The Overnight

by Ramsey Campbell

  He doesn't like wobbling on one leg while he gropes for the stair with the other foot. It must be the blind dark that makes him seem to have to stretch farther than he ought to need. He plants his heel as far back on the tread as there's space for, and slides his sweaty prickling hand down the banister, and lifts his other foot to hover above the oppressive depthless dark. It's just the night, he tries to tell himself—the same night in which Laura will be asleep, her face calm and still on the pillow, perhaps unconscious of a lock of hair that's tickling her cheek. The thought nerves him to shout at or into the dark. "I'm on the stairs now, Agnes. I won't be long."

  "Don't be."

  Her response sounds more distant than ever. Of course it's muffled by the wall. He wishes he could think how many steps lead to the delivery lobby: surely less than a couple of dozen. Since he's performing the identical action each time he clings to the banister and lets a foot sink into the blackness until it meets a stair, why isn't the process growing easier instead of seeming ever more dangerous? Perhaps that's because he didn't count the steps he has already taken, thus losing all sense of how far he has yet to descend. He could shout again to Agnes, but he's wary of discovering how remote she may sound. The edges of stairs scrape the backs of his ankles, and whenever a foot settles on a tread he feels as though he's leaning out too far over the blackness. He takes another wavering pace downwards that only the banister renders slightly less perilous—and then his fist closes on emptiness. Before he can catch his balance he flounders off the stair on which his left foot was supporting all his weight.

  He's staggering across the lobby to crash into a wall, unless he sprawls headlong on the concrete. He flings out his right hand so violently in search of anything to grab that the action throws him against the doors to the lift shaft, dealing his shoulder a bruise that may even outdo its twin. "It's me," the darkness suggests he ought to call. "It's Nigel. I'm here."

  "Where?"

  He almost wonders that himself, because her voice is farther beneath him than seems possible. She must be sitting down—on the pallet truck, no doubt. "Very close," he assures her as he feels for the edge from which the doors open on the shaft. He drags a gap wide enough to insert his fingers; at least, he struggles to. His fingers won't penetrate even as far as their nails. The doors might as well be a solid block of metal embedded in the wall.

  He hauls at them until the throbbing of his shoulders unites across his neck while waves of grey light surge into his eyes. He has the irrational notion that his inability to see what he's doing is the reason he's so useless. Why hasn't Ray fixed the fuses by now? How much longer will it take him? Nigel is wondering if he can shout loud enough for Ray to hear when he realises he shouldn't have to. He has nearly allowed the dark to get the better of his brain. There ought to be plenty of light within reach.

  He lets go of the unyielding door and closes his eyes until the waves of false illumination fade, and then he opens his eyelids a slit to peer across the blackness that's the lobby. There is indeed the thread of a glow under the delivery doors opposite the lift, although it's so thin he is barely convinced he's seeing it. "Hold on," he calls. "I've seen something I can do and then I'll be back."

  Agnes is silent. Perhaps she thinks it was stupid of him to tell her to hold on, which he supposes it was. He paces through the unseen lobby towards the promise of light and fastens his hands on the bar across the doors. It can't be as rusty as it feels; that must be the prickling of his fists. He flings all his weight against it and hears a shifting that someone less in control of himself might imagine was the sound of an eavesdropper retreating outside. Then the bar splits in two with an emphatic clank, and the doors swing so immediately wide that Nigel reels out of the building.

  He has let the light in. This should be all that matters, but he can't help wondering why it doesn't appear to be shining from above him. He turns to squint at the rear wall of the shops. The source of the illumination isn't above the giant X; the spotlight is smashed, and so is the one behind Happy Holidays. The whitish glow is at his back, and creeping closer, to judge by how his shadow that lies face down in the lobby is shrinking and blackening—shrinking as though it's desperate to conceal itself.

  He swings around to confront the luminous fog. A glow about the size of his head and more shapeless than globular blunders almost into the open before it either merges with the fog or sinks into the glistening tarmac. At once the lobby doors are pulled shut by their metal arms and lock with a triumphant clank, shutting him in not much more than darkness.

