The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  “I feel as if he’s in her house.”

  “That’ll just be her making you think he is. All it means is she’s mad,” Jim said and stared at the bend we were striding towards. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with Nobbly? Did he drive her off her rocker?”.

  “It’s not just her. She told my mum and dad he’s brought lots back for people. She’s a spiritualist and he’s some kind of medium, and he goes to their church.”

  Jim halted as though his shadow had snagged his feet. “Then what’s he doing at our school?”

  “He can be, can’t he?” I was disconcerted by Jim’s outrage. “Brother Treanor said everybody’s welcome so long as they believe in God.”

  “If you think Nobbly does. Some of the things he says, you’d wonder. Maybe he’s one of the lot Bent said you should watch out for. Fifth column, my dad says they’re called, only he says it should be filth.”

  “Mr Noble’s not like that. He’s just got his own beliefs.”

  “My dad says that lot have and that’s why they’re dangerous.” At least we were walking again, and now Jim said “Get a move on or we’ll lose him.”

  The pursuit felt less like an adventure than it had. “You won’t tell anyone about him, will you?” I pleaded.

  Jim glanced at me but didn’t slow his march. “Why not?”

  “Suppose he has to leave the school, then we won’t be able to watch like Bent said.”

  Jim was silent except for the footsteps he was muffling as much as he could. I was wondering if it would be inadvisable to remind him of the Tremendous Two when he said “Let’s see what he does.”

  I wasn’t sure if Jim meant now or in the future, or how he would react to it. From the bend we saw that the road was deserted all the way to the next turn. The moon was gliding higher, shrivelling our shadows. I felt silenced by the night and diminished by it too. While I was relieved not to be on my own, Jim’s eagerness to reach the field had begun to outstrip mine. The isolated sound of our minimised footsteps made me realise that since we’d startled the magpie I hadn’t seen or heard a sign of life. At the time I mightn’t have been able to articulate my impression that the moon had deadened the countryside, or something even older had. To the left of the bend ahead trees stooped towards the road as if the night were crouching in wait for us, and I knew they were at the corner of the field we were bound for. I was wondering how close we could venture without alerting Mr Noble, and about to suggest slowing down in case he heard us on the road, when I saw a flurry of movement ahead.

  It was beneath the bent trees, which made it harder to distinguish. Half a dozen dark shapes, small but of various sizes, were scurrying across the road. They’d emerged from the field we were heading for, and now they vanished through the hedge opposite with a shrill rustle of undergrowth. They infected Jim with their haste, and I was hurrying after him when the last of the animals blundered towards us along the middle of the road.

  We could tell from its progress that it was virtually blind. I saw its pink nose twitching in a black bewildered face, but I didn’t know if this meant it had scented us. In a moment it veered aside and shuffled rapidly onto the right-hand verge, where it disappeared into the earth, leaving a mound of upturned soil and uprooted grass. It had halted Jim, and I grabbed his arm to keep him where he was. “Wasn’t that a mole?”

  “Could’ve been. I’ve never seen one.”

  “I’m sure it was, but they shouldn’t do that, should they?”

  “Dunno,” Jim said and took an impatient pace forward, freeing his arm. “Do what?”

  “If it was scared of us it should have hidden where it was, don’t you see? Something else scared it out of that field, and the rest of them.”

  “Yes, Nobbly did, and I want to see what he’s up to. Aren’t you coming? It was your idea.”

  I couldn’t bear the notion that Jim was more adventurous than me. I wasn’t so sure he was braver, since he appeared not to think there was anything to brave. I wouldn’t have been able to convey my apprehension, even if my breaths might have by turning as pale as the moon because of the chill that had gathered around us. “We mustn’t make any more noise,” I whispered, “or he’ll hear.”

  Jim made for the bend as fast as he could while planting his feet softly on the road. He reminded me of a comedian miming stealth, but I wasn’t inclined to laugh. I was doing my best to imitate him when I heard a sound ahead—a sharp creak of wood. It came from a tree at the edge of the field, but it wasn’t sufficiently high up to have been made by a branch or even, I thought, by the trunk. I’d just had an unnerving notion when another sound distracted me: a voice.

