The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  I could feel the crawling banister yield as I clutched at it with my free hand. I felt an ache gathering in my right arm as it supported Lesley, and sweat prickling my armpits, and my breaths growing shorter and harsher while my heart gave jerk after painful jerk. I heard Lesley say “I’ll be fine if I can just stand for a minute” in a depleted voice, and I wondered belatedly if she might have been pleading to rest on the steps rather than beyond them—whether she would have survived if I hadn’t forced us onwards. On the last few steps she seemed to grow practically weightless, as though preparing to take her leave of me. Someone behind us had started to push, but I never knew if they were simply impatient or meant to help. Lesley and I stumbled off the escalator in a clumsy version of an embrace, and then she let go, covering her heart with both hands as if to hold it steady while she leaned against the wall and slid gradually downwards. When I stooped shakily to lift her she could only gasp two words. “Phone, Dominic.”

  The memory was too vivid and too poignant, and I couldn’t help retreating. By now I was unaware of any chant or even where I was. The recollection seemed to lead directly to another, of being back at university, though not as a lecturer. I was wandering into the students’ union when I heard laughter, a sound so musical despite its unselfconscious helplessness that it felt quite separate from the mass of conversations in the bar. When I located the young woman I saw that she was reading the student magazine. At once I hoped my contribution was the cause of her amusement, but could I have known I wanted us to spend our lives together? The thought was inseparable from the memory. I loitered near her chair outside the bar, and when she looked up, wiping her eyes so as to focus on me, I saw she had indeed been reading my couplets. “That’s what comes of being brought up a Catholic,” I said.

  Lesley took time over reducing her mirth to a faint expectant grin. “Do you know the poet?”

  “As well as anybody in the world does.”

  “Are you saying it’s you?”

  I couldn’t tell whether this was as reproving as she made it sound. “Guilty,” I admitted.

  “I think it’s the most reprehensible thing,” Lesley said before her grin got the better of her, “I’ve ever read in my life.”

  “If it affected you that badly then perhaps you need a drink,” I said, and soon I was standing in the haphazard crowd at the bar. Attracting the barmaid’s attention took so long that I grew nervous in case my new friend, whose name I had yet to learn, decided I wasn’t worth waiting for. In fact we’d never let each other down like that except on the night of our Shakespeare mistake. I didn’t want to relive that just now—it summed up my loss too much—and I was rescued by the memory of composing all the verses, most of them in the incontinent stuttering virtually uncontrollable shower in the shabby house I shared with three fellow students. I could smell the redolence we brought to it—a mixture of perfumes and aftershave and four different soaps in the bathroom, curry in the kitchen, cannabis in the lounge even though we blew the smoke up the chimney of the disused hearth for fear of being found out by the landlord. As I struggled yet again to moderate the temperature of the shower I came up with a verse I’d forgotten to include in my submission to the magazine:

  Before you down your Sunday roast

  Ensure your starter is the host.

  This took me back me to another unpublished item—Three’s No Crowd, the novel I’d attempted in my final year at school, when I still thought I could write a book. I’d tried to imagine an adult version of the tremendous trio, Jack the priest and Tommy (short for Thomasina) the socialist figurehead and Don, their best-selling chronicler. I’d abandoned it when Don discovered Jack and Tommy were having an affair, a situation that embarrassed me so much even though I depicted it in very little detail that I tore the whole book up for fear that my parents might read it. I could still recall the act of writing it: the sense that my mind was flaring with ideas, the way that if I paused too long the next word I put down would grow dark with gathered ink, the odd sweetish taste of the blue stains on my fingers as I tried to lick them clean. This instantly led to an earlier memory—although I’d been writing and drawing for years by the time I started school, the teacher shamed me by announcing Dominic didn’t know how to hold his pencil right—and then another taste returned, of the crayon I was sucking while I drew an infant picture of the sun, a yellow ball sprouting squiggles jagged with energy. Could I go back even further? Yes, I was emerging into sunlight or some artificial brightness, but I seemed unable to define the situation, not least because I had no words. Now I had some, which helped to fix how I was looking down at a newborn child in his mother’s arms. I felt unsteady with relief that the baby wasn’t stillborn, an event so common that it was noted just as SB on the death certificates, and then I was shaken by a wave of affection for mother and child. Despite its intensity, I experienced the emotion at some remove, perhaps because I was anxious to determine why the woman looked familiar, like an old photograph bestowed with life. In a moment she addressed me, and I knew. “Desmond, it’s a boy,” she said, “so he’ll be Dominic.”

