The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘Everything is for her these days.’

  ‘Never mind, love. You’ll be at university before you know it.’

  Rob had begun to envision the solaces which she was implying lay ahead when his father spoke. ‘Maybe the clothes-peg’s needed over here, and call me a slow old sod if you want, but if you won’t be seeing her any more, why are you reading that book?’

  ‘You’re a slow old sod,’ Rob’s mother obliged at once. ‘Weren’t you ever his age? Can’t you see he’s still thinking about her?’

  Rob was, but with so much less pain he was surprised and even rather pleased by himself. His nine months with Amy were receding to a manageable distance, and if he didn’t indulge for a while in remembering how she’d felt to him and looked at him, they would stay there. If she had wanted him she would surely have phoned by now, since she must realise that her father wouldn’t give him the number of wherever she was. This morning he’d awakened thinking that if she needed him she would phone while whoever was looking after her was out of the way, but now the absence of a message on the answering machine seemed no worse than inevitable. ‘I’ve started not to,’ he said.

  His father made to speak until Rob’s mother pinched the air in front of his lips to hush him. ‘I think you’re taking after me,’ she told Rob. ‘It used to be if two people broke up they were supposed to return all their gifts to each other, but I’ve always believed you should keep something to remind you of the good times.’

  Rather than complicate the moment with an explanation, Rob tried to deal with his father’s unconvinced look. ‘It’s just a story about when Nazarill was offices. I don’t really know why I’m reading it. I think I’ve given up.’

  That earned him twin smiles of affectionate scepticism which might have ended up irritating him if they hadn’t been interrupted by the phone. When a female voice made itself heard through the speaker of the answering machine, his mother picked up the call and agreed a time with her latest pupil. By then Rob and his father were clearing the table, and the subject of Amy was cleared away too. While his parents settled down in front of the evening’s first comedy programme to the sound of an audience laughing before the Haywards found occasion to, Rob retrieved the copy of Nazarill and carried it upstairs to put it out of the way of his school coursework.

  As he drew his bedroom curtains he saw Nazarill looming above the town. The glow from the marketplace glimmered on the long pale building and drained the colour from those of the upper windows that were illuminated. For a moment he had the impression that the building, to which the lit windows seemed irrelevant—cartoonish rectangles pasted to the facade—had turned into a ghost of itself, as dead as the chimneys that crowned it. That was a last trace of Amy’s thinking, he decided as he turned away with a shiver. The beacon of her apartment, to which he’d often looked before going to bed, was no longer lit for him. He switched off his light and went downstairs to the dining-table to start work, knowing that at least his parents wouldn’t trouble him while he was studying. More than once during their conversation he’d sensed that his mother could have said more if she had chosen to, but he was grateful to her for restraining herself. Whatever she might have left unsaid, he preferred not to know.

  24 - More of a cell

  ‘Your mother’s dead, and you’re mad, and you’re staying here in Nazarill.’

  As she awoke with her father’s voice in her ears. Amy had to remind herself that it had been just a nightmare. She must have been wakened by her own cry, and surely her parents would have heard it. She had only to lie still with her eyes shut until they came to reassure her. If she held onto her breaths and stopped them from panting and shivering, if she made herself take long slow deep draughts of air, the duration of the next breath would be enough to bring them—to be on the safe side, the next two breaths. She prolonged those for all she was worth, though they caused her jaw to twinge, no doubt because she had been lying awkwardly on it while asleep. She closed herself around the second inhalation despite its stale taste, and listened hard, but there was no sound except for the hissing of blood in her ears. She would have to call out for reassurance, and she was opening her mouth to do so when the kind of ache which she was expecting to declare itself in her forehead fastened on her jaw. The pain shocked her eyes open, and she yanked at the light-cord, and saw that she was where she was most afraid to be.

  Perhaps it wasn’t entirely the room she’d seen in her nightmare after her father had held her up to Nazarill, but too much of it was: the four hats hovering on the wall, the three necklaces adorning the flattened glass throat of the mirror. For as long as it took her to force her lungs to work she expected the door to be thrown open, revealing her father with a fire behind him, and then she remembered she had already heard him say what he would have said—had been wakened by the echo of his words. He’d uttered them before he’d punched her into her bedroom, bruising her jaw. Her headache seemed in retrospect no more than a premonition of this, but why did she feel that the new pain might be an omen of worse? What was the worst that could happen now that he’d spoken the words from her nightmare?

  The worst, she thought, might be that she lay there on her arse waiting for it to happen. She worked her body up the bed until her shoulders rubbed against the plump headboard. Since her movements hadn’t aggravated the various aches above her neck, she grasped the edge of the mattress and swung her feet slowly to the patch of floor she always kept clear for her first step. When she pressed her clammy hands against her knees and stood up, however, both she and the room wavered, the latter so badly that she was afraid she was about to see it change. To steady herself she threw out a hand to meet its cold flat glassy twin, and the necklaces jangled against the mirror as though they were trying to snare her reflection. She saw a threatening quiver pass through the dimmer of the two rooms she was in, and thrust herself away from it. She squeezed her eyes shut once she had her balance, and when she opened them she was sure enough of herself to make her way to the door.

