The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror by Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, David A. Riley Read Free Book Online Page B

the people, the traffic and the houses. An isolated world where folk would drop in unexpectedly, walk past the view and leave the stage finally past either the left or right hand window frame. Not much amazing happened on that stage, except once, just the daily life of part of a community. This microcosm settled easily upon my mind many a bright morning—I was the watcher, those out there the watched.
    Not that I was bored by other things that the mere existence outside my window could hold my fascinated surveillance, but I would often be working on catalogues at the table next to the window which allowed an uninterrupted view out, down to the grey strip of road below and up into the pale sky. I would quite often cease work and dream easily, letting whatever happened to appear through the glass to settle on the retina, there to be converted by a brain that was normally imaginatively dormant into some bizarre saga of modern life. Life had for me become a solitary affair, a routine job working at home in which I saw few people for long periods at a time. My line was in indexing, a laborious business, but one in which I reveled. I suppose, in a way, the complete negativity of indexing, its alien-ness from life, made my desire to watch folk go about their daily tasks all the more important to me. The fantasy of words, words and more words, meaninglessly jumbled together (for so it seems sometimes) could suck the mind dry and leave a hollow, black space. The printed page has a certain fascination, but it is nonetheless an escape and there is a relief sometimes in climbing back to some sort of reality; one puts down the book and the world seems to snap suddenly back.
    Anyhow, that’s how I sat on that fateful morning, sheets of paper and manuscripts untidily scattered about my table, the typewriter buried under a mound of carbons. It was about eleven o’clock and I’d just finished a cup of welcome coffee and was staring out at what I considered to be my own small world, my “theatre” on which I would direct the actors through their dingy roles, and there, across the road, like a patch of brighter yellow on the sun-basked pavement stood a little girl. She was about six or seven years of age, with hair of an unusual silver-straw colour, fixed in plaits. She had a strangely moulded face with a protruding chin, blue eyes and a small, inscrutable mouth. A white turned up nose peeped through the surface dirt, which covered the rest of her face. She wore a pair of cheap, brown plastic sandals, and in complete incongruity to the rest of her clothing, a pair of torn, grey woollen socks, one of which fitted snugly to the knee and the other bulging round the ankle. A plain yellow cotton dress hung from her small, thin shoulders and her bare arms were pale in the sun.
    The funny thing was, I don’t remember her walking into my view; one minute I stood there with the empty mug in my hand and she wasn’t there, and with the blink of an eye she stood across the way. No ball or skipping rope to play with and no friends chatting, she just stood there and her eyes burned into mine passionately. I looked away in surprise, suddenly caught in the act of “watcher”. The unusual thing was, that from that distance she really shouldn’t have been able to see me at all—the window would have appeared as dark and lifeless as those grim panes on the other side of the street. Anyway, briefly I had turned my gaze, now quickly I looked again.
    But she was gone.
    It was so silly of me to feel—what was it... afraid?—of those blue eyes of hers, but they held such a yearning and drilled into my brain for that minuscule moment of time. They were ineffably intense, with a cold kind of passion, and I realized in the quiet moments afterwards that I was shivering. That little girl had inexplicably become a major character in my dramas though so brief a bit part she had played, and I simply could not for the rest of that day shift her from my mind.