me from my linen web with a brisk humour that I find. As I gaze up at his greeting victim's face I resolve never to venture out of a room again without my special room diagram things. How am I meant to get any work done?

I tip the handsome man wizenly and warn him about the scurrying trees Hutson made. He appears to be concerned because of his frowning cheeks so I know that I am not alone in worrying about me.

I resolve to procure satellite navigation for my cowboy belt so as to avoid future linen and white capped men scenarios. I am sure that there must be easier ways to get from A to 7. In my heart I know that rooms cannot move but that doesn't mean it can't happen. In the meantime I follow my ears and sniff about for the yesterday aroma of Black Moroccan smoke. That alone can lead me donkeylike to the room where the small man talks in my handset: he is a good man, not a Hateful one, and he alone can connect me with that chap from Toxteth who delivers the weedy need.

My tummy grumbles like a traffic cone. But it isn't munchies, not at eleven o'clock, not before my fastbreak. I must have missed the wake-up meal again. Damn that Hateful Man!

A sudden clatter of blood-grued knives heralds the arrival of little white and brown things through my front door mouth. A tall blue post peers close at my window hoping for an autobiography but I outwit him by putting on my thinking hat. The odd messages of imported news trickle across the mat marked 'Ramsey, This Is Your Home' and glare up at me with an air of ingenuity. I pick up the two rectangles of concealed paper messagements and fan my face with all three, wondering whether James Herbert gets as much. As for Shaun H--

My eye hangs sinisterly on my cheek, trailing down like an octopus at a wake, gouged out by the umbrella I had mistaken for a fan. Damn that Hateful Man! But I am now able to see things in a different tunnel, looking at myself from eye to eye. Still, the pain is exquisite so I fumble the circular ocular orb back into it's cul-de-sac in my skull until I can again clearly see the trees scurrying up and down the garden through the opaque glass like laughing witches gliding shiftily through granite.

Despair jiggles into my brain - what am I going to do? Suddenly everything seems dark and morbid, like a supermarket with no lights, all rusty and pointed. Panic wassails me until I am so engulfed by fear that I forget the answer is in my trouser pocket. So I tease out the healing direction and with sweaty elbows read the balming missive:

1. Eat breakfast in the room-with-taps.
2. Type messages on the finger pad and send them through the air.
3. Put the cat out.

I reflect how shrewd it was not to have eaten the feline thingy given that Grimalkyn was sitting dangerously close to the cereal boxes at the time. I knew that mushrooms had been the wisest option with an instinct that seemed almost alert. But still the list possessed no adequate map nor compass points. Worse, no helpline digits, always assuming I could find the little speaking thing without further interference from my arch nemesis, sanity. I mean Barker.

Sheer luck crawls me to the place with the television that types my work. I flop up into the spinny chair and whizz around uncontrollably like a fish in a nightmare until the movement stops and leaves me dizzied beyond incomprehension. Someone’s been making hay with my oil can and I suspect whom.

Work reminds me that I have the clock to do. I bang on my letter board for half an hour and the television suddenly bursts into life. I reprise my weekly column which appears thrice-monthly in All Shallow, the genie magazine publicated by my great friend Christopher Stalin:

I need more words. Where do they come from? I open a book about prehistoric beasts called Roger’s Thesaurus but no words tumble out although I know they’re in there. Perhaps That Man has stuck them to the pages with sinister glue? Instead I cut out a glowing obituary from a newspaper about a newly deaded writer and stick it to my television screen. Perfect!


