Boiled Alive

by Ramsey Campbell

* * * *

Each weekday morning Mee was first in the pay office. He would sip coffee from a dwarfish plastic cup and watch the car park rearrange itself as the fac­tory changed shifts, several thousand random blocks of colour gathering about his green car on the concrete field. He would spend the next four hours at the computer, and three hours after lunch. The chirping cursor leapt to do his bid­ding, danced characters onto the screen. He had charge of half the payroll, half of the three-letter codes that denoted employees so secretively that he didn’t even know if he was in his own batch. Now and then Clare trotted in from the outer office with a handful of changes of tax coding; but Mee was mostly un­aware of Till, who computed the other half of the payroll, and Macnamara the supervisor, who was always repeating himself, always repeating himself.

Each day after work Mee listened in his car to wartime crooners rhyming the moon and waited until he had a clear path through the car park. The music rode with him along the motor­way to the estate that was mounting the sandstone hills. His street was of sandy bungalows, identical except for curtains or cacti or porcelain in the windows. He parked his car in the ga­rage that took the place of one front room and walked down the drive, round the end of his strip of lawn like a hall carpet, and up the path to his front door.

Each night he prepared the next day’s dinner and stored it in the refrig­erator. He would eat it facing the view back towards the factory, miles away. Roads and looped junctions left no room for trees, but the earliness of headlights signified the onset of winter. He was digging at his dessert with his fork and watching the swarming of lights, the landscape humming constantly like a dynamo, when the telephone rang.

A darts match at the pub, he guessed, or a message from the Homewatch leader, probably about youngsters us­ing the back alleys to take drugs, as if reality weren’t enough for them. Munching, he lifted the receiver, and a voice said, “Boiled alive.”

“Pardon?” Mee wondered if the man had mistaken him for a restaurant — but the voice was too lugubriously meaningful. “Boiled alive,” it repeated in an explanatory tone that sounded almost peevish, and rang off.

No doubt the caller was on drugs and phoning at random, and Mee wanted to believe the phrase was just as mean­ingless. He switched on the television and watched manic couples win holi­days on a quiz show. A dentist’s recep­tionist was leaping and squealing and popping her eyes at her prize when the phone rang again. “Is this the house of Dr Doncaster?” a voice said.

“I’m afraid not. Sorry.” Mee waited politely for a response, and was about to break the connection when the voice said, “Is this the house of Dr Doncas­ter?”

“I’ve already said not. Can’t you hear me?” Perhaps deafness was why the man was calling. “You’ve got a wrong number,” Mee said, so loudly that the mouthpiece vibrated.

This time the silence was shorter. “Is this the house of Dr Doncaster?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What do you want?” The doctor, Mee thought, and felt somewhat ridiculous himself. It wasn’t the voice that had called earlier; it had an odd quality — a blandness, a lack of accent. “Is this —” it recom­menced, and he cut it off.

Had its silences really been exactly the same length? Certainly it had re­peated itself with precisely the same intonation. He might have been talking to a robot, he thought, but that seemed to miss the point somehow. He went out to the pub, a longer bungalow, and tried to interest himself in the quiz league’s semi-final, questions about places he’d never heard of. Next day the lassitude he always suf­fered after a morning at the computer was worse, but the sight of men from the assembly line swapping pirated vid­eos in the windowless canteen wakened him and a memory he’d been trying to gain access to. He stopped at the video library in the wine shop on his way home after work. Horror films had oc­cupied the shelves nearest the window: Shriek of the Mutilated, Headless Eyes, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Boiled Alive.

The box showed photographs of peo­ple reddening and screaming, presum­ably the actors who were listed, though they sounded like pseudonyms. He would learn no more unless he hired a video-recorder. At home he ate boiled beef and watched the lights until he felt their swarming was preventing him from thinking. He was late for the com­mittee meeting at the church hall, and had to struggle to interest himself in the question of rents to be charged for jumble sales and Boy Scout gatherings. He voted against letting the peace movement use the hall. Life wasn’t as precarious as they made it out to be, he thought as he strode home; it had a pat­tern you could glimpse if you had faith.

The phone was ringing as he reached his path. He slammed the door, dashed to the phone, snatched the receiver. “Is this the house of Dr Doncaster?” the voice said.

Mee let out a long sigh, which his panting interrupted. “Do I get a prize for the right answer?”

Silence. It really was a total silence, empty even of static. “Is this the house of Dr Doncaster?”

“Where you are, you mean? It may be, for all I know.”

Silence. Mee found he was counting the seconds. If the silence was even fractionally longer he would know he’d thrown the caller, as he realized he very much wanted to do. But no: “Is this

“Go to the devil where you belong, you lunatic,” Mee shouted, and chopped at the cradle with the edge of his palm. He nursed his bruised hand and thought of contacting the police. They would only tell him to keep on receiving the calls so that the caller could be traced, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep for waiting tensely. He left the phone off the hook overnight and watched Boiled Alive, which varied wildly from dream to dream. Whenever he awoke he felt colder, as if the dreams were draining him.

Next morning he said to Till, “You’ve a videorecorder, haven’t you?”

Till blinked at him under his perpet­ual grey-browed scowl. “Used to have. Can’t afford it with the kids at private school. Besides, most of the films weren’t fit for them to watch. Puts ideas in peo­ple’s heads, that sort of thing.”

