Born To The Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  “So you’re saying she’ll take him and do what?”

  “Not Chris herself. She sent me to the only place that’s dealing with it anywhere near us. There are dozens of children like Toby, Dominic, and this place has been helping them for years.”

  My enthusiasm had started to fall short of hers. “You’re saying it takes that long.”

  “No, that’s how long she says the syndrome has been recognised. Even now it’s only alternative medicine that’s found an answer.”

  “What alternative?”

  “One to all the drugs they’ve been trying on him. I shouldn’t have said medicine. They use therapy at Safe To Sleep, a kind of meditation.”

  “They’re not Buddhists, are they?” my father said.

  “I don’t think they’re any kind of religious organisation, Desmond.”

  “I was only going to say that if the little feller needs religion, we’ve got one of our own.”

  Did he mean the country or just the family? If it was the latter, he couldn’t even include me. Rather than revive old arguments I asked Lesley “So when are we going to look at this place?”

  “I did today, Dominic. Toby did too. We’re both very much in favour.”

  “You couldn’t have waited for me.”

  “They only see people in the mornings.” With the faintest suggestion of a rebuke she said “Usually you’d have been here.”

  “Let’s be fair,” my father said. “He did say the trains let him down.”

  I could only wonder if he realised how little his intervention helped. “Do you think I should have a look too?” I said.

  “Of course you should. We can go tomorrow if you like.”

  “That’s Sunday,” my father said.

  “It won’t be a problem. They’re open at weekends, otherwise they couldn’t take children who are at school.”

  Of course my father’s veiled objection had concerned the Sabbath. I thought Lesley was trying to leave it behind as she said “Only, Dominic…”

  She glanced towards the hall as we heard Toby padding down the stairs, a sound not much less soft than snow. “Yes, what?” I said.

  “You mustn’t feel left out, but we’ve already enrolled Toby at Safe To Sleep.”

  “Who’s we?” my father said.

  “I’m certain it would have been both of us.” This looked like an appeal addressed to me. “Chris’s little boy goes there,” Lesley said. “Chris says it’s the only place she trusts to do what he needs.”

  Toby trotted into the kitchen. “Can I tell daddy where we went?”

  “You tell it like you saw it, Toby,” my father said. “Show the grownups how it’s done.”

  Rather than acknowledge any reproach this contained, Lesley told our son “Here’s your chocolate.”

  He took a hearty mouthful from his mug—it bore constellations from The Sky at Night, his favourite television programme—and wiped away a tan moustache before anyone could tell him. “Daddy,” he said with equal vigour, “it’s a great big house with lots of children in, and they all sleep in a giant room.”

  “A dormitory, would that be?” I asked Lesley. “Or a ward?”

  “Not really either. Those weren’t what it felt like.”

  “Mummy, I know how it felt. I could feel all the children being asleep.”

  “Just like I was saying, Dominic,” my father said. “He’s got your imagination.”

  “Toby,” Lesley said, “I think I felt it too.”

  While I didn’t know if this was a riposte to my father, he seemed to think to. “Do you say any prayers when you go to bed, son?” he said.

  “I don’t know any, grandad.”

  “I’ll teach you some. That’s if I’m allowed.”

  “Perhaps we oughtn’t to confuse him,” Lesley said, “when he’s about to start a treatment.”

  “You think God would confuse him.” When she gave him a saddened look in lieu of an argument in front of Toby, my father said “You just ask God to let you sleep in peace at night, Toby. Keep asking if you have to while you go to sleep.”

  As Lesley looked ready to abandon her reticence I risked saying “I shouldn’t think that can do any harm.”

  “Harm, I should say not,” my father said. “If you want to know what I think, maybe he’s not getting the peace a child deserves because you haven’t brought him up in the faith.”

  Our silence must have told my father that he’d gone too far. “Anyway, I’d better take myself off,” he said. “I only came to see him playing in the snow.”

