The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  At last the ferry veered towards Seacombe, where all the other passengers disembarked. I was tempted to find another route back to my car rather than be exposed out on the river. Just as I decided to use some other public transport, the gangplank clattered erect, cutting off my escape. I managed to resist spying on the house until the ferry reached the middle of the river, and then my apprehension enraged me. If the Nobles thought I was insignificant, they could hardly object to my watching the house.

  I brought the binoculars to my eyes and let them fall at once, grabbing the rail for support. I was desperate to believe that the sight I’d seemed to glimpse was a trick of light and shadow. A single face could never have filled all the windows of the house, glaring out at me with its six monstrously enlarged eyes, bereft of pupils but alive with darkness. I retreated down the steps, almost falling headlong from haste, and took refuge in the saloon on the lower deck. Even there I felt dreadfully vulnerable, as if I were suspended above an abyss that was eager to swallow me, the infinite depths of space that lay below the river—below the world. I had to keep glancing at the banks of the river, to fend off a persistent notion that the outlines of warehouses and dwellings and the crowded buildings on the waterfront had begun somehow to fray, a portent of collapse. It felt as if some awful future was spreading from the river to corrupt them. When at last I reached my car I felt compelled to keep hold of the present moment in any way available to me, and my skull grew brittle with the effort as I drove nervously home. Even the rush-hour traffic barely kept me conscious of where I was, or when.

  15 - An Ending

  That night I didn’t go to bed, because I’d grown afraid of wakening unaware of who I was. The impression that my ferry trip had left—that the buildings on both sides of the river had begun to grow furtively derelict—felt as though a catastrophic future was lying in wait. Even if it mightn’t be my own, this didn’t let it feel less ominous or less eager to appear. I suspected that the drowned icon had given me the vision; perhaps just the thought of it had. I did my utmost to put it out of my mind, but the very effort threatened to lodge it there, along with the mantra it recalled. I could only search for thoughts as remote from it as possible, and even then I feared that my hands would set about surreptitiously shaping the icon if I didn’t find another use for them.

  After I’d downed some of a token dinner I sat in the front room, leafing through an album Lesley had put together years ago. It was full of photographs of graduations—not just hers and mine but Toby’s and Claudine’s—preceded by events from Toby’s time at school, sports days and prize-givings. Our graduation robes seemed to recall forgotten rituals, and I found it hard to grasp the past we’d actually inhabited. The sports days brought back the afternoon I’d discovered Christian Noble’s journal, and even the pride I experienced at the sight of Toby accepting yet another school prize was undermined by knowing how he’d put his intelligence and skills at the service of the Church of the Eternal Three. This helped to fix me in the present, but not in any sense I welcomed, and I looked for another way to occupy my mind.

  Television offered very little I wanted to watch. A van load of killers had driven into a crowd before knifing more victims, and the airwaves abounded with reports of the event and interviews with witnesses and discussions of the issues it raised. While more than one group had claimed responsibility for the random massacre, I thought the perpetrators incarnated chaos. No doubt Christian Noble would interpret the murders in those terms, and did this mean he’d influenced my thoughts? I set about switching channels, but all the other programmes struck me as avoiding if not denying the truth. I made for the shelves jammed with films and grabbed the first title that came to mind.

  It was a restoration of Orson Welles’ Macbeth, the film that helped Lesley and me miss each other all those years ago. Three witches appeared to form out of a fog, and the sight of figures taking shape that way almost made me stop the disc. They’d perfected the rite since I’d last seen them, when an extravagantly damaged print shown at a cinema had them chanting “When shall we three set of sun.” I did my best to appreciate how much Welles had achieved on second-hand sets in just over three weeks, but when I wasn’t thinking of the hours with Lesley that I’d lost—a foretaste of losing her for good—I found the play even more ominous than normal: the portrait of an inexorable future, unavoidable once foreseen. The spectacle of unnaturally mobile vegetation swarming towards Dunsinane revived my encounter with the restless objects in the crypt beneath the Trinity Church of the Spirit, and I closed my eyes while I tried to remember Lesley instead.

  Vegetation brought to mind laying flowers on a memorial. Our garden was her monument, and her memory had no need of dying flowers while her own continued to grow. I hoped her ashes lent them life, but I was drawn to the notion of a remembrance in some favourite place of ours, where I might have a bench built with a motto on a plaque. The idea seemed to lead naturally to a view of some kind of shrine, a marble slab laid in a wide grassy gap between two houses at the summit of a slope. A kneeling woman had just stood a pot that contained a solitary flower on the slab. As the unrecognisable plant, whose piebald swollen blossom was as variously green and white as the thick convoluted stem, began to writhe like a snake I read the inscription on the pallid slab:

  CHRISTIAN

  CHRISTINE

  CHRISTOPHER

  LE BON

  Below the names a date was hidden by the pot, in which the mutated flower was performing an intricate sinuous dance. The blossom appeared to be mouthing a formula that I was anxious not to hear—that I feared I knew all too well. I struggled to recoil from the sight, and at once the space was blackened and strewn with rubble, and I recognised the houses that framed it. I’d seen them from the ferry, flanking the Noble house, and the memory snatched me back to myself.

