The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  He trod hard on the accelerator until he reached the suburbs. Where Crosby became Waterloo the houses crowded together, thinner and shabbier. As he turned along the side road, a buoy tolled beyond the dunes that faced the parade of nursing homes. Out past the marina, the coastguard radar cupped the movements of the night. He parked by Queenie’s house, under the last streetlamp.

  The street was quiet except for water splashing from a gutter and the slow muffled beat of the sea. He lifted the gate clear of the scraped path and let himself into the house, and made for the living-room, whose window was lit. But the only sign of life in the high gloomy room with its huge cold fireplace was a Lisa Alther novel, face down on the leather settee.

  That would be Hermione’s book, the kind she gasped and shook her head over. At least she’d come over from Wales to keep Alison company. He made for the kitchen by the stairs. The women weren’t in the cavernous stone-flagged room with its black iron range. He left the steaks and chops in Alison’s refrigerator and went back along the hall, pushing open doors on either side of him, but all the rooms were dark—the dining-room whose dusty chandelier chimed sluggishly, the sewing-room full of draped machines, the sitting-room with its screens and piano and framed brown photographs. He hoped the women were asleep, getting the rest they deserved. He climbed the wry stairs into the gaping hush the storm seemed to have left in the house.

  Rowan was murmuring disconnectedly in her sleep. He lingered outside her room, enjoying the sound of her being herself, and then edged the door open. Hermione was sitting on the bed, one arm stretched along the headboard, her head drooping sleepily toward the child. The door creaked, and Hermione lurched up from the bed, brandishing the stick she had been clutching. “Hermione, it’s me,” he hissed at her. “Derek.”

  Her features drew even closer together, and then she managed to smile. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. I came in because Rowan was calling, and I must have dozed off.”

  “Where’s Ali?”

  “Upstairs. She went up—” She glanced at her tiny gold wristwatch, and her features huddled together again. “More than an hour ago.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, girl. I’ll go and see what’s keeping her, and how about making yourself a fresh pot of tea?”

  “Making one for you, you mean.”

  “If Ali could see through me like you can I’d still be single,” Derek teased her. He might have thought he’d cheered her up except for the glance of panic she gave him as he climbed the stairs. He’d rewired the lower floors without telling Queenie, so that the house would be less of a fire risk, but the top floor was darker than ever. A single bulb made the askew walls into a frame for the dark where her room was. He peered ahead, and then he realised that he couldn’t see a light beneath her door.

  He went swiftly but carefully along the corridor. The door was wedged, he saw. He knocked softly on a cracked upper panel, not least to hear if Queenie was asleep. It was Alison who responded. “Is someone there? Derek, is that you?”

  Her voice was low and strained, just beyond the door. “It’s me all right,” he called. “Stand out of the way while I budge this.”

  As soon as he heard her move aside he gripped both uprights of the door frame, his fingertips sinking into the wood, and kicked at the lock. The door staggered inward, the doorknob split the plaster of the inner wall, and Alison dodged out at once and made for the light in the corridor, muttering “Close the door.”

  He could see nothing in the room but darkness, which seemed to billow toward him as a wind shook the window. “What about—”

  Alison turned as she reached the light. “Gone. I checked her pulse.”

  He could tell she was smothering her feelings. He closed the door and hurried to her, put his arm round her shoulders, raised her small dainty long-cheeked face by its chin, which had a hint of her aunt’s resolve without the disproportion. Her quick smile made him want to hold her tight and stroke her straight black hair that stopped just short of her shoulders, to remind her how much he loved her and admired her. Sensing that she didn’t want to linger, he led her down to the next floor, and then the question proved too much for him. “How long was the light out, Ali?”

  “A few minutes. Maybe half an hour or so. I couldn’t get the door open, and I didn’t like to shout in case it brought Rowan up there.”