“Something you wanted to watch, Mr Mee?” Macnamara said across the room, his hollow drone resounding. “Was there something you wanted to see?”

“A tape in my local library.”

“Bring it round on Sunday. Come for dinner after church, my mother likes the company. You can’t get too much use out of a machine, am I right? You can’t get too much use out of a ma­chine.”

Should Mee let him know the kind of film it was? But he might seem to be rejecting Macnamara’s gesture. He busied himself at the screen, wondering afresh whether any of the three-letter codes coincided with the employee’s car registration or whether someone had ensured they did not. Certainly none of his highest earners had the same codes as the limousines outside.

That night he hired Boiled Alive for the weekend. He’d finished eating din­ner and watched the racing lights for some time before he realized the phone hadn’t rung. He had a sudden irrational conviction that it wouldn’t while he had the videocassette. Such thoughts were dangerous; things didn’t work like that. All the same, the only call that week­end was from Macnamara, to make sure Mee was coming.

Macnamara lived in the town beyond the factory, in a house at the top of a flight of railed steps. “Here he is,” he announced as he let Mee into the long narrow hall beneath a lampshade like a flower of stained glass. “He’s here.”

His mother darted out from the far­thest doorway. She couldn’t really be that small, Mee thought nervously; but when she squeezed alongside her son her head was barely as high as his chest. Otherwise, apart from having all the hair, she looked much like Mac­namara: thin oval face, sharp nose, col­ourless lips. “Didn’t you bring the film?” she said in a stage whisper. “Sidney said you were bringing a film.”

They made Mee think of the voice on the phone, but neither of them would be capable of that voice. He dug the cassette out of his pocket. “Some kind of comedy, is it?” Macnamara said, rais­ing his eyebrows at the title, and to his mother, “Some kind of comedy.”

She herded them into the dining room then — to Mee’s acute embarrassment, she pretended to charge at them like a goat, emitting sounds of shooing. Dinner was Greek, and went on for hours. Whenever he thought the end was near she produced another course. “Is it good?” she demanded anx­iously before he’d had a mouthful, and as soon as he had: “It’s good, isn’t it?” Her whispering was the result of a throat disease, he realized, but never­theless she talked constantly, interro­gating him about himself long after the details ceased to interest him. Worse, she told him in intimate detail about her problems in bringing up her son after his father had deserted them. “How’s my Sidney getting on at work?” she asked Mee, and wouldn’t let him mumble vaguely. “Fine, I’m sure,” he stammered, yearning for it to be time to watch the film.

Macnamara’s reluctance was obvious as he picked up the cassette. “Sounds exciting, Boiled Alive,” his mother whispered enthusiastically, and he slipped it into the player with a de­spairing shrug. “That’s funny. Isn’t it?” she suggested as several thin flat sci­entists squeezed into sight behind the wide-screen credits, then she gasped as they inflated, released from the bonds of the words. Whatever they were doing to measure psychic energy, their ex­periment was going wrong: laboratory monitors were melting, a man’s face was blistering. “How do they do that?” Mrs Macnamara cried in a whisper, and Mee had to restrain himself from hush­ing her, for one of the scientists had just been called Doncaster.

She talked throughout the film. Mee wondered if she was trying to shut out the sight of people being boiled alive by some vindictive psychic power. “Is that the kind of car you make at the fac­tory?” she whispered as a scientist’s hands fused to a steering wheel. An­other man’s eyes burst one by one, and she struggled to her feet, croaking “I think I’ll go to bed now.”

Mee stared open-mouthed at the screen, which was filled with a tele­phone dial. A detective’s finger was dialling Mee’s phone number. “My mother wants to go to bed,” Macnamara growled, but Mee barely noticed he was speaking as the detective, mouthing, said “Is this the house of Dr Doncas-ter?”

“I’ll see you up, mother,” Macnamara said furiously, and Mee lurched for­ward to listen to the detective. “Is Dr Doncaster there?” . . . “What do the words ‘boiled alive’ mean to you?” .. . “We all have hidden powers that only need to be unlocked” .. . “We can’t talk now, this may be being traced” .. . “Right, I’ll meet you in an hour.” But he was boiled en route, leav­ing only his girlfriend, a reporter, to gun down the culprit in a refrigerator. Suddenly the gun was too hot to hold, and as she dropped it, a silhouette stepped out from behind a side of beef. “I am Dr Doncaster,” it said.

“The End.” Had something been missed out? The tape began to rewind, and as Mee picked up the remote con­trol he noticed Macnamara, who was watching him from the hall. “That wasn’t funny,” Macnamara said, even slower than usual. “Not funny at all.”

Mee thought of apologizing, but wasn’t sure what for. Had Dr Doncaster really been the culprit, or only in English? The question formed a barrier in his mind as he followed taillights home. Even the inclusion of his number in the film couldn’t quite break through.

In the morning he tried to phone the distributor of Boiled Alive, but when­ever the number wasn’t engaged there was no answer. He had to desist when Macnamara kept glaring at him. Oth­erwise Macnamara behaved as if Mee’s visit had never taken place. Mee crouched over the screen and tried to interest himself in the dance of the symbols, telling himself that they were as real as he was.

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