  I blinked in bewilderment at the television, where several black actors were declaiming lines from Macbeth. The disc had moved to an extra feature, footage of Welles’ voodoo version of the play. The occult undercurrent didn’t appeal to me, and I stopped the disc, which didn’t halt the clamour of my fears. Could seeing the present state of the Noble house hold me back from straying into the future? I suspect this was less a thought than a compulsion, and I never knew how much of that was mine.

  I shelved the film and stood in the front doorway, hoping the night would enliven my sense of myself. That it was hours later than I’d drifted away from watching the film didn’t help my confidence. How long had I been elsewhere and insufficiently conscious that I was? How much had my involvement with the Church of the Eternal Three undermined my awareness of time? An unseasonable chill felt like a touch of the blackness overhead. At least it went some way towards restoring my senses, and once I felt safe to drive I made for my car.

  The suburban streets were deserted, and I saw not a single lit window. The main roads were bereft of traffic, and every shop was dark. Even when I lowered the window to let night air stream in I heard no sounds beyond the whir of the engine and the rubbery murmur of the wheels on tarmac. The only movements to be seen were the routines of traffic lights, totting up their colours like a simplified species of abacus. The lifeless streets felt like an unwelcome omen of the desolation I’d imagined glimpsing from the ferry. Streetlamps peopled the route with elongated shadows not quite like their objects and blotted out the stars, an absence that reminded me too acutely of the void I’d explored from Safe To Sleep.

  I was still alone on the road by the time I reached the Wallasey tunnel, the newer of two routes that led beneath the river. I drove down the ramp and was in sight of the arched entrance when a thought jerked me further awake. How close would I have to pass under the spot where I’d thrown the icon in the river? I might have turned back if a concrete ridge hadn’t blocked all access to the opposite lanes. I gripped the wheel so hard my fingers ached as I drove beneath the arch.

  The tunnel was less than two miles long. I ought to be through it in under three minutes. Overhe
ad lights illuminated twin lanes leading to the far side of the river, strips of light in random groups that resembled a Morse version of words in an unknown language. The empty tunnel gave no sign of where it left the land above the roof behind, but long before I reached the midpoint I seemed to sense the massive burden of the river. The impression wasn’t just of water. It felt as though a colossal bloated presence was nesting on the roof, shifting restlessly and sending sluggish ripples through the earth if not the substance of the tunnel. I fancied I could sense its wakefulness, a stealthy rhythmic vibration that made my skin crawl as if the presence had begun to infest my flesh. Had the lights begun to flicker almost imperceptibly? They made the walls look unstable and brittle, close to collapsing and burying me in the dark.

  According to the dashboard clock it took me not much longer than a minute to arrive at the lowest point of the tunnel, but the information seemed meaningless, not remotely reassuring. The car began its climb towards the exit, which was out of sight beyond a distant bend, but the delay felt as protracted as a nightmare before the presence that was crouched or coiled or otherwise poised above the roof started to release my consciousness. At last the car emerged from the tunnel, and the sense of darkness massing overhead gave way to a different dark.

  Beyond the exit was a line of toll booths. At this time of night most lanes were automated, but the sign above the furthest left announced it was ATTENDED. Even if I could have found the correct change, I felt anxious to talk to someone. The pay booth was occupied by a short pale man with a wide face that looked oddly undefined, patchy stubble helping the dimness to blur his features under a lopsided oily mass of black hair that resembled a slipped wig. He gazed past me as if he was expecting more than my car to appear from the tunnel or from that direction, and then blinked at me as though I’d wakened him. He slid his window open to stick out a pale stubby hand, and I couldn’t think of much to say as I passed him two pound coins. “Quiet,” I observed.

  “Right.”

  His soft voice was so toneless that I could have thought the word was enjoining silence. When he reached for change the dimness left me unsure whether he was continuing to gaze beyond me as if he was still in a dream. “Any reason?” I tried asking.

  “Night.”

  This could have been a farewell or an invocation. Certainly it might have contained more than it admitted. As he handed me my change I saw that his fingers were longer and thinner than I’d taken them to be. “Is it always so quiet this late?” I persisted.

  He shut the window before speaking, so that I wasn’t sure I heard him say “Will be.”

  I was about to remind him to lift the barrier when it rose. I felt as though he’d tried to delay me, and I had to restrain myself from putting on too much speed. I drove around a roundabout beyond a ramp and pulled into a layby alongside a bus stop. Perhaps I wanted company, however artificial. When I switched on directions, the imperturbable manservant’s voice of my phone sent me onwards to turn right at the first junction and then fell silent for miles of twisted road. The devious parade of shops and equally unlit houses with their doorsteps on the pavement made me feel more alone than ever, and increasingly uncertain why I was there at all. A junction with another main road tempted me to head for home, but as a red light dropped its amber ball the phone advised me to turn left at the intersection. What was the point of coming so far if I didn’t venture to my destination? The green disc ousted or subsumed the rest of the trio, and I swung left at the crossroads to speed along another lifeless road.

