The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  “You don’t, Dominic. Now let’s forget all about that kind of thing and have a nice family dinner.

  I felt patronised, and might have protested that she seemed to find some mundane issues more important than she’d claimed, at least as a means or silencing unwelcome views. As soon as she let Macy into the hall the little girl said “Grandad, are you going to borrow my image?”

  I was starting to find everyone’s assistance close to unbearable. “As your mum says, let’s just enjoy our dinner.”

  I did my best and tried to feel I was setting her an example, although the Sunday roast resembled inhibition on a plate, an excuse to stop our mouths with food and avoid any number of difficult subjects. Perhaps that was why I overdid my gratitude during the meal and at the end as well. Once I’d added a last thank you on my way out of the house Macy said “Are you coming next week, grandad?”

  “Of course he is,” Claudine said more fiercely than I thought the question warranted. “That’s what Sundays are for.”

  “I ought to come and see you in the meantime, dad.”

  “Call me first,” I said as if I were far busier than I’d been for months.

  He was proposing to guide me again, of course, but I had no desire to venture further when it threatened to revive the nightmare vision I’d suffered in my adolescence—the nightmare I suspected had been no dream. If I didn’t mean to voyage any more, I had no use for the icon, and would rather not have it in my house. Better still if it were nowhere in the world.

  As soon as I was home I made for my desk and unlocked the drawer. Perhaps my shadow made the interior look darker than it ought to be. I’d forgotten that the drawer contained the copy of Christian Noble’s journal The coiled shape lay on top of the stack of exercise books, gazing up at me with eyes like globes of congealed night. Its wide smile could have been greeting if not mocking me, and I imagined Macy waking up to see the jovial inhuman face beside her bed. A surge of loathing made me grab the icon, which was so cold that my fingers twitched, and limp fast into the back garden to destroy the thing for good.

  Rocks protruded from the borders on both sides of the lawn. Lesley had covered them with tiny flowers, but they were bald in patches now. I found the largest section of bare rock and sank to my knees on the damp grass. I meant to smash the icon on the sharp edge of the rock. Its shape made it hard to wield or even aim, so that I could have fancied it was writhing in my grasp. More than a dozen blows left my hands shivering but failed even to chip the icon. Either I was feebler than I had been when I’d broken into the crypt of the Trinity Church of the Spirit or the icon was less fragile than the broken one I’d found at Safe To Sleep. I kept changing hands and tried using both, which was just as ineffective. Splinters flew off the rock while the icon remained stubbornly undamaged. When neighbours started peering out of their windows to see what was making the noise, I desisted. I almost brandished the icon to demonstrate what I’d been trying to break, a gesture that would have conveyed nothing to anyone unless they knew far too much about the church. I staggered to my feet and stumbled into the house, struggling to clutch the icon to my chest with my spasmic hands. In the workroom I slammed the gleeful face against the back of the drawer and locked the icon in my desk.

  My failure to destroy it left its presence more pervasive than ever. In the depths of the night I awoke to find it had crawled upstairs and crept into my hands, unless it had summoned me to fetch it in my sleep. No, my hands were empty, although they were describing its shape. Their obsessively repetitive movements revived the mantra in my brain, or else its rhythm prompted the compulsion to outline the icon. The shape was growing more elaborate, not merely concave where it ought to be convex but infinitely hollow yet immeasurably minute. The complexity infected the mantra, which began to hatch a multitude of syllables while retaining the length of each reiterated phrase, and my mind had to grow in order to contain them all. The expansion felt like reaching for the boundless night or whatever lay beyond it, a process that distracted me from noticing how my fingers had to mutate in order to encompass the form they were moulding. The impression dislodged me from my trance, and I clasped my hands together so hard that they shook. When at last I was convinced they hadn’t changed I set about trying to relax, but I didn’t sleep for some time, and even then not much.