  I thought Lesley couldn’t very well not say “Won’t you stay for dinner, Desmond?”

  He sniffed the air. “You mustn’t think I’m being rude, but what are you having?”

  “I’ve made Indian. There’ll be plenty for everyone.”

  “I better hadn’t or I’ll never get a proper sleep.” My father let his mouth fall open, signifying inspiration before he said “Do you think it could be anything the boy eats that’s messing up his nights?”

  “They’ve looked into his diet and it isn’t that,” Lesley said.

  “Well, so long as he likes what you give him. I know you like that sort of thing, and films as well.” My father seemed unable to stop talking, unless he was demonstrating his right to carry on. “One of the ones you rate was on telly this week,” he said. “Sorry if I’m thick, but I didn’t get it. Just a lot of sweaty characters wailing and jigging about and only talking English when it suited them.”

  “The Music Room,” Lesley said before I could. “It’s pretty contemplative even for the director.”

  “That’s what you call meditation, is it?” my father said and turned to Toby. “You try doing what I told you, son.”

  The three of us followed him to the front door. For the moment the snow had stopped again, though not before it came close to filling in my footprints on the path. I saw my father stumble as he reached the gate, and I was lurching after him when he swung around, knocking lumps of snow onto the pavement. “Stay in the warm, Dominic,” he said. “I’ll be taking care.”

  “Can we drive you somewhere, Desmond?” Lesley called.

  “Don’t you go risking the roads, love. That’s what the buses are for.” Having managed to shut the gate despite all the snow it heaped up, my father said “I hope I’ll see you soon.”

  “You don’t need us to tell you you’re welcome,” Lesley said but went back to the kitchen while Toby and I watched my father make his painstaking way towards the main road, patting the soft helmets of parked cars. When a bend muffled the shrill crunch of snow beneath his feet, we withdrew into the house. “Is grandad all right on his own?” Toby said.

  “He isn’t really, is he?” I felt as if my words had laid a trap for me. “On his own,” I said hastily. “He’s got us and his friends.”

  I thought Toby was about to bring up his grandmother, but he made for the kitchen to retrieve his mug and gaze out of the window. “Let’s make sure the snow is staying off,” Lesley said, “and then you can finish your creation if you like.”

  “I won’t today, mummy. I’ll stay in like grandad said.”

  “That’s sensible of you,” Lesley said and glanced out at the unfinished figure. “Or have you had enough of building him?”

  “It needs a face but I don’t know what to put. I’ll dream of one,” Toby said, and now I realise I was so desperate for him to outgrow his condition that his willingness to dream sounded like a hint of hope.

  3 - The Sleeping Room

  Overnight the snow ceased, and by Sunday morning the main roads had been cleared. “Lamp,” Toby said as I drove through Liverpool. “Shops. Bus.” He hadn’t been so monosyllabic for years, but we were playing I Spy with him. The sights his little eye spied were more sophisticated, though little was hardly the word for his eyes. On the outskirts or the city the land grew flat, and by the time we’d passed through Maghull and Ormskirk fields of unbroken snow stretched to the horizon from both sides of th
e road. Except for the occasional trees as white and fat as clouds the utterly flat land matched its own silence for featurelessness, and I let myself think it felt like a promise of peace. The promise was for Toby, not for me.

  I hadn’t prayed for decades, but if I had then it would have been for our destination to be what he needed. We’d exhausted all the ways that ordinary medicine had tried to help him. I still remember Lesley’s panic and mine when at just a few weeks old he’d suffered his first seizure. We’d found him lying face up in his cot, limbs limply splayed, eyes not quite closed but blank. As Lesley picked him up I couldn’t even see him breathing, and when at last she felt his tiny chest move she could only struggle not to hug him too hard. Neither of us had the least idea what to do next, which we were admitting in voices that sounded stiff with distress when Toby gave a cry and came back to us.

