The Collected Short Fiction

by Ramsey Campbell

  I had brought a flashlight with me to help me in my search of the nighted church, but a certain glow—a kind of iridescence—lay within its walls, as of moonlight reflected from the mullioned windows. I went down the central aisle, flashing my light into one row of pews after the other, but there was no evidence in the mounded dust that anyone had ever been there. Piles of yellowed hymnals squatted against a pillar like grotesque huddled shapes of crouching beings, long forsaken—here and there the pews were broken with age—and theair in that enclosed place was thick with a kind of charnel musk.

  I came at last toward the altar and saw that the first pew on the left before the altar was tilted abnormally in my direction. I had noted earlier that several of the pews were angled with disuse, but now I saw that the floor beneath the first pew was also angled upward, revealing an unlit abyss below. I pushed the pew back all the way—for the second pew had been set at a suitably greater distance—thus exposing the black depths below the rectangular aperture. The flickering yellow glow from my flashlight disclosed a flight of steps, twisting down between dripping walls.

  I hesitated at the edge of the abyss, flashing an uneasy glance around the darkened church. Then I began the descent, walking as quietly as possible. The only sound in the core-seeking passage was the dripping of water in the lightless area beyond the beam of my flashlight. Droplets of water gleamed at me from the walls as I spiraled downward, and crawling black things scuttled into crevices as though the light could destroy them. As my quest led me further into the earth, I noticed that the steps were no longer of stone, but of earth itself, out of which grew repulsively bloated, dappled fungi, and saw that the roof of the tunnel was disquietingly supported only by the flimsiest of arches.

  How long I slithered under those uncertain arches I could not tell, but at last one of them became a gray tunnel over strangely-colored steps, uneroded by time, the edges of which were still sharp, though the flight was discolored with mud from the passage of feet from above. My flashlight showed that the curve of the descending steps had now become less pronounced, as if its terminus was near, and as I saw this I grew conscious of a mounting wave of uncertainty and disquiet. I paused once more and listened.

  There was no sound from beneath, no sound from above. Pushing back the tension I felt, I hastened forward, slipped on a step, and rolled down the last few stairs to come up against a grotesque statue, life-size, leering blindly at me in the glow of my flashlight. It was but one of six in a row, opposite which was an identical, equally repulsive sextet, so wrought by the skill of some unknown sculptor as to seem terrifyingly real. I tore my gaze away, picked myself up, and flashed my light into the darkness before me.

  Would that a merciful oblivion could wipe away forever what I saw there!—the rows of gray stone, slabs reaching limitlessly away into darkness in claustrophobic aisles, on each of them shrouded corpses staring sightlessly at the ebon roof above. And nearby were archways marking the beginning of black winding staircases leadingdownward into inconceivable depths; the sight of them filled me with an inexplicable chill superimposed upon my horror at the charnel vision before me. I shuddered away from the thought of searching among the slabs for Young’s remains—if he were there, and I felt .intuitively that he lay somewhere among them. I tried to nerve myself to move forward, and was just timidly moving to enter the aisle at the entrance of which I stood, when a sudden sound paralyzed me.

  It was a whistling rising slowly out of the darkness before me, augmented presently by explosive sounds which seemed to increase in volume, as were the source of it approaching. As I stared affrightedly at the point whence the sound seemed to rise, there came a prolonged explosion and the sudden glowing of a pale, sourceless green light, beginning as a circular illumination, hardly larger than a hand. Even as I strained my eyes at it, it vanished. In a few seconds, however, it reappeared, three times its previous diameter—and for one dreadful moment I glimpsed through it a hellish, alien landscape, as if were I looking through a window opening upon another, utterly foreign dimension! It blinked out even as I fell back— then returned with even greater brilliance—and I found myself gazing against my will upon a scene being seared indelibly on my memory.

  It was a strange landscape dominated by a trembling star hanging in a sky across which drifted elliptical clouds. The star, which was the source of the green glowing, shed its light upon a landscape where great, black triangular rocks were scattered among vast metal buildings, globular in shape. Most of these seemed to be in ruins, for whole segmentary plates were torn from the lower walls., revealing twisted, peeling girders which had been partially melted by some unimaginable force. Ice glittered greenly in crevices of the girders, and great flakes of vermilion-tinted snow settled toward the ground or slanted through the cracks in the walls, drifting out of the depths of that black sky.

  For but a few moments the scene held—then abruptly it sprang to life as horrible white, gelatinous shapes flopped across the landscape toward the forefront of the scene. I counted thirteen of them, and watched them—cold with terror—as they came forward to the edge of the opening—andacross it, to flop hideously into the vault where I stood!

  I backed toward the steps, and as in a dream saw those frightful shapes move upon the statues nearby., and watched the outlines of those statues blur and begin to move. Then, swiftly, one of those dreadful beings rolled and flopped toward me. I felt something cold as ice touch my ankle. I screamed—and a merciful unconsciousness carried me into my own night…

  When I woke at last I found myself on the stones between two slabs some distance from the place on the steps where I had fallen—a horrible, bitter, furry taste in my mouth, my face hot with fever. How long I had lain unconscious I could not tell. My light lay where it had fallen, still glowing with enough illumination to permit a dim view of my surroundings. The green light was gone—the nightmarish opening had vanished. Had I but fainted at the nauseating odors, at the terrible suggestiveness of this charnel crypt? But the sight of a singularly frightening fungus in scattered patches on my clothing and on the floor—a fungus I had not seen before, dropped from what source I could not tell and about which I did not want to speculate—filled me with such awful dread that I started up, seized my light, and fled, plunging for the dark archway beyond the steps down which I had come into this eldritch pit.

