The One Safe Place by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

the paper as a promise of delivery. She was waiting until the attention of the cameras was well away from Susanne, who heard the argument dodge about the audience, retreating from her and then, like a storm, coming back. She found it difficult to be aware of anything except repetitions of the word violence, violence, violence. "They're scared of nothing any more," a man shouted from one end of the back row, "we've got to bring back fear." A pole lifted toward him, and the assistant tiptoed fast across the studio floor, glancing at the cameramen in case they should wave her away.
    She placed the folded paper firmly in Susanne's hand and retreated. Had she been ensuring that the paper didn't fall? The pressure of her hand on Susanne's had felt like reassurance. Marshall leaned over to read the message as Susanne unfolded it, and she thought of keeping it from him until she had seen what had been addressed to her, but it was too brief for him not to be able to read it immediately. All it said was YOUR HUSBAND WITH POLICE.

2 Meaning Business
    Just as Don grew convinced that the suburb was so content with its own uniformity that it would repeat itself for as many miles again, he saw a park beyond the low boxy houses which perhaps only the rain, as prevalent in Manchester as he'd heard it was in Seattle, had rendered the color of mud. One of the three-story streets across the park might even be his goal. He pulled over behind a van with a For Sale notice in the rear window, and a lengthily raincoated youth standing restlessly on the street corner stared at him as though he had no right to be there or had better prove he had. "A to Zee," Don mouthed partly for his benefit, and opened the book of street maps on the seat beside him.
    It was the only book whose spine he'd ever broken since he could remember, and that was partly from frustration. Not only had some streets been blocked up or restricted to one way or demolished since the compilation of the book, but the reality through which he was driving was out of proportion with the maps, streets ending before they were supposed to or narrowing unexpectedly or curving where they had been shown as straight, so that he kept thinking he had even less sense of where he was. Whenever the streets on the maps grew profuse he was reminded that he needed reading glasses, and now he picked up the magnifying glass from the dashboard.
    The glass had come from a drawer in the slipcase of his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he caught sight of himself in the rear-view mirror he saw how much it made him resemble some eccentric sleuth in an English detective story, with reddish hair that contradicted any amount of brushing, high forehead whose wrinkles implied it was packed with more thoughts than he presently had, eyebrows trying to meet across the bridge of his long nose, heavy eyelids which lent him a semblance of sleepy watchfulness behind his spectacles, mouth skewed slightly leftward so that even when he wasn't smiling he appeared to be about to do so. His glance had also shown him the youth looking yet more suspicious and perhaps suspected, digging his fists so deep in the pockets of the pallid plastic raincoat that it gaped to reveal he was wearing only a T-shirt and torn jeans. "Do what you want to yourself so long as you keep it to yourself," Don murmured, lowering the glass to lasso the map into focus. There, when he tilted his head until his chin and shoulder squeezed out a pinch of flesh, was the street name he'd been told, and next to it a patch of not much of a shape, identified as a park in larger letters than the streets had room for. He let the glass fall on the open pages and sent the Volvo toward the park.
    "Left into traffic," he reminded himself at the end of the street, "learn left, lurch left." An empty swing flew up from a playground in the park to greet him. A boy of about Marshall's age was swinging it to wind the chains tight around the bar, while others