  “My God, why wasn’t I here?” He didn’t want to imagine how it must have felt to her, he wanted her to tell him so that he could help. He was guiding her towards their room, where he hoped she could lie down while he told Hermione not to bother them for a while, when Hermione came hurrying upstairs. “Tea’s brewing,” she said, and her voice and her face wavered. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your aunt’s passed on,” Derek said.

  She glanced upward more nervously than ever. “I want to see.”

  “The light in there’s bust.”

  “You can change the bulb, can’t you?”

  She sounded close to hysteria, and he couldn’t think how to keep her away from Alison. “I’ll be cutting off the power to the top floor. It’s a wonder it kept going as long as it did.”

  “It would while she was alive. You’ll let me have your flashlight, won’t you? I’ve got to see.”

  “We’ll both go up while he cuts off the power,” Alison said.

  She sounded reassuring, though he was sure she needed that herself. “Just let me pull the fuses,” he said, “and then I’ll take Hermione up if she really can’t wait.”

  But the fuses were stuck fast in the dusty board under the stairs. He was still trying to dislodge them when the women brought the flashlight from his car. Before he could delay the women, they were overhead. He managed to jiggle one fuse loose, and then the other, and heard a muffled scream at the top of the house. He threw the cracked porcelain fuses into the kitchen bin as he ran to the stairs. He liked the silence up there even less than he’d liked the scream.

  Nearly all the light on the top floor was in Queenie’s room. He was able to distinguish the women, standing just outside the door and outlined by the glow that the flashlight was casting within. The light swung toward him as he trod on a loose board, and then it fluttered back into the room.

  An old woman was lying face up on the bare mattress. Death had seized her by her chin and dragged her mouth wide open, had pinched her cheeks inward as far as they could go. He knew she was Queenie, if only by the way the long pink nightdress couldn’t reach to cover her scrawny veinous shins, but she looked older than he would have imagined anyone could look. No wonder the women seemed almost hypnotised by the sight of her, until Alison murmured “Go and look if you want to, Hermione.”

  Hermione stepped backward, hunching up her shoulders and shaking her head violently. “Well then,” Alison said “hold the flashlight while I cover her up.”

  Hermione almost dropped the flashlight. The lit wall nodded toward them, opening its mouth that had swallowed Queenie. Derek made to grab the flashlight until he saw that Alison was trying to make sure her sister’s mind was occupied. The light did its best to fasten on the bed while Alison closed the eyes that were gazing blindly at opposite walls. She stooped to gather up the bedclothes, and the light shuddered. “Watch out for her!” Hermione screamed.

  Derek thought she was talking to him. He ran into the bedroom and grabbed one edge of the bedclothes to help Alison heave them over the corpse. She insisted on smoothing them and tucking them under the mattress and under Queenie’s chin before she would come out of the room, though the flashlight was trembling so violently that it made him feel the floor shake underfoot. “Now what were you saying, Hermione?” she said gently as she stepped over the threshold.

  “Didn’t you see her move? She’s only pretending. It’s another of her horrible games.”

  “It must have been the light, love. She’s dead now, at peace.”

  “Don’t you know her better than that?” Hermione crouched over the flashlight as if to protect it. “Look at
her,” she whispered. “She’s listening to us, can’t you see? God help us, she’s smiling…”

  She gripped the flashlight with both hands and poked the beam at the collapsed face. Now that Alison had closed the mouth and tucked the quilt under the chin, the corpse did appear to be smiling, so faintly it looked secretive. “She’s up to something,” Hermione cried, and then swung wildly towards the stairs, almost smashing the flashlight against the door frame. There was movement at the far end of the corridor.

  The walls tottered, the floor reared up. This time Derek caught hold of the flashlight and steadied the beam, and found Rowan on the landing, yawning and digging her knuckles into her eyes. “Mummy, why are you all up here? Why was Hermione shouting?”

  Derek closed Alison’s hand around the flashlight and murmured “Was Jo and Eddie’s light on when you went to the car?”

