The One Safe Place by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

smashed the ends of a seesaw against the concrete. Two boys no older than seven, who had apparently been driven out of the playground, were hanging onto the railings and watching the traffic, and Don grimaced sympathetically at them as he passed. The next moment each of them flung an object at the car.
    Don almost let go of the wheel in order to protect his face before he realised the missiles had cracked, not the windshield. They were large garden snails, and the impact hadn't killed them. "Hey, come on, guys," Don protested at the boys, who responded with a jeer apiece as they picked up ammunition to await the next car. He might have driven around the park to confront them if he weren't already late for his appointment. He switched on the wipers, then the washers, and gazed ahead, trying to ignore the greenish writhing as he steered into the side road.
    This one seemed to have taken the British habit of concealing street names on the walls of houses or front gardens even further. Eventually he located the name, low on an already low garden wall, and figured that Damb Street would have been Dane Street, his destination, until someone had attacked it with a marker pen. He backed the station wagon against the curb in front of a dusty car of indeterminate breed which was either parked or abandoned, and locked all his doors with a single twist of the key before proceeding to the uneven sidewalk.
    Unbroken ranks of houses reared up against the white June sky from narrow gardens stuffed with grass gleaming like knives with rain. That had stopped, leaving wet islands to steam as they dwindled on the sidewalk. Don couldn't see into a single room, though more than one curtain blinked. Nor was it easy to find house numbers; those that hadn't been stolen had been spray-painted illegible. He walked several hundred yards before catching sight of a rusty oval plate numbered 66, dangling from its one surviving screw in a position which seemed to turn the digits into frozen sperm. He crossed the cracked backbone of the roadway, and had just determined which of the colourless front doors must be number 73 when a net curtain stirred below it. That would be the basement to which the call from the public call-box had invited him, if invited was the word.
    While most of the basements peered through grass, the strip in front of this one was planted with broken bottles. Beside and below the stone steps leading up to the front entrance was an even less painted door, approached by steps scattered with chunks of moss. Don grasped the pockmarked bar of the door knocker and succeeded in raising it about an inch so as to deal its brass plate a timid rap. The brass flap of the letter-box looked capable of issuing more of a summons, and Don was pushing it open, his fingernails catching in its blackened pores, when it said, "I'd not do that."
    "Mr. Mevin?"
    "Depends. Are you the book feller?"
    Don wondered in passing whether the man beyond the door was mispronouncing an old-fashioned S as a bibliographical joke. "Sure am."
    "You'll have a name then, will you?"
    "Don Travis."
    "That's the lad."
    A series of noises of bolts and chains descended the edge of the door, which then protested a good deal about opening to disclose a short hall papered with dimness. The tenant, who was so short Don could look down on the three lines of grey hair which linked his ears across his mottled head, swayed backward from foot to foot, retying the cord of his ankle-length tiger-coloured dressing-gown. "Step over," he advised.
    In place of a welcome mat, Don saw just in time, a line of barbed wire was nailed to the carpet. Barbed wire framed three sides of the front door too, and the inside of the letter-slot, and Don was wary of touching the door to shut it until Mevin laughed at him. "You're fine once you're in.  There's been a few unwelcome sorts have gone hopping away, right enough. Yank, eh?" he said in a tone which suggested he was telling Don what to do, and vanished