  Recognising that the tiny crumpled suffused face was mine felt worse than any vertigo. It felt like plunging out of time and space with no means of rescuing myself, nothing to catch hold of, not least my own vanished identity. My body didn’t help even once I grew aware of it, because I wasn’t properly aligned with it and couldn’t make it work. Then the darkness within my inoperative eyelids blazed with light, and I felt hands clasping mine, exerting an irregular unsynchronised pressure that might have been designed to interrupt my trance. There was silence until Toby said “Take it easy as long as you need, dad. You’re back with us.”

  The pressure on my hands fed me back into them as if they were gloves composed of my flesh. Once the rest of me returned to alignment I managed to blink. “Where did you go, grandad?” Macy cried. “Were you born?”

  Realising she might have had a similar experience disconcerted me even more than mine. “Were you?” I said, hoping for the opposite.

  “Yes, and I saw me. I’ve been you as well.”

  Her parents were watching me with some concern. No doubt they wanted to establish that the trance and its effects hadn’t harmed me, but I was appalled by how unconcerned they were for their daughter. “What does she mean?” I demanded.

  “She’s been back too,” Claudine said. “Our genes remember, Dominic. It’s all stored inside us. People used to mistake it for reincarnation.”

  “You saw your birth, dad, yes? That’s nearly always the first step.”

  The idea that it would lead to more almost stole my words, but I complained “I could have done with being warned in advance.”

  “We don’t want anybody to feel prompted. It’s your voyage and yours alone.”

  “Don’t try it by yourself just yet, though,” Claudine said. “Wait till you’re more used to how far you can go.”

  I had no intention of achieving that state, but Macy said “Are we going to give grandad a worm?”

  My voice came out harsh and infuriatingly tremulous. “What’s she talking about now?”

  “Just an aid to meditation, Dominic. We’ll save that till grandad’s settled in.” As if to make the situation appear even more mundane Claudine asked me “What would you like now? A drink or just to sit?”

  “Neither, thank you. I’ll be off home to think over what I saw.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right to drive, dad?”

  “How are you saying your meditation might affect me?”

  “You may feel a bit out of it for a while, especially the first time. You may need to concentrate.”

  “Then I will.” Far too much like a peevish oldster I protested “Nobody told me I wasn’t meant to drive.”

  I stood up steadily enough and headed for the lifts. I was keeping my thumb on the button between them when Macy called “Be back again soon, grandad.” As I turned to respond, however non-committally, a man came to the door of the off
ice beyond Toby’s and Claudine’s. He was tall and thin with a long oval face, and some years younger than my son. “Let me welcome you to the Church of the Eternal Three,” he said, and was advancing at a measured pace when a phone rang in his office.

  He seemed to forget me at once. Darting back into his room, he shut the door. Through the frosted glass I saw him stoop to pick up the receiver, an action very much akin to the salute he’d offered me, and entirely too familiar. I had to swallow an unpleasant taste so as to speak, though I scarcely needed to ask “Who was that?”

  “He’s Mr Christopher,” Macy said.

  “He leads this chapel,” Toby said.

  I swallowed again, because my throat had grown dry as ash. “Christopher what?”

  “Le Bon,” Claudine said as if there was no reason for me not to know, and I might have confronted her and my son except for Macy’s presence. I dodged into the lift and didn’t glance back, but couldn’t tell whether my myriad selves looked distressed or determined or both. I knew only that I would be returning to the Church of the Eternal Three after all.

