The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  “You don’t think it’s cheeky of me to pay my respects, then? I was always a bit scared of Auntie Queenie. I used to feel she knew whatever I was thinking.”

  Hermione turned quickly to the window. “Is that the cars?” she pleaded.

  The limousines weren’t due for half an hour. Derek kept Rowan outside, away from Lance, where she gazed across the bay and pouted because the telescopes had been too expensive. Now and then Derek glanced through the window at Alison, winked at her or made a face like swallowing a slice of lemon by mistake or pretended to jump back from the sight of the family gathering, and she stuck her tongue out at him when nobody was looking: she’d never said that family life had no drawbacks. The family made conversation as best they could, avoiding the subject of Queenie for Hermione’s sake and slowing down whenever Lance had anything to say. The limousines came as a relief.

  Derek, Rowan and the sisters rode in the first grey car, Lance and the others followed. Oldsters by the factories on the coast road stood respectfully until the limousines had passed. A train on the shoreside railway raced the limousines through Glan-y-don, another caught them up at Ffynnongroew, and then the cars turned away from Talacre and its caravans clustering near the disused lighthouse, uphill through Gronant to the churchyard.

  Queenie and her parents had rented a summer cottage in Gronant. When her mother had died there, Queenie’s father had had her buried near the place they most loved. He’d moved into the room at the top of the Waterloo house so that he could see where he would eventually rejoin his wife. Bright as the sun was, he would have seen little on a day like this. The bay was a swarm of blinding diamonds, the sandy coast where Queenie’s house stood streamed like flames.

  The vicar met the party at the door of the chapel, a squat building with plump white walls, and ushered them into the interior, where sainted windows draped colours over the pine pews. It was as calm as Alison hoped Hermione would be. But Hermione peered down the aisle at the coffin. “Who wanted her left uncovered?”

  They glanced blankly at one another. “I’ll have them screw the lid on,” Keith said.

  “We ought to say goodbye,” Hermione said with some bravado, and stepped forward. Alison paced her, expecting grotesquely to see Queenie’s chin first over the side of the casket. The undertakers had tamed Queenie’s features and lent her cheeks a slumbering bloom that reminded Alison of Queenie’s last days, when she had seemed able to make herself look younger by her unshakable faith in herself. At least she looked more peaceful than Alison had ever seen her—but Hermione stumbled forward, her arms trembling by her sides, and stared into the coffin. “Who gave her that?” she almost screamed.

  Chapter Four

  He shouldn’t have brought Rowan after all, Derek thought angrily. He’d been afraid that Hermione might lose control, and this was worse than he’d feared. Whatever she was seeing in the coffin, she sounded capable of reaching in and dragging it out. He tried to turn Rowan away from the spectacle, but her head craned around as he urged her toward the porch. There was confusion in the aisle, Edith having grabbed Keith’s arm as he made to slip out to the undertaker’s men, Lance standing glumly in the middle of the narrow aisle, the vicar peering past him. Derek pushed Rowan as far as the vicar. “Look after her while I see what’s going on,” he muttered, and squeezed past the others toward the front of the chapel.

  Hermione and Alison were gazing into the coffin. Alison was holding her sister’s forearm to restrain her. Derek hurried forward, trying to hush his footsteps on the thick uneven flagstones. He could see nothing wrong. The old woman’s face was lovingly made up, her hands were folded on her chest, and the undertakers had found a white dress long enough to cover her ankles. “What’s up?” he murmured.

  Hermione stared at him as if she was afraid to speak. “We’re wondering how Queenie comes to be wearing that locket,” Alison said.

  He’d already noticed it, a heart-shaped gold locket resting on the old woman’s chest, its thin gold chain around her neck. “Not just any locket,” Hermione protested, lowering her voice when Derek frowned at her. “Alison knows what I mean.”

  “She means,” Alison said apologetically, “it had Rowan’s hair in it. I suppose it still has.”

  Queenie had demanded a lock of Rowan’s hair the first time it was cut, and Derek had never understood why Alison had hesitated. “I told you you should have got it back,” Hermione wailed, her voice rising. “You never should have given her anything of Rowan’s.”

