The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  Early in my life I learned to keep my insights from my parents. To start with they found them precocious, much like my rapid grasp of language and of reading. I was eager for every skill which would help me take hold of the world. At first my parents were proud to show me off, inviting the neighbours to watch me read the Bible when I was three years old. Tina, I think you may be younger still when you read this, and how young may the third of us be?

  I still recall my father’s grotesquely engorged face when he thought I had insulted his father. I had done no more than state the truth which I was beginning to appreciate: that the old man, like all my parents’ relatives, was unrelated to me in any way which mattered. My father struck me to the floor, which made my mother scream, and despite the pain of the blow to my head I felt as if they had been enacting a charade, a set of clichés of behaviour. I had begun to see how banal most human activity is; how it seems designed to dull the minds of the masses, to blind them to truths beyond their encompassing.

  After that I played the human game, despite its horrid tedium. With me you will have no need, Tina. I had few friends except for books, and no wish for them. I suspect that the children at school and in the neighbourhood avoided me because, in their limited fashion, they sensed more about my nature than adults could let themselves suspect. I was content to impress my teachers at school, though I had to restrain myself from correcting their errors. In the great perspective those were less than negligible, and I concentrated on not drawing unwelcome attention to myself.

  When did I grow aware of being chosen? Perhaps as the source set about speaking within me, not in words but in revelations which language can only confine. Once I glimpsed the face behind the sky, while the noonday sun blinded everyone about me to its galactic vastness, and on another day I sensed how the world resembles a fruit full of worms which were once men. Perhaps that vision was my first step towards our goal.

  A succession of funerals helped set me on our course. Grandparent after grandparent gave up the ghost, as the ignorant were wont to term it, more accurately than they could know. Each funeral showed me how the dead were being misused; abandoned when they still had qualities to offer. The rites were as ponderously solemn as the plodding of the horses which drew the hearse, and far more ineffectual. Every open grave I had to stand beside was a gateway to knowledge which nobody other than I appeared to realise was there to be tapped. As mourners dropped earth on the coffin it sounded very much like knocking on a door, and I imagined how terrified the priest and his little congregation would be if any opened in the earth. Each cemetery ceremony let me sense the dormant dead everywhere around the latest grave, though my impressions fell short of grasping their state.

  I was nine when I set out to discover what was being wasted in the graves. I could see that my father was touched by my visiting his mother’s, not least because he rightly thought I had disliked her. He saw me across the road from our house—still ours, Tina—and watched me as far as the cemetery entrance. How much was the source attempting to convey to me about the necessary method? My ideas were imprecise, and I thought the bouquet which I laid on my grandmother’s grave might help to entice her out of the dark beneath the sunlight. Wherever this inkling of the true rite came from, I failed to interpret it correctly, and once I was sure that nobody else was nearby I began to call her name. When this had no effect I tried envisioning her as she must be, boxed and supine, and then urging her to rise to the surface in that form. I held that in my mind until twilight settled on the graveyard. Then I felt my mind catch hold of something more solid than vision, and the plot of earth began to stir, quivering the flowers that leaned against the headstone. Perhaps this was simply a distortion of the air, because a colourless shape, less substantial than water but denser than mist, was seeping out of the grave. It was nearly the length of the mound and not much less wide, and was struggling to take more of a shape: unmatched limbs, undivided wads for hands, a head without features or hair. All at once it gave up the effort and drained back into the earth. I tried to retrieve it with all my mind, and instantly my grandmother’s face stretched up out of the mound. It had no colour, and resembled a thin flat mask no broader than the gravestone but as tall as I am now, Tina. Perhaps all this was why or partly why it was howling like a tortured beast. I imagine only I would have been able to see or hear it, but it brought me to the brink of panic, not least for fear that somebody might blame me for its presence. I fought to let go with my mind, but even when I succeeded, the elongated face took some time to sink with a series of shudders into the earth. I heard its subterranean howls of outrage as I bolted from the graveyard; indeed, all the way to our house. Even I was too young to welcome the encounter, and I avoided inviting its like again until not long before you were born, Tina. The Bible holds a few truths for those who can sift them. The prophet must live out the allotted span of years before he can come into his inheritance…

  None of this persuaded me that someone ought to see the book. Even Mr Noble’s words to his daughter struck me as more embarrassing than disturbing. When at last I concluded that I should show the journal to an adult, I almost took it downstairs to my parents until I realised they were bound to confiscate it. By this stage I was far too fascinated to give it up, and then I saw I didn’t have to—not in any important sense. I spent more than a week’s pocket money on exercise books, and then I devoted night after night to copying the journal.

