He had to force himself to step into the top corridor. He was terrified to find out why Rowan hadn’t made a sound since he had entered the house. When a board creaked beneath him, he flinched and froze there, one foot raised—and then Alison pleaded “Rowan, come on” beyond the door. However much noise he might have made on his way up, it seemed she would have been too preoccupied to hear. All he could do was pace to the door of Queenie’s room and push it open.
Alison was kneeling on the bare floor near the window. One arm cradled Rowan’s shoulders while she stroked the child’s forehead and peered at her closed eyes in the faint light that seeped out of the sky. Nothing else moved except her hair and Rowan’s as a thin chill breeze whined at the broken window. “Rowan?” she said with a kind of hopeless gentleness, her voice rising and breaking. “Rowan?”
Derek stumbled into the room. “Ali, what—what’s happened?”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to ask what she’d done, but her expression when she looked at him told him that he might as well have asked. Her mouth was trembling wordlessly, her eyes sparkled darkly with tears. He should have taken more care of her and Rowan, he thought numbly: he should have known sooner that things were going wrong between them. When he trudged forward, Alison clutched Rowan to her as if he meant to take the child.
He tried to tell her with his eyes that she could rely on him, not to dodge away from him as he was afraid she meant to, though he felt as if he might begin at any moment to shiver uncontrollably. Everything dismayed him, even the dark at the window; the window seemed more like the mouth of a tunnel. He fell to his knees beside Alison and held out his hands to her. She mustn’t close him out now, that would be worst of all. Surely she would either take his hands or give him the child, and couldn’t she be mistaken in her hopelessness even if she was a nurse?
She didn’t take his hands, but she leaned towards him as if she were giving way under her burden. He’d support her whatever she’d done, he vowed, because he loved her and because it must be his fault too. He wished they had never come to this uncaring house; it had helped cut them off from each other. Then Alison jerked away from him.
“Don’t, Ali,” he pleaded, but she didn’t hear him. She was gazing into Rowan’s face, lifting the child’s head and stroking her hair that shivered in the chill wind. The tunnel whose mouth was the window seemed longer and darker than ever. The pale blur hovering out there must be a bird, like a vulture, he thought agonisingly. He hadn’t time to look, he must get through to Alison, even if it meant acknowledging that the movement she imagined she’d sensed had only been the wind in Rowan’s hair. “Ali,” he murmured, “look at me, love, I’m here,” his body growing tense when her gaze didn’t leave Rowan’s face, which looked more still than sleep. He would have to let out the cry that was gathering inside him, because otherwise he would seize Rowan, anything to break the spell of not admitting the worst. He reached out again, his legs trembling with cramp. “She’s my child too,” he was going to cry out, and he had no idea what would happen when he did.
Then he heard a whisper. “It’s all right,” it said, and he froze despite the pain in his legs. It was Rowan’s voice.
He thought it was only in his head, even when Alison stooped closer to Rowan, cradling her head and kissing her closed eyes, murmuring her name urgently. “Don’t, Ali,” he muttered, desperate to stop her before his heart broke at the sight of her forlorn hope, “can’t you see—” And then Rowan’s eyelids fluttered, and she blinked up at her mother as though she was unable to focus. “I’m all right, mummy,” she said.
Alison reared up, almost dropping the child. She was drawing back, but only to be sure what she was seeing. She gazed at Rowan’s uncertain smile and cloudy eyes, then she hugged her so tight Derek was afraid she would bruise her. “Oh, Rowan,” she said shakily, “Don’t ever make me feel like that again.”
“Don’t worry, mummy, I never will,” Rowan promised, and the two of them burst out laughing and weeping as they clung to each other. They seemed hardly to notice when Derek struggled to his feet, rubbing his thighs. He couldn’t help resenting having been made to suffer such anxiety for apparently no reason—or were they trying to convince him there hadn’t been one? A movement at the window drew his gaze there, just as the pale watching shape dwindled out of sight down the tunnel that he could see now was the sunless sky. He’d never known a bird to be so swift, but the broken window was more important than a bird, and needed explaining. “Is someone going to tell me what’s been happening?” he demanded.
The two of them looked up at him. Rowan got to her feet as if she had to remember how, stretching out her hand until he helped her up. She closed her eyes and nestled against him. She hadn’t for months, he realised, and felt she was thinking that too. “It was Vicky,” she said slowly. “She’s gone now. She won’t come back.”
He stared at Alison as she wavered to her feet. “What was?”
“The window,” Rowan told him. “She broke it when mummy said I mustn’t see her again, and then she pushed me over so hard I bumped my head, and then she ran away.”
He was still waiting for Alison to speak. “I don’t get any of this,” he said. “Jo came to tell me you’d got Rowan. We couldn’t understand why you’d come home from work.”
