The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  I mustn’t blame her. Thoughts of Toph Noble had inhibited me too—of the threat he’d left after stealing me out of my body and transporting me to the site of Safe To Sleep, to the depths of the land infested by the visitor the Nobles had inadvertently attracted to the world. “You’re ours when we want…” His grandfather and mother were daunting enough, but the thought of being at the mercy of such an unnatural child seemed more fearful still. For years after that night, whenever I’d wakened in bed I’d felt insufficiently contained, in danger of straying helplessly into the dark, drawn out of my body on a vindictive childish whim. Far too belatedly I concluded that he’d simply lost interest in me; after all, the Nobles thought few people were significant besides themselves. Might I attract their attention again if I looked into the church that seemed to be related to Safe To Sleep? That mustn’t matter now that I had nothing to lose, and I’d promised Lesley that I would look after our son.

  The entire gap between the houses was touched by light now, and I made the mistake of glancing up at the sky. Night still massed overhead. A few stars relieved the vast blackness, and then more pinpoints began to glimmer across increasingly unimaginable distances of space and time. I couldn’t look away while I recalled the voyage I’d taken from Safe To Sleep, past galaxies so remote from the earth that my mind shrank from grasping the kind of life that inhabited the abyss between the stars—the colossal gelatinous globe swarming with eyes and mouths, hungry to drain stars that it left dead and blackened. I felt too close to reliving the expedition, a dread I often felt on seeing the night sky. I clutched at the table to drag my attention back to earth, and then I shoved myself to my feet and stumbled across the cold moist lawn into the house.

  It was too early to phone my son. I made myself coffee and drank it down, ignoring a faint sour taste like a tang of neglect and age. Lesley had drunk more milk than I did, and since I’d halved the delivery it tended to start turning before I’d emptied the bottle. I spent time distributing my daily medication among the compartments of my pill organiser, and once I’d downed the morning’s five varieties I headed for the bathroom. The speckled shaving mirror magnified my face, as if it weren’t already sufficiently mottled and swollen. I had to concentrate to judge how hot the shower was, having chilled and then nearly scalded myself. Once I was dressed I plodded downstairs to watch the latest news: wars, terrorism, lunatics in power, the disintegration of Europe, the depletion of a world well on the way to reverting or otherwise approaching some primitive state… Why did this make my task feel more urgent? I switched off the television and fumbled for my phone to bring up Toby’s number.

  “Dad.”

  I gathered this was an announcement as well as a greeting when Claudine said “Love.”

  “Claude sends her love, dad. Wait, I’ll put us on speaker,” he said, and then “We haven’t seen you yet this week.”

  “You did on Sunday. Most people would say Sunday starts the week.”

  “Because it’s meant to bring the sun up,” Claudine said, “even if they don’t know that’s what they’re thinking. That’s how nearly everybody works.”

  “The old beliefs are always there,” Toby said, “and now they’re rising up.”

  Before I could comment Claudine said “What did you want to say, Macy?”

  “I wanted to give grandad my love as well.”

  “And you’ve got mine, Macy.” I was relieved she hadn’t joined in the discussion, but how careful would I need to be while she could hear? “Toby,” I said, “I was calling about your offer.”

  I was aware how grotesquely impersonal this sounded, and Toby seemed bemused. “Which was that, dad?”

  “Meditation.”

  “Do you mean you’d like to try?”

  “You were both saying I should.”

  “That’s good. It’s better than. We’re very glad you’ll be with us at last. When would you like to start?”

  Now that I’d made the move I felt anxious to leave my nervousness behind. “As soon as it’s convenient,” I said.

  “We’re here whenever you need us.”

  I might have taken this to signify no more than willingness, but I couldn’t help asking “Where?”

  “Starview Tower.”

  Toby made it sound as if I should have known, and perhaps I secretly had. So they were in the building that housed the Church of the Eternal Three, and their little daughter was. “You aren’t there all the time,” I hoped aloud.

  “Most of it.”

  ”You manage to do all your research from there.”

