“Shaky,” the old man admitted. “Real shaky.”
The Nebraskan put the old man’s right arm about his own neck and picked him up. “I can carry him,” he said. “You’ll have to show me his bedroom.”
“Most times Joe was just like always.” The old man’s voice was a whisper, as faint and far as it had been in the dream-city of the dead. “That’s what you got to understand. Near all the time, an’ when—when he did, they was dead, do you see? Dead or near to it. Didn’t do a lot of harm.”
The Nebraskan nodded.
Sarah, in a threadbare white nightgown that might have been her mother’s once, was already in the hall, stumbling and racked with sobs.
“Then you come. An’ Joe, he made us. Said I had to keep on talkin’ an’ she had to ask you fer supper.”
“You told me that story to warn me,” the Nebraskan said.
The old man nodded feebly as they entered his bedroom. “I thought I was bein’ slick. It was true, though, ’cept ’twasn’t Cooper, nor Creech neither.”
“I understand,” the Nebraskan said. He laid the old man on his bed and pulled up a blanket.
“I kilt him didn’t I? I kilt my boy Joe.”
“It wasn’t you, Grandpa.” Sarah had found a man’s bandana, no doubt in one of her grandfather’s drawers; she blew her nose into it.
“That’s what they’ll say.”
The Nebraskan turned on his heel. “We’ve got to find that thing and kill it. I should have done that first.” Before he had completed the thought, he was hurrying back toward the room that had been his.
He rolled Thacker over as far as the knife handle permitted and lifted his legs onto the bed. Thacker’s jaw hung slack; his tongue and palate were thinly coated with a clear glutinous gel that carried a faint smell of ammonia; otherwise his mouth was perfectly normal.
“It’s a spirit,” Sarah told the Nebraskan from the doorway. “It’ll go into Grandpa now, ’cause he killed it. That’s what he always said.”
The Nebraskan straightened up, turning to face her. “It’s a living creature, something like a cuttlefish, and it came here from—” He waved the thought aside. “It doesn’t really matter. It landed in North Africa, or at least I think it must have, and if I’m right, it was eaten by a jackal. They’ll eat just about anything, from what I’ve read. It survived inside the jackal as a sort of intestinal parasite. Long ago, it transmitted itself to a man, somehow.”
Sarah was looking down at her father, no longer listening. “He’s restin’ now, Mr. Cooper. He shot the old soul-sucker in the woods one day. That’s what Grandpa tells, and he hasn’t had no rest since, but he’s peaceful now. I was only eight or ’bout that, and for a long time Grandpa was ’fraid he’d get me, only he never did.” With both her thumbs, she drew down the lids of the dead man’s eyes.
“Either it’s crawled away—” the Nebraskan began.
Abruptly, Sarah dropped to her knees beside her dead parent and kissed him.
When at last the Nebraskan backed out of the room, the dead man and the living woman remained locked in that kiss, her face ecstatic, her fingers tangled in the dead man’s hair. Two full days later, after the Nebraskan had crossed the Mississippi, he still saw that kiss in shadows beside the road.
The Faces at Pine Dunes
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
1.
When his parents began arguing Michael went outside. He could still hear them through the thin wall of the caravan. “We needn’t stop yet,” his mother was pleading.
“We’re stopping,” his father said. “It’s time to stop wandering.”
But why should she want to leave here? Michael gazed about the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. The metal village of caravans surrounded him, cold and bright in the November afternoon. Beyond the dunes ahead he heard the dozing of the sea. On the three remaining sides a forest stood; remnants of autumn, ghosts of colour, were scattered over the trees; distant branches displayed a last golden mist of leaves. He inhaled the calm. Already he felt at home.
His mother was persisting. “You’re still young,” she told his father.
She’s kidding! Michael thought. Perhaps she was trying flattery. “There are places we haven’t seen,” she said wistfully.
“We don’t need to. We need to be here.”
The slowness of the argument, the voices muffled by the metal wall, frustrated Michael; he wanted to be sure that he was staying here. He hurried into the caravan. “I want to stay here. Why do we have to keep moving all the time?”
