The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  Rowan was curled up on the bare mattress, one arm stretched out, the fingers moving slightly as if she felt the absence of a hand she had been holding in her sleep. “Yes, on the beach,” she murmured. Derek lifted her without wakening her and made his way carefully along the middle of the unlit corridor. He tucked her into bed and watched until he was sure she was quiet, and then he crept in beside Alison. He mustn’t have been quite awake up there, he decided, already dozing. For a moment, as he’d gathered Rowan up, he’d felt as if they weren’t alone in the huge unlit room.

  Chapter Seven

  As soon as her parents had driven away, Hermione set about weeding the garden. A comedian was telling jokes in Welsh on a television beyond an open window, a mower droned on a lawn, but otherwise the hillside above Holywell was quiet as the evening crept down the mountains. Fat clouds the colours of pigeons and doves flocked above the distant strip of sea, stirring drowsily. Around her the gardens and cottages and fields were paying back the hours of daylight to the pale sky. She might have sat and watched the colours of the landscape rekindling gently, but she needed the work as much as the garden did.

  She’d made a generous dinner before her parents left for Waterloo, and then she’d eaten too much of it herself. Weeding would keep her from nibbling, from sitting in the cottage like a fat-faced rodent in its larder. She knew she ate whenever she was nervous, but what excuse had she now? Queenie was dead, and so were the terrors of Hermione’s childhood, and perhaps that meant it was time to remember, in between worrying while her parents were on the road and being anxious that Alison and Derek might have taken on too much. Even if Queenie had turned her childhood into a nightmare, she mustn’t let that rule the rest of her life.

  The thought felt like the start of freedom. If she could blame Queenie without flinching, perhaps she could also forgive her; perhaps she could accept, as Alison apparently had, that Queenie had been nothing but a lonely embittered maiden aunt with no understanding of children. “You’ll be where I can keep an eye on you,” Queenie had said when Hermione had moved into the cottage. Hermione laughed out loud at that, at having been made nervous by it when she’d been thirty years old. She was too old now for Queenie to seem terrifying, she thought, just as the phone rang in the cottage.

  She ran in so hastily that a fist seemed to close around her vision, squeezing it dark as she grabbed the receiver. “Who is it?” she cried.

  Her urgency had thrown him, for seconds idled by before he said “It’s Lance.”

  “It’s you, is it?” she said, and quieting her panic, “What can I do for you?”

  His answer was a mumble that she had to ask him to repeat. “Alison’s number,” he said as if she were deliberately adding to his difficulties.

  “Yes, what about it?” She was feeling as protective as she had when she used to warn Alison not to go on the beach with him. “She’s pretty busy just now, Lance. What did you want to say to her?”

  “About the little girl.”

  Hermione took a long breath while she chose her words. “I don’t think Alison’s husband would appreciate your interest, Lance. If you need to talk to someone, you can talk to me.”

  “It’s nothing like that.” He must be pressing the receiver against his face out of frustration with her and his slowness, for his voice blundered closer, blurring. “I was thinking about the old woman.”

  “Queenie? What about her?”

  “About her will. I want to tell Alison. It’s hard enough for me to talk.”

  “I’ll tell her you’re trying to get in touch and then perhaps she’ll call you. That’ll do, won’t it?”

  “I hope so,” he said, so inadequately that she waited for the rest. “You could remind her I never hurt anyone.”

  Except yourself, Hermione thought. He’d locked away his fantasies and lacerated himself with guilt, and all she felt once she put down the receiver was pity for him. If he’d believed Queenie was capable of seeing into his mind, he must have been even more frightened of her than Hermione had been. She wondered if he might have aggravated her own fears.

  Her parents had. She’d dreaded visiting her aunt all the more for knowing they dreaded it and yet gave in when they were summoned. Eating at Queenie’s had been the worst, feeling her waiting for you to drop food on the tablecloth or on the floor so that she could rap the table with her knuckles and cry “Look what the child’s done now.” She made you feel like an animal at the table, feel as if you’d smeared your mouth or dribbled or that your chewing was the loudest sound in the room. Being allowed to leave the table at last had never been much of a relief; the whole house had seemed neurotically aware of Hermione, waiting for her to touch something she shouldn’t, knock over an ornament, peep into one of the numerous rooms the children had been told to stay out of. Long before they left she would be constipated by the sense of always being watched.