  It was Mr Noble, who was somewhere on the field. His voice was distant enough that his words were incomprehensible, and so we risked running to the bend. Before we reached the corner of the field we saw him through the trees. He was on his knees with his back to us in the middle of the field, which was scattered with uneven overgrown mounds. I suspect they were all that remained of a ruin. Like the rest of the field, the vegetation that covered them was drained of colour, presumably by the moonlight, though had there been a hint of this depletion even in the daytime? As Jim and I each found a tree to hide behind, the notion I’d had earlier made me peer at the edge of the field. I was disturbed to see something like evidence—faint furrows leading to the roots, marks so nearly obscured by grass that I wasn’t sure I was seeing them. Could they really suggest that in the process of growth the trees had tried to edge out of the field, as though fleeing like the animals at their own lethargic pace? I was about to draw Jim’s attention to the marks when Mr Noble raised his voice. “Is he praying?” Jim muttered.

  It didn’t sound like any prayer I’d heard. The voice rose and fell as though, having reached for its goal, it kept recoiling. Perhaps it was a kind of chant, but so unlike the ones we heard in church and school that I could almost have imagined I was listening to someone wholly unfamiliar. I still couldn’t distinguish a word, and so I dodged to the next tree and then to its neighbour. From behind the third tree I saw that Mr Noble wasn’t as prayerful as he’d looked. Though his head was bowed and his shoulders drooped, his hands weren’t clasped. He appeared to have dug them into the earth.

  At once I thought of the bird I’d seen in the cemetery at home, pecking at the soil in search of food. I was recalling how Mr Noble had greeted the sight when Jim dodged past me to hide behind the tree beyond mine. “What’s he got?” he demanded.

  Mr Noble’s head reared up, and I was afraid he’d heard until I saw that the teacher was gazing at the moon. His stance made his words more audible, though I couldn’t judge whether he’d raised his head in some form of ecstasy or as part of a convulsive attempt to drag himself free of the earth. “Father,” he cried, and was still speaking as Jim said “What’s he saying about his dad?”

  Mr Noble lurched backwards and sprang to his feet, twisting to face us. As he stooped in our direction, that rapid habitual movement put me in mind of a snake. When he jerked his hands towards us at arms’ length while the night used his shrunken shadow to imitate the gesture, I was sure he’d seen us. I don’t know how long he stood like that, his black eyes glinting in his whitened face—long enough for my lungs to begin throbbing with my held breath. At last he turned away, and Jim dashed past me before I’d even thought of moving. “Come on while he’s not looking,” he whispered.

  As I darted after him on tiptoe I glanced across the field. Mr Noble was extending his hands towards the second corner, and I guessed this was some kind of ritual. I would have pointed it out to Jim, but he was already too far along the road to see it, let alone for me to speak to him. I could only follow him while I tried to understand what I’d heard Mr Noble say. Who did he mean had “really won”? I was happier to concentrate on this than on the glimpse I’d seemed to have as he stood up. Surely he hadn’t been digging for worms, but perhaps he’d found two fistfuls just the same. They hadn’t been fingers, I told myself, even if they’d appeared
to clasp his before they writhed their pallid way back underground. I didn’t want to think they had anything to do with how Mr Noble had started to behave, scattering earth from his hands like a benediction or a seed at corner after corner of the field.

  9 - The Dreams

  As Jim and I took the other front seat on the upper deck of the bus, Bobby said “What did you bring me back from France?”

  Jim looked at me, and then I looked at him. “I thought you got her something,” Jim said.

  “I thought you were going to.”

  Since I was sitting in the aisle seat, I got the punch on the arm. While I was expecting it, though it felt even more vigorous than usual, I didn’t expect her to say “Shows how much you both care.”

  She sounded more like a girl than I was used to. “We had other things on our minds, Bobs, that’s all.”

  My parents often used that excuse to each other. Sometimes it seemed to placate the recipient, but Bobby said “More important things than me.”

  I’d heard my mother retort along those lines. I felt as if we were playing adults, unless it meant they sometimes behaved like children—far too frequently, I’d begun to think, “They were important, Bobs,” I pleaded.

