The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  Dream or not, she might have wished she had worn her slippers. As she went up, the carpet grew damp and chill. On the top floor it felt like the threat of quicksand in the dark. At least her sensations were distant, as though she were hardly there at all. She groped her way along the furry wall to the room full of squelchy furniture, and edged between the vague squatting shapes to the window.

  The sash slid up, its weights thumping like irregular heartbeats in the wall. The eyepieces of the binoculars seemed to fit themselves to her eyes and disappear. The electrician had moved along the hall, tacking cable above the picture rail, and was nearly at the right-hand corridor. Rowan turned toward the corridor on the far side of the hall, but nothing looked back at her except paintings, splashier toward the nursery classrooms. Then she thought of the corridor he had almost reached.

  It was unlit. The light from the hall reached past the first window and made the wall gleam icily, but the next sample of wall faded from grey to black, and the third window looked stuffed with soot. She wasn’t sure if she glimpsed movement where the dimness became dark, movement withdrawing spiderlike into the dark. She only knew that she was growing tense as the man stepped down the ladder.

  He set it up just outside the mouth of the corridor, spread its legs and shook them to make sure they were firm. When he leaned toward the corridor, Rowan thought he had heard something, but he was stooping to pick up his boxes of cable-holders and nails. He climbed the steps carefully, arranged the boxes on the platform at the top, stood on the step below it, reached up and placed a holder over the cable, drew back his hammer to tap the nail in. Then, with an unexpectedness that at first made Rowan want to giggle, the hammer flew out of his hand.

  Shock had flung his hand up and loosened his grip—shock at whatever he saw rushing at him out of the corridor. Perhaps shock overturned the ladder: could a figure as small as the one Rowan barely glimpsed have snatched it from beneath him? It was certainly shock that made him clutch thoughtlessly for the only support he could reach—the wire of the light overhead.

  Rowan saw his mouth twist and gape so wide she thought his jaw would break, and then his body began to jerk. The holder from which the wire hung ripped loose from the ceiling. Yards of cable tore the plaster open, dropping him to the floor. He was clutching the wire with both hands, unable to let go. She pushed the sight away from her with the binoculars when he started to dance helplessly at the end of the wire.

  Despite the distance, she saw his face turn black. He was tiny as an insect now, and twitching like one that was almost dead. She turned away, feeling drained, exhausted. She might have curled up on the floor, except that of course she was really asleep in her room. All the same, she had to dream that she tiptoed down the chilly stairs and replaced the binoculars in the corner of her bedroom and wriggled back into bed before the dream could end.

  Chapter Fifteen

  What haunted Alison most about Julius was that the single bed was far too big for him. Much of the time he lay there, gazing with bloodshot eyes at whoever came to see him. Blood vessels showed through his bald scalp, blue veins webbed his papery skin. When he had changed into his pyjamas she’d seen that he had almost no penis. His arteries were hardening, and he was suffering from heart disease. He was nine years old.

  He looked at least sixty. He had been given a side room off the ward so that the other children wouldn’t gawk at him while he waited for the specialist to see him, but even with the door closed the staff was constantly aware of him. He’d affected both of the student nurses: Jasmine had brought him a box of chocolates, and flowers from her seventeenth-floor window box; Libby kept glancing into the side room in case he needed anything and didn’t like to trouble the staff. Soon after ten o’clock she came to Alison and moved her stubbly head to indicate that they should talk in the corridor. Once there, she murmured urgently “What’s the matter with him?”

  “With Julius? Progeria, premature aging. What we call the Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome when it takes someone that young.”

  “What can we do to help him?”

  “Treat the symptoms as best we can, alleviate the pain. The honest answer is, not enough. He’s unlikely to see twenty,” Alison said as gently as she could.

  “If that’s the best we can do, why is he in here at all?”

  “So the doctors can observe him, Libby. It’s a rare condition, and they want to learn all they can.”

