The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  “They’re within us all,” Claudine said. “What has been and what shall be.”

  “That’s what you meditate about, is it?” I persisted as if this might drive the truth out of hiding. “That’s all you do.”

  “What’s to come has always been,” Toby said.

  To me this sounded like a ritual response, but I saw Jim and Bobby take it to confirm my words. I was searching for questions that wouldn’t embarrass my friends any further when Jim left the subject behind. “Dom says your daughter’s a real delight.”

  “She’s at school today,” Claudine said.

  “I know I went to grandad’s funeral when I was her age, dad,” Toby said. “I hope you aren’t upset because she won’t be with us.”

  “We couldn’t be sure what will be said at the funeral,” Claudine said, “and we’d rather her beliefs weren’t confused.”

  Ibis provoked another question I’d suppressed far too long. “Does Macy go to your church?”

  “Of course she does, Dominic. Why would we keep her away?”

  “And joins in the meditation?”

  “All the children do. I’m sure people who belong to what Jim calls real churches make their children worship.”

  “Laura and I showed ours the right way,” Jim said with some force. “We’d be failures as parents if we’d done less.”

  “If your church is so legitimate,” I said to Toby and Claudine, “how is it I didn’t know Macy was involved?”

  “Dominic, you never asked.”

  “Dad, mum knew and she didn’t have a problem.”

  This felt as if I’d lost her even more completely than I feared—as if I’d been robbed of an aspect of her I thought I could trust. “Nobody told me,” I muttered and heard how pathetic I sounded.

  “Maybe she thought you’d make an issue out of it,” Claudine said, “the way you did over Safe To Sleep.”

  I looked at Jim and Bobby for support, but they didn’t look at me. Even if they wanted to avoid further argument, I felt they’d let me down. I was trying to think how to continue, not least because in several ways I felt utterly alone, when Toby stood up. “I think mum’s here.”

  I could easily have feared he was saying Lesley had returned in the sense the Nobles would have meant it, but two long black cars were outside, and the foremost contained a large white box. I’d already seen it unlidded—I’d seen the work of art into which my wife had been transformed, a perfect waxwork so cold and unresponsive that leaving a kiss on its forehead felt like mouthing at emptiness rendered solid—but its arrival brought home how much awareness I was trying to fend off. Panic at the prospect of the day and of the life to follow seized me somewhere in the guts, and I fled to the bathroom.

  I didn’t throw up despite feeling close to it. I drained myself as best I could, a prolonged and intermittent process, and stumbled downstairs to find everyone bereft of conversation in the hall. The front door was open, admitting an insistent chill. Drops of melted frost glittered on Lesley’s flowers beside the path, and some of the tiny globes enshrined rainbows. I tried to imagine they were signs from Lesley rather than think they were among the countless experiences I wouldn’t share with her. I almost forgot to turn the key in the mortise lock before setting off along the frosty path.

  The limousine held a discreet scent of flowers or air freshener, which caught in my throat like grief. Once Toby had joined me and Claudine on the back seat, the small procession moved off with Bobby’s Golf at the rear. Stretches of the roads were black with ice, and despite the measured pace of the little parade I thought the wheels came near to skidding more than once. Most of the traffic on the main road stayed behind us out of respect or so as not to take a risk, but the occasional impatient driver overtook all three vehicles, veering dangerously close to the elongated grove of trees that divided the wide road. Some pedestrians stood still while we passed, and an old man with a stick reached up to lift a hat he wasn’t wearing, but most of the folk on the pavements were too intent on their phones to notice the procession. I reflected that the man with the stick might have been no more than my age, and that Lesley never would be. I had to take a deep breath, struggling to hold it steady and silent, as the hearse led the way through the gates of the crematorium.

  Outside the chapel groups of mourners—friends of Lesley’s, colleagues from her tenure, students she’d taught—turned to face us. The limousine driver opened the door as another of the undertaker’s men raised the hatchback of the hearse. I was hauling myself out of the limousine when the celebrant came over—Dophie Lembert, a slim coppery young woman whose loose multicoloured headscarf could have gone with a variety of occasions and beliefs. I thought she meant to offer motivation of the kind she’d lent me last time we’d met, but she murmured “The crematorium has asked me to apologise. The heating’s broken down.”

