The Influence

by Ramsey Campbell

  Would it dream? She wondered if the nightmare she’d had to struggle through in order to return had been Vicky’s or her own, or a tangle of both. That confusion made her feel in danger of drifting back into the nightmare, until she concentrated on the house and made herself think of nothing else. Hours passed, and the sleet became thin icy rain. Lights climbed the house, bedrooms lit and were extinguished, and then the house was dark except for the lamps in the hallways.

  Now that all the family must be falling asleep, the house no longer seemed to have sufficient presence for her to hold onto. She wanted to be inside, not cast out in the night that could turn into nightmare. She went to the porch door and gazed through the small latticed panes. Beyond them and the window of the inner door was the silvery hall, where suddenly she yearned to be. Her surge of yearning was stronger than her fear of making her way in. The next moment, easily as dreaming, she was in the hall.

  The way the house felt came as a shock: old and stale, however new it looked. The silvery wallpaper on either side of her, and the new plaster on the staircase wall, were no more convincing than chalk sketches, already fading from the bricks. She didn’t like the way the darkness of the house seemed to reach for her through the lamplit halls, but she was more afraid of the night outside. At least the dark here was familiar. She let herself go effortlessly to the stairs, and up.

  She would have enjoyed the lack of effort if she had been dreaming, but it made reality feel slippery, made her feel closer to the darkness underlying the new paper and plaster. She settled on the first landing and gazed along the hall towards the room where her mother and father were. Another remnant of emotion flared in her. She wanted a last sight of them to take with her into the dark.

  As soon as she thought of it, she was passing along the hall. She faltered by the door of the room that had been hers. Someone, presumably her mother, had left the door ajar. A dull helpless resentment and a compulsion to see what her enemy looked like in her sleep took her to the gap.

  It was almost like seeing herself dead. Her still face was upturned on the pillow, the blankets were humped over her clasped hands. Only the slow rise and fall of the bedclothes showed that her body was alive. Rowan gazed at it until she felt she had forgotten how to move, until she began to feel trapped not by watching but by being watched. She felt as if her body had become the lair of the hidden ageing of the house. She was reminded of the shrunken thing she’d seen in the grave and afterwards; she felt as if it had become so shrunken that it could hide inside her body. The idea frightened her so much that it released her, and she fled to her parents’ room.

  Their door was ajar too. Rowan hesitated on the threshold; she didn’t feel welcome enough to go in. Her parents were in bed, their backs to her. Her mother was closer to the door, one arm around Rowan’s father, her face against his shoulder. Rowan watched them for a long time and hoped they felt safe in their dreams. She watched until she felt sure of remembering how they looked just then, together and untroubled. Perhaps dreaming of them in the dark would be like being with them. She ought to go up now, while the sight of them had made her feel peaceful. She was withdrawing from the doorway, lingering over her last sight of them, when her mother stirred restlessly. She let go of Rowan’s father and turned towards the hall.

  For a moment Rowan thought her mother was aware of her—that perhaps she was able to sense her because she was asleep. She shrank back until she realised that despite having moved, her mother was too deeply asleep to be aware of anything. Peace on Earth, Rowan thought with vague contentment, and then the sight of her mother seemed to lurch towards her as she saw how much older her mother looked.

  She hadn’t looked so old while she was awake, but she couldn’t pretend in her sleep. She’d aged while Rowan was away, not by the months Rowan had taken to come back but by years. Her face looked pinched and lined and starved of colour, as if worry had dragged at it until the skin wore threadbare. Rowan wished she could give her just one kiss on the forehead to get rid of the lines that would always be there now, but what was the use of wishing? At least her parents had each other, and they would look after each other—but they couldn’t keep each other safe when they didn’t even know that their child was no longer their child.

  Her father turned just then, groping blindly for her mother until his arm bent round her. The two sleeping faces lay on the pillows, aware of nothing outside themselves. Her father’s wasn’t as drawn as her mother’s, but both seemed dreadfully vulnerable, at the mercy of the thing that was hiding inside Rowan’s body. She couldn’t bear to leave them like this. Somehow she had to waken them.