  Nocturnal seizures were a form of epilepsy, they told us at the hospital. While it was unusual for them to begin at such an early age, most children grew out of them within a few years, or they could be treated with various drugs. All of those were tried on Toby over the years, offering new hope that never lasted long. We grew to dread finding him in yet another seizure, flat on his back in the middle of the night, limbs outstretched as though they were reaching for familiarity, eyes slightly open but unaware of us. I couldn’t count the nights we lost sleep waiting for the baby monitor to bring the sound that meant he’d gone, a prolonged gasp as if he was giving up his breath. How much of his sleep might these episodes have stolen? The possibility that he’d been misdiagnosed until now and could be cured was my and Lesley’s most heartfelt wish.

  I must have been thinking some of this as I drove through the simplified monochrome landscape. I was waiting for Lesley to tell me where to turn off the wide deserted road when Toby called “Mummy, aren’t we there?”

  A line of trees had only just appeared to our left ahead. In a couple of minutes I saw they marked one side of an avenue that led to a large sandstone building several hundred yards from the road. “I think you’re right,” Lesley said.

  I wasn’t sure until we reached the gateway, where the left-hand granite gatepost bore a discreet silver plaque etched with the words SAFE TO SLEEP. As the high iron gates swung inwards I noticed a camera perched on the right-hand post, its lens peering through a crust of snow. The drive between the trees was a stretch of slushy mud, which hissed beneath the wheels as the gates crept shut behind us. At the end of the drive, tyres had drawn a blurred gibbous circle in front of the extensive two-storey house, which was lopped with extravagant chimneys. As I parked the Volvo alongside three cars and as many minibuses, a large woman in a dark suit opened the front door and stepped out beneath a pointed arch. “There’s Doctor Phoebe,” Toby cried.

  She strode to the car as Lesley opened Toby’s door. “Dr Sweet, this is Toby’s father Dominic,” Lesley said.

  The woman took my hand and then closed her other hand around it. Everything about her was considerable—not just her buxom figure and big face framed by reddish curls but the personality she conveyed without saying a word. She seemed so maternal she might have been embracing all three of us, emotionally at any rate. “Dominic,” she said, keeping hold of my hand as if she wanted to protect it from the chill that whitened her breath. “I’ve so looked forward to meeting you.”

  I felt a little overwhelmed. “At least I haven’t kept you waiting long. Till yesterday you didn’t know I existed.”

  “We want to get Toby’s treatment started, don’t we?” As I made to respond she said “And of course you want to learn about it for yourself before you say yes. Come with me and ask anything you like.”

  She let go with one hand so that Toby could take it, and then ushered us and Lesley up the steps to the stone porch. Beyond it a wide lobby was illuminated by a pair of windows full of sky above a massive oak staircase, which split in two at a half-landing and led up to a gallery over the entrance. Somewhere on the ground floor I heard a murmur that might have been several voices speaking in unison. “Will you see what we do here or talk to me first?” Phoebe Sweet said. “Ask me anything at all you want to know.”

  There was at least one question I needed to ask, and she let go of our hands as she led the way past the stairs to her office at the back of the house. Diplomas in psychology and medical certificates graced the walls on both sides of an ample desk, behind which French windows overlooked expansive grounds where the occasional bush was reshaped by snow. As Lesley and I sat opposite the doctor she said “What will you do while we’re talking, Toby?”

  He sent the view a hopeful look. “Can I make something in the snow?”

  “Our other children might be sad if we let you while they’re sleeping, do you think?”

  “Would you like to go in the playroom again?” Lesley said.

  “Can I read?”

  “Certainly you can,” the doctor said. “We’ve books in there for whatever age you are.”

  “I’m nearly five,” Toby said with all the pride his years conferred.

  He made for the next room as though he was perfectly at home, and Dr Sweet murmured “I meant whatever reading age.”

  “He’s years ahead,” Lesley said. “We’ve always read to him.”