  By dawn I was desperate to see the last of the icon. I stayed in the shower until I felt sufficiently awake to be safe to drive, and downed a second mug of fierce black coffee with half a bowl of cereal. Once I’d binned the remains of my dully healthful breakfast I strode into the workroom, only to falter when I opened the drawer. The icon was still squatting on top of the exercise books, but now it was smiling up at me, and I could have thought its blank black eyes were wide with triumph.

  Could I have mistaken how I’d placed it in the drawer? The possibility that my memory had grown more unreliable than I recognised didn’t reassure me much. I seized the icon, gripping it harder as its unnatural chill spread through my hands, and hurried out to the car. Once I’d dumped my burden on the seat next to mine I locked the house and climbed into the car to find the icon smiling up at me. It hadn’t moved—surely I’d left it like that—but I turned its face away before starting the car.

  Birds flew up from hedges and trees as I drove out of the suburb, and a wind swayed branches away from the car. I couldn’t feel the wind until I came to a roundabout on the main road, where I had to believe the gust was why the car lurched out of control as though eager to return home. I recaptured my hold on the steering and swerved into the correct lane as horns blared at my back. The manoeuvre twisted the icon around to face me, and I felt anxious to turn the exultant countenance away, but every time I took one hand off the wheel the car began to stray out of the lane. At last I found a layby alongside a bus stop, past which two women were walking twice as many dogs. As I pulled over, all the dogs started to bark, baring their teeth at the car while I adjusted the icon. The women were staring hard at me by the time the traffic let me onto the road. I gripped the wheel and avoided looking at the icon all the way to the rubbish dump.

  I hadn’t visited one for years. I remembered hurling household items into an enormous pit in an open shed. I was so preoccupied with ridding myself of the icon that I hadn’t considered how such places might have changed. A sign beside a narrow one-way track beyond a wire mesh fence identified the dump as a waste recycling site. The track led past anonymous boxy shuttered buildings, a route so nondescript it might have been designed to signify abandonment. At the end, ahead of several battered hoppers big as trucks, men in yellow plastic waistcoats were interrogating drivers at an impromptu checkpoint. One guardian of garbage, a slow stocky fellow with a round flat face that looked determined to be unsurprised, stopped my car. “What are you bringing us today, squire?”

  As I pointed at the icon I saw that it had crept around to face me once more. “Just an old trinket,” I said.

  “Hope that hasn’t brought you far.”

  I’d grown nervous enough to demand “What do you mean?”

  “Only saying it’s not much to make a trip for.” He stooped to peer at it. “Second thought,” he said, “some might say different.”

  “I was passing, that was all.” In an attempt to leave unease behind I said “Where shall I dispose of it?”

  “Give us a squint first,” Having screwed up his face in a mime of concentration, he said “Could mean a lot to someone even if it’s not my thing.”

  “I promise you it’s worthless. Would you mind directing me now? I really need to be somewhere else.”

  Perhaps my urgency made me appear suspect, or the second lie did. The man took time to relinquish his grimace before extending a large hand gloved like a surgeon’s. “I’ll take it for you, squire.”

  “That’s perfectly all right. I can drop it on my way out. Just tell me where,”

  “Some of us don’t like to see stuff go to waste. Too much of that in the world.” As I wondered if I was
about to suffer an ecological lecture he said “So long as you’re done with it you won’t mind where it ends up.”

  “I might. Where is that likely to be?”

  He thrust out his hand, and his blunt fingertips thumped the window, smearing the glass. “Someone here who knows can have a proper look.”

  I took this to mean they knew about antiques, but I had to put the icon out of anybody’s reach, not spread its malevolent influence. “Maybe you’re right and I don’t appreciate its value,” I said. “Ill take it to an expert myself.”

  His face was closing around a scowl, whether suspicious or frustrated, as I trod on the accelerator. I’d travelled just a few feet when he shouted “Steve” and jabbed both forefingers at the car. A man as wide as the average door, his torso tightly encased like frozen meat in plastic stepped into my path. “There’s a limit, grandad.”

  I did my best to fight off apprehension with verbiage. “Where am I supposed to have transgressed?”

  “There’s the signs.”