  At once she was in the room, having slipped through the gap between door and frame without needing to sidle. This was the room she’d crept into during their first nights in the house, whose chilly emptiness had troubled her sleep. She’d snuggled between her parents and hidden from the huge dark. They had let her do that instead of telling her she was too old to be scared of the dark, and the memory made her feel closer to them, a closeness that ached. Might she even reach them while she felt like this? She went like a leaf on a wind toward the bed. She was almost there when she caught sight of the dressing-table mirror. The bed and her parents and the stretch of carpet leading to the door were in the mirror, but there was no sign of her.

  That snatched away the last of her sense of herself. She was shrinking like a picture on a television that had just been switched off, she was being dragged toward a pinpoint by the nothingness on the far side, and the smaller she grew, the less strength she had to resist. There was nothing to hold her, nothing to contradict the absence of herself the mirror was displaying with a cold glassy glare like ice that was fixing her absence forever.

  Then her parents stirred again. They moved apart and lay on their backs, their faces slack. They looked even more helpless, each of them alone in sleep. At least the dismay that seized her managed to hold her there in the room. She turned away from the mirror, blotted it out of her awareness, and tried to feel as if she were leaning rather than sinking bodilessly towards the bed. She was so close to her mother that she could see how dry her slightly parted lips were, how they trembled minutely with each breath. She could see veins sketched on her mother’s forehead, under the skin that looked fragile and worn. Behind the long eyelashes her mother’s eyelids looked bruised, and uneasy with a dream; a drop of moisture glistened at one corner. Rowan was suddenly desperate to hold her and be held. Without thinking, she stooped to kiss her mother’s lips.

  She jerked back just in time from the imminent sensation of falling and being unable to stop. Why was there so little of her, when Vicky had seemed so real? She mustn’t give in to the sense of being outcast and bodiless. All she had to do was make her parents realise she was here, because then they must know that the creature they had taken for her was something else.

  But when she tried to call out to them she couldn’t even hear herself. She tried to feel that she was standing by the bed instead of hovering beside it, in case that allowed her to reach out and touch them, but that didn’t work; she wasn’t even able to judge how close she was, since she couldn’t see herself reaching. If she touched her mother, she might sink into her. The idea seemed warm and comforting, almost unbearably so, but it wouldn’t keep her mother safe. She tried to scream at her parents and her helplessness instead, scream at her parents to waken while she was still there.

  Trying to scream only made her more aware that she no longer had a mouth. She could feel the mirror reaching coldly for her, the nothingness beyond the mirror waiting to draw her in. She tried to hold onto the sight of the lit room that used to be her refuge. She remembered snuggling between her parents under the blankets and murmuring to her mother, who was always the one who wakened. “It’s me, mummy. Can I stay with you tonight? It’s too dark out there. I’m frightened.” The memory was achingly intense, so intense that she could hear her own voice in her mind, the voice she hadn’t heard for so long. “It’s me, mummy. It’
s only me.”

  And then her mother’s face turned towards her, eyes flickering within the eyelids as if they were fighting to see. Her mother’s hands struggled out of the blankets and groped clumsily toward her. “Oh, Rowan, it is you, isn’t it?” she said in a voice clogged by sleep. “I thought I was going mad.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  On Boxing Day the family went for a stroll by the sea. The day was piercingly clear. The dunes were still pockmarked by yesterday’s sleet, but the sea had drawn into itself all the pools the downpour had left on the beach. A few distant ships glinted beneath the cold bright blue sky from which seagulls fell like shards of ice. The men and Rowan led the way along the concrete promenade while Edith held onto Alison’s arm and chatted about old times, the days she and Keith had spent across the river at New Brighton when there had been a pier and a fairground and a tower, when there had been a ferry to bring them back to Liverpool and the overhead railway along the dock road. “Happy days,” she sighed, and Alison nodded and murmured agreement and stared ahead, barely hearing her mother. Perhaps she had been right in the first place about herself, perhaps she’d told herself the truth last night on the edge of wakefulness. Perhaps she really was going mad.