  “But that’s awful.” Libby fumbled for her cigarettes, pulled one out of the packet, pushed it back in so hard that she snapped off the filter. “That’s like using him for vivisection. He’s only a child, he can’t even make the choice for himself.”

  Alison thought he had. Though nobody had told him how long he had to live, his instincts might have. Perhaps that explained his calm, however much that seemed like sadness. Children in his state were supposed to be no more advanced mentally than others of their age, but Alison felt he was mature beyond his years. Or was she only seeing him as she believed he ought to be, compensated by nature for the shortness of his life? She didn’t feel sure enough to answer Libby, who turned away abruptly as though Alison were conniving at cruelty to Julius and went in to read to him.

  Before long the ward sister sent her out to deal with other children, but lingered herself to talk to him with a gruffness that disguised her pity less than she might have wished. Jasmine and Libby were growing more attentive to the other children now. Both of them were busy when it was time to make the hourly entries on Julius’s chart, and the sister had been called out of the ward. Alison looked through the glass panel of his door.

  He was playing a game on the computer his parents had brought him. The sister must have set up the keyboard and the monitor on the bed table, for he couldn’t lift the monitor himself. A gleam reflected from the game danced in his eyes, a faint contented smile had settled on his lips. When Alison saw his smile widen as he broke his own record, she went in.

  He watched her while she took the readings and entered them on the chart at the foot of his bed, and she was suddenly afraid that he was about to ask her if he was going to get well. But when she glanced up, his large eyes in his old man’s face were calm, so calm that she felt they were sad only for her. “Would you like me to stay and talk to you?” she said.

  “It’s okay, I was playing,” he said, and then with the ghost of a smile “The other children need you more. You can help them to get better.”

  Watching him play the computer game, she’d thought he was wasting precious minutes of his life, but now she saw how unreasonable she’d been: he had the right to play like a child if that was meaningful to him. Nobody should interfere if he was at peace with himself, and it occurred to her that his parents were resigned to that. “Well,” she said awkwardly “I’m here if you need me.”

  He smiled so charmingly it pierced her heart. He seemed about to speak, but glanced past her. The door had opened, the disinfectant smell of the hospital surging in. When he frowned, she realised that a child had wandered into the room. She turned to shepherd the child away, and then she faltered. In the doorway, gazing at Julius as though the sight of him had paralysed her with dismay, was Rowan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Earlier that morning Rowan wakened feeling happy and refreshed. She yawned and stretched until the sheets untucked themselves, and then she padded to the window. Though she thought her mother had closed the curtains last night, they were half open. Long skeins of cloud unravelled on the blue sky, a tanker turned ponderously between two tugboats on the bay. Rowan’s gaze drifted over the seascape and lit on the school, and then she remembered her horrid dream. She opened the window and let the sea breeze stroke her face until her father hurried in. “Come on, don’t be dreaming, we’ve overslept. I ought to have got you to school by now and be on the way to a job.”

  He brought her a bowl of cereal to eat while she washed and dressed. As she ran along the naked hall, Jo and her children were straggling out of their house. “Do you
mind going with them?” Daddy said. “You’d be helping me. I’m mad busy today.”

  She couldn’t refuse when he put it like that. She kissed him through the open window of the car and crossed the road as he drove off. “Please may you take me to school?”

  “Of course, chick, you know you’re always welcome,” Jo said with a heartiness that was meant to deny whatever Rowan thought she’d overheard yesterday, but Rowan sensed how eager Paul and Mary were to tell their friends. She wished she could be like Vicky, not needing to go to school. It didn’t matter, she told herself. whatever anyone said about her, she knew her parents wanted her and always had.

  She was on the main road when she began to see children she recognised, not going to school but coming back. Jo couldn’t ask their parents what was wrong; they were on the far side of the road, beyond the impatient traffic. Rowan felt uneasy, as if the night or the dream were reawakening. The school came in sight, and she saw that the schoolyard and the building were deserted.