  I strove not to acknowledge how this sounded like a grisly joke, and still felt obliged to say “You don’t mean the, the mechanics of the place.”

  “Just the heating for yourselves and the other service users, Mr Sheldrake.”

  I heard shuffling footsteps and equally muffled conversations on the far side of the chapel. The previous funeral was over, and it was time for me to perform the task I ached to do justice as much as I dreaded it. Two undertaker’s men eased out the coffin, which looked white as an absence, not just of colour. They waited for me to grasp the left front handle while Toby took the opposite, and the four of us lifted the coffin together. I felt no less dismayed by how relatively easy this was than I would have been if I’d proved unequal to the effort. As we fell into a tortoise’s march towards the chapel I noticed frost on the path and grew terrified of stumbling. I had to refrain from hitching up the casket on my shoulder in case that might aid my balance.

  More slowed-down hobbled paces than I cared to count took us to the chapel, by which time the edge of the casket was digging into my shoulder. Half the pews were occupied by mourners, who rose to their feet in rather less than unison as we plodded down the aisle. Dwarfish speakers high on the walls were murmuring the adagio from Schubert’s string quintet, which Lesley used to find one of the most consoling passages in music. Just now it threatened to blur my vision, and failed to ease the weight on my aching shoulder. I felt the gazes of the congregation gather on my back like a threat that everyone was about to watch me buckle under my burden, or rather the quarter that I presumed to be able to manage. I kept glimpsing my pale breaths, which made me feel as if shivering might rob me of control. I had the awful notion that the only way I would be able not to drop the coffin was to put on speed—to trot or, worse still, run past the front pews and the deserted lectern to dump the casket on a stand in the middle of a stage flanked by curtains, and I would have to trust my fellow bearers to keep up. No, they were dragging me back, and so was my sense of how shameful the spectacle would be. I clutched at the handle with both hands as best I could and trudged onwards, clenching my teeth until I felt a creak. Now I was past the front pews and Claudine’s encouraging gaze, and then the lectern was behind, and as my arms began to throb with as much pain as my shoulder I managed to join in lowering the coffin onto the stand. “I did it for you, Lesley,” I whispered almost too low to hear myself, and tried not to massage my shoulder as I made for my place.

  Claudine gave it a rub as I sidled along the pew. Her hand was soft but firm, and I lingered until the ache grew dull. As it shrank to a blunt pang I couldn’t help feeling that Claudine had erased a trace of Lesley, however painful. Dophie Lembert had moved to the lectern, and once I took my seat she spoke. “We are here today to honour Lesley Sheldrake, wife and teacher and good friend,” she said as though she might be claiming one of those relationships. “Nobody’s life can be summed up in just the few minutes we have, and I know you’ll all have memories I hope you’ll share when we gather afterwards, but I think these occasions can be like a poem, distilling the essence of a life…”

  Her summary was deft and true enoug
h—she’d obtained the details from Toby and me—and felt almost unbearably prolonged yet far too brief, since it was the prelude to my own oration. I barely took in her words for mutely rehearsing my own, and didn’t realise she’d finished until I heard my name. Lesley’s husband Dominic of many years wobbled to his feet and had to shrug off a resurrected ache while limping to the lectern. When I saw members of the congregation willing me not to break down in front of them, I almost did. I’d practiced my speech for days, persisting doggedly even when my tears grew indistinguishable from the downpour of the bathroom shower, until I hoped I’d exhausted the physical signs of my grief. Of course I hadn’t—that reservoir seemed bottomless—and I found myself remembering how Lesley had brought about her end by scrambling up a stationary escalator from the underground station at Lime Street in the rush hour.

