I was concentrating mostly on the path when it brought me alongside the streetlamp. Opposite the ground where the demolished house had been, the glare was so unnaturally pale that it reduced the trees and shrubs and other vegetation to black and white. A stretch of ferns and their shadows beside the path looked more monochrome than alive or real. My shadow ventured past the lamp before I did, and jerked nervously over a discoloured mosaic of dead leaves as I turned my back on the site of the house. Now that the light wasn’t in my eyes I could walk faster, even if details of the woods tried to snag my attention: a circular patch of yellowish lichen on a log, lichen so intricate that it resembled embroidery; the vertical pattern on a tree trunk, lines thin and straight as pinstripes; a tangle of branches that put me in mind of collapsed shelves; a fractured branch protruding like a chair arm from a seat in a hollow tree with blanched ferns growing inside the hollow. None of this managed to halt me. It was a glimpse of a face in the darkness that did.
As a shiver held me where I was I saw that the face was peering out of the depths of a bush. It was on the side of the path that was further from Copse View, and some yards away from my route. I was trying to nerve myself to sprint past it when I realised why the face wasn’t moving; it was on a piece of litter caught in the bush. I took a step that tried to be casual, and then I faltered again. It wasn’t on a piece of paper as I’d thought. It was the queen’s portrait on a plate.
At once I felt surrounded by the deserted house or its remains. I swung around to make sure the waste ground was still deserted—that the woods were. Then I stumbled backwards away from the streetlamp and almost sprawled into the undergrowth. No more than half a dozen paces away—perhaps fewer—a figure was leaning on its sticks in the middle of the path.
It was outlined more than illuminated by the light, but I could see how ragged and piebald the scrawny body was. It was crouching forward, as immobile as ever, but I thought it was waiting for me to make the first move, to give it the excuse to hitch itself after me on its sticks. I imagined it coming for me as fast as a spider. I sucked in a breath I might have used to cry for help if any had been remotely likely. Instead I made myself twist around for the fastest sprint of my life, but my legs shuddered to a halt. The figure was ahead of me now, at barely half the distance.
The worst of it was the face, for want of a better word. The eyes and mouth were little more than tattered holes, though just too much more, in a surface that I did my utmost not to see in any detail. Nevertheless they widened, and there was no mistaking their triumph. If I turned away I would find the shape closer to me, but moving forward would bring it closer too. I could only shut my eyes and try to stay absolutely still.
It was too dark inside my eyelids and yet not sufficiently dark. I was terrified to see a silhouette looming on them if I shifted so much as an inch. I didn’t dare even open my mouth, but I imagined speaking—imagined it with all the force I could find inside myself. “Go away. Leave me alone. I didn’t do anything. Get someone else.”
For just an instant I thought of my uncle, to establish that I didn’t mean him, and then I concentrated on whoever had robbed him. An icy wind passed through the woods, and a tree creaked like an old door. The wind made me feel alone, and I tried to believe I entirely was. At last I risked looking. There was no sign of the figurer ahead or, when I forced myself to turn, behind me or anywhere else.
I no longer felt safe in the woods. I took a few steps along the path before I fought my way through the bushes to the railings. I’d seen a gap left by a single railing, but was it wide enough for me to squeeze through? Once I’d succeeded, scraping my chest and collecting flakes of rust on my prickly skin, I fled home. I slowed and tried to do the same to my breath at the end of my street, and then I made another dash. My mother’s car was pulling away from the house.
She halted it beside me, and my father lowered his window. “Where do you think you’ve been, Craig?”
His grimness and my mother’s made me feel more threatened than I understood. “Helping,” I said.
“Don’t lie to us,” said my mother. “Don’t start doing that as well.”
“I’m not. Why are you saying I am? I was helping Uncle Phil. He’s gone slow.”
They gazed at me, and my father jerked a hand at the back seat. “Get in.”
“Tom, are you sure you want him—”
“Your uncle’s been run over.”
“He can’t have been. I left him in his flat.” When this earned no response I demanded “How do you know?”
“They found us in his pocket.” Yet more starkly my father added “Next of kin.”
I didn’t want to enquire any further. When the isolated streetlamp on Copse View came in sight I couldn’t tell whether I was more afraid of what else I might see or that my parents should see it as well. I saw nothing to dismay me in the woods or the demolished street, however—nothing all the way to Pasture Boulevard. My mother had to park several hundred yards short of my uncle’s flat. The police had put up barriers, beyond which a giant Frugo lorry was skewed across the central strip, uprooting half a dozen trees. In front of and under the cab of the lorry were misshapen pieces of a wheelchair. I tried not to look at the stains on some of them and on the road, but I couldn’t avoid noticing the cereal bars strewn across the pavement. “He forgot to buy me one of those and I didn’t like to ask,” I said. “He must have gone back.”
My parents seemed to think I was complaining rather than trying to understand. When I attempted to establish that it hadn’t been my fault they acted as if I was making too much of a fuss. Before the funeral the police told them more than one version of the accident. Some witnesses said my uncle had been wheeling his chair so fast that he’d lost control and spun into the road. Some said he’d appeared to be in some kind of panic, others that a gang of cyclists on the pavement had, and he’d swerved out of their way. The cyclists were never identified. As if my parents had achieved one of their aims at last, the streets were free of rogue cyclists for weeks.
I never knew how much my parents blamed me for my uncle’s death. When I left school I went into caring for people like him. In due course these included my parents. They’re gone now, and while sorting out the contents of our house I found the book with my early teenage stories in it—childish second-hand stuff. I never asked to have it back, and I never wrote stories again. I couldn’t shake off the idea that my imagination had somehow caused my uncle’s death.
I could easily feel that my imagination has been revived by the exercise book—by the cover embroidered with a cobweb, the paper pinstriped with faded lines, a fern pressed between the yellowed pages and blackened by age. I’m alone with my imagination up here at the top of the stairs leading to the unlit hall. If there’s a face at the edge of my vision, it must belong to a picture on the wall, even if I don’t remember any there. Night fell while I was leafing through the book, and I have to go over there to switch the light on. Of course I will, although the mere thought of moving seems to make the floorboards creak like sticks. I can certainly move, and there’s no reason not to. In a moment—just a moment while I take another breath—I will.
THE LONG WAY
Copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2008 & 2011
The right of Ramsey Campbell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in December 2008. This electronic version published in May 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
This book is a work of fiction. names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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The Long Way Page 3