  “I’ll bet they were to you.”

  “Look, you decide how important they were,” I protested, having lowered my voice. “The teacher who took us to France, we know things about him the school doesn’t know.”

  Jim nudged me almost as hard as Bobby’s punch had been. “Thought you said we couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Bobby isn’t anyone, she’s us. She’s—”

  “Okay, I get it,” Jim said and crouched over his knees. “No need to say.”

  “What are you saying I am?” Bobby said in a tone like the threat of a punch.

  “I just mean we’re the Tremendous Three,” I told her. “Only Jim doesn’t like me saying.”

  “I don’t mind,” Bobby said as Jim crouched lower. “No need to let my friends hear, though, okay?”

  This didn’t sound much like support to me. Perhaps Bobby sensed my disappointment, because she said “And I liked your stories about us. I hope you write some more.”

  Her praise was at least as awkward for me to receive as she seemed to have found it to utter. I looked away towards a blitzed street we were passing, where the jagged scraps of housefronts backed by a mass of rubble put me in mind of a set on a stage. “Thanks,” I mumbled while my face grew hotter still.

  “I’ll give you your book when we go home,” Bobby said and shuffled closer along her seat. “So are you going to tell me about your teacher?”

  I glanced back through all the smoke that loitered in the aisle. Apart from us, almost everybody upstairs had a cigarette, even the passengers who weren’t much older than us. No doubt some of them had been recommended to smoke by their doctor. The nearest people, a pair of head-scarved women leaning together to chat, were three rows behind us, but I flattened a hand alongside my mouth before murmuring to Bobby “Why he got the school to take us all to France, it wasn’t what he said.”

  Bobby made a face she usually saved for lemon drops, even the thought of them now that we could buy them. “Did he interfere with someone?”

  “That’s Brother Mayle,” Jim said, “except he didn’t either. He just likes watching everybody in the shower.”

  “We’ve got a teacher like that too.”

  “You’ve got to let him see you in the shower?” Jim demanded in outrage not quite unmixed with envy. “You ought to report him.”

  “No, stupe, she’s a woman.” As Jim remained outraged or at any rate incredulous Bobby said “Some of the girls are in love with her, but I’m not. I’ll never be in love with anyone.”

  Jim returned to his defensive crouch as my face rediscovered its heat. Since neither of us knew how to reply if we’d wanted to, it was Bobby who relieved the silence. “What did your teacher do, then?”

  “It isn’t mostly what he does,” Jim said, “it’s what he thinks. He’s a spiritualist and he goes to their church.”

  “What’s wrong with that? We’ve got a Muslim and a Buddhist at our school. My dad says once you start telling people what to think you’re on the way to a dictatorship.”

  To head off the argument she could have provoked I said “But your school knows about those girls, doesn’t it? Why do you think ours doesn’t know about him?”

  “How do you know it doesn’t?”

  “Because he never lets on what he is,” Jim said. “Only maybe he’s trying to turn us all that way with some of the things he says.”

  “Sounds like one of Dom’s stories.”

  “Well,” Jim said more resentfully than I appreciated, “it’s the truth. We don’t tell lies at our school.”

  “It’s not just what he says,” I said to forestall yet another disagreement. “He does things too.”

  Bobby gave me a look to make it clear that I’d better earn her attention. “What sort of things?”

  “He’s supposed to bring the dead back for the people at his church to talk to. Really talk like you and me are now.”

  “I wouldn’t mind talking to my dad’s mum. I used to like her.”

  “We’ll all see everyone like her,” Jim protested, “when God brings us back together.”

  “My dad says religion—”

  I suspected how she meant to go on, and interrupted before she could provoke Jim. “We haven’t told you what our teacher did in France.”

  “Go on then, tell.”

  The bus had reached the crest of Everton Brow, from which streets sloped down towards the distant river. On its bank a pair of giant stone birds were tethered to their perches as if they would otherwise take flight, and I couldn’t help thinking of Mr Noble in the cemetery—of the idea that flight was somehow associated with the dead. It made me oddly nervous of saying “He sneaked out one night and went off to a battlefield.”

  “How do you know where he went?”

  “Because we trailed him,” Jim said.

