Born To The Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  This earned me a smile less studied than the laugh. “You know they did, Dominic,” she said and returned the student magazine to the drawer of my desk.

  It had brought us together when we were students. I’d seen her reading it in the campus bar and laughing so hard that I couldn’t help hoping my contribution was responsible. When I told her I’d written the verses—Little Memoranda for Churchgoers—she’d had to catch her breath and wipe her eyes before she could inform me how reprehensible my doggerel was and how eager it made her to read more of my irreverence. I would never write any more, but just then I no longer minded having been summoned to the dean’s office for a stern lecture about offending the sensibilities of the faithful. When I told Lesley about the interview she had to overcome her mirth again to let me know she thought the couplets offered perfectly sound advice that anybody visiting a church would do well to heed:

  If in a church you cough or sneeze.

  Say “Thank you, God, for this disease.”

  If in a church you need to pee,

  Just contemplate eternity.

  And if your bladder aches with piss.

  Say “Jesus suffered worse than this.”

  If while at church you bulge with dung,

  Pray “Holy Ghost, provide a bung.”

  In church a trait you’ll need to ditch

  Is scratching any kind of itch.

  If in a church you chance to fart,

  You pierce your saviour through the heart.

  Even the highest form of mass

  Can’t sanctify release of gas.

  Communion needs you to squelch

  The slightest tendency to belch.

  Before the altar, eructation

  Will simply hinder your salvation…

  I suppose I was celebrating how my time at university had liberated me from the last of my religious indoctrination. All the same, although my parents often asked me when I was going to write something for publication, I never showed that to them. I hadn’t even expected it to see print—I’d only shown it to one of the editors to learn if it amused anyone other than me. If it hadn’t appeared I might never have met Lesley, or would a different future have achieved this somehow? I doubt that we were so important to any scheme of things. I still have the magazine and the memories it embodies, but now I recall Lesley frowning over my transcription of Christian Noble’s journal once we were sure that Toby was asleep. “You did read this, didn’t you?” I’d had to prompt him.

  “You promised you wouldn’t be angry.”

  “Toby, I’m not. Just don’t go in my desk without asking, all right? There might be things in there you really shouldn’t read until you’re older.”

  “I won’t do what I did again, daddy.”

  “That’s a good boy,” I’d said, rousing a memory I sent back into the dark. I’d kept the exercise book shut while showing it to him. I might almost have been trying to trap the ideas it contained to ensure no more of them reached him. Now Lesley was leafing through it as she sat at her desk opposite mine in our workroom. “I think I’ve had enough of this,” she said, having turned just a few pages. “I can’t see how you knew Toby had been looking at it.”

  “You will.” I hugged her shoulders while I found the first pages. “There,” I said.

  Once I glimpsed the face behind the sky, while the noonday sun blinded everyone about me to its galactic vastness… Lesley’s shoulders moved as though she was inclined to shrug. “I suppose that’s something like his dream.”

  “The other one he told us about is closer.” I had to search through the book to find the passage, by which time I felt as if any number of phrases and occult references I’d glimpsed were massing inside my skull. “Don’t you think?” I said.

  Perhaps our future bides its time in that darkness where no light may exist; where worms composed of darkness span the vast stars they consume, battening on the stellar substance to impel their awful transformation… “I see what you mean,” Lesley said, “and I wish he hadn’t read it. I almost wish he weren’t so literate so young. I wonder how much more of it he may have read.”

  “We could always ask him.”

  “I’d rather he put it right out of his head. We certainly don’t need to remind him.” She closed her fingers around mine in order to shut the book. “Make sure it’s hidden well away,” she said.

  As I replaced it in my desk and covered it with other items I remembered hiding the original in the classroom. Lesley’s gaze told me that she wished I could lock the drawer. “When did you write that?” she said.

  For a moment I was silenced by the prospect of having to explain so much. “I was thirteen, but—”

  “How did you think all that up? Who were you trying to sound like?”

  “It wasn’t like that. It’s something I copied down,” I said and glanced towards Toby’s room overhead. “Let’s talk where we’re sure he can’t hear us.”

  In the kitchen I poured us each a large glass of Rioja and took a good deal more than a sip from mine. “You were saying you copied it,” Lesley said as if she couldn’t quite believe I had.

  “Yes, from someone’s journal. His name was Christian Noble. He taught at the school Jim and I went to, Holy Ghost Grammar.”

  “You copied a teacher’s journal? How on earth—”

  “Let me just tell you it was a Catholic school, but he became some kind of spiritualist and then took it a lot further. Some of that got him fired from our school.”

  “You sound as if you were in favour. I didn’t think we went in for religious intolerance.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t tolerate anyone who exploited vulnerable people and believe me, Christian Noble did. He set up his own church eventually, but someone must have seen through it, because they destroyed the entire place.”

  Lesley looked more concerned than I found appropriate. “Didn’t you think that was going too far?”

  “Someone with a column in the paper didn’t think it was. I’ve still got the clipping in my desk.”

  “No need to show me. I thought that kind of thing was why we teach our students to scrutinise media. Uncritical consumption, you used to say that was a good name for a disease.”