“Don’t come in here talking to your mother like that,” his father shouted.
He should have stayed out. The argument seemed to cramp the already crowded space within the caravan; it made his father’s presence yet more overwhelming. The man’s enormous wheezing body sat plumped on the couch, which sagged beneath his weight; his small frail wife was perched on what little of the couch was unoccupied, as though she’d been squeezed tiny to fit. Gazing at them, Michael felt suffocated. “I’m going out,” he said.
“Don’t go out,” his mother said anxiously; he couldn’t see why. “We won’t argue anymore. You stay in and do something. Study.”
“Let him be. The sooner he meets people here, the better.”
Michael resented the implication that by going out he was obeying his father. “I’m just going out for a walk,” he said. The reassurance might help her; he knew how it felt to be overborne by the man.
At the door he glanced back. His mother had opened her mouth, but his father said, “We’re staying. I’ve made my decision.” And he’d lie in it, Michael thought, still resentful. All the man could do was lie there, he thought spitefully; that was all he was fat for. He went out, sniggering. The way his father had gained weight during the past year, his coming to rest in this caravan park reminded Michael of an elephant’s arrival at its graveyard.
It was colder now. Michael turned up the hood of his anorak. Curtains were closing and glowing. Trees stood, intricately precise, against a sky like translucent papery jade. He began to climb the dunes towards the sea. But over there the sky was blackened; a sea dark as mud tossed nervously and flopped across the bleak beach. He turned towards the forest. Behind him sand hissed through grass.
The forest shifted in the wind. Shoals of leaves swam in the air, at the tips of webs of twigs. He followed a path which led from the Caravanserai’s approach road. Shortly the diversity of trees gave way to thousands of pines. Pinecones lay like wattled eggs on beds of fallen needles. The spread of needles glowed deep orange in the early evening, an orange tapestry displaying rank upon rank of slender pines, dwindling into twilight.
The path led him on. The pines were shouldered out by stouter trees, which reached overhead, tangling. Beyond the tangle the blue of the sky grew deeper; a crescent moon slid from branch to branch. Bushes massed among the trunks; they grew higher and closer as he pushed through. The curve of the path would take him back towards the road.
The ground was turning softer underfoot. It sucked his feet in the dark. The shrubs had closed over him now; he could hardly see. He struggled between them, pursuing the curve. Leaves rubbed together rustling at his ear, like desiccated lips; their dry dead tongues rattled. All at once the roof of the wooden tunnel dropped sharply. To go further he would have to crawl.
He turned with difficulty. On both sides thorns caught his sleeves; his dark was hemmed in by two ranks of dim captors. It was as though midnight had already fallen here, beneath the tangled arches; but the dark was solid and clawed. Overhead, netted fragments of night sky illuminated the tunnel hardly at all.
He managed to extricate himself, and hurried back. But he had taken only a few steps when his way was blocked by hulking spiky darkness. He dodged to the left of the shrub, then to the right, trying irritably to calm his heart. But there was no path. He had lost his way in the dark. Around him dimness rustled, chattering.
He began to curse himself. What had possessed him to come in here? Why on ear
th had he chosen to explore so late in the day? How could the woods be so interminable? He groped for openings between masses of thorns. Sometimes he found them, though often they would not admit his body. The darkness was a maze of false paths.
Eventually he had to return to the mouth of the tunnel and crawl. Unseen moisture welled up from the ground, between his fingers. Shrubs leaned closer as he advanced, poking him with thorns. His skin felt fragile, and nervously unstable; he burned but his heat often seemed to break, flooding him with the chill of the night.
There was something even less pleasant. As he crawled, the leaning darkness—or part of it—seemed to move beside him. It was as though someone were pacing him, perhaps on all fours, outside the tunnel. When he halted, so did the pacing. It would reach the end of the tunnel just as he did.
Nothing but imagination, helped by the closely looming tree trunks beyond the shrubs. Apart from the creaking of wood and the rattling sway of leaves, there was no sound beyond the tunnel—certainly none of pacing. He crawled. The cumbersome moist sounds that accompanied the pacing were those of his own progress. But he crawled more slowly, and the darkness imitated him. Wasn’t the thorny tunnel dwindling ahead? It would trap him. Suddenly panicking, he began to scrabble backwards.