  I let my parents think I was busy with homework or writing a new tale. I knew this was the kind of unspoken lie the Holy Ghost staff found especially pernicious, but their influence was losing its power over me. As I copied Mr Noble’s secrets I heard fragments of the radio programmes my parents had on: Arthur Askey calling “Hello playmates,” Rawicz and Landauer tinkling their pianos, the comically camp cries of Frankie Howerd, a song by Vera Lynn on The Music Goes Round, singers adding vocals to the band of Henry Hall or evoking nostalgia in Those Were The Days… Perhaps all this distracted me from the material I was transcribing. Certainly I copied some of it almost automatically while its meaning stayed aloof, though I could easily have fancied that the words themselves were eager for a second home.

  I passed decades in the wilderness of ordinary mundane life. I played the schoolboy and his elder self, and then took the role of teacher. I found the minds of my pupils no smaller than those of their seniors, and occasionally not quite so imprisoned within themselves, but there was little chance of expanding them except along the dully hide-bound lines the school approved. Telling them truths might have exposed me, and I could only bide my time, or more precisely live in that sense of the insignificance of time which I inherited from the source. Tina, let me confess that in those days I was no more aware of my own true nature than of my purpose.

  Then came the opportunity of the new war. My father persuaded me not to fight, perhaps because he had brought terror home from his own battlefield experience. He may even have been directed along the right path, unbeknown to him, since my years with the ambulance corps let me spend more time with the dying than involvement in the conflict might have afforded me. I had heard the view expressed that war was a waste of life, but soon I came to see that it was a waste of death. I remembered my grandmother’s face above her grave, and wondered if, far from protesting her retrieval from the unknown dark, her howls had been a comment on the state in which she found herself. How much might she have been able to convey about the territories to which death gave admission? Every dying man whom I encountered in the war was a fresh cause of frustration, so close to answering questions which I could scarcely formulate and yet denied to me by the banal presence of my fellow Nightingales. I returned from the war determined to bring my insights to life.

  I had seen further truth. However slow the process of enlightenment might appear to the masses, and even to myself while I had yet to gain my nature, it had no need of time as man perceives the medium. From observing how many of the war dead never enjoyed a floral tribute I deduced why flow
ers were important to the dead, or had been before the upstart religions misrepresented an ancient practice, one of a multitude of distorted truths. You are my second person, Tina, and we shall bring forth the third. In the old days flowers were never gifts which the living gave the dead; rather were they signs which the dead presented to the living, although even in that era so close to our own primal state, perhaps only the chosen could survive the rite.

  I thought myself equal to it, and when the last of my grandparents died I took the opportunity to test myself. The school where I played pedagogue was closed for the summer, and my parents were sojourning at the seaside for a week. I had already planted a herb on my paternal grandfather’s grave under cover of laying a wreath. I brought home the product of the grave, where the swiftness of its growth suggested how eager its roots had been to reach deep into the earth, urged by the essence of the tenant of the coffin. As I lay on my bed, chewing as a shaman chews his drug, I felt as if I were adopting my grandfather’s posture, the better to share his experience.

  Tina, I was not as ready as I wanted to believe. With my eyes closed I had the impression of occupying a lightless place whose dimensions were as indefinable as my own had become. I was unsure not just of my identity but of the extent to which I myself was the indefinite darkness. When I attempted to take hold of the impression I felt a shapeless presence start to blunder about inside my skull, fumbling as though desperate to clutch at my substance without the benefit of any members that would serve as hands. Worse still, I had the sense that my mind was about to migrate to the place from which the intruder had come; to leave my body and expand in a helpless bid to grasp the boundaries of the dark, beyond which I might waken a vast form infinitely more inhuman than the invader of my skull. My mind recoiled, and I rushed to the lavatory to vomit up not just the herb but, if I could, the vision. For many nights it threatened to rise up from my slumber.

  You may be forgiven, Tina, if you struggle to believe what I have to tell you now; that my mission of discovery was revived by encountering your mother. Otherwise she need not concern us. Previously I had found no use for her kind, but the time for your birth was approaching, and so I sought a suitable candidate without knowing why I did. Sometimes our source withholds its purpose from me until it is achieved. When I chose her your mother was a fellow teacher, but now she is your mother. I still recall the moment when I was brought to see you newly born, and I believe you do. As our eyes met we recognised each other, aspects of a single being, while your mother was no more than an aid to your birth, like the staff around us at the hospital.

  Your arrival was an omen of imminence. My yearning to learn from the dead returned with renewed strength, and your presence gave me the courage. What other forces may have been at work the day I met the Norris widow in the graveyard? Some versions of the future are no less determined to be born than you were, and wield events to bring about their goal. I was attempting to sense which graves contained tenants whose identities had survived the onslaught of the dark when the woman approached me to proselytise on behalf of her church. I had heard of its like, but only now did it occur to me that the adherents of such a belief might act as buffers between me and the dead.

