Read Online Secret Story by Ramsey Campbell - Free Book Online Page B

as sharp as a razor,” Walt said, “but go easy on our competition winner.”
    “I never voted for him.” Shell’s stare at Dudley hadn’t relented. “If you didn’t enjoy thinking about it you wouldn’t write it,” she said.
    “The last I heard we were still allowed to like creating what we create,” Vincent said. “Don’t you like making up your jokes?”
    “I don’t make them up, I observe them. How about you, Dud?”
    Dudley’s lips made such an issue of what he was going to say that Patricia didn’t expect it to be “My father used to call me that.”
    “Wonder what he was thinking?” Shell looked away from him at last to tell a larger female Beatle “I’ll have Elvis’s Enchiladas and a Jagger’s Jigger,” and then said “Don’t let me stop you geniuses working on your masterpiece.”
    “So where are we going to kill people?” Vincent said.
    “Someone could wake up and she’s tied up with something in her mouth on the edge of the roof of, I don’t know, where’s the highest building? And then she falls.”
    “She’d wake up a long time before you got her there,” Shell said and downed half her Jagger’s Jigger, “if she had the sense any woman’s got.”
    “It’s kind of close to an old serial, is it?” said Walt. “Not so much if she’s not rescued.”
    “All right, they’re laying concrete somewhere and he could tread her face in it, and she wouldn’t be able to make a noise. And if she wasn’t dead when it got hard she’d be stuck.”
    “You boys love things getting hard, don’t you,” Shell said. “What’s making you sit like that, Dud? Like tying women up and gagging us?”
    As Dudley finished squirming Vincent said “Nobody could shut you up, Shell. Any more ideas, Dudley?”
    “He could get into wherever she lives while she’s drying her hair. You know how hot those dryers get, and he could tie her up and—”
    “Are you maybe forcing it too much, Dudley?” said Walt. “I have to say you aren’t convincing me this is how a real killer would think.”
    “God, that’s a look,” Shell said. “You want to snap that, Tom.”
    As Tom photographed the scowl that appeared to have sent Dudley into a crouch, Vincent said “Do you think you need to see things more from your character’s viewpoint?”
    “There’s nobody else’s in that story,” Shell objected. “If that’s a woman’s view of anything I’ve just sprouted a knob.”
    “Try telling us about him,” Walt urged Dudley. “What’s his background? What’s his tale?”
    Patricia wondered if Dudley was in some kind of pain to be huddling so low. “I’ll have to think,” he muttered.
    “What’s anybody need to think about?” said Shell. “They’re all the same, his kind of thug. There’s so many these days they must be breeding.”
    “How would this work?” Walt said. “Tell Dudley how you see his character and maybe that’ll help him figure what he’s like.”
    “Nothing like you think,” Dudley said.
    “Hey, that sounds like a challenge. Let’s hear from you, Shell.”
    “I told you, he’ll be like they all are. Tortured animals when he was a kid. Scared of women. Hasn’t got a girlfriend. Likely brought up by a single mum. I’m not dissing them, but she’d have kept telling him how he was better than everyone else, treatinghim like every time he farted somebody should bottle it and sell it. Only deep down he’ll know he’s nothing and hate her for not stopping him knowing. That’ll be another reason he’s got it in for women even more than most men have. So whenever he’s feeling more than usually knobless, because I don’t reckon he’ll have much to play with and anyway he won’t be able to get it to salute, he goes creeping after women on their own so he can pretend he’s worth knowing about. Most of the time he can’t catch them, because women aren’t as stupid as him. Just now and then one of them’s unlucky, thinks he’s so pathetic he has to be