  I was ready to demand which until I glanced away from his unblinking reddish eyes and saw that traffic was restricted to five miles an hour. “Sorry. Distracted,” I said, and when this earned not so much as a blink “Age.”

  He moved aside at considerably less than the posted speed, and I could have fancied he was indicating I should drive no faster than his pace. At least coasting along the virtually featureless exit road gave me time to plan. I turned the icon to face the door, and then I headed for the motorway out of town.

  The main road had broken out in potholes left by lorries. Each swerve and bump inched the icon around on the seat until it graced me once more with its grin. Before I could find anywhere to risk taking a hand off the wheel, I was on the motorway. Cones closed off the inner lane and then the middle, reducing traffic to a speed that wouldn’t have shamed a funeral. My car was trapped between two juggernauts several times its height, and I could have imagined the icon was amused not just by the hindrance but by the wake of fumes that had started to stifle my breath. They seemed capable of blurring my vision as well, unless that was a symptom of the panic I was struggling to suppress. The cones went on for miles without revealing any purpose, and when at last they came to an end the lorry at my back gathered speed before the one I was following did. For a distracted moment I lost all sense of which way to steer, and then the leading lorry veered into the left-hand lane, swinging its ponderous tail at my car. I raced past with my pursuer still close behind, and left the motorway as soon as I could.

  I wasn’t just escaping. The bridge ahead was where I’d planned to go. I sped fast around the roundabout at the top of the exit ramp, a manoeuvre that failed to shift the icon. As I drove along a wide dual carriageway, a cat ran out of a large garden and into the path of my car, only to freeze like a stricken rabbit. I trod hard on the brakes, and the icon performed a jubilant hop on the seat as though celebrating the prospect of a sacrifice. The cat dodged, by no means far enough, and then lurched in the opposite direction before twisting around to flee into the garden with a snarling howl that hardly even sounded feline. “That’s one you didn’t get,” I muttered as I headed for the bridge.

  It was almost clear of traffic. I parked in the middle and took the icon out of the car, restraining a shudder at how unctuously smooth it felt. I held it on the parapet above the concrete strip that divided the motorway and waited for a chance to let it drop. Whenever a gap developed in the outer lanes, a stream of vehicles immediately raced to fill it, and I couldn’t risk causing an accident—suppose a fragment of the icon shattered someone’s windscreen? I was still clutching the figurine when a police car appeared on the motorway, and I mimed interest in the distant Liverpool skyline. Perhaps my performance lacked conviction, because I hadn’t seen an opportunity to drop the icon when the police came onto the bridge.

  Their car stopped behind mine, nearly close enough to touch the bumper, and the driver and her colleague moved to stand on either side of me. They didn’t look even as old as my son, and I had to resist thinking they were youngsters determined to act older. “What are you doing there, sir?” the policewoman said.

  I couldn’t hide the icon, since that would have been obvious, not to say suspicious. “Just sightseeing,” I said.

  “Which sights are those?”

  “The famous skyline.” With this inspiration came another. “I’ve been taking photographs,” I said.

  “With that.”

  “With this, that’s right.” When she and her partner continued to gaze at the icon I said “With it in.”

  “May we see?” the policeman said.

  I did my best to produce a laugh. “I wouldn’t claim they’re any good.”

  “We’d like to all the same,” the policewoman said. I fumbled in my pocket while I tried to think. The solitary idea I had was wild, and I could only hope it worked. Before I produced the phone I managed to locate the switch to mute it. As I pretended to search for photographs I took a rapid surreptitious burst with no time to focus or even to check them in advance of showing them to the police. “I told you they weren’t much,” I thought it advisable to say.

  “I wouldn’t quite say that, sir.”

  Her tone went with her colleague’s resolutely neutral look. The cluster of images depicted the icon and very little else. The figurine was considerably closer than I’d held the camera, and another caprice made the bulging black eyes and joyful mouth swell larger still. “You’ve left your skyline out,” the policeman said.

  “The sun was in my eyes. I didn’t know.”