  She gazed at Rowan’s back and winced from her own feelings. The child was wearing the long dress Keith and Edith had bought her for Christmas, its hem swaying beneath her duffel coat. She was holding her father’s hand and Keith’s, and strolling gracefully. The combination of elegance and childishness made Alison’s eyes moist, but did she deserve to feel that way? Suppose Derek had been right, and there was madness in the family, surfacing in her because she hadn’t been able to cope with her fears while Rowan was lost in Wales? Perhaps she had been so riddled with the fear that Rowan might be dead that she was secretly unable to believe she had come back—but there could be no excuse for her suspecting her own child.

  Yet she couldn’t dismiss what she’d thought she had heard last night and what she had certainly seen. She’d heard Rowan calling her, sounding more like Rowan than she had for months, and the child had seemed so close that Alison had wondered why she was unable to touch her. She’d felt a surge of love for Rowan as intense as when Rowan had first been laid in her arms, and she’d murmured to her, welcoming her back as she blinked away sleep and opened her eyes. She had been so convinced she would see Rowan that the deserted room had looked like a dream from which she had yet to waken. The room had been real enough to make her eyes sting as she stared at it, and she’d been telling herself sadly that Rowan’s voice had been the dream when she’d heard it again. “It’s me, mummy. It’s me.”

  Could it have been the last trace of a dream? She’d waited breathlessly to hear it again, until she’d realised that she felt as if Rowan were still calling her from beyond the door. Carefully, so as not to waken Derek, Alison had slipped out of bed and tiptoed to Rowan’s room.

  When she’d eased the door open she had been ready to sit with Rowan, to talk her back to sleep. Just then there had been nothing she would rather do, for she’d realised what she had missed most since the child had come back: feeling as if Rowan needed her, even a little. But there was Rowan, lying quite still and untroubled, and at first Alison hadn’t understood why the sight had made her quail. Then she had realised what she was seeing, and she’d dug her knuckles into her mouth. Rowan had been lying in precisely the position she’d assumed when Alison had tucked her up in bed, hours earlier.

  That wasn’t like any child asleep, let alone like Rowan. She had been lying like a corpse—like Queenie’s corpse. Alison had hung onto the doorframe for support, gripping it until she’d thought she felt it shift. The notion that the child in the bed wasn’t Rowan, whatever she looked like, had seemed to illuminate the last few months with a clarity that made Alison’s mind feel seared. She’d pushed herself away from the doorway at last and had crept into bed as if she could hide from her thoughts, telling herself that it was just the night that was telling her storeys, that she couldn’t think such things in daylight. But she had, and she’d been watching Rowan all day, waiting for proof.

  She wanted to be proved wrong, she told herself. She wanted someone to catch her watching and ask why, and tell her how absurd she was being when she owned up. They’d tell her she was worse than Hermione for wondering why Rowan no longer let anyone see her naked: didn’t she want the child to grow up? If Rowan seemed increasingly like Queenie, that must mean she’d needed her hereditary wilfulness to help her cope with that night in Wales. Good riddance to Vicky who Hermione had thought was Queenie, and what did it matter where she’d gone? What was Alison trying to suggest that she didn’t dare put into words? Out here in the sunlight, where the shadows of the nursing homes pointed at her, Alison felt exposed to herself. That was Rowan ahead of her, and any other notion was grotesque; where else did she think the child could be—in the empty sky, on the stained dunes, in the shallow waves that plucked at the beach? Thinking that made her feel disloyal, cruel, more confused than ever.

  When her mother grasped her arm more firmly Alison grew tense, waiting for her to demand what was wrong. But her mother said “Step out a bit and let’s catch them up. We’ll have them thinking we’re past it.”