The thorns hardly hindered his retreat. He must have broken them down. He emerged gasping, glad of the tiny gain in light. Around him shrubs pressed close as ever. He stamped his way back along what he’d thought was his original path. When he reached the hindrance he smashed his way between the shrubs, struggling and snarling, savage with panic, determined not to yield. His hands were torn; he heard cloth rip. Well, the thorns could have that.
When at last he reached an open space, his panic sighed loudly out of him. He began to walk as rapidly as seemed safe, towards where he remembered the road to be. Overhead black nets of branches turned, momentarily catching stars. Once, amid the enormous threshing of the woods, he thought he heard a heavy body shoving through the nearby bushes. Good luck to whoever it was. Ahead, in the barred dark, hung little lighted windows. He had found the caravan park, but only by losing his way.
He was home. He hurried into the light, smiling. In the metal alleys pegged shirts hung neck down, dripping; they flapped desperately on the wind. The caravan was dark. In the main room, lying on the couch like someone’s abandoned reading, was a note: OUT, BACK LATER. His mother had added DON’T GO TO BED TOO LATE.
He’d been looking forward to companionship. Now the caravan seemed too brightly lit, and false: a furnished tin can. He made himself coffee, leafed desultorily through his floppy paperbacks, opened and closed a pocket chess set. He poked through his box of souvenirs: shells, smooth stones; a minute Bible; a globe of synthetic snow within which a huge vague figure, presumably meant to be a snowman, loomed outside a house; a dead flashlight fitted with a set of clip-on Halloween faces; a dull grey ring whose metal swelled into a bulge over which colours crawled slowly, changing. The cardboard box was full of memories: the Severn Valley, the Welsh hills, the garishly flittering mile of Blackpool; he couldn’t remember where the ring had come from. But the memories were dim tonight, uninvolving.
He wandered into his parents’ room. It looked to him like a second-hand store for clothes and toiletries. He found his father’s large metal box, but it was locked as usual. Well, Michael didn’t want to read his old books anyway. He searched for contraceptives, but as he’d expected, there were none. If he wasn’t mistaken, his parents had no need for them. Poor buggers. He’d never been able to imagine how, out of proportion as they seemed to be, they had begot him.
Eventually he went out. The incessant rocking of the caravan, its hollow booming in the wind, had begun to infuriate him. He hurried along the road between the pines; wind sifted through needles. On the main road buses ran to Liverpool. But he’d already been there several times. He caught a bus to the opposite terminus.
The bus was almost empty. A few passengers rattled in their lighted pod over the bumpy country roads. Darkness streamed by, sometimes becoming dim hedges. The scoop of the headlamps set light to moths, and once to a squirrel. Ahead the sky glowed, as if with a localised dawn. Lights began to emerge from behind silhouetted houses; streets opened, brightening.
The bus halted in a square, beside a village cross. The passengers hurried away, snuggling into their collars. Almost at once the street was deserted, the bus extinguished. Folded awnings clattered, tugged by the wind. Perhaps after all he should have gone into the city. He was stranded here for—he read the timetable: God, two hours until the last bus.
He wandered among the grey stone houses. Streetlamps glared silver; the light coated shop windows, behind whose flowering of frost he could see faint ghosts of merchandise. Curtains shone warmly, chimneys smoked. His heels clanked mechanically on the cobbles. Streets, streets, empty streets. Then the streets became crowded, with gleaming parked cars. Ahead, on the wall of a building, was a plaque of coloured light. FOUR IN THE MORNING. A club.
He hesitated, then he descended the steps. Maybe he wouldn’t fit in with the brand-new sports car set, but anything was better than wandering the icy streets. At the bottom of the stone flight, a desk stood beside a door to coloured dimness. A broken-nosed man wearing evening dress sat behind the desk. “Are you a member, sir?” he said in an accent that was almost as convincing as his suit.