  I ran feverishly upward, frequently colliding with the wall and tripping on the steps and on obstacles which seemed to materialize out of the shadows. Somehow I reached the church. I fled down the central aisle, pushed open the creaking door, and raced down the shadowed steps to the car. I tugged frantically at the door before I remembered that I had locked the car. Then I tore at my pockets—in vain! The key ring carrying all my keys was gone—lost in that hellish crypt I had so miraculously escaped. The car was useless to me—nothing would have induced me to return, to enter again the haunted church in High Street.

  I abandoned it. I ran out into the street, bound for Wood Street, and, beyond it, the next town—open country—any place but accursed Temphill. Down High Street, into Market Square, where the wan moonlight shared with one high lamp standard the only illumination, across the Square into Manor Street. In the distance lay the forests about Wood Street, beyond a curve, at the end of which Temphill would be left behind me. I raced down the nightmarish streets, heedless of the mists that began to rise and obscure the wooded country slopes that were my goal, the blurring of the landscape beyond the looming houses.

  I ran blindly, wildly—but the hills of the open country came no nearer—and suddenly, horribly, I recognized the unlit intersections and dilapidated gables of Cloth Street—which should have been far behind me, on the other side of the river—and in a moment I found myself again in High Street, and there before me were the worn steps of that repellent church, with the car still before them! I tottered, clung to a roadside tree for a moment, my mind in chaos. Then I turned and started out again, sobbing with terror and dread, racing with pounding he
art back to Market Square, back across the river, aware of a horrible vibration, a shocking, muted whistling sound I had come to know only too well, aware of fearful pursuit…

  I failed to see the approaching car and had time only to throw myself backward so that the full force of its striking me was avoided. Even so, I was flung to the pavement and into blackness.

  I woke in the hospital at Camside. A doctor returning to Camside through Temphill had been driving .the car that struck me. He had taken me, unconscious and with a contusion and a broken arm, taken me from that accursed city. He listened to my story, as much as I dared tell, and went to Temphill for my car. It could not be found. And he could find no one who had seen me or the car. Nor could he find books, papers, or diary at No. 11 South Street where Albert Young had lived. And of Clothier there was no trace—the owner of the adjacent house said he had been gone for a long time.

  Perhaps they were right in telling me I had suffered a progressive hallucination. Perhaps it was an illusion, too, that I heard the doctors whispering when I was coming out of anaesthesia—whispering of the frantic way in which I had burst into the path of the car— and worse, of the strange fungus that clung to my clothes, even to my face at my .lips, as if it grew there!

  Perhaps. But can they explain how now, months afterward, though the very thought of Temphill fills me with loathing and dread, I feel myself irresistibly drawn to it, as if that accursed, haunted town were the mecca toward which I must make my way? I have begged them to confine me—to prison me—anything—and they only smile and try to soothe me and assure me that everything will “work itself out”—the glib, self-reassuring words that do not deceive me, the words that have a hollow sound against the magnet of Temphill and the ghostly whistling echoes that invade not only my dreams but my waking hours!

  I will do what I must. Better death than that unspeakable horror…

  - Filed with the report of P.C. Villars on the disappearance of Richard Dodd, 9 Gay ton Terrace, W.7. Manuscript in Dodd’s script, found in his room after his disappearance.

  The Horror From The Bridge (1964)

  I

  Clotton, Gloucestershire, is not a name which can be found on any map, and of the inhabitants of the few leaning red-brick houses which remain of the uptown section of the once-prosperous town, there is not one person who can remember anything of that period of horror in the town in 1931. Those in Brichester who heard the rumours that filtered out of the terror-clutched town deliberately refrain from recounting what they learned, and they hope that the monstrous series of events will never become generally known. Nobody, in fact, knows quite why that twenty-foot-high concrete building was erected on the bank of the Ton, the tributary of the Severn which flows near what used to be the riverside section of Clotton. Nor can they tell why a band of men tore down all the buildings which lay anywhere near the river, leaving only that sparse remnant of uptown Clotton. And of the eldritch sign which was clumsily engraved in each wall of the concrete riverside building, Brichester folk do not like to think. If one asks the professors at the University, they will answer vaguely that it is an extremely ancient cabalistic symbol, but one is never told exactly what the symbol is supposed to invoke, or against what it may be intended as a protection. The whole affair, in fact, is a curious conglomeration of hints and avoidances; and perhaps it would never have been known what actually took place in Clotton in 1931, had not a typed document been found in the house of a deceased Brichester recluse. It seems that this recluse had recently been preparing the document for publication, and possibly it may be better that such a document was never published. For, in fact, the document is a description of the horror, by one of those who tore down the riverside buildings; in view of what he recounts, it is understandable that he became reclusive.

