The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  It yielded beneath her weight, but not far. There was still earth between her and what lay face up beneath her. She reached for her coat and managed to pull the flashlight out of her pocket. She propped the flashlight against the pillar, facing the unevenly quadrangular pit. Yellow light fastened on black glistening lumps of earth at her feet. She glanced warily towards the road, where there hadn’t been a car since she had left the pavement, and moved to the foot of the grave.

  The willow was behind her now. Whenever shadows scuttled over the heaps of earth that hemmed her in, she thought someone had peered out between the dangling branches, but she could never catch sight of a watcher. Being watched should mean there was no danger beneath her, for how could it be in two places at once? Before long she was hardly aware of the movements: she must be almost on the coffin—close enough to dread what she was stepping on as she edged along the trench to point the flashlight downwards more sharply. At the end by the willow the fan of light grew wide as the grave, but so dim that it was able only to make the earth glisten sluglike. She retreated there, her jaw aching until she managed to unclench her teeth.

  As she poked the spade into the earth, gingerly in case it was about to strike wood, she felt both sick and, grotesquely, famished. Nothing like hard work to give you an appetite, she thought helplessly, and leaned all her weight on the spade. It sank in a few inches and stood there. It had reached a surface more solid than earth.

  The halting of the spade seemed to spread through her body, freezing even her thoughts. The willow lurched towards her, hissing and rattling its branches; shadows swarmed over the heaps of earth that walled her in the trench. For Rowan, she thought, and swayed forward as if she were starting awake. For a moment she thought the lid had shifted beneath her, but the spade had slipped on the wood. Between fury and panic, she began to fling earth out of the trench.

  It didn’t take long to uncover the lid. She glanced about at the shifty night, the headless scarecrow of her coat, the streetlamp peering through the willow, and then she set about scraping the last of the earth from the glimmering lid. Every so often the spade would clank. She stared at the scraped wood displayed in earth like sodden plush, and made for the brighter end, poising her spade to use as a screwdriver. Then a chill seeped through her from the soil to the roots of her hair, for she’d realised why the spade had kept clanking. All the screws were half out of the lid.

  She grabbed the flashlight as if it were a lifeline on which she could haul herself out of the grave, and made herself train the beam on the screws. They poked out of the coffin, dripping earth, daring her to turn them further and lift the lid. She thought distantly of Rowan, and then of herself, of the way Queenie had terrorised her when she was Rowan’s age. Wasn’t she still doing so, confronting Hermione with the screws so as to make her incapable of lifting the lid? “I can see through your tricks,” Hermione whispered, and reached shakily for the nearest screw.

  It was gritty with moist soil. As soon as she had extracted it and dropped it near the foot of the pillar she rubbed her fingers together, shuddering. She did that automatically each time she removed another screw. She was beginning to wish she’d dug a wider trench: though there was just enough room on the left-hand side of the coffin for her to perch on the earth in the grave, she was nervous of slipping onto the lid now that it was held by so few screws. She paced along the yielding strip of earth and stooped to lift out a screw, another, a third. Now there was only the one closest to the pillar, and if she sprawled onto the coffin the lid might swing away from her on the pivot of the screw, dumping her into Queenie’s lair. That was what Queenie would want her to think, she told herself, and snatched out the last screw and shied it toward the pillar. Before another wave of apprehension could inhibit her, she squatted on the strip of earth, gripping the flashlight between her shaky knees, and poked her fingers under the lid.

  One heave and it came up, so easily that she almost overbalanced. It thumped against the far side of the grave, spilling earth into the coffin. Hermione stood up as quickly as she dared, grasping the flashlight with both hands. She longed to clamber out of the trench to recover from the shock of having almost lost her balance, but then she might not be able to force herself back in. She swayed against the wall of the trench to steady herself and gazed down, eyes twitching, at the long pale shape that lay beneath her in the coffin, beyond the reach of the flashlight beam. For Rowan, she thought fiercely, and let the beam sink into the coffin, past the fat white ridges of the lining, until it settled on the object in the box.