  “I still say so, but you didn’t much like what you read of Noble’s journal, did you? You may have noticed he kept addressing it to Tina. She was his daughter, and back then she was just three years old.”

  “That hardly means she was likely to have read it, though.”

  “Maybe not, but I think she may have, or else he brought her up with those beliefs. I’m certain she knew about them from the way she used to talk.”

  “How do you know about his family, Dominic?”

  “Because even though he’d been fired from our school I knew he’d still be up to his tricks. It wasn’t only me who thought so. Jim and Bobby helped me keep an eye on him.”

  “And do they both still think the same?”

  “Bobby wishes we’d done more at the time. And they’d both like to know what’s become of Noble and his daughter.”

  “Your friend wishes you’d done more than destroy a church.”

  For a moment I felt found out and accused. “No,” I said forcefully enough that Lesley blinked her eyes wider, “she’d have liked us to do more about the little girl.”

  “You couldn’t have done much as children, could you?”

  “That’s why we told our parents, but they didn’t want to interfere. I’d say that was the wrong sort of tolerance.”

  Lesley parted her lips sharply enough to mean it as a retort, but said “I still don’t understand how you acquired the teacher’s journal.”

  “His father hid it at the school. I copied it all down and then I handed it in, but they behaved as if I was in the wrong instead of Christian Noble and gave it back to him.”

  “His father.” In case this wasn’t enough of a question Lesley said “Why would his father do that?”

  “I’m sure it was to protect his g
randdaughter. He brought the book to show the head but then he panicked in case he was caught doing it. He still did his best to persuade the head to deal with his son, though, especially that church of his.”

  “You’re saying he did that in public even though he hid the book.”

  “No, they talked in the head’s office.” Now I couldn’t very well not say “I listened in the corridor.”

  “You do seem to have been obsessed with your teacher, Dominic.”

  “You might have been if you’d seen how his father acted. He got himself run over while he was trying to find someone who’d stop his son.”

  “How do you know he was doing that?”

  “Because he was chasing me and Jim and Bobby to find out where we lived so he could talk to our parents, and we saw him fall under a tram.”

  “Oh, Dominic,” Lesley said, reaching across the table to clasp my hand. “How did that affect you all at that age?”

  “I dreamt I saw him come back.” The memory drove me to add “In bits.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She squeezed my hand before withdrawing hers as if the memory might be contagious. “You don’t still think about it, do you?” she murmured.

  “Not for a long time. No reason now.”

  “That’s right, so don’t.” While I could tell she would have liked this to be her final comment on the subject, Lesley said “There’s one thing I think needs explaining. Why would your teacher use that kind of language in his journal? Surely it can’t have been how he spoke.”

  “Nothing like. I think it was meant to sound like an ancestor.”

  “Why would he want that?”

  “He was into calling up the dead. I told you he went beyond spiritualism. I think that was part of it, the voice of the book.”

  “You’re saying that’s what he believed. You aren’t saying you do.” When I shook my head, which went some way towards expelling any secret thoughts I had, Lesley said “So long as we’ve stopped Toby believing in that nonsense.”

  “I think I did, don’t you? It’s not as if he believes in Peter Pan or anything like that. I’m sure I convinced him the journal is the same kind of thing made up for adults.” At that moment Christian Noble seemed as remote as the past, with any threat of his influence shut safely in my desk. “And he’s promised not to scare his schoolmates any more,” I said, but just for a moment I wondered if I was too anxious to reassure myself.

  6 - A Visit And A Game

  That night I saw a man in rags fleeing through an urban wasteland. The miles of derelict houses looked not simply ruined but drained of colour and substance, as though the world had grown thin. Despite the devastation, the city was surrounded by trees that rose from the horizon, towering so high that their tops were lost in a pallid fleshy overcast too thick to be composed of clouds. Then the lanky crooked trunks stirred, revealing themselves to be quite unlike trees as a dozen of them raised their tips around the dead city to range across the roofs in search of their prey. The fugitive dodged into an empty church, where the vacant windows might have been arching their eyebrows to mock his desperation. Soon the limbs of the presence that had replaced the sky closed around the church and grew thinner with eagerness as they groped through the windows for their quarry. As he dashed shrieking out of the church, several filaments fastened on his skull and elevated him like an offering above the church until he withered, relinquishing all colour while his cries grew inhumanly shrill. The husk that the spidery clutch let fall was unable to die, and staggered twitching and emitting a pinched giggle through the lifeless streets as the fattened filaments withdrew to the horizon and the pallid mass that loured over the world quivered with some momentary form of repletion. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a victim perform such an involuntary mindless dance, and I had the dismaying idea that the spectacle was just a euphemism. In that case I was desperate not to experience the reality it veiled, and my plea came out as heartfelt as any prayer. It had less success at finding consonants, but I managed to utter enough of a noise to waken Lesley. “Don’t wake Toby,” she whispered in my ear. “What’s wrong?”

  “Juster dree.” This was close to the thought I was struggling to have, but I needed the right words to convince myself. “Just a dream,” I said with all the force I could summon up.