  She planted her feet wide in the space between it and the contents of her room, and having cupped her hand behind her ear, rested a palm against the slippery wood and leaned her head towards it. She could still hear no sound from outside. She shifted her hand to the doorknob, and felt the metal grow slick with her sweat until she wiped both with an unbuttoned cuff of her jacket. She gripped the knob and twisted it slowly, even slower, manoeuvring it very gradually past the squeak it often gave when it was halfway turned. She felt it turn all the way, and closed both hands around it to control the movement of the door as she inched it open. Or rather, as she tried; because the door shifted a fraction of an inch and then came to an absolute halt.

  At first she thought she’d failed to turn the handle completely after all. She relaxed her grip before twisting the knob with both hands and every vestige of strength. This time she heard metal scrape out of the socket, and felt the door give its fractional lurch. She swelled her lungs with air that made her cranium feel fragile as an egg, then she grasped the handle so hard her palms began to throb, and threw herself backwards as violently as she could—so violently that when the door refused to yield she almost lost her grip on the handle and sprawled on her back. She imagined her father clinging to the opposite knob, his feet wedged against the uprights of the frame, before she wondered whether objects no longer quite so much like hands might be clutching the knob at the far end of the shaft from the knob she’d again taken hold of. The thought would have made her shrink away if she hadn’t managed to remind herself that surely none of the denizens of the secret places of Nazarill would have the strength. She sagged against the door and then, as though to take the hindrance by surprise, she heaved at it. This time she heard a faint unfamiliar sound through the crack between the door and its frame: a constricted rattle, a metallic snigger. As though his voice had been triggered by the metal, her father spoke.

  He wasn’t far from the door—perhaps not even as distant as the other side of the hall.
He sounded groggy, roused from sleep, but ready to be more awake. ‘Throw all the weight about you like,’ he mumbled loudly. ‘Exhaust yourself. That bolt will hold you, I warrant.’

  For a second she felt as unable to move as the door had become, and then she was driving her shoulder against it, kicking it savagely, yanking at the handle, flinging her body about as if she was struggling to release herself from a shackle. When she saw that her actions no longer made much sense and that she would indeed exhaust herself if she persisted, she relinquished her grip and stumbled away to fall into a sitting position once the backs of her legs encountered the bed.

  Soon her father greeted the silence. ‘I hope I hear you beginning to see sense. You must stay in there until I am persuaded that you can be released.’

  ‘Just watch me,’ Amy whispered, knowing that was one feat he couldn’t perform. His voice sounded increasingly blurred, closer to sleep—surely too close for him to reflect whether he’d left her any means of escape, as she saw he had. If she unscrewed the hinges of the door, the room couldn’t hold her. She held onto the edge of the bed while she looked for a tool.

  There was none to be seen: nothing in the clutter on the floor or amid that on the dressing-table. She could fetch a hanger from the wardrobe, except that all the hangers were so thin that any she tried to use would simply bend and most probably snap before a screw moved. She was beginning to raise her fists in despair while she trapped a screech between her teeth when her gaze roved to the bag she had forgotten throwing into the room. She fell to her knees beside it and tipped its few contents onto the floor.

  If only she had thought to retrieve the pills Beth had given her! Just now, however, it was more important that she had her metal comb. She leaned over to pick it up and laid it beside her in a wrinkle of the quilt, and waited, and then made herself wait longer. She had no idea how much—far too much—time passed before her patience was rewarded by an absurdly welcome sound: her father’s snoring.

  ‘You stay asleep,’ she whispered. ‘It’s past your bedtime. You sleep and dream about…’ She didn’t know what she would like to think he was dreaming: certainly not about her—the notion threatened to trap her once more in the nightmare he had built around her. Perhaps he should be dreaming about her mother if that had the potential to revive his old self, except that Amy didn’t care to imagine her mother’s memory engulfed in the brain he had now. All that mattered was that he stay asleep while she removed the screws from the door, and if he needed anything like as much sleep as her eyes were crying for, he should. She pushed herself up from the bed, reassuring herself that the creak of the mattress wasn’t audible outside the room. Two stealthy paces brought her to the door, where she inserted the point of the metal handle in the topmost screw. As soon as she twisted the comb the point slipped out of the groove.

  She had expected as much. She slid the edge of the handle into the groove and steadying the improvised tool with one hand, bore down on it with the heel of the other. The screw held firm as the handle started to bend. She tried the screw below it, and the next, and had to kneel to reach the last, the angle of whose groove caused the comb almost to touch the floor. None of the screws gave so much as a millimetre, but each bent the handle further. By the time she wavered to her feet, rubbing sweat out of her embers of eyes with the back of her free hand, the metal was curved as a grin. It wasn’t mocking her, she told herself, it was showing her how to proceed. She sat on the end of the bed again and trod hard on the tip of the handle while she grasped the comb with both hands and levered it towards her. At once, before she was expecting it to, it snapped.

  Most of the handle was quivering beside her heel, but an inch or so was left on the comb. Surely that had to be strong enough. She padded to the door again, encouraged by her father’s snores, and fitted the end of the remains of the handle into the highest screw, or thought she did. It required two attempts to turn it, during both of which the stub of metal only scraped across the disc, to convince her that the tip of the would-be-screwdriver was thicker than the grooves.