  He stumbles through the clinging chilly murk to fetch up against the doors. They're just as unresponsive as he feared. No amount of bruising alternate shoulders on them will move them. He could pound on them, but what effect would that have beyond distressing Agnes? It would take Angus far too long to find his way down to them. The fog or rather its inertia must be gathering in Nigel's brain, because he has to make an effort to remind himself that he can head for the front of the building. There'll be light as well as a way in.

  He has taken only a couple of steps between the dim walls—one of concrete, one of fog—when he notices there's light behind the bookshop too. It's more of the kind he encountered as he left the building. It dances lazily through the fog, making his shadow prance on the wall of the shop to keep him company. It would be more welcome if there weren't other signs of life in the fog. He can hear something else on the move, shuffling towards him while dragging a package that sounds worse than waterlogged. Indeed, the noise makes clear that there are two of whatever is approaching.

  He peers into the fog and glimpses movements. Although they're low on the tarmac, he doesn't think the intruders are crawling on hands and knees. They could owe their glistening greyness to the murk, but he can't maintain this as an explanation for their lack of shape. He stares at them until he distinguishes that the unstable packages they're dragging are themselves, and then he bolts for the alley between Texts and the holiday agency. The sight that greets him jerks him to a halt as though he has stepped deep in a marsh.

  Fog radiant with floodlights blocks the far end of the alley, but that isn't why his mind feels near to paralysis. He's no longer even slightly glad of the light. His shadow has thrown itself face down in the alley, and it's no longer alone. On either side of it a squat lumpy silhouette is expanding like a misshapen balloon, either creeping closer at his back or swelling up from the tarmac, unless they're doing both. For the moment they have nothing he would want to call heads, but they have at least one arm each, altogether too long in both cases, that they're stretching out to him.

  He daren't look. He can't even bear to see their increasingly malformed shadows. As he dashes into the alley he shuts his eyes tight, feeling like a child who's trying to believe he can hide in his personal dark. He has fled just a couple of steps when the shuffling converges swiftly on him. In a moment his fists are captured by appendages too cold and soft and uncertain of their shape to pass for hands.

  He can make no sound beyond a low choked wordless moan. His fingers writhe in a desperate attempt to pull free but only embed themselves up to their knuckles in the oozy substance. The sensation makes him unable to open his eyes; he squeezes them tighter as if that can drive away what feels like a nightmare born of his sleeplessness. He's trapped in his own night, where he no longer has a sense that Laura is anywhere he can reach. All he seems able to do is strive to retreat into it as digits or tendrils of various thicknesses slither like worms between his fingers. He's held fast by their engulfing clutch as his captors whirl him vertiginously round and round before scuffling away from the shop with him, into the pitiless dark. A solitary hope is left in his whirling brain, and he's past caring how desperate it is. It occupies so much of his mind that surely it has to be true. He hopes that by the time whatever is going to happen takes place, he will no longer be able to think.

  Agnes

  "Gee, I wish I knew what's happening to time around here," Woody uses the speakers to
remark, as if his voice isn't already overbearing enough. "He's what you need, right?"

  "Should be," Ray shouts.

  Of course he must be. He's a man, and on top of that he's Angus, than whom nobody on the staff is more anxious to please, however little self-respect it leaves him. If all they want to apply to the problem of Woody's door is brute force, no doubt he'll do as well as anyone. Agnes only wishes she could believe that the exchange wasn't meant for her to hear. If management have turned so petty and vindictive, she needn't let it affect her. She grabs handfuls of Gavin's books off the racks and slams them onto the trolley to deafen herself.

  It doesn't work. She can hear Woody saying "Maybe I should solve your other problem too"—the whole shop can. She isn't sure that isn't addressed to or aimed at her until he offers to count, and then she feels stupid for wondering. Now he's saying he needs someone's body, and she's glad to be out of reach of the suggestion, though he'd better realise he shouldn't dare make it to her. Perhaps on balance she's grateful to have been sent off by herself; she can't bring to mind anybody on the staff whose company she would welcome. If they aren't trying to prove they're entitled to tell people what to do, they're showing how small they are in some other way. Perhaps the best course for everyone would be to spend time by themselves.

