Read Online The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

murk—headlamps, of course, however quiet the cars are. Overhead the spotlights are elongated toadstools blurred by luminous mould. The fog loiters in the glow of the units that are occupied by shops and smudges their windows while it gathers like a huge breath on parked cars. Figures composed of painted bones lean against the fronts of the unoccupied units: they're graffiti surrounded by scrawls that are barely words, if even. Wilf hastens past them to take refuge in Frugo.
    The walls and ceiling of the supermarket are as colourless as the befogged spotlights. Unspecific muffled music hangs in the air while silent personnel unload cartons in the white aisles. Wilf takes a moss-green plastic basket to the rudimentary delicatessen section and bears a pack of sushi to the nearest till. The checkout girl, who wears an overall like a dentist's and has eyes weighed down by mascara, hardly glances at him even when she passes him the sushi in a bag so flimsy it's sibilant. The package thumps his ribs as he folds his arms to breast the automatic doors. For a moment it seems the glass won't move aside in time, and then the fog embraces him.
    The quickest route back is through the car park. The fog wobbles backwards as he jogs across the tarmac. Out here the murk seems more solid; it reminds him of tripe, a thick slab of whitish flesh that crawls back to expose its tarry bones. Those are saplings keeping one another company in strips of grassy earth that relieve the barren black. Before long they're his only companions, since the fog has done away with the shops. He feels it trail over his face like wisps of icy cobweb extending themselves from the leafless branches of the saplings he's about to pass between. As he rubs his face with his free hand the supermarket bag blunders rustling against his chest. He treads on grass strewn with fallen leaves, and his other foot follows. The moment all his weight is off the tarmac, a mouth fastens on him.
    It feels as if the veiled landscape has puckered to seize him. The cold slimy bloated lips close on his ankles and suck him down. The fog towers over him, and he imagines it muffling his cries for help before the mouth does. Then he flounders out of the mud and hears it smack its lips as he staggers across the tarmac. It was only mud, he almost shouts at his unforgivably silly self, but why was it so deep? Besides his shoes, an inch of his socks and trouser cuffs are black with it. He tramps at the fog until it peels itself away from the bookshop.
    He's stamping on READ ON! when Greg strides to the near end of the counter. "Good Lord, what on earth have you been up to?"
    "Just trekking back from"—Wilf feels trapped in stupidity until he manages to dredge the word up—"foraging."
    "Anyone would think you'd been out in the fields. I don't think you should walk through the shop like that, do you?"
    Wilf's mouth is opening before he can think of a polite answer or a quiet one, but he succeeds in saying only "I wasn't going to." He wipes most of the mud off his shoes with the supermarket bag and hands it to Greg. "Can you bin that while I try and get upstairs without being asked to leave?"
    As he trudges across the shop his left shoe reiterates a sound rather too reminiscent of the nether fanfare he seems unable to suppress whenever he uses a public toilet. He has to walk with his right toe turned up while he grips the right knee of his trousers to lift the sodden cuff clear of his ankle, so that it's no wonder Greg watches him and two small children giggle at his progress. The cuff moulds itself to his leg as he shows the staffroom exit plaque his badge. Even once he's closed in he still feels watched and stupid. He hauls his trouser leg upstairs and leaves the sushi on the staffroom table before heading for what some of the staff as well as Woody have started calling the men's room.
    The light flares on with a stuttering buzz. Who can be responsible for the state of the place? Wads of paper