The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

concentrated her fierceness, tugging her small face into sharper relief. A dusty wind flaps her faded black dress like a crow's wings and tousles her greying hair. "What do you see?" Luke retorts.
    "Someone pretending, it looks like."
    He feels altogether too exposed. Is she another viewer of the Brittan show? "What do you mean?" he blurts.
    "Pretending you've got business round here."
    'Just looking. No harm in that, surely."
    "You look a bit too interested in other people's cars."
    "Well, I'm not. There's mine."
    When he uses his key to make the Lexus yip and blink she continues staring narrowly at him. He's beginning to feel he has forgotten how to portray an ordinary person by the time she says "Maybe you're the other kind we get round here."
    "You'd have to tell me what that is."
    "If they're not buying they're selling."
    Once her stare makes her meaning clear Luke says "I've got nothing to do with drugs at all."
    "You knew what I was talking about, though, didn't you?" Rather less than immediately she says "What are you after, then?"
    "I was looking for Amberley Street."
    Her stare doesn't relent, but it changes in some way Luke isn't sure of. "What do you want there?" she demands.
    "My uncle—" Luke may not feel entitled to say that any more, but to alter it seems disloyal. "He knocked down a house there," he says.
    "What one?"
    "I think it was owned by somebody called Strong. Apparently the cellar collapsed while someone was in it, and then the house had to be demolished."
    He hasn't finished speaking when her gaze softens at last. "God bless him," she says. "Tell him that if you see him."
    "I wish I could." In some haste Luke adds "Why?"
    "The man who had that house was messing with things nobody should. John Strong, they called him or he called himself. Don't ask me what he did, but worse than drugs." With something like defiance she says "There were always people going in like they couldn't stop themselves. Tell me why he'd live anywhere like that if he could do that to people."
    Luke isn't even sure what he is being asked. "Can you say where it was?"
    "Across there." She raises a hand in the direction of the car park, so briefly and violently that she might be trying to fend off whatever it signifies. As soon as Luke thanks her she retreats through the doorway, and he can't be certain that he hears her mutter "Maybe it needed more than knocking down."
    It seems even more pointless for Luke to abandon the search than it does to continue. He advances through the gateway and is halfway across the waste ground when he hears rats squealing in a heap of rubbish beside the path. No, chunks of polystyrene white as headstones are chafing together in a parched breeze that rouses random clumps of grass and weeds to twitch like insect limbs. As the noise subsides and the vegetation reverts to lying low he makes for the end of the path.
    This side of the waste ground is overlooked by a block of student flats, juvenile with bright red bricks and relieved only by four storeys of niggardly windows. Opposite the block on Falkner Terrace a row of Georgian houses is fungoid with satellite dishes. Two tiers of indifferent faces spy on Luke from a passing bus. He's alone on the pavement, and the sound of the bus recedes to isolate his footsteps. He tramps past the flats and turns the corner, and lets out a lingering breath.
    He's in Amberley Street, all that's left of it—a strip of roadway flanked by pavements, ending at the fence on this side of the car park. It's identifiable by a street sign attached to the railings of a basketball court and covered with graffiti. Opposite the court the multicoloured railings around a windowless brick bungalow show it to be a Caribbean centre. Otherwise the lopped-off road seems to have nothing to offer except the view of parked cars, beyond which a slender pointed spire appears to be fixing a stray cloud. Luke is back on the path across the waste ground when he falters, remembering what Dan said