  “Not so loud, Dominic. What were you dreaming, for heaven’s sake?” If I’d been more alert I might not have said “Something like Toby did.”

  “I hope you aren’t starting as well. One’s enough for us to deal with.”

  “I’m fine now I know where I am.” Her dim face on the pillow next to mine looked less than wholly reassured by this, and so I kissed her forehead. “Don’t even think of worrying about me,” I said. “Let’s catch up on our sleep.”

  I watched until her eyes closed, and once I was sure they were staying that way I shut mine. I managed not to open them while I did my utmost to drive the vision of the unnaturally inhabited sky and its prey back into the dark. I was able to tell myself it had been just a dream brought on by encountering Noble’s journal once again, and couldn’t the similar vision I’d had as a teenager have been a dream too, along with the malformed face I’d glimpsed on my pillow and the monstrous body it possessed? That memory left me too uneasy not to reassure myself that the face beside mine was Lesley’s. The sight helped me regain sleep, and so did the thought that the derelict streets had been a version of the ones that used to surround Christian Noble’s church.

  In the morning I woke with a sense of a task left undone. It felt like a remnant of my dream, and nagged at my mind throughout the discussion I had with the students about Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, a subject Katy raised. The vision of God as a spider seemed too reminiscent of my dream, even if it was just schizophrenic Harriet Andersson’s delusion, eventually repudiated by her father’s faith in God as love incarnate. Brendan and Alisha were determined not to see this coda as ambiguous. I did, but I let Katy argue the point, because I’d realised what the dream had left me anxious to learn. I wanted to know what occupied the site where the Trinity Church of the Spirit had been.

  Ten minutes’ drive from the university brought me to Edge Lane, the main road leading to the motorway out of Liverpool. In my teens Edge Lane and Kensington had bordered two sides of the blitzed district around the church. When I turned the car off Edge Lane I couldn’t see a single ruined house, and might almost have imagined that my memories were false. Every few hundred yards the roads with shops embedded between houses were crossed by even narrower streets, terraces of dwellings that looked compressed by their neighbours, every one boasting a railed yard no wider than a coffin in front of a single-storey bay under a pair of windows each less than half its breadth. I could easily have fancied that the houses were huddling together to conceal a secret they mightn’t even acknowledge, an impression that intensified as I saw the sign for Joseph Street ahead.

  It was high on the side of a corner house that might have been designed to stay inconspicuous—a white pebble-dashed two-storey block with a window beside the sign. The front was featureless apart from a pair of meagre windows and a door that a plastic number rendered only slightly less anonymous. All three windows were obscured by cheap white plastic blinds shut tight, and I was reminded of the city drained of colour in my dream.

  Terraces of cloned houses led both ways from the corner. No house had even a token front yard. The massed anonymity felt like a denial of the site the houses occupied, where the Trinity Church of the Spirit once stood. A dead cat lay beside the kerb in front of the corner house—run over, no doubt, but it put me in mind of a sacrifice. I halted opposite, because its condition looked worse than an accident could quite account for. I was climbing reluctantly out of the car when the front door of the corner house swung inwards and a woman squinted at me, blinking as if daylight were as unfamiliar as I was. “Are you from the council?” she called across the road.

  She was a dumpy unkempt woman with a face dulled by pugnaciousne
ss and framed by greyish curls that appeared to be unravelling. When she folded her arms hard to underline her purposeful expression it looked like a bid to do away with her already flattened breasts. I was about to claim to be a disinterested passer-by until I saw she might have given me a way to obtain information. “Why, madam?” I said.

  “Are you here about the vermin?”

  The word seemed too imprecise to let me risk saying more than “Vermin.”

  “That’s what my man always called them.” Some aspect of this made her angrier. “He’s gone but they’ve not,” she said.

  By now I was on the pavement, and glimpsed moisture in her eyes before she rescinded it with a fierce blink. “I’m sorry, have you lost your husband?”

  “Last year, and I’m blaming them. He wore his heart out trying to find them, and we got no help from the council.” Even more defiantly she said “We were never wed, and I don’t care who knows it now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, only to realise that it came at least two of her remarks too late. I’d run out of useful ambiguities, and had to ask “By vermin, do you mean criminals?”

  “I’m talking about the rats we’ve got under the house.”

  I found I’d wanted to hear nothing like that. “You’ve seen them,” I hoped aloud.

  “My man did, I’m sure of it. I think he was trying to tell me, but he’d had a stroke. Couldn’t talk till he died or even write. Maybe he will.” Before I could enquire into this, not that I was anxious to, she said “I’m still hearing them.”

  I was even less eager to learn “What do you hear?”

  “Them crawling round down there and scuttling about and God knows what else you’d call it. I don’t know how they’ve got the space to get up to all that. It isn’t like there’s a cellar,” the said, and then her face grew duller with suspicion. “If you’re from the council, where’s your badge? You’re asking a lot and not telling me a thing.”

  “I didn’t say I was. With the council, I mean.” I needed to discover more, and desperation suggested a ruse. “My relatives live up the road,” I said. “You aren’t alone with your problem.”