  "One," Woody's pointlessly exaggerated voice announces, and Agnes is ready to propose that he might like to do without the phone when he does. She hears the start of an argument of some kind in the office, but amusing as it could well be, she won't indulge in eavesdropping. She loads the last few books there's space for onto the trolley and wheels it through the stockroom, past a muffled squeaking that she takes at first for mice. Polystyrene fragments are rubbing together under the mesh on the bin, she realises as she arrives at the lift and thumbs the button.

  "Lift opening," she's told at once as if it was waiting for her. The doors shrink aside, revealing the empty pallet truck, which barely leaves room for her and her cargo. Having manoeuvred the trolley in sideways, she squeezes between its end and the wall of the lift to poke the Down button. There's no point in struggling out again; at least Woody won't be audible in here. The lift gives her notice of its intentions and shuts her in just as she blurts "What did you say?"

  She's glad there's nobody to observe her being idiotic. The tape or whatever the lift uses to speak must be growing worn, however premature that seems. Of course it said "Lift closing," not "Still hoping." She finds it less easy to dismiss the impression that the lift itself feels worn out—that it's descending more slowly than usual. Perhaps she's fancying this because she's wedged in a space that would barely let her turn around if she had any reason to. She resents having to borrow an idea from Woody, but nobody will know. "One," she murmurs, and "Two" after pausing for a second, though she isn't sure whether she's timing the lift or occupying her mind so as not to feel at the mercy of the time the descent takes. "Three," she adds, "f—" Whatever word she might gasp retreats into her mouth, because the lift has jerked to a halt as though it has run out of cable. Instantly it fills with blackness.

  For rather more than a moment, during which she's unable to breathe, she begins to imagine that she has been engulfed by a medium more solid than a simple absence of light—that the lift has been flooded with black water. No doubt that's how quite a few of the staff would expect her and any of the women to react, which is why she isn't going to panic. Once she succeeds in drawing a breath she repeats it until it comes naturally, and then she runs her fingers over the cold metal wall to her left and level with her head. In certainly no more than a handful of seconds her forefinger locates the door to the compartment that houses the emergency phone. It must work even if the power to the lift has failed, otherwise what would be the point of it? She snaps the door open and gropes into the recess to find the receiver clinging to the wall. As she lifts it out, a worm as cold as midnight fog squirms over her bare forearm. It's only the cord of the phone, but her arm recoils and she almost drops the receiver. She seizes it with her other hand as well and is bearing it carefully towards her face when it says "Hello."

  It sounds almost too welcoming under the circumstances, and not unlike the voice of the lift. Both must have been chosen for their reassuring quality, of course. "Hello," Agnes feels bound to respond.

  "Hello."

  Her tone is more welcoming still; Agnes could almost find that mocking. She's close to being prompted to echo the greeting once more but understands how stupid that would be. Instead she says "I'm stuck in the lift."

  "We know."

  Did Agnes expect the phone to be answered from within the shop? She can't decide whether the opposite makes more sense or less. "The lift at Texts the bookshop," she says. "Where are you?"

  "Not far."

  "Can you let me out?"

  "Won't be long."

  Isn't the voice unnecessarily odd? Agnes could almost think it's on a tape that is slowing down. Certainly its pitch is dropping as if staying high involves too much effort. She tries to ignore the transformation, not least because she's alone in the blackness with it, and asks "What will you do?"

  "Doing it now."

  It can't be the same voice. The operator or whoever took the call must have transferred it to an engineer. While Agnes is sure a woman could perform his function quite as well, that isn't as important to her just now as it should be. "Don't you need to be here?" she protests.

  "What do you think?"

  "I wouldn't know, would I? I can't do your job."