  If she was going to bring Rowan into it, he’d be taking the child for a walk. But now the aisle was further blocked by one of the undertaker’s men. “He says they always leave the lid off unless they’re told different,” Keith explained. “Anyone who wants to should pay their respects, and then he’ll close it for us.”

  The family came forward before Derek could usher Rowan out. By the time he managed to edge unobtrusively through to her, the undertaker’s man was picking up the lid. “We mustn’t leave the locket on her,” Hermione cried.

  “Behave yourself, Hermione,” her mother said, low and sharp. “Show some respect for the dead. She must have wanted to wear it, and that’s all that need concern us.”

  Hermione glanced desperately from face to face. Apart from Lance, who’d given the coffin a token blink and was trudging back to a pew, all the adults were willing her to control herself. Alison guided her toward the pews, murmuring “No need to worry, love, I’m not,” but Hermione’s shoulders writhed as she heard the faint thud of the lid, the almost inaudible squeal of the screws.

  During the funeral Derek kept sensing her nervous glances at Rowan. The vicar said that their sister in God was a woman of rare education and a tower of strength to those who knew her, qualities that were seen too seldom nowadays. Derek took Rowan out of the chapel as soon as he felt he could, catching the undertaker’s men eating biscuits in one of the limousines, their hands held like trays to catch the crumbs.

  Rowan scattered earth on the coffin, since Alison and her parents did. On the drive back to the cottage she wanted to know why you were meant to throw earth like that, but nobody could remember. Hermione stared at her empty hands as if she regretted not having cast earth, whether to placate Queenie or to help fill in the grave.

  At the cottage Rowan sensed that the adults wanted to talk, and took a plate of sandwiches and a glass of orange juice into the garden. Even then the conversation only sidled around the subject of the funeral. “At least she’s where she wanted to be,” Edith said, and Hermione’s eyes flickered. Derek couldn’t stand the timidity of the conversation any longer. “With her father, you mean,” he said.

  “He made her think she was the most important person in the world,” Lance said, and Derek’s innards tightened at his slowness: the cure seemed almost as distressing as the illness. “She wanted to keep him with her always, even when he died.”

  “That was just a silly business you children scared yourselves with,” Edith told Hermione.

  “It’s all very well for you to dismiss it like that, mother, but you were never that anxious to be left alone with her yourself.”

  Derek meant to help. “What were you all so shy of? She looked like any old maid to me. What was all that about Rowan and the locket?”

  “She used to terrorise Hermione when we were little,” Alison said. “That doesn’t go away all at once just because the person has.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Derek, that may help you understand,” Hermione said as he opened his mouth and closed it again. “When I was a baby they gave her one of my first teeth, and do you know what she said to me when I was old enough to realise? She told me that if I ever did anything she didn’t like or said anything against her she’d make me feel as if that tooth was being pulled out. I wonder if you’d want anyone saying such things to Rowan.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s the first I’ve heard of it if she said that to you,” Edith declared.

  “Mother, I
did try to tell you, but you said exactly what you’re saying now, that it was all nonsense. Only I noticed you never gave her any of Alison’s teeth.”

  The imminence of a family quarrel made Derek uneasy, and he tried to head it off. “No wonder you didn’t like her, but you must have realised sometime that she couldn’t do what she said she’d do to you.”

  Hermione seemed not to know where to look, and then she stared defiantly at him. “She did.”

  “Hang on, you mean she—”

  “I mean that if I ever said anything about her I thought she wouldn’t like, the tooth that had grown there started aching. This tooth,” she said, poking a stubby forefinger into the flesh beneath the left-hand corner of her mouth.

  “You poor little sod. Thank Christ we all grow up. How long is it since you felt she could do that to you?”

  “The night she died.”

  Derek didn’t know what to say. Distressingly, he felt a twinge of the inner shrinking he’d experienced on meeting Lance. “She’s dead now at any rate, Hermione,” her father said. “You’ve no reason to worry about yourself, or Rowan for that matter.”