She glanced at Rowan, and an understanding that he couldn’t grasp seemed to flash between them before she looked at him. “I saw Vicky hanging round near here when I was on my way to the hospital. I knew she’d be trying to approach Rowan again, which I don’t think you’d have wanted either, and so I came back.” Her voice was almost steady now, and so was the plea in her eyes. “Besides, it was time to have it out with Rowan about her.”
“And while we were talking Vicky came and wouldn’t go until mummy made her,” Rowan said. “She was why I’ve been so nasty all these weeks. She kept being with me and you never knew. There’s just me now, though. You still love me, don’t you?”
“Of course we do, babe.” Yet he felt that questions he should ask were slipping away from him in the dimness. “Where does the little bitch live?”
“I can’t tell you, daddy. I never knew. I’ll tell you if ever I see her again, but I’m sure I won’t.” She lifted her face and gave him a wide-eyed look he couldn’t glance away from. “Aren’t you going to cuddle mummy as well?”
Questions squirmed in his head, but they seemed shameful now she was gazing at him. He took a long breath and gave up. If Rowan trusted her mother as she obviously did, how could he do otherwise? He reached for Alison almost blindly. “Come here, Ali, if you can still put up with me. I don’t know what went wrong with us.”
“Vicky did,” Alison said fiercely and, leaning against him as if she were near to fainting, put her arms around him and Rowan. They stayed like that long enough for a knife-edge of blue sky to lever up the lid of cloud across the bay. As the room began to lighten he looked down at Rowan, and was still searching for an injury when she glanced up at him. “Daddy, will you let me come and watch you work again sometimes? I won’t be in any danger really, will I?”
More than anything else, that made him feel she was herself again. “I wouldn’t ever let you or mummy be.”
“You’ll have another job to do when you’ve finished at the school,” Alison said unevenly, hugging them tighter than ever. “I’m afraid the lights on this floor have gone up the spout again.” She shuddered, and at first he didn’t realise she was laughing, so helplessly she had to struggle to make a sound. The sky opened above the sea, and Rowan started giggling too. The afternoon light seemed to reach for them, and Derek relinquished the last of his unanswered questions. Without the least idea why or any need to know, he began to laugh until he cried.
Epilogue
They moved on a Saturday in May. Rowan went to the edge of the dunes for a last look while the men were loading the furniture into the van. Shoals of sunlight basked on the rippling water beneath the cloudless sky. Wales stretched along half the hor
izon, a green serpent scaly with cottages. Ships seemed to sail past only inches from the dunes, and their names felt like voyages to her: Tamathal, Knud Tholstrup, Essi Silje, Atlantic Compass… A Russian ship with several of the letters in its name turned backwards glided by, and she remembered the endless night in Wales, when she had been unable to read anything. She hurried back to her mother and father, away from the whisper of sea and windblown sand.
She wouldn’t be sorry to leave here after all. None of the children played much with her, because of the way she must have seemed to them before Christmas. Miss Frith was disappointed in her and felt she wasn’t trying, since she had been spelling perfectly last term. Mummy knew why, and daddy felt it was part of what she’d been through: he said he’d rather have her like herself even if she had to learn all over again to spell. They knew she was trying. Only her mother knew that she’d thrown away last year’s diary, with the entries that looked as if an impatient teacher had been showing her how to spell but in Rowan’s own handwriting. Rowan had no longer been sure whose diary it was.
Mummy knew what had happened. Perhaps that was why they never talked about it, or perhaps she was waiting for Rowan to be old enough to want to; perhaps she was even embarrassed that Rowan had had to lie on her behalf, though Rowan thought that doing so on behalf of someone else might be part of growing up. It made her feel protective of her parents. Just now she was glad she was still a child and able to rely on their protection, though the years during which she would be a child seemed like almost no time at all.
The van was loaded. Her father had been helping the men, and now he was sharing coffee from their vacuum flask. “Mummy’s checking the house if you want a last look,” he told her, “and then wagons roll.”
Her mother was coming downstairs as Rowan trotted along the leafy hall. “Ready for the adventure?” she said with a smile that wavered as she reached out gingerly, almost automatically, to touch Rowan’s throat. She hadn’t forgiven herself for that, though it had never hurt much: Rowan had only been bothered in case her father might have noticed that at first she’d found it hard to speak. She took her mother’s hand and moved it up from her throat to her cheek. “Please may I say goodbye to my room?”
“Of course you may.” As they passed on the stairs she added “Just don’t be long, or I’ll come to find you.”
Rowan ran to the middle floor and glanced into her bedroom. It was bare and unfamiliar, and looked much dustier now that there was no furniture for dust to hide behind. Only the view of the bay remained, and she shed a tear for that before she tiptoed quickly up to the top floor.
