The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  Rob couldn’t argue or otherwise react—hadn’t even room within himself for resentment. All he wanted was that the pain should go away or, for the moment, simply not grow worse. He suffered himself to be marched to his car, where the passenger door was opened for him from within. He heard and smelled the spicily perfumed woman assume the driver’s seat while he propped himself on his left shoulder against the shampooed upholstery, and then there was a pause he didn’t understand until she said ‘If I had the keys it would be useful.’

  ‘Trousers. Can you get them?’

  She greeted this idea with a solitary tut, and he thought she was going to insist that he produce the keys. Then he felt her fingertips probing his pocket, fastidiously avoiding contact with his thigh. The keys left him, and the engine cleared its throat. As the car began to swing round she said ‘I’ll go as gently as I can.’

  As the Micra completed its turn Rob saw the other cars start to follow as slowly, and had the impression that a funeral was leaving Nazarill. The facade withdrew into the mirror, mist draining curtained windows of their colour while adding to the pallor of the stone. Until his injury was fixed he could do nothing except hope—hope that Amy would be safe for all the time that might pass before he would be able to come back.

  26 - The silencing

  ‘Come and let me out or he’ll do worse,’ Amy shouted, and had to snatch a breath. In a moment she heard the intercom responding to her father or to her, though she couldn’t distinguish whose voice it had. Whoever was out there wouldn’t be able to hear her except when her father was speaking, and so she made herself wait until he did. ‘Help, he’s locked me up,’ she cried, but something was wrong: he sounded muffled. She’d heard him speak several times, separated by bursts of noise from the intercom, before she deduced that he’d cupped his hands around the microphone and was talking between them so as to exclude her cries.

  ‘Help,’ she almost screamed. ‘You can hear me. You must hear me.’ Her bruised jaw ached from being forced so wide the skin at the corners of her mouth felt close to tearing. She no longer knew what room she would see if she looked behind her, she only knew she couldn’t bear to be robbed of the solitary hope she had. She clutched at the doorknob and set about shaking the door, having remembered that it was secured by just the bolt and a single screw. Could she wrench it out of the frame while her father was distracted? Even when she flung all her weight backwards with both hands gripping the knob, the door hardly stirred. She let go of it and encircled her mouth with her hands, and tried to concentrate her pleas so that they must penetrate any barrier. It seemed to make less sense now to restrict her shouts to the times when her father was speaking; how many chances to be heard might she deny herself by stopping to listen? She paused only for breath, as little of it as practicable, and so she didn’t know when he ceased to speak. The sudden appearance of his voice directly outside her room felt like the springing of a trap. ‘Let there be an end to your ravings. Your friend has departed.’

  Amy’s cupped hands found her cheeks and dug their nails in. ‘Which friend?’

  ‘The one you so vulgarly sent on his way, I believe.’

  ‘You’re saying Rob was here?’

  ‘Was without, rather. I understand the bird had some name of the kind, and I am certain he has hopped away for good.’

  She let go of her face rather than injure it. ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Why, that you are in the place that will do you most good. You yourself have ensured he will assume that is anywhere but here.’ Her father’s voice was moving away into a room. ‘Now cease your useless prating and spare my brain for a little.’

  She didn’t need to be told not to attract his attention further. The thought that Rob had been so close—was perhaps still outside, not entirely relieved of whatever suspicion had brought him—had renewed her desperation to escape. She stooped for her comb and tried to fix her gaze on the screw she had to attack, but she couldn’t avoid catching sight of the mirror from the corner of her eye. She gripped the comb through the handkerchief as though the dull bite of the metal teeth might help reinstate reality, and confronted the image in the mirror. Nearly the whole of her poster was there, together with a sample of wallpaper, and not so much as a hint of bare brick.

  For a prolonged moment she wondered how she could be certain that the scene beneath the glass was more present or more genuine than the view of the cell had been, and then she managed to put the uncertainty out of her mind. ‘Stay there. Just be there,’ she whispered at the reflection, and crouched quickly to the screw. She wedged the metal tooth into the groove and leaned awkwardly over the comb, clenching her hands around it, then bore down on it as hard as she could.

  Sweat prickled her forehead like a gust of hot ash as the teeth of the comb dug into her palm, and her wrists began to shiver. Just as she was about to let go until her palm stopped smarting, she felt movement. Metal had shifted, had twisted. She threw all her weight against the clumsy tool. With a snap that seemed to travel through the bones of her arm on its way to her skull, the tooth at the end of the comb broke off.

  Amy’s knees struck the floorboards through the carpet, and tears sprang out of her eyes. She rubbed away the moisture with the back of her hand before she could give way to despair. The comb had plenty of teeth left, and the next in line must be almost as strong as the one she’d lost. She poked the broken fragment out of the groove of the screw and tried to manoeuvre its neighbour into place, tried to stay calm as she fiddled with it, tried to believe it would work. Once she saw that the length of shaft which had held the end tooth would get in the way however she angled the comb, she tried to snap it off, first by wedging it under her heel and then in each of the holes for the screws she’d withdrawn. None of this had the least effect on the idiotic half-inch of metal. When the teeth pierced the handkerchief and found her already tender palm she flung the comb across the room.