  She was beginning to feel angry, not afraid. There was no point in pretending Queenie hadn’t been vicious. Hermione dug her fork into the flower bed, remembering the night after Queenie’s father had been buried. Queenie had never been more vicious than that night, when Hermione had ventured up to sympathize with her.

  She had been six years old, and glimpsing the hidden world of adults. The family had converged on the house in Waterloo when it became clear that the old man was dying at last. He and Queenie had lived there alone for years. Hermione recalled him dimly as a bony man with a disproportionately large mild face and a shock of grey hair, who’d sat hunched at the head of the dining table and who had emitted questions now and then, questions which she’d never understood and which seemed to elude him too. He must have been trying to recall his tenure as a professor in Liverpool. She hadn’t realised he was dying until Lance had looked into the room she’d shared with Alison, to tell them he was dead.

  By then the girls were huddled in Hermione’s bed, where Alison had taken refuge from the screams, their aunt’s screams, so piercing and desperate they’d seemed to come from all over the house. The floor shook as people ran upstairs, and Keith told the girls to stay in their room. The screams grew intermittent, until the girls were breathless with dread of the next scream. The murmur of the adults overhead seemed far too distant, two corridors and a staircase away. When Lance sidled round the door to tell them their grandfather was dead, Hermione ordered him out of the room, though she would have pleaded with him to stay if he had been anyone but Lance.

  During the night Queenie calmed down but refused to leave her father’s room. That much Hermione learned in the morning, when Lance’s father Richard took Lance and the girls for a walk on the wintry beach. Between then and the funeral the children were kept away from the house as much as possible, but Hermione gathered that even the doctor hadn’t succeeded in moving their aunt from beside her father’s bed. The family had to give her a drink laced with a sleeping pill before the undertakers could remove the corpse. She didn’t scream when she awakened by the empty bed; she didn’t speak to anyone, even to ask where they’d taken her father. No wonder the house felt like a trap about to spring. No wonder Edith kept the girls at the back of the church during the funeral.

  The pews were full of ranks of grey professors. The church smelled of wreaths and mothballed suits. Edith craned to watch Queenie over the grey heads, and Hermione saw her knuckles whitening as she gripped the pew in front. Suddenly a murmur passed through the congregation, for Queenie had reared up, flinging Richard aside as he reached for her arm, and was running stiff-legged toward the coffin, her arms outstretched as if she meant to hoist the corpse. Edith rushed the girls out of the church, and Hermione couldn’t see what happened as the priest and several other men closed in on Queenie, her face glaring wildly above them. Keith and Richard brought Queenie out behind the coffin, but she ignored the ceremony: she stood at the graveside and stared at the sky, smiling bitterly and secretly as if she could see something none of the mourners could. Afterwards the family drove back to Waterloo, where she went
straight up to her father’s room and lay on the bed. She refused to speak to anyone or even look at them, and the family was unwilling to leave her alone in the house in case she planned to do away with herself.

  Hermione had gathered that from Lance. She felt sorry for her aunt then, even when Lance told her what her aunt had cried as she’d collapsed before the coffin: “He moved, he moved.” When Hermione had finished her bath and Alison was still playing with their bath toys, she stole up to the top of the house. Perhaps if she comforted her aunt, her jaw would stop aching with the fear of entertaining thoughts that Queenie mightn’t like.

  At first she knocked timidly, with just one finger. The huge dim passage made that sound dismayingly small, and so did her distance from the rest of the house. Knocking more loudly brought no response, and made her even more nervous. At last she poked the door reluctantly with her finger, poked until the door swung wide.