  “May she rest in peace,” Hermione muttered, “which is more than she let your father have.” She gazed wistfully out at Rowan, who was throwing back her head to drain her orange juice. “I was going to suggest that Rowan could stay for the weekend while you sort out Queenie’s house, but now that you’ve heard how neurotic I am I don’t suppose you’ll want her to.”

  Derek glanced at Alison, who looked his question back at him. “We’ll be staying,” Edith said.

  “Rowan can stay if she wants,” Derek said. When he went out and asked her she skipped with delight, and he felt he’d been unfair to Hermione. He ought to know as well as anyone that it wasn’t so easy to shake off what had been done to you as a child. Rowan would be fine, he told himself, with three adults to keep her safe. He closed his eyes and raised his face towards the sunlight, and scoffed at himself: surely there was nothing here for Rowan to be kept safe from.

  Chapter Five

  Dear diary, this morning I tidyed my room but Hermione wouldn’t let me use the vaccume even though I do at home, but yesterday I helped in the shop becose grandma said I ought to help Hermione chuse what children would like best, then we all went for an evening walk where I like, down Greenfield valley with the old factorys and resevwars…

  That Sunday morning, Rowan was sitting in a garden chair outside Hermione’s cottage. Writing didn’t feel like writing here; it felt like being part of the long September morning, the sound of church bells across the hills, a chiming as minute as the glitter of the distant sea. Now and then pale patches of grass that at first she’d thought were smoke sailed uphill toward her, and then a breeze would spill over her like cream. When she laid the diary on the lawn beside her, an invisible reader turned the pages. She gazed across the bay toward Waterloo and wondered what her grandaunt’s house felt like now.

  It hadn’t felt the same since the night Queenie had died, but Rowan wasn’t sure what the difference was. Perhaps it just felt emptier. A feeling of emptiness and being called had taken her upstairs that night, still half asleep, to Queenie’s floor. She was sad that she hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. You could be sad when someone died even if you’d been scared of them when they were alive. Though Queenie’s room seemed vast Rowan had always felt closed in by the vastness, by the smell of books and disinfectant and by the dusty net curtains that made the outside world look like a faded pattern in the fabric. Queenie would want to know everything she’d done that day, would ask question after question until it was worse than being at school, especially since Rowan had always felt that Queenie already knew the answers. She’d felt as if the questions were gobbling her up.

  Once Rowan had been as frightened as Hermione had always tried not to seem. Every night she’d had to say good night to her grandaunt, had had to climb on the bed that felt like a mound of lumpy dust and hug the old lady’s bony shoulders. Rowan had closed her eyes as she craned to kiss the old lips, dry as a bird’s beak. She’d opened them as she retreated from the bed—and once, just a few nights before the old lady had died, Rowan had frozen, for the old lady had been gazing past her in such dismay that Rowan had been terrified to look.

  It had only been the light, which had dimmed momentarily. If Queenie had been frightened of the dark, why hadn’t she let daddy fix her electricity? He’d said that by rights it shouldn’t be working at all. The memory made Rowan shiver in the sunlight, and she watched birds gather like weights on opposite branches of a sapling until her grandmother called her from the kitchen window. “Come here a minute, lovey. Would you like to take your granddad for a walk while we make the lunch?”

  “Or a drive if you want to save your legs,” he said from the living-room window.

  “That’d be enormous, great,” Rowan cried, and ran in to the toilet before anyone could tell her to go, ran out again to her grandfather. “Please may we go to Talacre?”

  “Bingo land again, is it? Well, you should choose, since it’s your last day.”

  She giggled at the way he was trying to sound enthusiastic. “I don’t mean Talacre exactly. I wanted to walk to the lighthouse.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sorry, I expect that’s over your head.”

  “I know who she is, she writes books. My grandaunt had one in her room. When I grow up I want to write books for people to read. I try to now, but the storeys won’t stay still long enough.”

  “You’re an old-fashioned young lady, aren’t you? Not that we’d ever change you for a newer model.”