  The writer, Philip Chesterton, obviously intended his document to be as scholarly a document as possible. His reclusiveness, stemming, for reasons not to be conjectured, from 1931, allowed him a great deal of time to investigate the historical aspects of the affair through his large stock of volumes on the Roman occupation of Britain and following events. Other tomes, indeed, made it possible for him to include a good deal of historical and genealogical data about the people of Clotton, though this does not give more than a composite picture of the small population of the town, and does not add any information for those seeking to learn all factors affecting what erupted at the beginning of that cataclysmic period. Admittedly, however, certain legends and quasi-historical tales about some of the people of Clotton may be taken as hints of the eventual explanation of that problematic flood of 1931, but it is undeniably difficult to assess the true worth of various peculiar tales which Chesterton seems to have believed. The intrinsic value and veracity of several pivotal descriptions in the following transcription, which is a version, in some places severely cut, of the document found in the Brichester house, must therefore be considered carefully by the reader.

  In 1800, according to the manuscript, a strange visitor moved into an empty house on Riverside Alley, a little-tenanted street within sight of a bridge over the Ton. The townsfolk could learn little about him, save that his name was James Phipps, and that he had come from Camside because his unorthodox scientific researches were distasteful to the inhabitants. Of course this was when the Reverend Jenner's witch-hunts were at their height, so that these 'researches' may have been taken for witchcraft. People living near the riverside street noticed the anomalous instruments and cases which were carried into the house by two furtive-looking rustics. Phipps seemed to direct operations with singular care, and came near to fury when one of the men almost slipped while carrying something which appeared to be a statue wrapped in thick canvas. The gaunt, pallid-faced man, with his jet-black hair and long bony hands, must have affected the watchers with strange feelings.

  After some days had elapsed since his arrival, Phipps began to haunt taverns near the river. It was noticed that he never drank anything, and was once overheard to remark that he was averse to alcohol. It seemed, in fact, that he came there solely to discuss affairs with the less reputable inhabitants of Clotton—in particular, to learn of the prevalent legends of the countryside. In time, of course, he heard of the legend that a demon had once lurked nearby, and showed great interest in the story. The inevitable elaborations reached his ears—the belief of one or two people that a whole race of abominations was entombed somewhere in the vicinity, and the idea that a monstrous underground city could be discovered if one found the entrance which was reputed to lie submerged under the turbulent river waters. Phipps showed unaccountable interest in the further idea that the alien monster or race had been sealed up in some manner and could be released if the prisoning talisman were removed. He apparently held much stock by these curious legends, for he rewarded his informants very highly. To one or two he even suggested that they should send their sons to him for education in the sciences, but those approached were not interested in offers of this sort.

  It was in the spring of 1805 that Phipps left his home one night. At least, he must have moved in darkness, for nobody knew of his temporary removal until the silence and lightlessness of the building on Riverside Alley made them aware of it. The strange tenant, it seemed, did not deem it necessary to set any guard upon his house, beyond locking the doors and shuttering the windows; and, indeed, nobody was sufficiently curious to investigate, for the barred house near the river remained silent and untouched.

  Some months later, in early November, Phipps returned to take up tenancy again. This time, however, he was not alone, for during his absence he had taken a wife—a woman with a similar corpse-like pallor, who was heard to speak little and walked with a peculiarly stiff gait. What information could be gathered about her was sparse, only revealing that her husband had met her in Temphill, a nearby town in the Cotswolds, where he had journeyed to procure some extremely rare chemicals. They had met at some unnamed gathering, and Phipps showed strange caution in speaking of this mysterious gathering.r />
  Nothing more need be noted about the curious couple in the house bordering the river for some time after this. In late 1806 a son was born in that darkly brooding house, and some consider that this was the actual beginning of a series of events to reach so devastating a climax in 1931. The child, who was named Lionel by his science-seeking father, was born on a day in November, of lashing rain and skies ripped by lightning. The people living near Riverside Alley used to say that a throaty and muffled rumbling had seemed to come from below the ground rather than from the throbbing sky; a few would even insist querulously that the lightning, often striking near the river, had once struck, in the form of a scintillating pillar of energy, directly through the roof of the Phipps homestead, even though no marks of such a phenomenon were afterwards found. The son was, at any rate, born of strange parents, and no such superstitious accounting for his abnormal inclinations in later life need be believed.

  It was in 1822, when Lionel Phipps would have been seventeen or eighteen years of age, that his rumoured instruction by his father commenced. Definitely passers-by would see faint gleams of light through the shutters which nearly always now were closed over the windows, and frequently muttered discussions or arguments between father and son were overheard. Once or twice these low-voiced conclaves took on a faintly ritualistic flavour, and those hearing the words would experience a vague sense of unease. A few passersby would become sufficiently interested to peer through a crack in the shutter, upon which they might see the younger Phipps poring over some large and ancient tome, or assisting at some unknown and vaguely sinister-looking apparatus. It seemed obvious that the boy was passing through a period of initiation or instruction in some branch of knowledge, of a definitely outre kind, if one were to judge from reports.