  The sight seemed to brighten luridly, filling her eyes. Her dream was there before her in broad daylight, and she was afraid to see the blackened puppet on the cord, still dancing. Jo hurried her into the schoolyard. If she saw the figure now, she would be able to make out every detail of its face. But the assembly hall was empty. That was such a relief that at first she didn’t take in what a mother emerging from the school told Jo. “No school today. There was an accident last night. The electrician electrocuted himself.”

  “He couldn’t have been much good at his job. Pity they didn’t give it to Rowan’s dad,” Jo said, and frowned at Rowan. “Why the face?”

  Rowan was struggling to know how she should feel. “I dreamed that happened,” she admitted.

  “People do sometimes, they said so on television. It would have happened anyway, chick.”

  Or had it been a dream? In any case, did that matter so long as it still seemed like one? Rowan waited apprehensively for the horror of what she had seen to catch up with her, until she realised that it wasn’t going to. Last night she must have looked away just in time. Her relief gave way to hope. The sooner her father knew what had happened, the better. When she came in sight of the big house she ran across the road to it, for the front door was open.

  As she ran into the hall, the dimness closed around her eyes, and she almost fell headlong. Someone came out of the dark to catch her, came so quickly that it was like falling into a mirror, except that the other was wearing a long white dress. “Did you leave your door open?” Vicky said.

  Rowan supposed that she must have when her father was hurrying her. She might have resented Vicky’s having entered the house uninvited, but she felt more resentful of Jo, who pushed the door wider and blinked at the dimness. “Is anyone in there with you, Rowan? Your mam wouldn’t want me leaving you all by yourself.”

  The idea that Jo was too dazzled by the sunlight to see Vicky amused Rowan, and she couldn’t help sharing a little of Vicky’s contempt. “I’m not by myself,” she said.

  “Don’t be clever, Rowan. You just come and play with Paul and Mary where I can see you.”

  “I don’t tell lies. I’m not by myself,” Rowan said, and with a sudden wickedness that was Vicky’s too “They can come and play here if they like.”

  Jo stared at her and protruded her lower lip. “You’re to tell me if you go out of this gate, do you hear?”

  She shooed Paul and Mary across the road and slammed her door. Silence settled on the garden that smelled of the earth Hermione had dug. “I don’t care, I wanted to stay here anyway,” Rowan said.

  When she looked round, Vicky’s deep pale eyes that seemed never to blink were gazing at her. “I haven’t seen you for a while,” Rowan said.

  “I’ve seen you. I’ve been busy. I should have come if you’d really wanted me to.”

  She was strange, Rowan thought, but there was a way to find out more about her. “Shall we go to your house?”

  “We’ve no reason to go out of the gate.”

  “You’ve been in my house, so now I want to go in yours.”

  “You needn’t worry about that, my dear.”

  It didn’t sound exactly like a threat, nor was it quite a promise. “When?” Rowan demanded.

  “You’ll see where I live as soon as you’re ready.”

  Rowan might have retorted that she was ready now, except that seemed likely to bring her another slippery answer. She decided to wait until she could tell one of her parents that she was going to Vicky’s. “I’ll do some jobs for mummy, then. You can help me if you like.”

  Revulsion flickered over Vicky’s face. “You aren’t a housemaid, are you? Why don’t we give your mother a surprise and go and see her at work?”

  Rowan had often wanted to, but her mother always told her to wait until she was older. Her sense that Vicky was capable of adventures she wouldn’t have dared herself made her reckless. “Yes, let’s. I’ll just leave my daddy a note.”

  She sat under the chandelier to write. Dear daddy, Ive come home from school becose the ellectrision had an acciddent which I ecspect means theyll want you now but now Im going with my freind Vicky to visit mummy at the hospittal… She stopped, because the small sharp noise she’d thought was coming from the chandelier was snickering. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  “I thought you’d be a better speller at your age. It’s only the Welsh who double their letters.”

  Rowan wrote Lots of love from your Rowan and then glared at Vicky. “Maybe you think you could do better.”