She wasn’t sure why she needed to go there. As she stepped into the central passage she felt almost as frightened as she had in the weeks after Christmas, when falling asleep had felt like falling out of her body into the waiting dark. She’d taken refuge in her parents’ bed for weeks before she’d felt safe enough to sleep by herself. Surely she was safe now: her mother was downstairs and within hearing. She ventured along the stale corridor where sunlight never reached, and pushed open Queenie’s door.
There seemed to be nothing to make her afraid, nothing to explain why her whole body seemed to shrink around the sudden pounding of her heart. The room was bare, and nothing moved except a tanker and the seagulls in its wake beyond the window. Yet she could feel how short-lived all this was, how if she gazed for long into the room it would turn into the mouth of a tunnel that led to the dark. She closed her eyes and, groping for the handle, shut the door tight.
She’d come up here as if that would tell her what had happened last time she had, but she was as uncertain as ever. Had her mother been able to drive Queenie out because the old woman had turned herself back into a child, or had Queenie relented at the end and let Rowan return? If she had gone to look for her father again, mightn’t she find him this time or at least believe she had, since she deserved to? All Rowan knew was that when her mother had let go of her throat she hadn’t known where she was: she had been falling out of the sight of her own body in her mother’s arms into darkness, falling as if she would never stop, except that the fall had ended inside her body, a life-size weight she’d had to learn to move, to see out of and to make speak. In the instant of returning she’d sensed Queenie soaring away into the dark, Queenie’s dark—and it had taken her months to realise that if that bare scoured dark was Queenie’s, the place Rowan had passed through in her efforts to come home must have been her own.
Things could change, she told herself. The house would soon be a nursing home, where people like Queenie would be cared for, made to feel less lonely, she hoped. She was beginning to think she might like to do that kind of work herself. Whatever was waiting at the end of her life, surely it needn’t be what she had already gone through, unless she gave in to the fear that it would. She opened her eyes and ran downstairs, and breathed easier once her surroundings felt less flat, more real.
As her mother’s car turned in the shadow of Queenie’s house, the shadow seemed to gape like a long pit in the road. Then they were in the sunlight and following the van, and the sight of Jo and her children waving goodbye dwindled. As soon as Rowan finished waving she clasped her hands together to make herself feel she was still holding onto her mother and father. The last thing she heard in the road was the sound of the waves beyond the house, so distant that she might have been hearing them in a shell, the thin blue shell of the sky. The car turned out of Queenie’s road towards the future, and she whispered “I’ll never come back.”
About the Author
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know and The Kind Folk. Forthcoming is Bad Thoughts. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.
Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
Look for these titles by Ramsey Campbell
Now Available:
Dark Companions
The Seven Days of Cain
Ancient Images
Obsession
The Hungry Moon
Coming Soon:
The Nameless
A lost horror film holds the key to terrifying secrets.
Ancient Images
© 1989 by Ramsey Campbell
The legends have persisted for decades of a lost horror film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi that was never released. Rumor has it that, for reasons long forgotten, powerful forces suppressed the film and burned all known prints. Nobody now living has seen the finished film. But that might no longer be true…
Film researcher Sandy Allan is invited to a screening of a newly-discovered sole-surviving print, but then the film disappears and the real horror begins. Sandy’s search for the film leads her to Redfield, a rural community known its rich soil, fertilized by blood from an ancient massacre. But Redfield guards its secrets closely, with good reason. During every step of her search, Sandy is watched, shadowed by strange figures. Is it paranoia, or is someone—or something—determined to keep the lost film and the secrets it reveals buried forever?
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Enjoy the following excerpt for Ancient Images:
At last the pain became unbearable, but not for long. Through the haze that wavered about her she thought she saw the fields and the spectators dancing in celebration of her pain. She was surrounded by folk she’d known all her life, oldsters who had bounced her on their knees when she was little and people of her own age she had played with then, but now their faces were as evilly gleeful as the gargoyles on the chapel beyond them. They were jeering at her and holding their children up to see, sitting children on their shoulders so that they were set almost as high as she was. Her streaming eyes blinked at the faces bunched below her. As she tried to see her husband she was praying that he would come and cut her down before the pain grew worse.
She couldn’t see him, and she couldn’t cry out to him. Someone had driven a gag into her mouth, so deep that the rusty taste of it was choking her. She couldn’t even pray aloud to God to numb her awareness of her bruised tongue that was swollen between her back teeth. Then her senses that were struggling to flee what had been done to her returned, and she remembered that there was no gag, remembered why it couldn’t be her tongue that felt like a mouthful of coals whose fire was eating its way through her skull.
For an instant her mind shrank beyond the reach of her plight, and she remembered everything. Her husband wouldn’t save her, even if she were able to call out his name instead of emitting the bovine moan that sounded nothing like her voice. He was dead, and she had seen the devil that had killed him. Everyone below her, relishing her fate, believed that she was being put to death for murdering him, but one man knew better—knew enough to have her tongue torn out while making it appear that he was simply applying the law.
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