  Rowan and the men were nearly at the houses that marked the end of the promenade, where they would have either to turn back or continue along the beach. Suddenly Alison thought how she could prove herself wrong, and she was about to tell Edith when, for no apparent reason, Rowan and the men stopped short of the houses.

  The day seemed to freeze around Alison as if it had become a photograph, pitilessly bright and unchallengeable. She was certain she’d seen Rowan halt the men. Rowan had stiffened as if she knew without looking back that Alison was about to speak—as if she knew what Alison would say. Alison swallowed dryly and stammered “Actually, I’m getting a headache. You catch them up and I’ll go back.”

  She spoke so that only Edith could hear, and stared at Rowan’s back. Her heart shuddered then, for Rowan turned at once, her face blank, and tugged at Keith’s hand. “What’s the problem?” he called.

  “Alison’s off home to nurse her head. I’ll walk along with you if you give me the chance.”

  “We’ll all go back,” Derek said, and Alison was sure that Rowan was tugging his hand. “You shouldn’t have let us tire you out, Edith. We aren’t all as young as our Rowan.”

  Rowan’s face stayed blank. Alison thought of a mask behind which a puppeteer was hiding while she worked the men. That seemed crazier than ever, but surely that meant she needed to be away from Rowan, to sort out her thoughts if she could. “My mother isn’t tired, she wants to carry on, don’t you?” Alison pleaded. “I won’t be able to relax if I think I’ve spoiled your walk. At least you take Rowan a bit further, Derek. She needs the exercise after being inside for so long.”

  “We’ll go on at least a little further,” Edith said. “You deserve a rest before you go back to work.”

  Alison hugged her and let go immediately, in case Edith sensed that something was wrong. As she swung toward the house, her head began to ache. She took a dozen steps and glanced over her shoulder. The others were strolling down to the beach. Just as she glanced at them, Rowan looked back at her. Her face was too distant to be read, but Alison felt discovered, shamefaced, more paranoid than ever. She urged herself home, almost running.

  The promenade was deserted. A breeze slashed across the dunes and seemed to sprinkle her legs with sand and ice. Ripples like cracks spread across the fringe of the sea. There was no other movement near her, and she felt alone and deluded, robbed of her child by her own doubts. The glare of sea and sand and concrete pierced her eyes, but she mustn’t just lie down when she reached the house: she might be able to show herself the truth.

  She slid her key into the lock and drew a breath that made her head swim. She turned the key, which numbed her fingers, and pushed the front door inwards. She stepped across the threshold and halted, gripping the
edge of the door.

  The house wasn’t empty. Rowan was there, washing dishes in the kitchen or tidying her room, writing notes for her parents to find, reading so quietly that you mightn’t know where she was until you heard her laugh. If all this was just a memory, it felt like a presence Alison had failed to be aware of. It felt as though Rowan had been with her all the way along the promenade, hoping to be noticed when they were alone. Closing the door behind her, Alison paced along the hall.

  The sight of the deserted rooms didn’t make her feel closer to Rowan, nor did the smell of stale books that lingered in the house—but she had something that would. She ran upstairs to her bedroom and rummaged in her handbag for the note. Dear mummy and daddy, I love you and I realy dont mind if you dont buy me things becose you cant aford them… It was her last link with Rowan as she used to be. She blinked fiercely as her vision blurred. The note should help her see the truth.

  She was at Rowan’s door when she had the panicky notion that Rowan was already home and waiting for her, the new contemptuous, watchful Rowan. She flung the door open and stalked in, appalled to feel she was venturing into a lair. She hurried to the window and pushed up the staggery sash, in the hope that she would hear when the family was close, and then she began to search.

  She found the diary almost at the bottom of a pile of books. All the spines were turned to the wall. It seemed a cunning way to hide the diary without appearing to do so, she thought, and heard her paranoia like a shrill whisper in her head. Much as she’d wanted to read what Rowan might have written about her last night in Wales, she had never asked; she would never have considered reading the diary without asking—but if it could prove her wrong, surely she mustn’t hesitate.