  We could have used the lift if she hadn’t insisted on leaving it for the disabled, and she was as resolved not to hinder anybody on the escalator as the crowd was determined not to be delayed. “I’ll be all right,” she’d told me before I realised she mightn’t be. “Let me get out of everyone’s way,” she’d gasped as she dragged herself upwards, and I’d seen how the hand that wasn’t clutching at her chest was digging its nails into the rubber banister. When I’d clambered up beside her to support her, someone had tried to shove past, and I’d come close to delivering a vicious backwards kick. “Hold on, this lady’s ill,” I’d cried, making Lesley protest “Just get me to the top, Dominic.” Even once we’d struggled to the summit, where she leaned against the white-tiled wall and then sagged into a sitting position, the crowd flooded onwards without hesitating, and more than one commuter stepped over her legs. Perhaps people took her for yet another beggar, but it felt as if the future was streaming onwards without us. Eventually a member of the station staff approached to offer help, by which time I was already phoning for an ambulance.

  “I think that’s all I can say for now,” I said, having described none of this, and stepped back from the lectern. I had a sense that the self who’d enunciated memories had been speaking at some distance from me while I relived the endless minutes at the station. Perhaps that had been the only way I could cope with speaking. As I returned to the pew Toby clasped my arm, whether supporting me or in appreciation I couldn’t tell, and then Claudine did. “Thank you for gifting us that, Dominic,” Dophie Lembert said from beside the lectern, “and now Toby Sheldrake has words for us.”

  As Toby left the pew a shiver caught up with me, and I saw my breath. I would never see Lesley’s again or feel it on my skin or hear it beside me in bed, and I tried to ignore the sight by watching my son step up to the lectern. “I’ve got too much to say,” he said.

  He told us how his mother had been someone he could always confide in. “And dad was,” he added, gazing over my head. She’d given up years of her career to look after him at the start of his life, and I saw him share a silent thought with Claudine that I couldn’t interpret. If there was a disagreement his mother had always resolved it, and he hoped I didn’t mind if he said she’d held the family together. He would always remember how childlike with wonder she’d grown when we’d all spent a week at the theme parks in Orlando—“you’d have thought she was younger than me.” He recalled how proud she’d been at his graduation, as if she was responsible for it—“and the way she brought me up was, her and dad.” I shivered several times in the course of his tribute, a reaction that kept other feelings at bay until he said “She liked me to read to her when I was little. I remember reading Peter Pan to her and Peter saying if he ever went ahead it would be an awfully big adventure. I hope she’s having one right now.”

  I remembered the copy of the book Jim and I had found in the room next to Phoebe Sweet’s office at Safe To Sleep—the images of airborne children with their eyes enlarged and filled in with a void. As Toby came back to the pew, Dophie Lembert returned to the lectern. “Thank you for adding to our picture of your mother, Toby,” she said, “and now let’s all stand for one of her favourite songs.”

  It was All Together Now, a Beatles singalong, which Lesley had said more than once she would like at her funeral. I’d thought she’d chosen it because it was a cheery ditty with which people could join in, as the congregation gradually did, but now I kept hearing three words as if another voice were singing them, like a message she’d left for me: “I love you.” I managed to steady my own voice by not much less than roaring the phrase and then the rest of the song. Once everyone was seated again Dophie Lembert said “And now we have a reading that I believe meant a lot to Mrs Sheldrake.”

  It was from Henry Scott-Holland’s celebrated sermon, the thoughts of a professor of divinity at Oxford, not to mention Canon of Christchurch. “Death is nothing at all…” Lesley had liked the vision of the afterlife, the idea that it resembled entering another room. “Call me by the old familiar name,” and I almost did under my breath. “Life means all that it ever meant,” and I caught a glance that Toby and Claudine sent each other, which they repeated when we heard “There is absolute and unbroken continuity.” I hoped this signified the same to them as I would have liked to be true, along with “I am but waiting for you somewhere near, just around the corner.” Surely Toby and his wife could never think of Lesley in the way the Nobles would.