  Her aunt was lying face up on the bed. Her eyes were closed, her hands were folded on her chest. Her chin was thrust up so rigidly that Hermione felt certain she was dead. A ship moaned on the horizon, and the murmur of grown-ups downstairs sounded even farther away. Hermione wished so hard it made her head swim that they would miss her and call out to her, because then she could run downstairs. Nobody called her, and she found herself trudging helplessly forward into the room where the furniture looked like the shadows grown more solid, trudging toward the still figure on the bed.

  She was close enough to touch her aunt before she noticed the shallow rise and fall of the flat chest beneath the folded hands. She had to swallow before she could speak. “Auntie, are you going to die?” she whispered out of pity, and hoped at once that Queenie hadn’t heard.

  Queenie’s eyes opened so slowly they looked gloating. They were the only part of the long pinched face that moved. Their first glint froze Hermione. She could only stand and shiver as her aunt glared at her with icy loathing. At last Queenie’s lips drew back, baring gritted teeth, which parted just enough for her to speak. “So that’s what you’re hoping for, is it, my little shoat?”

  There wasn’t so much as a hint of emotion in her gentleness, and Hermione was almost too frightened to speak. “No, Auntie, I only—”

  “Shall I tell you something you won’t relish? I’m never going to die. Never, so don’t waste your time looking forward to the day you’ll be rid of me. He should have listened to me,” she added as if a memory was making her forget who she was speaking to. “You needn’t die unless you choose to, and you wouldn’t choose to if you didn’t let yourself grow old. It’s all an illusion, disease and ageing and death. You just need the will to see through it.” Then rage flared in her eyes as she noticed Hermione again. “And you dared ask me if I were dying. You deserve to be shown what that means.”

  Surely she wouldn’t if Hermione told her she was sorry, if she pleaded with her not to do whatever was gleaming deep in her eyes. Or if Queenie was beyond being placated, Hermione could scream for her parents; she had only to open her mouth. Then she heard the door close tight behind her.

  Perhaps a draught from the window had closed it, but Queenie smiled as though she had closed it herself without moving from the bed. Hermione would have run to the door, except that Queenie’s glare was paralysing her with terror even before she understood why. Then she did, and she would have buried her face in her hands if she had been able to move, so that she wouldn’t see what Queenie was waiting for her to notice.

  A stirring in one corner of the room, alongside the window and out of reach of the meagre daylight that lingered above the sea, dragged her head around to look. She tried to tell herself that the grey mass that filled the corner from floor to ceiling was just a shadow, and then it stirred again as a spider that looked as big as her hand scuttled back under the cornice, leaving its meat struggling in the midst of the web. She felt as if her gaze were caught there too, not least by her fear of seeing the rest of the room. It had aged horribly, cracks clawing at the ceiling and the walls, wallpaper bulging rottenly, furniture sagging forward at her, wardrobes opening like bat-wings that would enfold her in darkness. She began to sob dryly, and then Queenie sat up at the edge of her vision, a tall thin pale shape. Hermione felt a scream mounting behind her locked teeth as she turned to look.

  But Queenie hadn’t aged, nor had the bed. If anything, she looked younger, enlivened by her power over her niece. She seemed to know all that Hermione was seeing, for she was grinning like a skull. “Look at yourself,” she murmured almost tenderly.

  Perhaps she was only mocking Hermione; perhaps she wasn’t telling her to do so literally. All the same, the child would have fled to the window and jumped rather than look at herself in the mirror. Queenie seemed to tire of her; she closed her eyes and waved Hermione away like an annoying fly. Or was that a last cruel trick to make Hermione think she was safe? As the child reached shakily for the doorknob she saw her own hand, a blotchy hand that looked almost fleshless and far too large. It was an old woman’s hand.

  She squeezed her eyes shut until they blazed and throbbed, and grabbed the doorknob, tugging until the door lurched at her. It felt as if it had been released, though the frame wasn’t warped. She fled along the corridor and fell down the first flight of stairs, bruising her legs. She crawled sobbing down to the next floor as her father ran to her, demanding to know what was wrong. When she realised that he saw nothing odd about her, she was able to look at her hands, her small, familiar pink hands. She clambered desperately up her father to hide her face against his chest. “A spider, a spider,” she babbled. “I couldn’t get out of the room.”