  “I do like old things.”

  “That must be why you’re going out with me. Well, let’s get to the beach before the tribes of Homo Transistorus begin their bottle-breaking ceremonies,” he said, and ushered her out to the small blunt car.

  He braked all the way down the valley. On the coast road trees enclosed the car in a deep green tunnel broken by arches of sunlight, and then the coast flattened out beneath a hillside boiling with foliage. Soon the car turned toward the open sea. Beyond a bridge over the railway was Talacre: houses like wheelless caravans crowded in the lee of the glaring grassy dunes; long brick sheds faced the encampment across the soft road. The sheds were penny arcades, souvenir or betting or fish and chip shops, the Boathouse Bingo that boasted Top Prizes and Quality Prizes. Granddad parked near a picture of a pirate with a sack and an eye patch outside the Smugglers Inn, a shed with a line of white arches stuck onto the front, and they made for the beach.

  Beyond the caravans a brambly path led through the dunes. Bits of ruined buildings poked through the undergrowth near the beach: here a foundation, there a chimney stack out of which a crow flapped. As the sand grew softer underfoot granddad began to toil, mopping his forehead with his large handkerchief. He clambered over the last dunes and flopped on a bald patch amid the spiky grass. “You carry on. You’ll stay where I can see you, won’t you, and watch out for horses on the beach.”

  Rowan ran toward the lighthouse, which stood on a pie of concrete surrounded by fallen walls at the edge of the waves. At first the beach was baked in mud that gleamed metallically, then the sand was exposed, embedded with pebbles that grew larger near the rubble. Two short stretches of wall wrapped in wire netting remained, though they seemed to cut off nothing from anything. Families were settling themselves against the dunes, but the only person near the rubble was a fat lady in a flowered dress, her head like a bag of flesh with hardly a bump for a chin, tied tight with a bow at the collar. Granddad waved and lay back on the dune, and Rowan walked around the lighthouse.

  She liked Talacre, where she could play a video game that made her feel she was flying into outer space, but this was better—older, lonelier. She was hoping she would be able to run up to the balcony around the broken lantern and give granddad a surprise. But though the windows in the white shaft were gaping, the doorway was plugged with bricks.

  She sat
with her back against the lighthouse and gazed out to sea. Flecks of colour, sandy and chalky, trembled on the horizon of the basking water. Hermione had told her that on a good day you could see the house in Waterloo. All days here were good days as far as Rowan was concerned, but she had never been able to make out the house. She was screwing up her eyes when a voice said “What are you looking for?”

  It wasn’t the fat lady. When Rowan shaded her eyes and glanced toward the redundant wall she saw a girl of about her own age in a long old-fashioned white dress. The girl was holding her chin as if it were a magic lamp and gazing palely at Rowan. “I was trying to see where I live,” Rowan said.

  “Across the water? I come from there too.” The girl moved closer to her but pursed her lips at the prospect of sitting on the concrete. “You wanted to go up the lighthouse, I thought.”

  It sounded like an invitation. “There’s no way in,” Rowan said. “I expect it’s dangerous.”

  “I’ve been up with my father. I could see right home.”

  “Why, does he work there?”

  “A lighthouse-keeper, do you mean?” The girl gave Rowan a look so sharp she felt she had been scratched. “Nothing so paltry. What does your father do?”

  “He’s an electrician. He calls it being a spark.”

  A smirk widened the girl’s small mouth. “Don’t take me for a snob. My father taught me to say good day to everyone, tradesmen included. It keeps them in their place.”

  She must live in Crosby and go to private school, Rowan assumed, and said angrily “Everyone says he’s the best electrician. He takes me with him sometimes, and I’ve seen how careful he is.”

  “Does he ever let you help him?”

  Rowan was about to boast, but a glint in the pale eyes deterred her. “No.”

  “I hope he never does. He’d be breaking the law. He could go to prison if you even helped him without his knowing, and besides, you could hurt yourself.”

  It was none of her business, Rowan thought, feeling vulnerable and responsible for him. “You’re here with your father, are you?” she said.