  Her grip tightened until the flashlight began to shiver. Her throat closed around her held breath. She’d expected Queenie to have worsened, but not like this. The long face had withered to the bone around the shrivelled eyes, which were almost black, and the mouth, exposing all the teeth and the blackened gums. The hair was spread out around the skull. The face was almost all grin, a dead grin with tiny eyes, staring up out of a nest of grey hair.

  She had to look away from the face to find the locket. She forced her gaze and the light away, though her arms trembled. The beam swung farther than she meant it to, jerking at the folded hands on Queenie’s chest. There was barely enough left of them to be called hands, and they were spattered with earth that the lid had dislodged. Hermione dragged the light back to the neck.

  It was gnarled and peeling as a dead branch, and dismayingly thin. She strained her eyes until they stung, and then she held onto the edge of the grave and lowered herself to one knee on the narrow ridge beside the coffin. Still grasping the crumbling edge, she leaned precariously toward the coffin and lowered the flashlight until the lens was almost touching the circle of bright light on cracked dead ropy flesh. Nothing gleamed. There was no chain around Queenie’s neck.

  Hermione got down on both knees, her right knee resting on the rim of the coffin. With the casing of the flashlight she probed at the chest above the hands in case the chain had broken, leaving the locket concealed. When she was sure that the locket wasn’t there she continued to prod the corpse, more viciously now, to show that she knew she was being watched and didn’t care. She’d faced the worst, and it couldn’t harm her, it was only loathsome. She could even make out the watcher at the edge of her vision, a small pale shape beyond a grave to her left. She let her face take on all the contempt she was feeling, an unexpected rush of it that she could scarcely cope with, and then she raised her head and looked straight at the watcher.

  Her hand clenched on the wall of the grave, tearing loose a fistful of earth. The small figure who was watching her, and clinging to a granite cross as though it could barely support her, was Rowan.

  She looked ready to turn and flee if Hermione even spoke. Hermione was overwhelmed with shame and panic. She might have ducked out of sight if she’d thought Rowan hadn’t recognised her. Queenie had tricked them both, she realised with a fury that made her head swim: Queenie, who was Vicky, and who must be the shape that was moving at the edge of Hermione’s vision. But Vicky had miscalculated, she thought as she swung toward the movement, trying to focus on it. She’d strayed where Hermione could confront her in front of Rowan, and that might even show Rowan the truth.

  But the moving shape wasn’t Vicky, nor was it beside Rowan. It was much closer to Hermione, which was why she hadn’t been able to focus at once. It was a hand, a shrivelled hand piebald with earth. Though it was jerky as a puppet’s hand, it was able to close around the back of Hermione’s neck.

  She flinched convulsively away from its touch, and tried to scream as if that would help her twist out of reach. But a pain deep in her innards had sucked breath into her, pain that bowed her over herself and sent her sideways into the coffin. She was still gripping the flashlight, which thumped the lining of the coffin and showed her Queenie’s grinning head. The head was rising from its nest of hair.

  The hair stuck to the lining. It tore free of the grey scalp as the corpse sat up stiffly, a bald grinning doll with no eyes worth the name. Perhaps it was
mindless as a puppet, but its fleshless grin fell open in what might have been a soundless scream of triumph as it clasped its arms around Hermione’s neck and pressed its face against hers.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rowan didn’t ask the question until she was back at the main road. She followed Vicky down the flinty path between the trees that hid the lights. Vicky waited for her next to the splash of a streetlamp, but Rowan lingered just inside the gap between the hedges of the lit houses. “How do you know where my aunt is?” she said.

  Vicky put her hands on her hips and gazed expressionlessly at her. “I thought you trusted me.”

  “I do, but I still want to know things. You always seem to be where I am whenever I’d like you to be.”

  “Then you should be grateful, shouldn’t you?”

  “I’ve said I’ll be your friend, but I don’t like you knowing more than I do.”