  Opposite a park where fattened mossy gravestones leaned companionably towards one another outside a derelict chapel, the phone sent me towards the river. Across a main road on which every shop was shuttered if not boarded up, a street descended steeply to the promenade. Halfway down the slope, a cross street contained the Noble house. While I wasn’t about to be daunted, there was no need to park too close. Coasting to the riverside, I parked in front of an unlit pub, where the car was out of sight of the house.

  I retrieved the black item from the seat beside mine, standing the binoculars on the roof while I eased the door shut with both hands and locked the car with a blink of the lights. Apart from the multiple click of the locks, I was surrounded by silence. Beyond the bay at the end of the river, a minimised cruise liner pricked with lights sank over the horizon as if the abyss below the world had drawn it down. An incomplete contorted moon lay low at the edge of the sea, outlining scrawny windmills as their restless spikes tried to unpick the inky fabric of the sky. The tide was high, and reflections of hotels on the Liverpool riverside were testing the water, though I could have fancied that the lightless inversion of Starview Tower was probing deeper. Ripples slow and black as tar appeared to spread from the middle of the river, rebounding from the banks to elaborate a pattern. The languid intricate repetition put me in mind of a mantra that was being intoned and then reversed, and I felt far too close to hearing it in my head. I turned away from the river as fully as I could and stole to the corner of the pub, which let me see the Noble house.

  Although its neighbours were unlit too, its darkness felt less somnolent than secretive. This close the binoculars showed me how desperate the flowers and shrubs in the high steep garden looked to flee the dwelling perched at the top of the slope. The tall pale house crowned with triple chimneys might have been gazing down from its eminence not just at the river but at a world to which it felt superior. No doubt that was why the six identical windows reminded me of the indifferent gaze its occupants had trained on me so often in my lifetime. I couldn’t see them or any sign of life inside the house. Perhaps they weren’t even at home, if the term applied in any ordinary way. At least I’d established that the place was still intact, and hoped the knowledge would help me overcome any tendency to drift towards its future, whatever that might be. I was about to lower the binoculars when I saw movement near the house.

  I had to press the eyepieces against my face and strain my eyes to grasp what I was seeing. Somebody—more than one of them, indeed several—had just dodged around the building. A figure remained at the outer edge of the garden, and another loitered at the side of the house nearest to me, which contained a ground-floor window. He must be watching whoever was at the front of the house, and I guessed they’d given him a sign, because he turned and raised a vigorous thumb to the man in the garden. Seconds later small lights flared—flames that the men applied to objects they were holding. They shied the flaming items through the windows, and I heard glass smash on the far sides of the house as well.

  There was a thump—at least a double one—inside the building, and an explosive concussion of glass. In a moment the ground floor was bright with fire. It showed the perpetrators fleeing almost in silence, but one yelled “That’s for anybody you all abused.” Before the shout came to an end the men were out of sight, and I heard the roar of a car engine and the screech of tyres. I barely noticed any of this, because three figures had reared up in the midst of the blaze inside the house.

  They were Christian Noble and Tina and Toph, and from what I could see I deduced they were naked. They clung together as the fire closed around them. The leaping flames made their flesh look unstable, writhing like a mass of snakes. I saw them mouth at one another as if their lips were eager to meet in a triple kiss. They were repeating words I didn’t need to hear to recognise, and I thought the ripples that I couldn’t avoid glimpsing on the black water had adopted that rhythm. The flames streamed towards the Nobles and raced up their bodies, and I felt as unable to move as they appeared to be. I thought I saw their bodies start not just to melt but to merge into a single monstrous shape. As the flames reached their heads their mouths gaped to cry a name in unison. However agonised the outburst was, I heard triumph in it too, and when the blazing composite mass sank out of view it looked as sinuous as the Nobles ever had.

  By now lights had come on in the surrounding houses, and I heard distant sirens—fire engines and police. It would do me no good to be
found near the scene of the crime, and I hurried to my car. As I drove away the front door of the pub opened, and I swerved fast up the slope. At the top traffic lights were sending up an amber ball, but I raced through as they leapt to red. I’d progressed just a few hundred yards when the voice of my phone began to direct me back to the Noble house, and I could easily have thought they had made it speak.

  I silenced it as a police car sped towards me, flashing its lights. I pulled over, hoping that the driver only wanted to pass, and was able to breathe once he had. After that I encountered nobody, on the roads or in the tunnel. I kept trying to assure myself that I was leaving the Nobles behind at last, though I couldn’t stop seeing the agitated fiery mass they’d become. For the entire length of the tunnel I felt as though a dark mass was squatting on the dim brittle concrete tube and about to close around my mind.

  16 - Visitors

  Tina, space and time are formed of correspondences, and we who grasp them may wield creation. Man’s universe is but an atom of the cosmos, just as man’s history is but an atom of his universe. Yet a flower may hint how a galaxy is shaped, and a flower grown from a grave may adumbrate a shape unrestrained by flesh. We are made of night and stars, and dark stars have walked the earth. Black holes have opened there, which assume the form of men. We are what came from the sea and from the void before it, and we are what voyaged to the stars and beyond them. Tina, we shall be the only past, and we have been the only future. Great power lies in uniting correspondences, and no union shall be the like of ours…