Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell Page B

Street to Whitechapel.
    I do my best to douse the lurid flare of memory by turning to Paradise Street, formerly the Common Shore, across the intersection. Most of it is fenced off by builders, and shops and a pub have occupied the Royal Colosseum. Known to its friends as the Colly, it put on a play written by the stage manager, Prince’s Park and Scotland Road; or, Vice in Liverpool. Before its theatrical years it was a Unitarian chapel. Theatregoers had to enter through the old graveyard, and a vault was used as a dressing-room. Bones could be found in its depths beyond a flimsy partition, and some of them were used as props in plays. “That’s what you call recycling,” the eager girl says, stoppering a flask from which she keeps sipping water. “Trust Scousers not to let anything go to waste.”
    The Sheas, if that’s what they both are, seem dutifully amused, the straight-lipped man not at all. I lead the way along Church Street, past a block of shops that has erased Church Alley, the birthplace of James Maybrick. The narrow lane bordered the churchyard of St Peter’s, where his brother Michael became known as a precociously youthful organist. When the church was demolished about a century ago, the contents of some of the coffins were found to have turned to stone. How soon did James become jealous of his musical brother? The family lived in the alley until James was thirteen, and perhaps he was one of the children who had to be chased away from Joseph Williamson’s grave, whatever made them play some forgotten version of hopscotch on the slabs around it. Williamson died on May Eve in 1840, less than two years after James was born and a year before Michael’s birth. The mysterious builder was buried with his wife in a crypt of St Thomas’s Church at the far end of Paradise Street, less than five minutes’ walk from the Maybrick house. Two minutes would have taken James to Whitechapel or the Colly or the Liver Theatre, originallythe Dominion of Fancy, on the upper floor of shops on Church Street. Might this have helped him develop a taste for playing roles? “Maybe he played with the bones,” Moira Shea says with a delicious shudder.
    I’ve let myself be diverted by Maybrick on her behalf. This isn’t my night tour, and I’m not sleepwalking, whatever Waterworth said. Beyond the site of the Liver Theatre, Bold Street leads uphill to the district where poets of the Beatles era dwelled and wrote and drank. Around the corner in Hanover Street is the Neptune Theatre, which sounds as if it ought to be beside the Pool. Other theatres were—at least, beside the ground that supplanted it—which is why I guide my party past a stone eagle pinioned by a wire cage on the corner of a store to Williamson Square.
    Stalls like remnants of the vanished markets are selling football shirts and other symbols of Liverpool’s pair of teams. Children run through shivering arcades of water that the pavement raises like instruments of an aquatic ritual. Of the theatres and concert rooms that surrounded the square, only the Playhouse has survived. Its greatest rival, the Theatre Royal, had a pit approached through passages as good as subterranean and “choaked with a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” perhaps from the drained marsh. I can’t recall which theatre staged Water, Water Everywhere !, a comedy by a local Victorian playwright that included characters such as Captain Squelch and Mistress Trickle. Next to the Playhouse a shop full of aquariums has been replaced by the Fall Well pub, although the real well was farther up the slope of Roe Street. On our way to the site we would once have passed the Parthenon Music Hall, where in 1850 Daughters of the Deep was among the staged tableaux. The well was filled in at the end of the eighteenth century, and the Royal Amphitheatre was built opposite. Among its circus acts were the Guising Gorsutchers, a pair of Scouse contortionists so bonelessly supple that they used