  It clashed against the mirror and fell among the mass of jars and sprays and bottles on the dressing-table, where it struck an object that sounded more metallic than glass. What had it found? Amy made her way over, watching herself approach across the room that was still her room, and discovered her manicure scissors. If only they were the scissors she had used last summer to cut the legs off an old pair of jeans! But perhaps those blades would have been too large to deal with the screw, and in any case they were in a kitchen drawer. Those on the dressing-table looked pitifully fragile, but she had to try them. She’d barely started levering at the screw with the thicker blade when it snapped off, and the other blade took no time at all.

  ‘Think,’ she pleaded with herself. ‘It’s only a screw. Think.’ She dragged her gaze around the room in search of another improvised tool, but the place might have been the bare cell she was afraid to see, its contents offered her so little. She ran to the wardrobe and rummaged in all the clothes that had pockets, but the only secret they were keeping was a half-used book of matches with which she lit her incense sticks. She imagined trying to twist the screw with a fingernail in the groove. While the notion made her cringe, she could think of nothing with which to engineer her escape besides herself.

  And perhaps her father had told her how, if she was getting on his nerves even more than he acknowledged. She strode over to the door and began to kick it, chanting ‘You can hear me. You can hear me.’

  Before long he responded from across the hall with a weariness that afforded her some hope. ‘Be quiet in there.’

  ‘I’ll be quiet when you let me out, and till then I won’t stop.’

  ‘Do as you choose, as is your wont. You will exhaust yourself before you wear me down,’ he said, and started to pray, more loudly as she redoubled her kicks and her chanting. He faltered at ‘deliver us’, and had to recommence. When his words gave out at the phrase a second time he shouted ‘Hold your tongue, or I—’

  ‘You’ll what? You can’t do anything to me unless you come in here.’

  This time she wo
uld be ready for whatever he might try. Let him throw another punch at her—it would bring him across the threshold so that she could dodge past him. Bolting the door on him would give her all the time she needed to escape. She was straining her ears to detect any sounds that would betray he was trying to take her unawares when he spoke, still across the hall. ‘Your subterfuge is a poor effort. Can you contrive me no better diversion?’

  All she had left was the truth. ‘You’ll have to let me out sooner or later.’

  ‘Indeed? Pray explain.’

  ‘I need to go next door.’

  ‘I think not. I fear you have made yourself unwelcome.’

  ‘Next door here. The bathroom.’

  ‘I cannot see how that will be necessary when you have supped so sparingly of late.’

  ‘What are you going to do,’ Amy said, her voice uneven with an element that only sounded like laughter, ‘starve me?’

  ‘I shall pray that fasting will bring you to your senses and to God.’

  ‘It won’t, so what’s going to happen instead? Am I supposed to die in here or what?’

  ‘Should that come to pass I shall pray you repent at the last so that your soul goes up to Heaven.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Amy whispered, and as the words became audible she knew they were no longer an insult or an exaggeration. She was overcome by a shiver that made her feel walled in by damp bare brick. Perhaps the cell in the mirror was where she would die, she thought—where she would be imprisoned once she died. She returned to kicking the door, an action which suggested what she could shout. ‘That’s your head I’m kicking. Can you feel it? You will soon if you don’t yet. I’ll kick it till you open my door.’

  She was anticipating that when he’d had enough he would rush her door, but when he responded he was no nearer. ‘You will injure none except yourself, and any harm you do yourself will have only God to help it.’ He didn’t sound entirely unaffected, and when he set about praying louder than before, she knew she had reached him. This time he was less than halfway through the prayer when he broke off, yelling ‘You fiend, you’ll not best me.’ He was staying where he was, however, and her foot was beginning to ache. ‘You won’t be able to pray till you let me out,’ she called, ‘you won’t be able to think,’ searching her mind for a monologue she could use to rob him of his self-control as an alternative to bruising her toes against the door. There was plenty of material in the room—all the books her mother had bound for her. The biggest volume, a collection of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, lay on top of the others, but now she realised she needn’t consult it; she could recite from memory. Before she was conscious of deciding which of her old bedtime verses to perform, she was projecting her voice through the door.

  ‘ “Come dance with me, young and old, out from the tree.

  There are songs to be sung, there are marvels to see.

  Come dance with me, young and old, under the moon.

  You’ll have wings on your shoulders and dew for your shoon.”

  “Dance away to the moon, Mother Hepzibah, flee.

  In the morning they’ll come to play prickles with thee.”

  “Let them come to my hovel, whoever they are.

  I’ve games that I’ll play with them,” says Hepzibah…’

  It seemed to Amy she had read this only once, and perhaps not to the end. Her father was raising his voice in yet another bid to scale the prayer, and surely he must lose his temper very soon. She rested her fingertips on either side of her nose and the edges of her thumbs gingerly against her jaw.

  ‘ “They’ve come, Mother Hepzibah, come with the dawn.

  Your cat she is drownded, your friends they are flown.”

  “Good day, Master Matthew, for that’s who you are.

  Will you trip the old dance with me?” says Hepzibah.