  4 - The Cold Past

  “Was it everything you hoped for, Mr Sheldrake?”

  “Why are you saying I came, Mr Joe?”

  “No need to call me mister, Mr Sheldrake. That’s just what your little one does.”

  “She’s hardly mine. Well, she’s my granddaughter.”

  “Close enough, some would say.”

  A grin presumably intended to be personable displayed his small dauntingly regular teeth, but I didn’t mean to be distracted. “You haven’t told me what you thought I was hoping for.”

  “Mr Sheldrake said your wife left us the other week.”

  I couldn’t tell whether Joe meant his bluffness to be bracing, but it angered me enough that I retorted “So why would that bring me here?”

  “Mr Sheldrake lost his mother, and it helped him.”

  “How?”

  “It gives us some perspective. That’s what meditating’s all about.”

  “That’s been your experience.”

  “Never felt so close to my family.”

  This reminded me of witnessing my own birth with my father’s mind, and I almost grabbed the edge of the counter to steady myself “Your parents, you mean.”

  “Them to start with.” He opened his mouth further before apparently deciding to withhold a remark. “Has Mr Sheldrake told you what comes then?” he asked instead.

  “All I was told was not to try it by myself yet.” Rather less truthfully I said “That’s why I’ve come back.”

  “It’s something else when there’s a lot of us.” As if he’d realised the comment was premature Joe said “Anyway, I’m keeping you. You go up and your family will look after you.”

  He might have been addressing someone a good deal older and more infirm than I meant to be. “They do their best,” I said and made for the lifts, hoping Joe couldn’t see beyond my words. My multiple selves swarmed out of the walls of the cage, a spectacle that might have been parodying the way I’d become somebody additional in the meditation room. Last night I hadn’t slept much, for fear not just of drifting into someone else’s memories but of discovering I couldn’t return without help. I’d clung to my own recollections to hold myself in place, and for greater safety only recent ones—the hospital, the funeral, the wake. Even grief had felt reassuring, since it was mine alone, at least until I wondered if my granddaughter could have experienced it by proxy. Ought I to have sensed her somewhere inside my mind? Might Toby have been in there at some point too? Surely this wasn’t how the process worked, but this was among the questions I was determined to raise. I would rather Macy didn’t hear, though it distressed me to wonder how much she already knew. If she was here I planned to ask Claudine to keep her away while I questioned my son.

  As soon as the lift reached the top floor I stepped forward—a great many of me did. My army stayed behind while I crossed the lobby, but I hadn’t reached Toby’s office when another door swung wide. The occupant of the room leaned out as if he was repeating the bow he’d given me last time or else mocking the gesture. “I missed my chance for a word with you yesterday, Mr Sheldrake.”

  “You can have a lot more than a word,” I said, having taken a deep breath that helped me stand up absolutely straight. “Don’t you remember the rest of my name, by the way?”

  “Do come in and sit down, Mr Sheldrake.”

  The invitation seemed to hint at a reprimand, as if I were proposing to cause a scene in public. Might he prefer Toby and Claudine and anybody else who was nearby not to hear? I could have made sure they did, but suppose this endangered them? I was here to achieve the opposite if I could. My host was holding the door open like a mime of patience or a suggestion of its finitude, and I sidled past him into the room.

  It was much like Toby’s office next door, with unadorned white walls and an equally colourless almost skeletal desk that bore a phone and a computer. Between them lay an object that roused unwelcome memories—a figurine carved out of material so black I had difficulty in making out the details of its shape. It portrayed a worm-like creature with its tail in its mouth and protruding a tongue split in three at the tip. Members resembling rudimentary hands with too many fingers sprouted at irregular intervals and in a variety of sizes from the coiled trunk. I had to force my gaze away from it as my host closed the door and sat at the desk with his back to the window, beyond which a moon like a chewed wafer invoked the night in the otherwise empty blue sky above the mouth of the river. “You were asking for your name,” he said. “Will it be Dominic?”