Summer 2005

Recently it has been my eleventy-fifth birthday. I think. Either that or Mayday, when the small people of Wirralside enter my grassy patch to dance around a flagpole on which hangs a picture of a giant anorak. Actually it IS an anorak, the one they gave me when I left the shop which freely gave out books. I still have the card which accompanied this leaving present, signed warmly by Ethel Davenport and Mildred Justintime. Sometimes I nibble it, but mostly I tear out strips for roaches, so all that is left is the signatures which say “Good luck in your new job, Hallmark Cards’”

But now I have a new present. They say it was a Mayday present but I am suspicious and suspect Him. For starters, I ate the wrapping paper, and it wasn’t very nice. It tasted blue. Then I smiled as thin as an elephant when I realised it was one of them cordless speaker units, already having one I was concerned about the little people inside who had to do all that shouting. But this was white with a picture of a half full apple on it, so I had to pretend it was different, which it was. “It’s called an Eyepud,” someone said. “Gizza go!” Being swift-footed, I quickly pocketed my new thing because stolen ringy machines are worth a fortune down the docks or at least an eighth of Nepalese black. I could always trade it in for a quick.

I had to learn Spanish to read the instructions, but then someone left a window open and the paper wafted up into the air like a slab of mozerella cheese on a motorway, and when it landed the words were all suddenly in English like, so I will have to learn that one again. But the strangest thing is that the little people inside this ringy thing sing rather than shout, and some of it sounds good like I used to hear down the Writer’s Social in the city. Adam Faith, Racey, Gerry and the Pacemakers, these little fellas and felleressas seem almost as talented as Bad Bongo George, the world famous Liverpudlian banjo player who said my horror stories inspired him to play quicker. We used to have these free-loving jam sessions with me reading excerpts from ‘Lovecraft In My Basement’ down in my attic room, and he always said he never played so fast as he did when we got together. On one occasion we even managed to play for eight minutes before he ran out screaming with excitement.

People who say Bad Bongo George drowned in my garden pond are bad and under the brain power of That Hateful Man. I had the pond carefully dredged by the British Custardy Society, Kim and Steve together in fact, and they signed a beermat to the effect that he was not there and did not commit suicide. I sent this document to the senior manager at my local Iceland and even he was powerless to act. “How dare you,” I wrote, “sell deep-frozen chips when everybody knows I had no extended foot in that man’s death? You should be ashamed of yourselves.” And he was - he couldn’t even find the words to reply to my letter.

Then someone said you could put music into the little white ringy thingy, but that can’t be, because I have tried every plausible avenue to ingress some of my vinyl 78s into the inadequate apertures marked ‘Phones’. I even melted some of my Bing Crosby’s on the gas stove hobs thinking I could drizzle a little in, like Jamie Oliver does with his dogs. But then this woman who wears a t-shirt called ‘Your Wife’ suddenly appeared and began telling me off for trying hot knives again. In the end I accepted a frying pan around the head and took my toys out into the garden to fly planes with. Then I got so excited I tried to make a kite out of a paper block called The Wasp Factory but when I tied my British Custardy Award to it, the miserable thing took off in the shy winds and flew up into the sky over Liverpool Cliffs, taking my block of paper with it. “Come back,” I lamented gleefully, shaking a fist at the ground and then, realising my error, up at the empty sky. “Come back and tell me how to work my thingamejig!”


Autumn 2005
As summer beckons into autumn my thoughts fall to the floor like apples in a grocers shop accidentally tipped over by a pregnant and poorly navigated crow.

I was briefly cheered by the Rhubarb Crumble Appreciation Meeting that my fans held for me in a Midlands hotel recently. Shiny awards were given out to polish and and munch. It was kind of them to provide a Mini-Me in the guise of a Grey Monk but I fear his neck is not quite yet copious enough. But when I got home and unpacked someone else’s suitcase the Mini-Me wasn’t there any more so I realised if it was just for the weekend. It could have been so useful around the house what with all the litter that Shaun Hutson keeps poking through my vestibules.

Apparently I have written a novel which is being stood upon by Jeremy Connery who was in the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I do hope they provide him with a stunt net because the drop is so very high. One critic’s letter had these fine things to say about my book:

“’She might have cried out except for her lack of a mouth....’”

“Anatomically absurd. One needs vocal chords and a throat to cry out, not a mouth. Besides, how can one’s mouth be removed? It would leave a large mouth-shaped gash, surely, unless it had been sewn up. And that ‘except for’ is all wrong.... No, Mr. Campbell should have referred to his victim’s tongue or vocal chords, not her mouth, and he should have done so in a clearer manner.”

