The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  It might have been a set of legs on one side of a spider, legs emerging from the trap which the creature was widening in anticipation of its prey. Only their size told Amy that the four long thin crooked members were the fingers of a hand, which was displaying itself to notify her that it was ready to throw the door wide if she ventured nearer. Amy hugged her bag with both arms in case that gave her strength, but it simply made her feel even more crushed into herself. Her lips had begun to tremble, drawing so much of her awareness to them that it was partly to control them that she spoke. ‘What do you want? I’ve never done you any harm.’

  The fingers hitched themselves forward on the wood, and then the forefinger raised itself, tatters of skin at the knuckles peeling away like bark on a rotten twig. Though it had no nail and very little flesh, there was no mistaking its intention. It was pointing straight at her.

  Amy had to respond, because she’d thought of a ruse. ‘Well, you can’t have me. I never wanted to live here in the first place,’ she said with the very little confidence she could summon up, and as she spoke she was forcing herself to be prepared to move. The moment she fell silent she made herself start tiptoeing towards the doors.

  She had never considered how vulnerable that posture felt—as though she was about to lose her shaky balance with every step. All the same, her plan seemed to be working. The remains of a finger were continuing to point at the foot of the stairs, where Amy had last been audible. So long as none of the doors was open wide enough to allow her to be seen as she crept past, or to let her see whatever remnant of a face lurked there— But she was several paces short of the nearest doors when she was addressed by a voice.

  It was toneless as a sound of husks rubbing together in a wind. She wasn’t sure that she was hearing it outside her brain, where it felt like webs settling over her consciousness. ‘None of us did,’ it said.

  You can’t blame me, I wasn’t even alive, thought Amy, trying to stand still on the tips of her trembling legs. In a moment she saw that her efforts were useless. Her response, though silent, had betrayed her. The finger raised itself almost to snapping like a twig and pointed in her direction, then it beckoned, twitching more than ever like a spider’s leg.

  She’d had enough of its games. If she couldn’t conceal her presence she wasn’t going to act afraid, however much she was. Surely there was nothing in the rooms that would be capable of overtaking her if she sprinted for the doors. She dropped herself to her heels, causing less noise than she’d feared, and poised herself to run. They couldn’t scare her by opening the doors, she tried to convince herself: she had already seen how they looked.

  Her pretence of reassurance might just have worked, except she had forgotten that it could be overheard. It brought an immediate response. The fingers flexed as though recalling how to exert themselves; then they pushed the door away and sent their body tottering to meet her.

  Perhaps in answer to her thought, it appeared to want her to see it as it had once been. If anything, this worsened its looks. The grey wispy coating of the skull was certainly not hair. The figure still had some of a face, or had somehow reconstructed parts of one, which looked in danger of coming away from the bones, as the scraps of the chest were peeling away from the ribs to expose the withered heart and lungs, which jerked as though in a final spasm as Amy’s gaze lit on them. It had taken her only a couple of seconds which felt like forever to distinguish all this—not long enough for her to back away, supposing she could. Then the shape took another staggery step towards her and raised its cobwebbed head against the sunlight. Enough tatters of its lips survived for her to be able to see it mouth the words that entered her mind: ‘Remember your dream.’

  Amy almost understood, and that was why she resisted understanding. She felt close to a terror even more dreadful than the sight in front of her. The figure stretched its arms wide, so slowly and unevenly it might have been tearing them free of an enormous web, and she saw light between the bones. She thought it meant to wobble forward and embrace her, and despite its slowness she wasn’t sure that she would be able to back out of its reach—but she had misinterpreted its intentions. When it began to curl what passed for fingers on its right hand, she knew it was summoning a companion from beyond the door.

  Amy heard movement in the dark—a scuttling over the carpet. It sounded crippled but rapid, and smaller than its summoner. Despite guessing its size, she wasn’t prepared for how low down it presented itself around the door, hardly a foot above the carpet. The face might once have been almost human, and even now the hole too large to be called a mouth was doing its best to counterfeit an expression, rendered yet more grotesque by the shrivelled blackened lolling tongue. Though its eyes were long gone, it cocked its head around the door towards Amy, and the scrap of skin between its ragged nostrils fluttered in and out. It lurched into the corridor on members which had never been entirely hands nor paws, and dropped to its haunches, its incomplete sides heaving. It was waiting for instructions from its mistress.

  Amy’s body had taken over from her thoughts. As the hands jerked to point at her, she wasn’t aware of retreating until the backs of her ankles struck the lowest stair. The shrivelled creature hobbled quickly at her, its head wagging like a puppet’s with each unequal step, and she whirled round, not knowing which way she was turning or which hand her bag was in or whether it was that hand she had flung out for the banister. It was not, and as it struck the metal she hauled herself upstairs almost faster than she could breathe.

  Was the light growing dimmer? She was almost certain that it had begun to flicker. In the midst of all her terror she found she was afraid to touch the wall. She swerved around the first bend and glanced downwards. Her pursuer was already halfway up the lowest flight, its enlarged mouth writhing over the bared display of more than teeth. She practically fell up the stairs to the middle floor, and only just saved herself from sprawling helplessly onto it by clinging to the banister. As she let go of it, she heard a door opening along the corridor.