  “Easily,” Claudine said. “Online.”

  I envisioned her and Toby looking down on the world from the skyscraper, and it was partly to dislodge the image that I said “Could I come to you today?”

  “We’re as eager as you are. As soon as you possibly can.”

  I wasn’t quite that eager. “Can you give me an idea what’s involved?”

  “You are, dad. The whole of you will be.”

  “All the secrets deep inside you.”

  I hardly grasped the answers, because the last one dismayed me—not the words but the fact that they came from Macy. “And who’ll be doing whatever you do?” I had to learn.

  “Just us,” Toby said.

  I was distressed by needing to establish “Just you and Claudine.”

  “If you like. Will you be driving?”

  “I still can, yes. I haven’t lost the skill.”

  “I only meant we have parking under us. Remind me of your registration number and I’ll enter you in the system.”

  The seconds I took to recall it made me feel as incompetent as I’d just denied being. “Drive straight down when you get here,” Toby said, “and the car park will let you in.”

  “Then go up to the ground,” Macy said, “and Mr Joe will send you to see us.”

  Lesley had always relished her precociousness, and I told myself that the little girl was nothing like Toph Noble, at least in any bad sense. “I’ll be with you shortly,” I said, making for my car ahead of second thoughts.

  Trees were blossoming throughout the suburb, yet another sight my wife had left behind. Soon I came to Toxteth, where Hope Street linked a brace of cathedrals, a thorny concrete Catholic and a solemn sandstone Anglican. By the crossroads at the midpoint of the street the Philharmonic Hall advertised a concert performance of Pontius, an opera best known for the aria “What is truth?” As I drove downhill on Hardman Street, a name Lesley always thought should belong to a district run by gangsters, I saw posters for the Chortle Club, a venue in a converted warehouse near the docks. I’m Disabled So I Must Be Funny was this week’s comedy event, preceded by Muslim and Black with Transgender yet to come. Meanwhile the venerable Empire Theatre was provoking controversy with a show in which a paternity squabble on Jack Brittan’s television programme involved Mary and Joseph and God, who couldn’t be tested for DNA. Not long ago the theatre had been picketed for staging Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which the protesters condemned for trivialising rape.

  Downtown was crowded with pedestrians avoiding the homeless. My car and many others stuttered through a succession of traffic lights to the Strand, the main road closest to the river. Starview Tower was among the skyscrapers that had multiplied within and around the famed riverside skyline of Liverpool. It was a broad white building stacked with ranks of windows, variously curtained except for the top floor, where they seemed to consist of one-way glass. That floor—the thirty-third—and the one below it spread outwards like a bloom, lending the rest of the tower the appearance of an unnaturally broad stalk. When I turned down a ramp that sloped under the building from the Strand, the entrance barrier saluted me at once.

  The ramp descended to a car park considerably wider than the tower, and I tried not to be reminded how extensive the cellar beneath Safe To Sleep had been. Cars had gathered around a bank of lifts in the middle of the concrete bunker. I parked close, wondering why so many spaces were unoccupied. Slamming
the car door sent echoes scurrying into the corners, where darkness massed like cobwebs. I poked a button between a pair of lifts and tried to fend off an impression that despite all the fluorescent slabs set in the ceiling, there was an unreasonable amount of darkness overhead. An insectoid ticking must be the noise of a vehicle—my own, of course. A lift big enough to contain more than a dozen people gaped at me, and as I dodged in I heard a version of the clatter of my footsteps flee across the car park.

  As I reached for the ground-floor button—like the button for the basement it was green, while those above were red—the lift shut me in. The upper half of each grey wall was covered with a mirror, and a sideways look showed a multitude turning to meet my eyes while their companions presented the backs of their heads. I had to fight off an irrational compulsion to count all the manifestations of myself, which receded into darkness the light couldn’t reach. I jabbed the button a second time and stared at the door to encourage it to open. I felt hemmed in by innumerable extensions of myself by the time it did.