  “Now we’ll take a few minutes to reflect on the lives we each shared with Lesley Sheldrake,” Dophie Lembert announced, bowing her head in a gesture to fit most beliefs. I lowered mine, only to discover that when I searched for Lesley in my mind I couldn’t immediately see her. The best I could summon up was a sketchy image of her at an indeterminate age, and I hadn’t managed to restore it to any kind of life by the time Dophie Lembert spoke again. “Now if we can all please stand…”

  As I wavered to my feet the curtains set about creeping together across the stage. They might have been ending a show more austere than Lesley and I had ever seen in the theatre. To compensate we heard her final choice of music, Sousa’s Liberty Bell march. She meant it to send everyone out with a smile, but it reminded me how I’d never told her about Monty Bison. I wanted to believe that in some way she knew about the misunderstanding now—that she would know about everything that might still happen in my life.

  The march saw everyone to the side door, beyond which I had to wait with Toby to accept the ritual parade of condolences. Hugs and handshakes quickly grew familiar, and quite a few phrases did. At least this helped prevent the sympathy from stealing my control. When a one-time lecturer’s moist infirm handshake finally ended the rite, I limped to the limousine, where the wipers gave a solitary muted screech as they scraped frost from the windscreen. “You both did well,” Claudine said as Toby sat beside her, and I thought she sounded as if she was talking about an occasion far less distressing than I for one had had to face.

  The car took us at a discreet speed to the Chimneys, a pub so close to the crematorium that Lesley and I used to think the name was a macabre joke. The large barroom was portly with upholstery on booths and chairs, all printed with autumnal foliage. While the buffet in a side room looked tempting, I didn’t feel enticed to much. I sat in a booth with Toby and Claudine and Bobby and Jim, and was glad that nobody approached except to take their leave. Though I didn’t want to drink too much, too little seemed equally unwise. I’d seen off most of a bottle of claret, which none of my companions would let me pay for, by the time everyone but them had bid farewell. “I’d better be heading for my train,” Bobby said. “I can drop you off on the way, Jim.”

  Jim was lingering over shaking my hand when she grasped both of us by an arm. “Just remember what we used to say, the three of us.”

  “I do,” Jim said, and I told them “I always have.”

  Claudine seemed eager to learn the secret but didn’t speak. As my friends made for the door Toby said “Dad, will you let us do something for you?”

  “You’ve done plenty. You both have.”

  “Then let us do what you need now. Not n
ecessarily just yet, not till you feel you’re ready, but will you come to meditation with us?”

  Claudine abandoned her unasked question. “It helped me when mum died last year.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, which left me with an absurdly inappropriate sense of equivocating over a treat children were wishing for. Perhaps Toby and Claudine viewed it as some kind of treat for me. I didn’t want to ask what kind just now, especially when I seemed to glimpse an unreadable thought in his eyes and hers. I would have liked Bobby and Jim to be there to hear, and wondered if my son and his wife had delayed the proposal until we were alone. “We won’t talk about it any more now,” I said, and although the room was close to overheated, I had to fight off a shiver.

  3 - Stepping Back

  After the police brought me home I sat in the garden behind the dark house to await the dawn. In Lesley’s last years we’d often dined out here, not least in spring and autumn as the climate changed. Now the picnic table gave me an uninterrupted view all the way across the deserted lawn to the empty house, but I was most aware of the space on the bench that faced me—the aching absence that seemed airless, robbed of breath. All around me the night felt forsaken by my wife: the faint nocturnal scent of flowers, a hint of rising daylight in a gap between two houses, the garnering clamour of birds in the trees, the screech of a fox, more distant than ever. I was desperate to believe that Lesley could somehow share these experiences, but couldn’t I content myself with knowing she was present in a sense? I’d scattered her ashes over the lawn and on the flowerbeds as she’d wished, and if I gazed at them I could fancy that the grass and the somnolent blossoms were sending me a gentle secret glow. Perhaps in time this would feel like a token of peace, but for the moment it was more important to remember what the policewoman had reminded me I ought to do. Now that Lesley had gone, there was nothing to hold me back from investigating the new church.