  I still had to raise my question. “Dr Sweet, is this a private facility?”

  “Independent of the health service, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I was wondering about the cost of the treatment.”

  “You were referred to us by the hospital, weren’t you? In that case it’s nothing at all.”

  “I could have told you that, Dominic.”

  I was feeling doubly apologetic when the doctor said “Am I sensing reservations, Mr Sheldrake?”

  “I’m just surprised you can afford a place like this.”

  “It’s owned by the parents of one of our children.”

  I was moved to observe “You mean that’s how grateful they are.”

  “Rest assured we don’t expect that kind of gratitude. Knowing we’re doing what we set out to do is enough.”

  “But you’ve got to make a living like the rest of us,” Lesley said.

  “Some people make donations, but let me say again we don’t expect them. We’re provided for.”

  “So can I ask what the treatment is?” I said.

  “I’ll show you shortly. Let me tell you at the outset we don’t believe in drugs, not to treat nocturnal absence.”

  “I haven’t heard it called that before.”

  “I think you will if the condition becomes more widespread. Don’t ask me why it has developed so recently, unless it went unobserved before, but I can assure you it’s far more psychological than physiological.”

  “Lesley was saying you go in for meditation.”

  “There are elements of that, or similarities. I can assure you it’s a fully developed technique that produces the results you’re hoping for.”

  “You were telling me it’s had peer approval,” Lesley said.

  “It has,” the doctor said and stood up. “Shall we see how it’s progressing?”

  As we made for the lobby, Lesley told Toby “We’re just going to show daddy the sleeping room.”

  He joined us so eagerly that he didn’t even leave his book behind, a copy of Peter Pan. “I was reading about the boy who flies,” he said.

  “What kind of boy would you like to be?” Dr Sweet said.

  “One who sleeps all night.”

  I felt urged to promise that he would, but I still wanted to see how the treatment worked. We followed Dr Sweet past the stairs and along a hall, where I didn’t immediately understand why I was doing my best to mute my footsteps, as she appeared to be muting hers. The voices I’d heard earlier were quiet now, but there was more to the silence—I felt as though I was approaching a hush more profound than simple noiselessness. When Dr Sweet halted in front of a door I thought it looked heavy enough to break the silence, but she inched it open without a sound. />
  Beyond it was a room in which at least thirty children lay face up on mattresses, three ranks along the room with space for more. A tall man stood at the window at the far end, gazing out at the blanketed landscape. Dr Sweet gestured me forward without a word, and I tried to stay as quiet while I ventured over the threshold. The hush that closed around me felt like an absence of breath, and I found I couldn’t take one until I saw that the children were breathing. Their chests rose and fell so nearly in unison that I thought they must be conscious of it, and then I saw that despite lying in a posture that was entirely too familiar, arms and legs splayed as if they were reaching for companionship, every child had their eyes closed. I took the oldest children to be at least eight years old, while the youngest was a toddler on a mattress by the window. At that distance I was just able to see the tiny regular movements of his chest, and I felt my own breaths start to fall in with their rhythm. I might have grown as peaceful as all the children looked if I hadn’t been distracted by whispers in the corridor.

  I turned to see Toby grimacing with the effort to keep his voice down. As Dr Sweet eased the door shut I made for him. “What is it, Toby?” I murmured.

  “He was wanting to join the others,” Lesley said.

  “I wish you could have, Toby,” Dr Sweet said and ushered us out of the corridor. “Only everyone has to start together, do you understand? Otherwise you might wake someone up, and that wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

  “I don’t want to wake the baby,” Toby said almost too low to be heard.

  The idea kept him quiet all the way to the room full of toys and books. Once Lesley and I were in the office Dr Sweet said “What’s your verdict, Mr Sheldrake?”

  “Can you tell me why the children were lying like that?”

  “They weren’t having seizures, let me say at once. Part of the process is to train the body to associate that posture with sleep instead of seizures.”