  I observed some of the mediums at the next service. Frequently they are dismissed as charlatans or worse. Not long after I was born, one Sidney Mosley wrote a book which attacked the famous Arthur Conan Doyle for his faith in spiritualism, wakened by his observations of the battlefield. In fact Doyle had a modicum of our instincts and intelligence, however timid his exploration of the afterlife may have been, while Mosley made a popular mistake, which is to dismiss the dead on the basis of the imprecision of their messages. Tina, those messages are merely attempts by the dead to cling to their memories and regain some sense of themselves. That their communications are so often vague to the point of impersonality demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain that sense of self in the great dark.

  When I proposed to members of the congregation that I could restore their lost ones in a way the mediums could not, many were as skeptical as their detractors are about their church. Having introduced me to their faith, the Norris widow felt compelled to test my offer and persuaded several of her friends to follow suit. One baulked at consuming the produce of her late husband’s grave, but the rest found my proposal palatable enough; some declared that the act itself brought them closer to their dead. Soon those creatures became their companions, and I saw why I had been inspired to use their church: because the bereaved helped the dead to recover their personalities, simply by perceiving them as they used to be.

  At first I was able to wield those restored personalities by partaking of the yield of their graves. As I sent them farther into the infinite void which knows neither space nor time but which is the secret essence of the universe, however, so they began to return transformed by their exploration. Perhaps the nature of the place they investigate is closer to the primal instant of creation, before life was restricted to whichever single form each example took, but I have also concluded that the very act of perception compels the explorer to reflect, however imperfectly and reluctantly, that which is perceived. Even observing this in the imprecisely mimicked form which the dead bring back is capable of shaking the foundations of the lesser mind.

  Tina, I believe that together we shall be stronger than ever I have been. My visit to the field in France whence I originated has revealed to me how many secrets we have yet to learn. He who lies beneath the field has gained strength from them, though centuries of searching for them has left him monstrously transformed. You need not fear him, Tina. He is but an emblem of the revelations we shall experience. When I took his transmuted hand he conveyed hints of some of them to me, so that I beheld why the moon grins, and saw beyond it to the galaxy which a restless tract of the cosmos wears for a mask. Together with these glimpses a word came into my mind: Daoloth, which is the name of that which rends the veils men call reality. So much I subsequently learned from a set of volumes which even the librarians have recognised is not meant for the mundane eye. In the field from which my essence came, my true father yielded up a portion of his substance to be scattered to the points of the compass in that most ancient ritual which some surviving traditions imperfectly reproduce. What gifts may he bestow upon you, Tina? My instincts have yet to reveal when the two of us should visit him. May it be soon…

  At times I’d come close to forgetting who had written this, since it was so unlike how Mr Noble spoke. I wouldn’t learn until much later that many writers don’t speak the way they write—that writing lets their true selves speak. The paragraph about the field in France brought his behaviour all too vividly to mind, however, and I felt anxious for his daughter. It seemed clear that he wouldn’t take her there just yet, and I still had a good deal of the journal to transcribe. I took most of a week to finish the task, but as soon as I had I went to my parents.

  They were listening to the week’s good cause, an appeal for contributions to a home for distressed gentlefolk. “Pity their families can’t look after them. That’s the way it’s going with all this welfare we’re supposed to pay for,” my father said and turned the radio down to silence its solicitation. “Have you finished your homework at last, son?”

  “It wasn’t homework.” I thought one of my parents might have enquired further, but when they left my remark unanswered I said “Dad, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can.” Just the same, he sounded warier than he was admitting, I suspect he expected the kind of question adolescent boys had to brave themselves to raise. “Your mother and me,” he said, “we’re here whatever you need to ask.”

  “What happened to Mr Noble?”

  “We heard he found himself another job.”

  “Why, dad? Who got rid of him?”

  “I should think your headmaster did, him and the governors at your school.”

  “Didn’t you do something, though?”

  “Quite a few parents had a word wi
th the head.” my mother put in. “Why are you asking all this, Dominic?”

  “I was just wondering what anyone said.”

  “We weren’t there when he had his interview,” my father said. “No use asking us if he was told to leave.”

  It was plain that my parents wanted the subject put to rest, but I said “Don’t you think someone should stop him?”

  My mother sounded close to leaving her patience behind. “Stop what, son?”

  “All the things you said Mrs Norris said he did.”

  “She ought to be safe where she is. If they don’t like what he’s up to where he’s working now that’s for them to deal with. He’s no threat to you or your schoolmates any more.”

  “Dad, he’s got a little girl. Do you want him bringing her up to be like him?”

  “Where do you think this is, Russia? We don’t interfere with families in England even if we don’t agree with them. We don’t tell other people what they have to think.”

  “I only thought the way you and the other parents talked to Mr Noble—”

  “We did what we had to and that’s all. I don’t want to hear another word about him in this house, now or ever.”

  In case this was insufficiently final my father stalked out of the room and stumped upstairs, where he made even the flush of the toilet sound stormy. While he was there my mother murmured “Your father isn’t proud of what we had to do, son. You let him forget about it now.”