Inside was worse than Michael had feared. On a dance-floor couples turned lethargically, glittering and changing colour like toy dancers. Clumps of people stood shouting at each other in country accents, swaying and laughing; some stared at him as they laughed. He heard their talk: motorboats, bloody bolshies, someone’s third abortion. He didn’t mind meeting new people—he’d had to learn not to mind—but he could tell these people preferred, now they’d stared, to ignore him.
His three pounds’ membership fee included a free drink. I should think so too, he thought. He ordered a beer, to the barman’s faint contempt. As he carried the tankard to one of the low bare tables he was conscious of his boots, tramping the floorboards. There was nothing wrong with them, he’d wiped them. He sipped, making the drink last, and gazed into the beer’s dim glow.
When someone else sat at the table he didn’t look at her. He had to glance up at last, because she was staring. What was the matter with her, was he on show? Often in groups he felt alien, but he’d never felt more of a freak than here. His large-boned arms huddled protectively around him, his gawky legs drew up.
But she was smiling. Her stare was wide-eyed, innocent, if somehow odd. “I haven’t seen you before,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Michael.” It sounded like phlegm; he cleared his throat. “Michael. What’s yours?”
“June.” She made a face as though it tasted like medicine.
“Nothing wrong with that.” Her hint of dissatisfaction with herself had emboldened him.
“You haven’t moved here, have you? Are you visiting?”
There was something strange about her: about her eyes, about the way she seemed to search for questions. “My parents have a caravan,” he said. “We’re in the Pine Dunes Caravanserai. We docked just last week.”
“Yeah.” She drew the word out like a sigh. “Like a ship. That must be fantastic. I wish I had that. Just to be able to see new things all the time, new places. The only way you can see new things here is taking acid. I’m tripping now.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly; his faint smile shrugged.
“That’s what I mean,” she said, smiling. “These people here would be really shocked. They’re so provincial. You aren’t.”
In fact he hadn’t been sure how to react. The pupils of her eyes were expanding and contracting rapidly, independently of each other. But her small face was attractive, her small body had large firm breasts.
“I saw the moon dancing before,” she said. “I’m beginning to come down now. I thought I’d like to look at people. You wouldn’t know I was tripping, would you? I can control i
t when I want to.”
She wasn’t really talking to him, he thought; she just wanted an audience to trip to. He’d heard things about LSD. “Aren’t you afraid of starting to trip when you don’t mean to?”
“Flashbacks, you mean. I never have them. I shouldn’t like that.” She gazed at his scepticism. “There’s no need to be afraid of drugs,” she said. “All sorts of people used to trip. Witches used to. Look, it tells you about it in here.”
She fumbled a book out of her handbag; she seemed to have difficulty in wielding her fingers. Witchcraft in England. “You can have that,” she said. “Have you got a job?”
It took him a moment to realise that she’d changed the subject. “No,” he said. “I haven’t left school long. I had to have extra school because of all the moving. I’m twenty. I expect I’ll get a job soon. I think we’re staying here.”
“That could be a good job,” she said, pointing at a notice behind the bar: TRAINEE BARMAN REQUIRED. “I think they want to get rid of that guy there. People don’t like him. I know a lot of people would come here if they got someone friendly like you.”
Was it just her trip talking? Two girls said good-bye to a group, and came over. “We’re going now, June. See you shortly.”
“Right. Hey, this is Michael.”
“Nice to meet you, Michael.”
“Hope we’ll see you again.”
Perhaps they might. These people didn’t seem so bad after all. He drank his beer and bought another, wincing at the price and gazing at the job notice. June refused a drink: “It’s a downer.” They talked about his travels, her dissatisfactions, and her lack of cash to pay for moving. When he had to leave she said, “I’m glad I met you. I like you.” And she called after him, “If you got that job I’d come here.”
2.
Darkness blinded him. It was heavy on him, and moved. It was more than darkness: it was flesh. Beneath him and around him and above him, somnolent bodies crawled blindly. They were huge; so was he. As they shifted incessantly he heard sounds of mud or flesh.
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