  “I think so, but—” But he couldn’t linger while Rowan might see what lay in Queenie’s room or be infected by Hermione’s panic. He hurried Rowan downstairs to her room and saw from her window that someone was still up at Jo’s and Eddie’s, three houses distant on the opposite side of the street. “Just put on your coat and shoes, and we’ll see if you can sleep with your mates tonight,” he said.

  “What’s wrong, daddy?”

  He was touched by her grave look, her willingness to help and be grown up. “The old lady died tonight, and that’s upset Hermione.”

  Rowan clutched her collar to her throat as they stepped out of the porch. The wind from the sea was so cold it seemed to make the stars wince. Jo and Eddie were watching a video, but switched it off when they saw Rowan. “You can sleep in our Mary’s bed, give her a surprise when she wakes up in the morning,” Jo said, and bustled Rowan upstairs without even asking Derek what the trouble was.

  He told Eddie about the death, and declined the offer of a Scotch. “I’d better get back and see how they are,” he said, preparing to help calm Hermione so that Alison could let go of her feelings. But when he let himself into the house that felt as if the night were seeping down through the roof, he found the women in the living-room, sipping quietly from large glasses, a bottle of gin and one of tonic on the floor between them. He might have thought they were over the worst if it hadn’t been for the way Hermione had stared at the door to see who he was. He might almost have thought she was more terrified of Queenie now than she had been when the old woman was alive.

  Chapter Three

  Soon after dawn on the day of the funeral, the sun above Wales drove the mist into the mountains. Rowan stood in Hermione’s small back garden that sloped toward the valley and the reservoirs, and gazed across the sea and through the gap in the hills of the Wirral peninsula toward Waterloo. Eventually Derek took her into the village to buy a child’s telescope. Alison knew he was leaving the family alone to talk.

  She wished he didn’t feel he needed to. It wasn’t just that he was slow to form relationships, though they’d had to encounter each other three times outside the hostel before he’d asked her out. Perhaps he still found family life dauntingly unfamiliar, or perhaps, she hoped, he simply found the cottage overcrowded now that the family was gathering. Hermione was in the kitchen with her mother Edith, making ham sandwiches for after the funeral. Alison stayed in the living-room, which was less than half the size of any of the bedrooms in Queenie’s house. Houseplants bloomed on the sill of the mullioned window, on the rough stone mantelpiece, on shelves in alcoves of the shaggily plastered white walls. Her father Keith was sitting on the window seat, gazing mildly at the sky and fingering his chin, the family chin that Queenie’s had caricatured. When he patted the cushion beside him she sat there and laid her head against his shoulder. They stayed like that, silently sharing memories that felt drowsy as the longest summer afternoon of childhood, until he reached for his pipe and she sat up. “You’ll be pleased about the will,” he said. “Sister Queenie had some good in her after all.”

  “Don’t you think she always had? She wasn’t vicious really, just lonely.”

  “She was one because of the other, but don’t ask me which came first,” he said with a droll blank look. “I only hope her house makes life easier for you and yours.”

  “I’m sure it should. Only I keep feeling it was so convenient, her dying when she did, almost as if I—helped her go.”

  He straightened up and tried to make his compact features appear stern. “What started you thinking that nonsense? Come on, tell papa.”

  “I feel as if I weakened her by making her so dependent on me all at once. She kept herself fit all those years and yet I’m hardly in her house before she’s dead.”

  “If you’ve been bothering yourself with that I wish you’d told me sooner. She never would have depended on anyone unless she absolutely had to. Take my word for it, she must have been counting her days when she had you move in.”

  Hermione and their mother came through from the kitchen, Hermione guiltily nibbling a ham sandwich. “Budge over and let Hermione sit down,” Edith said to Keith with a hint of rebuke, as if he ought to show her more concern, and Alison couldn’t help thinking resentfully as she stood up that she was the one who’d been trapped in the dark.

