Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell Page A

fewer than have booked. Perhaps the rest are daunted by the likely weather; the sky above the river looks pregnant with night and rain, which is why I’m wheeling a golf bag stuffed with six umbrellas, an assemblage I bought on my roundabout way here. One newcomer is a man whose wide dull eyes and thick straight lips appear to be challenging the world to alter their expression. By contrast the slim girl, who clearly isn’t with him, seems close to dancing with eagerness to start the tour. I might be more inspired by her if I weren’t trying to determine which if either of them is here on Waterworth’s behalf. Asking would seem paranoid at best, and so I call “Tour just beginning. Pool of Life.”
    An unshaven scrawny man in an expensive suit and tie looks tempted to use this as a reason to skip court, but that’s the most positive response. “Never mind, you’ve got us,” Moira says. “Blame the wet.”
    “Are we off to see the pool?” the slim girl says.
    “Maybe the one Jung dreamed about,” I tell her.
    “That’s when he saw the pool in all the rain and knew he was in Liverpool.” Since the others look blank she adds “It was where all the streets led in his dream. It was lit up with a tree on it and he thought the light was coming from the tree.”
    The straight-lipped man doles out a voice that’s little better than expressionless. “What’s that about?”
    “He thought it was him.”
    “Some of us think it’s about creativity,” I intervene. “There’s plenty of that here.”
    I don’t just mean where we’re standing, though it’s where plays were first performed in Liverpool—the earliest on record, at any rate. A Pace-Egg play was staged at Easter in the Castle, if staging isn’t too strong a word for drawing a circle with a wooden sword to contain the performance. St George and the Serpent was the title, and I wonder if the monster called Slasher was meant to have come from the sea, since Neptune was among the characters, along with Toss-pot and the King of Egypt and Beelzebub. By now the girl is eager to interrupt. “They think they’ve killed Slasher,” she contributes, “but they forget there’s still the egg.”
    Is this true? It feels like a dream she has planted in my mind. My lack of sleep distorts the image, making me imagine not an egg but a mass of spawn, and I do my best to expel the notion by continuing to speak. Strolling players were so popular in medieval times that one of the seven original streets of the town was named Juggler, although by 1571 the corporation was prohibiting the display of “monstrouse or straunge beasts, or other visions voyde or vayne.” On the other hand, four years earlier a theatre down towards the river doubled as a cockpit by order of the corporation “for further and greater repair of gentlemen and others to this town.” None of this enlivens the thick-lipped man, and I push my golf bag downhill away from the river.
    I wouldn’t be surprised if people think I’m selling the umbrellas. Above Lord Street the dark sky looks ready to collapse, and the tubular concrete tower that houses a radio station is supporting a cloud like the nest of a great bird. A few brave tourists flourish cameras on the upper deck of an open-topped bus that passes my party and turns left along North John Street, narrowly missing a phalanx of young mothers pushing buggies and impatient with the traffic lights. The south branch of the street was once Love Lane, leading to the custom house at the oldest dock, where yet another stretch of water was subsequently drained. The dock became Canning Place, where in 1840 creatures with too many limbs or eyes or heads or alternatively too few were exhibited. South John Street is presently a trail of rubble above which helmeted workmen perch on scaffolding that sketches an imminent mall, and I wonder if my father talked to any ofthem. Perhaps I should ask, but not now. Instead I conduct the party past the stores on Lord