  If she had been thinking—since she had no time to establish which door it was, and no means of knowing who or what had opened it—she might not have called out. ‘Quick, come and see,’ she cried. ‘It’s on the stairs. You have to see it, then you’ll believe me.’

  She was indeed addressing one of her fellow tenants. That was immediately clear from the way the door—Peter Sheen the journalist’s, she realised now—slammed, shutting her out. The silence was broken by a muffled scuttling which sounded so close below her that she dared not look. Grabbing almost blindly at the banister, she floundered upstairs, trying to open her bag with the hand in which it was, to have her keys ready by the time she reached her door.

  All she achieved was to risk both dropping the bag and losing her grip on the banister. In her panic she hardly knew which hand was which. She hitched herself around the bend and up the last handfuls of banister. When it came to an end she had to remind herself that now she had both hands free to deal with the bag. As she fled into the unreliable twilight of her corridor she supported the bag with one hand while she picked at the drawstring with the other. Her earlier attempt to loosen it seemed to have pulled it immovably tight. She was nearly at her door, and sobbing with rage and loss of breath, when she felt the mouth of the bag give a reluctant inch. She wrenched it wide with all her fingers and thrust them in.

  The stiff cold rectangle of her bus pass, a crumpled five-pound note and a scattering of coins, an open pack of towels which yielded to her groping, a birthday card which she’d forgotten to send one of her friends and which she was saving until next year, the Bible and the pages in which it was wrapped, a lump of rock she’d thought resembled a baby’s smiling face when Rob had found it for her on the moors, her tube of pills from Beth, some scribbled bits of paper, and—at last, at the very bottom of the bag—a chink of metal against metal. She closed her fingers around her keys. They almost pierced her skin, the tines did, because the object she’d located was her comb, which h
ad knocked against a stray coin. Her keys weren’t in the bag.

  She hauled it open to the limit of the drawstring and peered desperately into it, but could see little of its contents in the dimness. She upended it and shook it empty in front of her door. Everything she’d felt in it spilled out, and nothing else. She flung the bag at the glinting eye of the door and dug her hands into all her pockets, but there were no keys. As her thoughts began to circle helplessly in search of when she’d last had the keys and what she could have done with them, she heard a movement at the far end of the corridor. Her reluctant eyes turned towards it, dragging at their sockets until the ache forced her head round. A shrivelled eyeless head was poking above the top stair, awaiting her next move.

  Amy stooped so fast the rush of blood to her head seemed to drive all the meagre light from the corridor. She knew what she was reaching for, and before she could see she’d straightened up again with the comb in her hand. She’d known when she bought it that the pointed handle could double as a weapon if she ever needed to defend herself, and now she had a use for it. She imagined rushing along the corridor to stab wildly at her persecutor, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of touching any of the denizens of Nazarill. Instead she began to gouge at the door where the wood concealed the lock.

  Splinters flew, and she heard and felt the chunk of metal cutting into wood. Fewer than twelve blows, however, and the handle of the comb started to bend. She dug the point between door and frame and tried to catch the bolt of the lock to chivvy it out of its socket, only to find herself unable to thrust the comb deep enough or, once she’d given up, to pull it out either. She lurched across the corridor, her eyes refusing to glance in the direction of the stairs, and leaned both hands clenched together on the doorbell in case Beth had come home before Amy had left the apartment. When there was no response for longer than she wanted to imagine, she snatched up her bag to protect her hands while she hung onto the comb and threw all her weight backwards. The comb sprang free, and she almost cannoned into the opposite wall, but crouched away from it and renewed her assault on the door, trying to straighten the comb with her blows. She failed to recognise how her chipping at the wood was overwhelming all her senses, narrowing them down to itself, so that she didn’t immediately notice when she ceased to be alone in the corridor.

  When she heard movement closer than the stairs she whirled round, raising the comb like a knife. Her father was halfway along the corridor, staring at her and the debris around her with no expression she could name. As she saw him he strode forward and grabbed the wrist of the hand that was holding the comb while he slid his key into the lock. He twisted the key viciously and shoved her against the door so hard that she staggered several feet along the goggling hall. She recovered in time to see him kicking her bag and its contents into the apartment as he retrieved the key. In a moment the door was shut, and he was locking the mortise. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Amy said with the little breath she was able to summon.

  ‘Yes,’ her father said in a voice she hardly recognised—didn’t want to recognise. ‘Yes, I must.’

  21 - The last message

  The key was withdrawn and inserted in his trousers pocket, and as he turned towards her Amy had time to realise how afraid she was of him—too afraid to venture within his reach to pick up her belongings from the floor. She couldn’t help retreating a step as his face came into view, though she wasn’t quite able to define what she saw. Some quality she might not have appreciated while it was there had gone out of his face to be replaced by the unyielding gleam of his eyes. If she let her fear take over her mind she would imagine that he was only pretending to be her father, that the eyebrows she’d seen growing bushier and greyer throughout her childhood, and the cheeks and chin that had sagged with the burden of those years, were the most convincing aspects of a mask. She didn’t want to hear his voice again, not now it had become as cold and heavy and oppressive as the old stones walling her in. Still less could she bear the silence, however, and she saw him waiting for her to speak. Perhaps there was some way to move him. She made herself breathe evenly despite the shivers that kept passing through her, but she couldn’t think of much to say—just the truth. ‘I lost my keys.’