  She had felt trapped for hours. If she had tried to open the door she would only have pulled the knob loose, and so she had stayed as still as she could, waiting to hear someone, anyone, coming upstairs. She’d tried not to look behind her, especially whenever the creaking of the window sounded like movement on the mattress where the dead woman lay, but now and then she’d felt Queenie rising stealthily from the bed, creeping barefoot behind her and lowering her face with its dead eyes staring in opposite directions, so that it would be level with Alison’s when she had to turn and look. Whenever Alison swung round, Queenie was face up on the bed, and only the dim glow through the rain on the window had made her appear to stiffen her limbs in readiness to rear up from the mattress. Alison had felt trapped in a nightmare version of the schoolyard game in which you had to turn quickly enough to catch whoever was behind you moving.

  Perhaps something like that had happened to Hermione as a child; her nerves hadn’t been the same since the day she had run sobbing out of their aunt’s room. All the more reason not to resent the way their mother fussed over Hermione, Alison told herself. “Derek’s taken Rowan shopping,” she said. “They shouldn’t be long.”

  Edith lowered her head and gazed at her as if over invisible spectacles, her broad ruddy oval face sinking into its chins. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing our little girl. We were hoping you’d come to stay more often now that we don’t do much driving.”

  They lived in Cardiff, a day’s drive away on roads that were never as straight or as clear as they looked on the map. “We will once I’m roadworthy again,” Alison said. “My old car gave up the ghost the week we moved to Queenie’s.”

  “We didn’t see that much of you when you were driving. Hermione seems to manage, even if she has to close her shop and take the train to come and see us.”

  Just because they were fifteen years younger than Queenie didn’t mean they had fifteen more years of Rowan, Alison reminded herself as Hermione said “Ali’s children need her more than children need my shop.”

  “I certainly hope they appreciate you as much as we do,” Edith cried. “Just remember you’re welcome any time you feel you’d rather not be on your own.”

  “You’ve no need to worry about me,” Hermione said, so shrilly that she contradicted herself.

  “Well, you know best,” her mother said in a tone that managed to combine hope and umbrage, then craned to look out of the window. “Here come Derek and our little girl, and someone else.”

  “My brother, I expect,” Keith said.

  “No, it’s not Richard. Good God, I believe it’s his son.”

  “It could be Lance, they’ve let him out of hospital,” Keith admitted. “I suppose that could be him under the beard.”

  It was indeed Lance, whom Alison hadn�
�t seen for years. She and Hermione had always been wary of him. He’d been twenty, and a civil servant, when the sisters were five and eight, but they had never gone with him along the beach at Waterloo to see his secret, even though that would have taken them out of sight of Queenie’s house. He’d never harmed anyone so far as she knew, but whatever he’d imagined doing must have consumed him with guilt, for when his father had found his cache of magazines he’d not only denied they were his but begun to deny he was Lance. Now Hermione let him in and said brightly “Hello, Lance. We weren’t expecting you, but you’re welcome.”

  It occurred to Alison that he was a childhood fear Hermione could deal with. He had grown entirely bald, his cranium as red as his face, which was hidden from the cheekbones downward by a thick gingery beard. His suit was civil-service grey but shabby as social security now. “So isn’t your father coming?” Edith demanded. “We understood he was.”

  “He said he would.” Lance paused, his pale lips parting within his beard as if he found it hard to breathe. “And then he said he’d left home because of Auntie Queenie, and he wouldn’t have her thinking he’d forgiven her just because she was dead.”

  “We both left home as soon as we were old enough to get away from her living our lives for us,” Keith said. “My only regret was that our parents couldn’t make their escape too.”

  “So Richard sent you instead, did he?” Edith accused Lance.

  “I wanted to come,” Lance said, more sluggishly than before. His slowness was the price of treatment, Alison realised. “I thought someone should, and I wanted to see the family. I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

  “We’re glad you did,” Hermione assured him.