‘“Her entire body was seized by a convulsion that felt like an attempt to give shape to a scream...”’

“Oh dear. Do screams really have form? Do they? And even if they did, do whole bodies really convulse in order to describe them? Indeed, should one find one’s body thus similarly convulsed, would it necessarily feel like an attempt to give shape to any audible utterance?  This is not a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario. It is far more likely that a scream would be the result of suffering an acute convulsion rather than be the root cause of it........ Once again Mr Campbell indirectly proves that a good editor is a writer’s best friend. The only pity is that despite his questionable status as Britain’s greatest living horror writer, he appears not to be acquainted with one..... Were his work published by a mainstream publishing house, then he would almost certainly be required to submit to house rules which require certain basic common sense formalities of language to be followed, but for as long as he continues to publish with small and relatively unknown publishing bodies, Ramsey Campbell will, “probably”, keep making the same clumsy errors whilst excusing them as stylistic devices.”

I don’t know what all this means but it does make my foot twitch uncontrollably as it seeks to cry out in anger on behalf of my distress. I undo my slipper lace and remove my five lucky socks to give the toe beast a chance to release its pented up frenzy, but the room remains as silent as a fish bubble.

Here is a shopping tip: always wear five pairs of socks when you go shopping for shoes so that you don’t accidentally buy shoes that are too small for you. Plus you get more leather for the same price. Then all you need to remember is to wear five pair of socks every time you put them on. And if your feet get too hot in summer, simply slice off the toe ends of the socks so that the foot fingers can wiggle out through the ends of the sandals. NB. Be very careful to remove your socks before cutting the ends off. I forgot to do so on three separate occasions and now have pig trotters grafted onto the ends of my feet because I accidentally ate my own toe segments after an attack of hashish munchies.

I haven’t always dappled with drugs or been inflicted with delusions of mass paranoia. When I was a lad I would often catch marbles and chew them up a fruit tree. Now I keep reading about serial killers and sugar beet harvests so little wonder that I need to write books about spanking girls. Or was that yesterday? I walk out into the garden with a sense of pulsating insects under the growling turf and cross to my favourite blade of grass. But I can’t find it - it’s missing! - that HATEFUL MAN from Norfolk has hidden it amongst the many! No doubt he crept out here under the cover of moonlight and gregariously dug it up root, stem and all, before repotting it elsewhere. I spin and whirl dazzled by the millions of different blades it could be, cursing, cursing, cursing all the time. Then I remembered that our Diary Planner was affixed by a steel chip to the wall of the food preparing room, and not on my favourite blade of grass, so I hasten over to the garden shed to revolve the problem. Then wrongly shedded and realising my error, I return to the house and explode into the food room where I find the Planner but it is helpless and devoting because despite having somewhere in the region of 350 separate and closely defined dates, there is none marked ‘yesterday’. This new development is more puzzling than a can-opener. If there is no such thing as yesterday, what hope is there?

I must ask my new girlfriend Brenda Rattus. She teaches dates and numbers at a school but doesn’t like to boast about it but she is good at copying stories from people. Rodents, I was forgetting I was married already. Still, as President of the British Custardy Society I should be allowed extra wives because what else are perks but places where Liverpudlians walk their dogs? Brenda’s husband has a thing about Captain Pugwash but I think it’s because he forgot to wash his hands. This often happens to me when I switch on the hoover, it has such a sharp nozzle. The doctor said I should go at A&E the next time.

Hurrah, I find a notice on the board of small messages, which informs me that Raving Joel, the self-styled ‘Mendacious Moomin’, is offering a wash-and-wax for just eight pounds fifty. If I cash in all my Monopoly winnings I can have six but I had better hide my tubes of Jesus Juice because that Joel is a well known bruiser! Better go now Diary, I have to find some things to wax and wash.