  Vicky glared at her so harshly that Rowan almost retreated between the shivering hedges. For a moment she thought Vicky was about to say “How dare you speak to me like that?” or even “Don’t you know who I am?” She held her breath until her ears throbbed, and then Vicky’s face softened, her voice turned almost wheedling. “You could know everything I know if you’d trust me.”

  “I’ve told you, I do.”

  “You didn’t just now when we were on the hill. You were nearly home, you could feel you were. It would have been so easy to go on, I should have made sure it was, but instead you had to come back.”

  Rowan was lost. If all this was about the binoculars, she was beginning to feel they were more trouble than they were worth. “I thought you wanted to be there forever,” Vicky said.

  That made Rowan even sadder than she had been on the hill. “I did before,” she whispered, not wanting to be heard.

  “Before what, Rowan?”

  Rowan felt as if she weren’t being allowed to hide something she was ashamed of. “Before I heard mummy and daddy talking. They never wanted me.”

  “They had you because they were careless, you mean.”

  “I suppose so,” Rowan said, but Vicky’s eyes were telling her to go on. “I feel as if I’m making everything that’s going wrong for them worse, and I think they think so too.”

  Vicky beckoned her off the path, over the uncertain rim of the glow beneath the streetlamp. “Suppose you could always be with them and yet never be a problem?”

  Rowan felt betrayed. Vicky shouldn’t make her imagine such things, especially when Rowan had shared her worst secret with her. “I expect that’s what they’d like.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Suppose you could always stay the age you are now and never have to leave your house? Suppose you could always watch over your mother and father, be there waiting when they came home and never cost them a penny?”

  “Suppose we were in fairyland and dreams came true.”

  Rowan meant to be sarcastic, but Vicky’s eyes brightened. “That’s it exactly. It would be like dreaming your best dream, the one you always wanted to dream, except it would be real and never end.”

  Her eyes were so bright that Rowan felt as if, should she look away, she would see only darkness. It was like being unable to take the binoculars away from her eyes, this being surrounded by darkness with a single light ahead, except that the binoculars were on her chest, in her hands as she groped for something to hold on to. “That’s the ticket,” Vicky murmured. “Let’s go back where we were.”

  She was speaking so low that the words might have seeped into Rowan’s mind before she was aware of hearing them, if she hadn’t sensed how Vicky was concealing her impatience. Why should it be so urgently important to Vicky that they go up the hill? Rowan squeezed her eyes shut and kept them shut as long as she dared before she opened them. She was under the streetlamp on the empty road, along which a wind roared like an invisible bus. She was there, however flattened it seemed. “I want to go to Hermione,” she said.

  “Then you’ll get what you’re asking for, my dear.”

  Vicky turned her back on her at once, to head uphill. “She said she was going to the hotel,” Rowan protested.

  “That’s as may be. You still don’t trust me, but you will.”

  Rowan felt as if she had rejected something Vicky valued deeply, though she had no idea what it might be. If so, she had realised too late. Vicky was striding uphill like a parent daring a child not to follow—like the adult she increasingly resembled. Rowan followed, because if her aunt hadn’t told the truth she was even more anxious to see where Hermione was.

  She had to trot and sometimes to run, though even then she couldn’t quite catch up with Vicky. Shadows roamed the deserted road, and she promised herself that if Vicky led her much farther into the dark she would refuse to go on until she knew where they were bound for. She panted up the sloping pavement, and felt safer as she saw the church below. She felt safe until Vicky halted, one hand on the churchyard gate.

  She would have hoped her aunt was in the church, except that the church was dark. Even the church was less reassuring when she remembered the last time she’d seen her aunt in there, lurching at the coffin. Vicky put her finger to her expressionless lips, and then her mouth grew even thinner as she unlatched the gate.

