Secret Story by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

mouthful and another, and felt sufficiently cooled down to talk. “How much did you read?”
    “Less than I’d have liked,” Patricia said. “I didn’t have time to read any all the way through. Enough to think we might want to use more of them.”
    “Patricia voted for your story,” Kathy said and gave him a surreptitiously pleading look.
    Dudley turned the printouts face down on the table as he sat opposite the journalist. “All right, I don’t mind being interviewed now.”
    Tom released a wordless noise, which Patricia made it clear she was disregarding. “Do you mind if I tape this?” she asked Dudley.
    “I wouldn’t have minded,” Kathy said.
    The remark with which Patricia had greeted his arrival flared up in his head. “What have you been saying?”
    “That you don’t believe in your achievement,” Patricia told him.
    He kept his stare on his mother. “That’s all you said.”
    “It’s your interview, Dudley. You should be the one to talk.”
    “Go on then, Patricia. Ask about me.”
    She depressed two buttons on the dinky tape recorder with a single fingertip. “What made you start writing?”
    “My father.” He thought that was the safest answer. “He wrote poems,” he said. “Used to read them like a lot of local poets do. Still does. I saw a poster he was on the other week.”
    “You could have gone to hear him if you wanted,” Kathy said. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
    “What’s his name?” Patricia waited to ask.
    “Monty Smith,” Kathy said at once.
    “He used to read to me a lot. That must be what made me want to write.”
    “Just your father?”
    “Her as well.”
    “That isn’t what you call your mother,” Tom objected, “her.”
    “No, I call her Kathy when I call her.”
    “She’s helped you too, I expect,” Patricia intervened.
    “She kept saying I should keep on writing. And a master at school did.”
    “Maybe I could talk to him.”
    “No.”
    “He turned against Dudley in the end, you see,” Kathy said.
    “One of Dudley’s stories shocked him because it was so real. It shocked me too, but that’s not bad, is it? Not bad for a fifteen-year-old. It showed how imaginative he was even then. All he had to go on were the news reports about a murder.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Then you shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”
    “Now, Tom, let me do the interviewing.” To Dudley, Patricia said “Do you remember when you became interested in crime?”
    He felt as if everyone in the room was eager to scrutinise his answer. “Lots of people are,” he protested. “It’s normal.”
    “Maybe, but if you write without trying to be published you have to find it satisfying all by itself.”
    He didn’t have to respond, but then he saw how he could deal with it. “I know when I started being interested,” he said to Kathy. “When you let me watch Eamonn’s videos.”
    His mother risked a smile. “They weren’t supposed to watch them at their age, but I knew he could tell the difference between fiction and real life. His friend’s parents owned a video library.”
    “Eamonn watched the films as well, and he ended up working for the government like us. Eamonn Moore. He’s in the tax office. His parents ran Moore and Moore Video.”
    “So where do you find your inspiration?” Patricia said.
    “You started with real murders, didn’t you?” Kathy said.
    Dudley struggled to produce an expression that felt like a grin. “Did I?”
    “I’m sorry to keep bringing it up, but the story Mr Fender didn’t like was about a real murderer and the things he did. Mr Fender said it was too real, as if a story could be.”
    “Do you still have it?” Patricia said.
    “Why would I? It was only a school thing.”
    “You could have given it to me,” Kathy said wistfully. “So you didn’t just destroy the story I wanted you to send somewhere.”
    “What was that about?” Patricia asked them both.
    “Nothing but me being