  At her second try the metal teeth scratched her hand. She wrapped the comb in her handkerchief and did her best to move the screw using the edge of the stub, but it wouldn’t stay lodged in the groove. When she persevered it slid off the disc and dug a splinter out of the wood, and her father emitted a louder sound, bordering on the articulate, as though he’d sensed the damage and was trying to awaken. Once she was certain he’d subsided she attacked the screw with an effort that trembled her wrists, only to have the comb deal the wood another gash. ‘Bastard,’ she said through teeth she nearly clenched until her jaw hinted at the pain she would experience if she did, and let the comb drop at her feet. She didn’t know if she’d meant her father by the word, or the improvised tool, or the whole of life and anything that might be responsible for it. The cloth fell open, displaying the comb, and she was about to retrieve the handkerchief alone when she saw that she might have been wielding the tool the wrong way round. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ she murmured, less sure whom or what she was addressing—surely anything that could help her—and picking up the comb again, inserted the edge of the tooth farthest from the handle into the groove of the topmost screw.

  It fitted perfectly. The angle, though, was awkward, since the groove was close to vertical. She muffled most of the comb once more in the handkerchief and pressed the tooth into the groove with all her weight, then she grasped the knuckles of the hand that was gripping the comb and exerted whatever strength she still had. She felt metal twist at once.

  It was the end of the comb, she thought; she’d wrecked that now. Even when she lowered it towards her face and saw that it didn’t appear to have bent, she had difficulty in believing it had held. She lined it up in the groove, which remained almost vertical, and threw more force than she had thought was left to her into her wrists. This time she felt and heard and, best of all, saw the screw turn at least an inch.

  Her earlier struggles had been worthwhile after all; they must have eased the screws. She waited until an untroubled snore indicated that the faint squeak of metal within wood hadn’t alerted her father, then she returned to her task. Three increasingly effortless twists, and she was able to wind the screw out with her fingers, nearly cutting their tips on the sharp edge before she protected them with the handkerchief. She felt the screw lose its hold on the wood, and at once it was gleaming on her palm. As it came she thought she heard movement beyond the door.

  It might have been her father shifting his position while he continued to snore, except that she had the impression it had been closer to her than he was. It had sounded as though something had permitted itself to grow audible as it scuttled unevenly to her door and settled down to wait for her.

  Amy closed her fist around the screw, digging the helix into her skin, and glared at the door with her overheated eyes. ‘You can’t reach me,’ she muttered. ‘You have to stay out there. You don’t scare me. Try scaring him.’

  Her words seemed to promise at least the possibility of reassurance. Unless she believed in them she couldn’t go on, and she mustn’t falter while her father’s sleep was giving her a chance. When no response made itself heard outside the room she forced herself to relax her nervous grip on the screw, which she shied onto the bed, so as to apply the wrapped-up comb to the remaining screw of the upper hinge.

  It wasn’t as forthcoming as its companion had been. She redoubled the grip of her hand on her fist and fought to turn it with her whole body, using her straight arms as a single lever. She felt metal shift—the tooth slipping out of the groove—and rammed it back in as a trickle of sweat found her left eye. That had started to blink as though it had been seized by an uncontrollable nervous tic—she was desperate to clear it of the stinging, but even more determined not to slacken her hold—when the screw executed a half-turn with a protesting squeal.

  Amy wiped her eye, then let her arms hang by her sides while they trembled towards stillness. Her forehead and jaw we
re working on joining their aches across her face. She might feel worse before she’d finished, she told herself fiercely, but she ought to try not to be tense: apart from the mechanical snoring, there seemed to be no activity beyond the door. So fatiguing were her efforts, so dulling to her brain, that if she allowed herself she might even forget that anything was out there. When the tremulousness of her arms reduced itself to a throbbing that might, given time, have become pleasurable, she drove the tooth into the groove and twisted her hands along with their painful spiky contents. The screw turned nearly half a circle at once.

  She was able to grasp it between finger and thumb, though for an unpleasant second as she unscrewed it her nail was caught beneath the rim. Before her father had snored thrice the screw was nestling in her palm. About to swing round and aim it at the bed, she froze. Something had come into the room behind her.

  She thought she smelled how damp and mouldering the intruder was. She was sure she felt its chill on her back. Since it was making no noise, she was unable to judge how close it was to her, and so she had to look—had to, no matter how much her body was shivering as if to shake her out of herself, to extend her that chance to escape. She staggered around on her wavering legs and raised the hand which held the comb. She’d forgotten it no longer had a point, even supposing that would have been any defence.

  But the room appeared to be deserted. Whatever had joined her had hidden itself, and she could only wait until it poked any face it had left from under the bed or out of the wardrobe. ‘I’ve seen you,’ she whispered, but the words were barely out of her mouth when she ceased to understand how she’d hoped they would reassure her. Perhaps they brought her a response, however—a glimpse of movement which she tried desperately to locate. It was in the dressing-table mirror, she realised. It was in the room in the mirror, which was no longer her bedroom.