  The lobby was a large high almost entirely white space, deserted apart from a man encircled by a counter. Beyond glass doors traffic sped along the Strand in untroubled silence. The lobby walls were decorated with clumps of concrete stalks or branches, which I imagined expanding into flowers or treetops somewhere up above. As I stepped out of the lift the man said “Help you, sir?”

  He was as stocky as a guard’s job might require. His smooth pale skin appeared to be entirely hairless, which gave his head the look of an egg. His expression was innocently neutral, and his greeting revealed small unusually regular teeth. “Will you be Mr Joe?” I said.

  “That’s what she calls me, Mr Sheldrake.”

  “How do you know my—” I might have seemed even more paranoid if I hadn’t realised “They told you I was coming.”

  “Your son did.” Joe bared his teeth in what I assumed must be intended as a smile. “I’ll let you up,” he said and clicked a detail on a computer screen. “Take the lift you just took, all the way to the top. You’ll be thankful you did.”

  I couldn’t let his last words pass unremarked. “Are you involved with them?”

  His gaze retreated into innocence. “I’ve been.”

  “Can you tell me what to expect?”

  “Nobody can tell anyone. You have to be there for yourself.”

  “Where?”

  “Where just you can go,” he said like a direction.

  It was plain he had no more to say. “Then I will,” I said.

  The triple multitude that wore my face crowded forward to meet me as I stepped into the lift, and they grew restless as it crept upwards. They were miming my unease, because I had a sense of rising towards darkness. No doubt the shaft was unlit, not to mention empty, which could explain why I fancied that the lift was bearing me towards a void. An office building shouldn’t feel that way, and I thought of stopping the lift so that I could see the floors were tenanted. Or would it only stop where I’d been sent? The idea left me nervous of finding out, and I urged the lift onwards—all its countless occupants did.

  It opened on a nondescript lobby across which I was faced by several office doors. The upper panels were composed of frosted glass, and featureless. I’d barely stepped out when the lift crept shut, and I heard its dwindling murmur. I was making for the nearest door when its left-hand neighbour opened, though the glass panel had stayed blank, which unnerved me until Macy stuck her head out level with the handle. “I said it was grandad,” she cried.

  She had Claudine’s roundish face and small features, and Lesley’s wide dark eyes, which brightened as she ran to take my hand. She was tugging me across the lobby when her mother looked out of the office. “Are you guiding grandad?” she said.

  I imagined families where the question could only be innocuous, and wished fervently that ours were one. As I let myself be ushered, Toby emerged from the next room. “Dad,” he said. “True to your word.”

  I was near to demanding why this should be unexpected when I realised he was saying I’d arrived in good time. He followed me and Macy into Claudine’s office, a disconcertingly austere room with unadorned white walls and a single chair behind a desk occupied by a phone and a computer. A child’s desk stood under a wide window that looked out to the river’s mouth. Macy kept hold of my hand as she returned to the desk, where she was drawing a spectacularly toothy tyrannosaurus. “That’s what those look like, grandad.”

  A copy of Conan Doyle’s Lost World lay beside the drawing, but I wondered “Have you seen them in films too?”

  “She’s no need,” Claudine said.

  “It’s good that she’s reading books.”

  “She may as well,” Toby said, “while we still have them.”

  I felt as if I’d missed the significance of his answer and his wife’s, but before I could ponder them Claudine said “So what changed your mind about us, Dominic?”

  “You said you could help with my loss. I’m not coping as well as I’d hoped.” While this was true, it wasn’t the reason I was there, and my deceit held back my grief. “I know it has to take time,” I said.

  “You won’t look at it that way much longer.”

  “Claude means you won’t think about time.”

  “Not like you’re doing now, grandad.”

  Macy’s contribution perturbed me so much that I turned away from her. “That’s what your meditation does, is it?” I said, but not to her.

  “That’s some of what it brings you,” Toby said. “You have to discover yourself.”

  I was trying to prepare as best I could. My memories of voyaging at Safe To Sleep were all too vivid. “Shall we, then?” Claudine said. “We’ll be there if it gets too much.”