  His gaze closed around that, but she couldn’t read the gleam. Maybe more of the truth might appeal to him on her behalf, if he truly wanted to protect her. ‘I was frightened,’ she said, and fought another shudder. ‘I couldn’t get back in.’

  ‘You should not have been out. You undertook not to be.’

  ‘I know what I said, but when you’d gone I couldn’t—I had—’ The truth hadn’t worked, but she was incapable of manufacturing a story that might convince him. ‘Didn’t you see anything when you came in?’ she blurted, though if these terrors hadn’t been so recent she would have kept them to herself. ‘Didn’t you hear something on the stairs?’

  ‘I heard someone causing damage to the property, and I prayed it was not my daughter. Perhaps you yourself can tell me what I saw.’

  ‘I told you, I was trying to get back in. I’d have thought that would please you,’ Amy said, and realised she sounded crazy even to herself. ‘It’s like I said, I lost my keys, and I wasn’t expecting you back so soon.’

  ‘You hoped I would not be, rather.’

  ‘Why would I have felt like that,’ Amy said, so confused she no longer had the least idea whether this was true, ‘when I needed you to let me in?’

  It was clear that he thought she was trying to trick him; the blankness hardened on his face before his mouth shifted. ‘I have your keys.’

  ‘Where did you find them?’ Amy said, and held out her hand.

  He stared at the gesture with a weary disbelief which he then raised to her face. ‘Where you left them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just give them to me?’ she said, and kept her hand out. ‘Can I have them now? They’re mine.’

  ‘I should not have taken them if you might have them.’

  Amy felt in danger of shivering again, but instead the cold which had suddenly invaded her body held it still. ‘Taken them from where?’

  ‘I fear your untidiness has proved to be your downfall,’ he said, and poked her bag with a foot. ‘You may remember leaving this unattended after you had sought asylum with a friend in Sheffield.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Amy said unevenly, meaning his behaviour. ‘You stole my keys.’

  ‘Perhaps you should remind yourself you had them by my sufferance. This home is your only refuge, and I was making sure of it.’

  ‘A refuge from what?’ Amy demanded, seeing her chance.

  ‘From the eyes of everybody who has seen what you’ve become.’

  ‘If you hate me so much, give me my keys back and you’ll never need to see me again.’

  ‘I think not. I shall not shirk the responsibility I have been given.’

  Amy’s headache was pressing against the backs of her eyes, and she cared less and less what she said. ‘If it hadn’t been for mummy you wouldn’t have had me. Try and think how she’d have treated me. She’d never have behaved like you’re behaving.’

  ‘Your mother’s dead.’

  A disgust so total it looked capable of extinguishing any other emotion that remained in him had filled his eyes, but that wasn’t enough reason for the fear which Amy sensed awakening in her. As though weighed down by his contempt, his gaze sank to her bag and its scattered contents. ‘Clear away this offal,’ his stony voice said.

  At first Amy didn’t think she could—didn’t think she dared venture within his reach while her new dread remained unspecified and yet so close to definition—and then she saw the Bible and its attendant pages at his feet. If she lost that material, the nearest thing she had to evidence was gone. She made herself stoop to recover her bag, the foremost item, and felt as though his contempt was dragging her head down by the neck. ‘Mind out,’ she managed to say, more timidly than she wanted to. ‘Give me space.’

  Perhaps her
gaze had revealed her intentions. When he moved it was to lumber at her, sweeping the strewn objects with the sides of his feet, except for the Bible and its papers, which he left behind him. ‘Stop kicking my stuff,’ she cried. ‘I thought you didn’t like things being damaged.’

  ‘That is no longer your Bible,’ he said as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘There will be no more desecration here.’

  ‘I found it. It’s mine.’ As she spoke Amy was shoving her comb into her bag to prevent herself from jabbing at him with it. Changed though he was, she mustn’t let her desperate panic cause her to attack him; what would her mother have thought of her? ‘You don’t want it now it’s been written in,’ she told him, staring her hardest at him.

  ‘It is my duty to acquaint myself with your ravings,’ he said, and brushed at his cheeks with his fingertips, exposing more of the gleam in his eyes. ‘You have kept your last secret from me.’

  ‘I wanted you to read the writing in there, don’t you understand?’

  ‘I’ll hear no more of your lies.’ He swiped his cheeks again, enlarging his eyes so that they rivalled the eyes squeezed huge by the glass of the picture-frames, and this time his fingernails left marks. ‘God help us, I think you believe them.’

  Amy bowed her head and fell almost to her knees as if he’d got the better of her. She scooped the rock that had lost its baby face into her bag, and followed it with the pack of towels. Now the Bible was within her arm’s length. If she had been able to think more clearly she might have seen that pretending to ignore it only betrayed her plan. She darted a hand out, and had touched the wad of loose pages when her father planted one heel on her forehead and shoved.