  Both my interrogators glanced at the sun, which was only faintly visible behind an extensive leisurely cloud. “Can you tell us what that is, sir?” the policewoman said.

  “This?” I shoved the icon towards her along the parapet, realising too late that the question had distracted me from a prolonged break in the motorway traffic I could have dislodged the object while feigning to give her a better look, but now the lanes were busy once more. The only answer I could find was “What it looks like. Just a sculpture.”

  They must be aware of the Noble scandal and presumably the church. If they made any connections, where would that leave me? The roar of the motorway rose to fill my ears, so that I barely heard the policeman ask “Where is it from?”

  “From my house. From my family.”

  “And where do you live, sir?”

  “Liverpool.” When the policewoman’s gaze appeared to find no purchase on that I said “Allerton.”

  “You’re quite a way from home.”

  “If you want your skyline,” the policeman said, “maybe you ought to go back.”

  Perhaps I was unwelcome on their territory—little more than an annoyance they wanted to move on—but he’d given me an idea I ought already to have had. “That’s what I’ll do,” I declared and was turning to my car when the policewoman said “What is that actually meant to be?”

  “Something diabolical,” her colleague said.

  “That’s how I’d put it,” I said.

  Both of them gazed at me as though I might be tainted by its nature. “You say it’s in your family,” the policewoman said.

  I was tempted to tell them a great deal, but how could they help? “It’s been handed down,” I said and made for my car.

  I consigned the idol to the boot before I drove off. The police watched me leave the bridge, and I wasn’t sure if they meant to follow until I reached the motorway unpursued, at least by them. I’d had enough of my unblinking exultant companion, but now that it was hiding behind me I felt chased by a presence I couldn’t outrun. Beyond the motorway the road into Liverpool grew rougher, and whenever the car jerked I heard the icon growing restless. I forced myself to concentrate on the road, because I’d begun to feel the icon was about to revive the mantra in my brain, which would compel my hands to replicate the shape. “No chance,” I said over and over to keep the formula out of my mind. “No chance.”

  I was nearly at th
e waterfront when I realised that all the parking for the ferry terminal was visible from Starview Tower, and so was the river. Surely even the Nobles couldn’t see through bricks, and if any of them saw me from an office window, what were they likely to do? I was supposed to be too insignificant to bother with, although I’d no idea how much my latest intervention might have antagonised them. I mustn’t let myself be daunted, even if lifting the lid of the boot resembled opening a coffin where the stiffly gleeful occupant lay in wait. The icon was worse than that, and I jammed it under my arm so that I wouldn’t have to look at it while I made for the ferry terminal.

  A tethered ship was nodding somnolently beyond the pedestrian ramp. Speakers were emitting Ferry Cross the Mersey as if to fix the identity of the vessel, and I remembered that the singers of the sixties ditty were the Pacemakers. No doubt the name referred to the leaders in a race, but now it felt like an allusion to age. As I limped across the gangplank, which gave a lurch as I set foot on it, a crewman stared at the object under my arm. Perhaps he had taken it at first glance for a pet, and I had to tell myself I didn’t feel it squirm.

  I clambered one-handed up the steps to the top deck and leaned on the rail with my back to the waterfront. While I was tempted to dispose of my burden at once, it seemed best to wait until the ferry was on its way across the river. I tried to put out of my mind Eric Wharton’s fate on a ferry—perhaps even this one—most of my lifetime ago, and focused my attention on the ripples spreading across the water directly below me. Their intricate patterns were close to hypnotic, and the rhythm of their progress suggested syllables 1 could almost hear in my head.

  I had no idea how long the ripples held my mind before the captain blasted the horn, wrenching me back to awareness. The engine began to thump as my heart audibly did, and I couldn’t have said which was louder or harder. The boat swung out from the landing-stage in a stately arc and brought me face to face with Starview Tower. Above ranks of windows sparkling with sunlight the offices of the Church of the Eternal Three were as black as the icon I was carrying. If Toby and his family were up there, I was dismayed to think they were hidden. It made me realise how little of the dark power of the church I would be overcoming when I threw away the icon.