  “Bring her with us, stout fellows, bring her to the oak.

  She’ll dance us a jig ‘til her neck it is broke.”

  “‘Tis no dance with no partner, and it’s Matthew I name.

  In a twelvemonth from now you shall see me the same.

  I’ll come for to find you, wherever you are.

  And we’ll dance in the air,” says old Mad Hepzibah.

  They pricked her and spun her and swum her until

  They left her to rot on a rope on the hill.

  “Why, what ails thee, Matthew, thy face is so white?”

  “Tis her dead eyes I see turn to me every night.”

  “Come open the door to me, Matthew my swain.

  ‘Tis a year since I promised you’d see me again…”’

  Had Amy ever read all this? She felt as though she was dredging up the last lines from within herself. If to any extent she was making them up, couldn’t she take control of them? Her hands sank away from her face and clasped themselves in front of her. For the moment she was addressing only herself.

  ‘“You’re a poor partner, Matthew, so die in your bed.

  I’ve daughters and friends I shall dance with instead.

  We’ll dance through the fire, we’ll dance into the sky.

  The power of the hill means none of us shall die…”’

  She was trying to understand her own words, and grasp how responsible she was for them, when her father broke the silence which she hadn’t even noticed overtaking him. ‘Perhaps this will put an end to your ungodly chanting,’ he yelled, and tramped into the hall so resolutely that she felt the floor quiver. Instead of unbolting her door, however, he headed for the exit to the corridor. Had she driven him out after all? Then what had he meant by his threat? Just as she realised, she heard a click from the end of the hall, and her room vanished.

  He’d switched off the fuse which controlled her light. As her eyes jerked back and forth, desperate to free themselves from their blindness, he came to her door. ‘I imagined that would pacify you,’ he said.

  Amy began to kick the door, around which she was starting to perceive the faintest thread of a glow. ‘Turn my light back on. Turn it on now’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Turn. It. On. Or. I’ll. Wreck. Your. Head,’ Amy cried, punctuating each word with a vicious kick.

  ‘Your performances no longer trouble me. I rather think the dark will quieten you ere long,’ he said, turning his voice away from her and taking it into a room. A door slammed, extinguishing much of the rectangle from which light had seemed capable, given enough time, of leaking into her room. The darkness fitted more of itself to her eyes, and she felt it settling into her brain, robbing her of words. When she continued to kick out she had the dismaying notion that, despite the ache which spread through her foot, she was kicking only the adamant blackness. But it wasn’t quite as unrelievable as her father must want it to be. She had only to cross the room in the dark and find the book of matches in the wardrobe.

  Some effort was required before she managed to look away from the door—from all the light she had. She couldn’t distinguish so much as the hint of an outline in the depths around her, but she had a sense of something crouching low a few feet into the room, where her bed ought to be. Of course it was the bed, and she shuffled until her body was turned towards it, and moved forward.

  If only she had thought to take the matches while she was searching in the wardrobe! Her shins bumped hard against the corner of the bed, and she flailed the air to keep her balance. For a moment of panic that made her eyes feel overcome by cataracts she was afraid to touch walls closer than they should be. She could feel her bed, she was in the room with which she’d had to grow familiar, not the cell in the mirror. She made herself sidle to the right along the footboard, in the direction of the wardrobe.

  As soon as she relinquished her contact with the bed she felt lost in the dark. Her feet were beginning to encounter objects on the floor. Some were soft as flesh without much bone to keep it firm, some were hard as exposed bone. They were hers, she kept telling herself, even if more than one of them seemed to draw itself back as her foot tou
ched it. She thrust a hand into the darkness where the wardrobe was supposed to be, though she couldn’t help clenching her fist, and took another hesitant sidelong step. At once her knuckles collided, more loudly than she would have preferred, with the wardrobe door.

  She ran her hand over the flat featureless surface to locate the chilly sliver of a handle, and found its twin with her other hand, and pulled them both. She felt the doors pass on either side of her like the halves of a breath as she ducked into a blackness which pressed its smells of cloth and wood into her face. She groped in front of her, and one hand brushed against a dangling boneless arm. It didn’t belong to the coat she was trying to find, but she thought it was close. Her fingers ranged over a gathering of empty sleeves which stirred at her touch, and she had time to wonder what she might do if she met anything like an arm in one of them, just as an object harder than cloth and larger than any of her buttons presented itself to her fingertips. It was indeed the book of matches, which she pinched between her nails with all their strength—to ensure she didn’t drop it, surely not for fear it would be snatched out of her grasp—and having extracted it from the pocket, closed her other hand around it. She elbowed the doors shut, and was pushing back the cover of the match-book on her palm when she hesitated. Was she certain that she wanted to see the room in which she was imprisoned—the room which seemed to have abruptly grown cold and damp?

  Not seeing would be even worse. She prised up a match and tore it out of its rank and pressed it against the striking strip. When she felt it start to bend she realised that unless she struck it she was liable to render it useless, and so she dragged it along the strip. It sputtered but failed to ignite. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered, ‘you’re all I’ve got,’ and scraped the edge of its head on the strip. This time the match flared up.