  “The most dreadful experience of my life,” Macy said.

  More disconcertingly still, her mother laughed. “She does that, Dominic.”

  “Does what?” I almost couldn’t ask.

  “She’s just noting in her mind the last sentence she read. It’s her sort of bookmark.”

  As I recalled the scene from my own reading—the narrator’s encounter in the prehistoric forest—Macy shut the book. “Are we taking grandad in the room?”

  “That’s where it starts,” Toby said.

  She and Claudine stood up as he did, though at least not quite in unison. As I followed everyone into the lobby I said “Who else is in the building?”

  “Property companies and financiers and lawyers for three. People you’d say matter, dad.”

  I didn’t know whether I would, and had a sense that he mightn’t. Macy ran to open a door off the lobby. “Here you are, grandad.”

  I overtook her parents, not from eagerness but because I was unsettled by the sight she’d revealed. Beyond the door was blackness, as if the doorway led into a void. I didn’t like to see her on that threshold, let alone crossing it. “What’s in there?” I said not far from panic.

  “Not much,” Toby said and strode in. “It’s what’s beyond.”

  I heard a click, and half a dozen muted lights came on overhead. Whereas Claudine’s office was equipped with one-way windows, this considerably larger room was windowless. More than a hundred leather chairs as black as an absence of light faced away from the door. “You can come in, grandad,” Macy urged. “There’s only us.”

  “Sometimes it’s full,” Claudine said.

  “Even if there’s only you.”

  “Don’t confuse grandad,” Claudine said, though with an indulgent smile. “Sit wherever you’ll feel comfortable, Dominic.”

  I felt as if that might be nowhere in the room. As I advanced to the nearest chair I remembered staying by the door at Safe To Sleep. Though I didn’t want to think that might be necessary here, I was reluctant to venture further. I’d hardly sat down when the padded leather set about adjusting itself to my shape. “Sit however helps you relax,” Claudine said. “The chairs go back.”

  I suspected that reclining would leave me feeling helples
s. “I’ll stay how I am.”

  “Some do at first,” Claudine said and sat next to me, while on my left side Toby did. “Macy, you’re in charge of the lights again. Wait till I say.”

  The five-year-old ran to shut the door and then stood by the switch. “Does it need to be dark?” I protested.

  “You’ll find it helps,” Toby said. “Don’t worry, we’ll have hold of you. We’ll know when you ought to finish.”

  He took my hand as Claudine found the other. I was put in mind of a seance, except that the ring of us was incomplete. It would need Macy to make it up, and I had to be grateful she was out of reach. “What am I meant to do?” I said.

  “Close your eyes, Dominic.” Once I had, overcoming my reluctance fast enough to hope it hadn’t been apparent, Claudine said “We’ll do the rest. Just settle back.”

  “Join in when you feel like it, dad.”

  “Join in what?”

  “You’ll know, but don’t worry if you want to leave it all to us this time.”

  I had no idea what Toby meant. I was preoccupied not just with keeping my eyes closed but with trying to judge how dark it was. I hadn’t heard Macy switch off the lights, and the inside of my eyelids was only dim. Even if relaxing was supposed to help the meditation work, I couldn’t help straining my senses, which seemed to draw a sound towards me from both sides, barely a murmur. It consisted of three repeated syllables, and I knew them all too well. No, they weren’t just repeated, I grasped as they grew fractionally louder or my mind took a firmer hold on them; the slow mesmeric almost liquid syllables were reversed every second time. The insistent repetition felt like a pulse that was lending its rhythm to my own, perhaps because Toby and Claudine kept squeezing my hands at its pace, so gently that I wasn’t sure of feeling the sensation. I was even more uncertain how dark the room might be, but at least as far as I could tell, Macy wasn’t joining in the whispered chant. Although I didn’t mean to, my mind had begun mutely to participate, and I searched for thoughts that would let me feel in control—any thought at all. A memory might do, and one overwhelmed me, catching at my breath. I was struggling to help Lesley climb the lifeless escalator.