  She didn’t think he ever realised she meant Queenie’s room. She wouldn’t go to bed until he promised to sit with her all night. When at last she dozed off she awoke to find he wasn’t there, and wakened Alison with her screams before he came back. When they went home to Liverpool a nightmare followed her and lurked in her sleep for years. It was a nightmare about waking up—about wakening to find she was as old as she had seemed in Queenie’s room.

  She plucked a weed out of the earth and scoffed at herself, somewhat tentatively. What was so odd about dreaming you’d be older when you woke up, since in fact you would be? Queenie had made her believe the room had aged, that was all—no great feat when her victim had been just a child. She’d kept her childish for the rest of Queenie’s life. She seemed even to have got the better of her afterwards, at the funeral the other day, when Hermione had made such a fuss about the locket. Queenie must have been wearing it the night she died, and someone had decided she should wear it to the grave. She was letting this view take root in her mind when the phone rang.

  It was her mother calling from Waterloo. “We’ll be here two days and then at home if you need us.”

  “I’m sure I won’t, mother. Tell Alison Lance was calling, will you? I told him she might be in touch, but I didn’t commit her to.”

  “What was he after?”

  “He wanted to talk to her about Rowan, and something about the will.”

  “He’d better stay away from Rowan. I don’t care who says he’s cured. And God help him if he tries to make difficulties for Alison now. He’d have been the last person Queenie would have left anything, him and his father, and Richard wouldn’t accept anything even if she had.”

  Hermione said goodbye to her mother and went outside for her tools: it was growing too dark for gardening. She washed her earthy hands and strolled down to her shop. The shopping streets of Holywell were short and haphazard, as if they’d tumbled down the hill into this disarray. There was no clear view along most of them, which was why she stood the sign that pointed to AUNTIE HERMIONE’S on the street corner when the shop was open. As she let herself in, the streetlamp outside flickered on against the swarthy sky.

  She pulled the tasseled cord inside the doorway, and the shop lit up, the racks of children’s clothes, the crafted toys. When she’d first thought of moving to Wales, to somewhere near her favourite childhood haunts,
she’d meant to teach, but while she’d enjoyed her years at training college, teaching practice in a viciously Catholic school near Liverpool had almost given her a breakdown. She would never have expected the children’s clothes she made as therapy to prove so popular—popular enough to let her rent the cottage and the shop. Each year she added a few more lines, though never enough to satisfy Rowan, she thought wryly. It had been Rowan’s idea to order a carton of Halloween masks.

  When Hermione parted the lid of the carton and folded back the leaves, a witch’s face sneered up at her. It was grey and deeply wrinkled, and looked as if it would feel like clay. She picked it up by its long sharp chin and hung it in the window, and then she peeled off more layers of the onion of eyeless faces in the carton, green faces with one eye twice the size of the other, skulls with reassuringly artificial teeth. She was sorting out a representative display when a little girl looked in the window.

  Hermione gave her a quick smile without really seeing her. The child oughtn’t to be out so late, particularly in just a white dress when the mists were already seeping down the mountains. She selected three masks and picked them up by their elastic, and realised that the little girl hadn’t moved. She turned to call out that the shop was closed, and her fists clenched so violently that the elastic tore free of one mask.

  For a moment she thought that the figure outside wasn’t a child but a dwarf with an old woman’s long-chinned face. It was just that the reflection of the witch mask was blotting out the child’s face, and yet the sight made Hermione shrink back, for the child seemed to be peering through the reflected empty sockets. Then the child skipped aside, into the dark beyond the streetlamp.

  Hermione made herself stumble to the door and drag it open. The street was deserted as far as she could see. When she ran to the bend, there was no sign of the little girl. She retreated to the shop and locked herself in. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she’d seen, she told herself, fighting to be calm so that she could venture out before it grew much darker. She knew that children liked to make faces, but the child couldn’t really have looked like that. In the moment before the child had dodged out of sight, the eyes staring through the reflection that clung to the window had seemed to have turned outward, staring past either side of the mask.