  “Well, I wish I’d been there. What did you see?”

  “It was somewhere his dad fought in the first war. We thought he might have been praying for the men who were killed there, but I don’t think he was.” Having said all this, I was still reluctant to add “He brought something out of the ground.”

  “I saw it too.”

  Jim’s intervention came as a relief. “Tell her what you saw,” I said.

  “There’d been some kind of church there. His dad talked to us at school and told us. Nobbly dug up a bit of some old statue, only don’t ask us why. Maybe he wanted a souvenir of where his dad was in the war.”

  I felt not just betrayed but abandoned. “You didn’t say you saw that then.”

  “It’s what it must have been, though.”

  “Why didn’t he want anyone to know where he was going, then?”

  “Maybe he decided it ought to stay there. Just because he’s a spiritualist doesn’t have to mean he hasn’t got any respect.”

  I was growing desperate not to be left alone with my experience. “What about the dream we had?”

  “I’ve stopped thinking about it. It was just a dream.”

  “You’re never scared to remember it, Jim,” Bobby said.

  “Don’t be thick,” Jim said with enough resentment to suggest she wasn’t wholly wrong. “It was a man in that field with worms eating his face. Happy now?”

  “You didn’t say you dreamed that,” I objected. “You said they were his face.”

  “Who gives a monkey’s? We only dreamed it because Nobbly’s dad said he did.”

  “Nobbly.” Once she’d giggled at this Bobby said “What did you think you saw, Jim?”

  “Something like Dom said. I don’t want to argue any more.”

  It was rather that recalling what I’d seen and dreamed made me feel as if the object in the moonlit field was reaching to take hold of my mind. “Your teacher doesn’t sound much like a spiritualist,�
� Bobby said.

  “Then maybe he’s something else,” Jim said. “That’s another reason to watch him.”

  “Maybe it’s a job for the Tremendous Three,” Bobby said.

  We’d never said that to one another, but the trio in my stories often did. I felt both flattered and uneasy about the proposal. “Jim means watch him at the school,” I said, only to be thrown by feeling I was trying to protect her. I was quite relieved when she responded with a token punch.

  The bus was downtown now. We might have left it at Lime Street and watched Professor Codman’s Punch and Judy show opposite the railway Station, but we were too old to join the crowd of noisy children. Instead we stayed on board all the way to the terminus, where we caught the overhead railway to Garston for the view the journey gave us of the river. Once we were back at the Pier Head we climbed up James Street into the town. The Saturday streets were full of shoppers liberated by the relaxation of rationing, and there were even cars among the trams and buses. Our first stop was at a music store, where we convinced the shop assistant that we might buy records if she put them on for us. We crowded into the listening booth in time to hear Jim’s selection, the Stargazers telling us that birds with broken wings couldn’t fly, though in the past they’d flown up to the sky. I was reminded of Mr Noble and the graveyard yet again, and Bobby’s choice of record didn’t lighten my thoughts. While I wasn’t old enough to find the doggie in the window childish, it brought Winston to mind, and the idea of somebody needing a dog because they’d been left alone evoked far too much about Mrs Norris and her situation, I chose “Wonderful Copenhagen” because Bobby liked Danny Kaye, though perhaps I was simply anxious to be done; we only asked for Top Ten hits in shops, and it was the first that came into my head. I was quite glad when the assistant lost patience and sent us out of the shop. At least now we were bound for the cinema.

  Through the hordes that were close to spilling off the pavements on both sides of Church Street we heard cries of “Lost city higgo”—the call of the man who sold the Liverpool Echo from an upturned box outside Woolworth’s. The Kardomah Coffee House greeted us with a polite scent of ground beans, nowhere near as harsh as the smell of coffee that assaulted you across the road at Cooper’s. Next to the House of Bewlay, where dozens of tobacco pipes mouthed roundly at the window, was the Tatler News Theatre, which changed its programme of cartoons and comedies each week. Usually on Saturdays we went to one of the big cinemas, but that day they were showing films we either wouldn’t have been let into or didn’t want to see. We bought a tub of ice cream each, and an usherette with a flashlight showed us to seats in the smoky auditorium.