  “I’ll write it out for you if you like.”

  “I don’t like. I don’t want you to do my writing for me.” She added some lines of kisses and stood up. “I’ll just tell Jo we’re going.”

  “You needn’t. She was only interfering. I never—” Vicky’s eyes were suddenly opaque. “Let’s be off.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing to do with you. Don’t you want to see where your mother works?”

  “We’re going to, aren’t we? What’s your hurry?”

  Vicky flung up her hands, and the shadow of one swelled over Rowan. “How long do you expect me to wait?”

  All at once the room seemed dark and oppressive and chill. If this was Vicky’s impatience, Rowan didn’t like it much, especially when her legs began to shiver. Then Vicky turned away, and Rowan stumbled out of the house, her head swimming. The sunlight lit up her mind as she rang Jo’s rattly bell. “We’re going to mummy,” she said.

  Jo shrugged. “That’s up to her,” she said, and closed the door.

  The door of the big house closed like an echo. Vicky’s white dress seemed to brighten as she crossed the road and made a face at Jo’s house. “Wouldn’t you like to be able to go wherever you choose?”

  “Like you, you mean?”

  “You read my mind,” Vicky said with a meaningful look.

  Just now, riding the bus without a grown-up was enough of an adventure. The streets were full of people she would never meet, every house held secrets she would never see. A man unrolled a carpet along the pavement of a side street, another pasted an eye bigger than himself onto a billboard. A scrapyard was scattered with a giant’s fingernail clippings: mudguards. In Liverpool, in the street that led up to the hospital, early drunks seemed to be playing a game, touching all the bases of the lampposts. Vicky led the way into the muggy hospital. “Mummy will be upstairs, I think,” Rowan whispered.

  Nobody seemed to notice them as they ran up the stony uncarpeted stairs, past a folded wheelchair like a slice of itself. By the time they saw the sign for the ward where her mother worked, Rowan was sweating. Vicky, who looked absolutely cool, pushed open the double doors and followed her in, and Rowan caught sight of her mother beyond a door just inside the ward. She inched the door open, enjoying the surprise she was about to give her mother.

  She faltered. There was an old man in the bed, a tiny bald old man with crippled hands. He looked as if his skin had
shrunk almost to the point of tearing. What was he doing here? He oughtn’t to be in a children’s ward. Then his large sad eyes met hers, and she realised he was a child.

  She wanted to flee, to run out of the hospital before her mother saw her. She was still trying when her mother swung round and came grimly at her, taking her by the shoulders with a firmness that felt like the threat of bruises and marching her out of the room. “I’ll be back shortly,” she said to the withered boy as she closed the door, and urged Rowan into the corridor. “What on earth do you think you’re doing, child?”

  “There isn’t any school today,” Rowan stammered, glancing about for Vicky. “The electrician had an accident. Daddy may get the job now.”

  “That’s all very well, but do you realise how ill that boy is I was talking to? Don’t you know any better than to disturb him?”

  Rowan felt her lips begin to tremble as her eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to see where you worked. I only wanted to give you a surprise.”

  “Well, you succeeded.” Her mother patted her face, not too gently. “Now, young lady, don’t turn on the taps. I can’t waste time on that while there are children here who need looking after. Couldn’t you have stayed with Jo?”

  Rowan felt as if she hardly existed as a person any more, as if she were just an inconvenience her mother had to deal with, especially when her mother sighed and said “What are we going to do with you? I’d have you read to the little ones, but sister won’t let children visit. All the hospitals were like that when Hermione had to go in, and it didn’t help me then either. Just wait here.”

  Soon she reappeared, snapping shut her handbag. “Here’s your pocket money early. Go down to the shop and buy yourself something to read. You’ll have to stay in the staffroom until I finish work.”

  Rowan took the coin, which felt cold as indifference, and trudged along the shrill corridor. As she started down the stairs Vicky fell in step alongside her. “You don’t look very joyful. Did she send you away?”