  Rowan couldn’t hear the latch. Only her sight seemed to work. The willow stirred among the graves like a spider sensing its prey, and then it grew so motionless that it might have been petrified by the stillness of the stones. Rowan felt frozen too, for she’d glimpsed movement through the branches. A wide flat head on a thin neck had wavered out of the ground and lain down with a soft thump on the earth. It was a snake, she thought, a huge snake that had slithered out of a grave and might come writhing through the grass in search of her. Yet that seemed comfortingly unreal when she realised what she had actually seen: a spade. Someone had been digging a grave in the dark.

  Surely it wasn’t Hermione. She would rather Vicky were tricking her because Rowan had turned down whatever she was offering. But when at last she managed to turn away from straining her eyes, Vicky looked both pitying and accusing. “You asked me to bring you,” she said tonelessly, and opened the gate wider.

  Rowan could only step onto the gravel path. If her footsteps were half as heavy as they felt, they ought to be making enough noise to warn Hermione, give her the chance to bolt before Rowan had to see what she was doing—except that Rowan could barely hear her footsteps herself. When the willow was between her and the gaping earth, she stepped off the path onto the grass, and couldn’t hear herself at all. She felt diminished, outcast, hardly even there.

  She stole past the willow to a granite cross and hid behind it, clinging to it until her hands felt glued to it by frost. The binoculars stirred with each of her shaky breaths, and she gripped the cross harder in case she was tempted to use them. She could already see too much. She could see her aunt, stooping and straightening laboriously, stooping again in the glowing earth.

  She was picking objects from the grave and planting them beside the marble pillar that she’d dressed in her coat, as if for company. Rowan had a nightmarish impression that she was gardening, plucking pests out of the grave. Hermione dropped a last glint by the pillar and took hold of the flashlight that lay there. Its glow sank beneath the earth, and Hermione followed it. There was a silence that stopped Rowan’s breath, and then she heard a large soft thud in the grave, and a faint rain of earth.

  It seemed to shrink her until she was nothing but sight and hearing, helplessly aware. The glow of the flashlight hovered like mist in the open grave. As the willow flexed its branches, leggy shadows scuttled towards the grave, so purposefully that Rowan wanted to cry out a warning. Then her aunt straightened up in the trench.

  She had been digging for the locket, Rowan realised. She had a sudden dreadful suspicion that if Hermione saw her she would run to her with the chain she’d taken off the corpse and fix it around her neck. She had to flee, or at least hide behind the cross. But she was struggling to make he
r stony body move when Hermione raised her head and met Rowan’s eyes.

  It wasn’t only being seen that paralysed Rowan then, it was that her aunt looked at least as caught out as she felt herself. The embarrassment that flooded through Rowan and made her face blaze was her aunt’s as much as her own. It seemed that neither of them might ever move again, that they would stand there with the other statues while the wind shook the grass. Then Hermione turned her head, and seemed to clutch at the back of her neck with one hand. The next moment she ducked into the grave.

  The glow within the heaped earth wavered and steadied. The trench gaped silently under the pillar, where Hermione’s coat flailed its handless arms. Rowan tried to call out to Hermione to stop hiding: it was stupid, and it was frightening her. “Come out, I saw you,” she might croak, but her throat wouldn’t let out even a whisper. Anger and panic made her hands into fists on the cross. She shoved herself away from it and faltered toward the grave.

  Vicky was nowhere to be seen. Rowan both resented being left alone like this and was glad if Vicky hadn’t seen what her aunt was doing. She avoided the willow as she crossed the trembling grass and stepped gingerly onto the long thin heap of earth beside the grave. Her shoes sank into the heap as she leaned forward and looked into the trench.

  As soon as she saw what was there she felt as if she were falling into the dark. Hermione was lying in the coffin, whose white interior was spattered and stained with earth, a mass of fat white ridges that made Rowan think of the flesh of a grub. The flashlight lay close to Hermione’s face and shone pitilessly on her open eyes and mouth. Rowan willed her to blink, wished and then prayed that she would blink, until she couldn’t avoid seeing how slack and unresponsive Hermione’s face was. Hermione would never lie there if she knew that she was doing so. Her eyes were dead to the light, as she was.