  I lowered myself into the chubby leather chair across from his before retorting “You remember that much, then.”

  “We’re all about memory here, Mr Sheldrake.”

  “So what am I supposed to call you now?”

  “If we’re going by first names, it’s Christopher.”

  “What’s the alternative, just so I know?”

  “It should be on my door for all to see, do you think?” When I didn’t respond he said “Le Bon’s the family name.”

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “It’s always been Le Bon. That’s where we come from.”

  I looked away, having glimpsed more than reminiscence in his eyes, a darkness so deep that I feared it could draw me in. I saw fragments of the moon fall towards the bay—no, a scattered flock of seagulls—as I remembered the field in France. In a bid to put my thoughts in order I said “The last time we met you were Toph.”

  “We all have our pet names, don’t we, Dominic?”

  Though I couldn’t be sure that he almost imperceptibly emphasised the first syllable of my name, it felt like a sly indefinable threat to Bobby and Jim. “So is that what your family calls you?” I suggested.

  “Not at all. We’ve moved on. I’m Christopher to everyone who knows me.”

  Presumably this authorised me to use the name, but I kept it out of my mouth. “And where’s your family now?”

  He traced a line across his forehead with a fingertip, and I could have fancied he was describing a religious sign if not an occult one. “Opening more eyes in Europe and America,” he said. “They’ll be here before you know and pleased to see you.”

  “Why should they be?”

  “We like anyone who knows our secrets to be part of us.”

  Rather than ask how much he thought I knew I said “What else do you remember about me?”

  “You tried to stop Christian, didn’t you? You never realised it wasn’t us you had to stop, not that anyone can stop it or could have even then.” In a forgiving tone I found worse than grotesque he said “Still, you were only young.”

  “I wasn’t so young when I met you.”

  His lips let me glimpse amusement. “You were pretty well daunted, though.”

  “That was your aim, was it?” With growing rage I said “And you tried after all of you abandoned Safe To Sleep.”

  “I think I mo
re than tried, and I wasn’t even Macy’s age.”

  I didn’t know if he was offering this as an excuse or boasting of his powers, but I was most dismayed by the mention of my granddaughter. “That night’s stayed with you, has it?” he said.

  If this was designed to revive his infantile threat, it only angered me. “Should it have? I thought you’d lost interest, the way babies do.”

  “You’ve attracted our interest, Dominic. You can always count on that.”

  According to his mother Christian Noble was indifferent to me and to humanity in general, but rather than argue I said “I wonder what exactly drove you out of Safe To Sleep.”

  “Call it an infestation. Just an inconvenience.”

  “That’s what you sent me to that night, an inconvenience.”

  “You were one, and so it seemed appropriate.”

  “More than that.” My rage gave me no time to specify whether I meant the subterranean presence or myself. “I don’t think any of you realised what you were inviting,” I said. “It was more than you could cope with.”

  “I promise you we’ve dealt with greater powers.”

  “That’s why you had to shield yourselves with children, is it?” In the confusion I’d forgotten he had been one at the time. “Don’t tell me it didn’t get to you, that thing under Safe To Sleep,” I said. “You started writing about how it happened and you couldn’t even finish.”

  His dark gaze rested on my face, and too late I realised how I’d loosed the truth. “You read that,” he said. “You went back to our house.”

  “Yes, and not by myself either.”

  At once I regretted having said this, but Toph appeared to think it wasn’t worth pursuing. “So you saw it off,” he said.

  “We saw what happened to it. Perhaps you can tell me—”

  “I’m saying you roused what was underneath. You could say you fed it if you like.”

  “I’d say nothing of the kind. We didn’t bring it there.” Finding the argument absurdly disproportionate—a petty squabble over a monstrous invasion—I said “What’s become of it since?”