  "You want me there."

  She won't pretend she's tempted. Either he has a frog in his throat, in which case it must be an especially monstrous specimen, or he believes that the lower he pitches his voice the more masculine he sounds. The most she cares to venture as a response is "Whatever it takes."

  "Done."

  He must be saying it is, even if he makes it sound as though they've reached some kind of agreement. "What is?" she feels she has more than the right to ask.

  "Wait."

  "There isn't much else I can do, is there? Maybe you don't realise I'm stuck in here in the dark."

  "Oh yes."

  She doesn't want to think she hears relish in that. "I want you to tell me what you're doing," she says. "I still don't know where I'm speaking to. I don't even know your name."

  For a moment she imagines that the earpiece has become clogged with mud, because the slow thick laughter sounds like bubbles in that substance. Apparently he has no words left, but that needn't rob Agnes of hers. He sounds like a sadistic adult trying to frighten a child in the dark, and she knows at once that he has to be in the shop. So does the woman who answered her call, which means that at least two of her supposed colleagues dislike Agnes enough to be mindlessly vindictive. If she let herself she could imagine it was everyone. "You know something," she says as the receiver falls eagerly silent, "I don't know who you are or your friend either. If you look like you sound I'm glad it's dark."

  She has allowed herself to be provoked into saying too much. Half of it would have made twice the point. She swings the receiver away from her, and it meets the wall of the lift with a clang she hopes is agony for anyone who's listening. She's happy to make a noise with it in the process of locating its niche inside the compartment and fitting it in. As she slams the panel she vows that once she's out of the lift she'll learn who played the trick. She leans towards the doors and cups her hands around her mouth. "Can anyone hear me?" she shouts. "Angus? Nigel? Ray? I'm in the lift."

  Too much of her voice is trapped by the doors. She feels it or her breath fluttering insect-like between her hands. She tilts her head back to shout "Anyone?" and then presses her ear against the door, which seems to shift restlessly with her anticipation. She's just able to hear Ray calling "Agnes, was that you?"

  The way he can't be bothered to pronounce her name aggravates her sense of being singled out for general dislike. If she didn't answer she would feel worse than stupid, but she has to make an effort. "I'm
in the lift. It's stuck."

  He's silent for so long that she's beginning to wonder if he didn't hear or doesn't care when he shouts "Someone's coming in a minute, Agnes."

  She mustn't start imagining he feels the need to put more distance between them as they talk. He has moved away to deal with another task; that's why he sounds increasingly remote. Now there's silence, but however long it lasts she won't give anyone the notion that she's panicking by calling out again. Once she has succeeded in reminding herself that she's surrounded by a lift's worth of air, however cramped a space she's wedged in, she's able to take deep slow breaths while she tries to make the blackness that's glued to her eyes part of the calm she's striving to achieve. After all, she's in the midst of stillness, or is it stealth? Is the lift creeping downwards so gradually that she may well be imagining the surreptitious movement? She's holding herself immobile, even her breath, in an attempt to determine whether the cage is lowering itself like a massive spider when Woody's huge but muffled voice declares "No need to call it quits down there. No need to call it a day. You can see better than us."

  Is he so mistaken that he's saying this to Agnes? Of course it must mean the lights have failed elsewhere in the building, which is why nobody has reached her yet, not because they don't think she's worth reaching. Such reassurance as that offers is undermined by the way she's almost certain Woody's voice retreated fractionally above her while he spoke. She scrabbles at the gap between the doors and succeeds in parting them about an inch, which admits only blackness and a dank chill, unless there's a faint stagnant stench. She tries to slip her fingers through the gap but is unable to hold it open with one hand long enough to touch the wall of the shaft and judge if there's movement. She's afraid of trapping her hand, and snatches it back. The doors thud shut as a voice leaps down at her. "Agnes, it's Nigel. Are you all right?"

  If he's also in the dark he has more important things on which to concentrate than the pronunciation of her name. She takes a breath so that her shout won't falter. "I don't know where I am."