The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  All I could do was feign incomprehension and will her to realise why. “What, mum?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Has Mr Noble been writing stories like yours?”

  Desperation found me words that I hoped would satisfy all the listeners. “Not like mine.”

  “Perhaps yours will grow more like when you have seen more, Mr Sheldrake. We shall see what the future brings you,” Mr Noble said and let his gaze stray over the adults. “Is there anything else anyone’s anxious to learn?”

  “I wouldn’t mind knowing one thing,” my father said. “If it’s just a story, why did your father hide it?”

  “I’m afraid his mind isn’t what it might be any more. You may have noticed that yourself, Brother Treanor.”

  “Perhaps you should speak more plainly, Mr Noble.”

  “When he gave the talk you invited him to give. And more recently I believe he bothered you with some of the notions he’s got into his head. I imagine you realise now they were only fiction. I should never have let him read them when he’s in the state he’s in.”

  I was beginning to think Mr Noble didn’t care what he said so long as it let him retrieve the journal. Brother Treanor laid a hand on it, and I saw Mr Noble grow tense with waiting, especially when the headmaster didn’t pass him the book. I thought Brother Treanor was about to open it and enquire into the contents when my mother said “Does that happen to many people you know, Mr Noble?”

  His eyes widened as though to fit in more innocence. “What might that be, Mrs Sheldrake?”

  “How many of them end up with their minds affected?”

  His eyes looked as if he’d stretched them blank. “Only those who can’t cope with the truth,” he said and turned to the headmaster. “You’d think they ought to, wouldn’t you? You’d say it came from God.”

  Brother Treanor stared at him before pushing the book across the desk with the back of his hand. “Please take your property, Mr Noble. It doesn’t belong here.”

  Mr Noble rested a hand on the book, a gesture that seemed to take possession of a good deal of the room. “I hope we’re all as grateful as Mr Sheldrake deserves.”

  I felt as if the monks were adding weight to each other’s frowning silence. It was my mother who said “Why, Mr Noble?”

  “Another boy might not have turned the book in.” He was still gazing at the headmaster. “I shouldn’t like to think he will be punished for it,” he said. “You can hardly be surprised if he was afraid to mention me.”

  How long had he been listening outside? Had he played the trick I previously had with the fire door? As Brother Treanor made to speak Mr Noble said “I should be most unhappy if I thought Mr Sheldrake should suffer for anything connected with me. As unhappy as I was to leave your school.”

  “That discussion is closed, Mr Noble.”

  “I’m not so sure that it was ever properly had. I wonder if the reasons you gave me would stand up if I were to take the issue further. Well, perhaps there will be no need,” Mr Noble said and weighed his blank gaze on the headmaster. “May I have your undertaking that Mr Sheldrake should expect no worse than a reprimand?”

  Brother Bentley might have been emitting his discontented sound on the headmaster’s behalf as well. Brother Treanor drew a thin shrill breath on the way to saying “If that is what’s required to terminate this interview.”

  “Thank you for understanding,” Mr Noble said, which felt to me like the withdrawal of a threat and a sly gibe too. He cradled his journal in both hands and then hugged it to his chest all the way to the door, where he turned to face the room. “I don’t imagine I’ll have any further dealings with you,” he said and glanced at everyone but me. “Just to ensure there’s no misunderstanding, if I thought someone deserved a reminder how to behave I should arrange it myself.”

  As I wondered whether anyone besides me took this as more than a warning, the door shut behind him. I had no time to judge anyone’s reaction before Brother Bentley said “If I catch you in another untruth you will pay doubly for it, Sheldrake.”

  “I think that will do for now, Brother Bentley,” the headmaster said and stood up. “Thank you for attending, Mr and Mrs Sheldrake. I hope our next meeting will be under more auspicious circumstances.”

  Brother Bentley rose to his feet, but that was all he did. As the monks watched me let my parents out of the office, their robes seemed to darken their silence. Nobody spoke until the fire doors bumped together behind us, and then my mother said “Can’t we trust you any more, Dominic?” She sounded as though she hardly wanted to be heard, and her rebuke felt so much worse than any I’d had in Brother Treanor’s office that it drove Mr Noble’s parting words out of my head.

  16 - Laughter Needs A Mouth

  As we reached the railway bridge Bobby said “Why didn’t your teacher’s dad just tear up his book?”

  Jim halted in the shadow of the arch. “I never thought of that.”

  “Good job there’s a girl to do the thinking, then.”

  Once Jim and I had finished scoffing at this and rubbing our arms in response to the punches we’d earned I said “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen the book. It wouldn’t be like ripping up a magazine, the way our head at school makes people.”

  “Were they mucky magazines?”

  “Girls aren’t meant to be interested in those,” Jim said like someone older though not wiser. “Anyway, they weren’t. The last one was just about films.”

  “Then whoever’s it was should have stood up for it. You don’t destroy things just because you’re told to. They let us think for ourselves at our school.”

  Jim looked confused by resentment. “I bet they wouldn’t let Nobbly tell you the things in his book.”

  “I thought you hadn’t seen it.”

  “That’s right, Dom never even showed me.”

  In the hope of giving Bobby no time to feel slighted by his comment I said “I copied it all down, though.”

  “Then it must be like one of your stories.”

  “That’s what I thought as well,” Jim said.

  “Well, it isn’t one,” I retorted. “You ask my mum and dad if you don’t believe me.”

  Vexation was making me thoughtless, since I wouldn’t have liked anyone to ask them. I very much wanted my parents to forget about the book and the interview with Brother Treanor in particular. Even if they purported to understand why I’d behaved as I had, too many of their actions betrayed their doubts. Whenever they sent me on a message, the local word for an errand, they would count any change I brought back, though they never previously had. All too often they would ask if I was sure about something I’d just said, another tendency they’d recently developed. Even the increasing number of tasks my mother found me in the summer months—peeling potatoes or turning the mangle, taking loaded flypapers out to the bin, beating rugs on the line, pushing the carpet-sweeper through every room—felt like not just a compensation for distrust but a way of keeping an eye on me. At least my parents hadn’t prevented me from seeing Bobby and Jim, perhaps because they had no reason to feel that either of my friends was a pernicious influence. Just now Bobby and Jim were as peeved as only people of our age could be. “I never said you made it up,” Bobby protested. “I just meant if you let us read it it’ll look like something you wrote.”

  “When are you going to let us?” Jim said.

  “I don’t know.” For some reason the idea made me nervous. “My mum and dad don’t know I’ve got it,” I said. “They’d make me get rid of it if they did.”

  “You’ve still not said why your teacher’s dad just hid it,” Bobby pointed out. “He could have burnt it or chucked it in the bin.”

  “Maybe he was scared to go too far. Maybe he was frightened what Mr Noble might do if he did, or maybe he was scared of the book.”

  “Scared of a book.” Jim dismissed the notion with a laugh. “Still, he sounded a bit mad when he talked to us,” he said and halted under the rail
way bridge. “Hang on, here’s something else I don’t get. Why did he bring the book to our school?”

  “He must have wanted to show Brother Treanor.”

  “Then why didn’t he?”

  “He’d have found out Brother Treanor wouldn’t want to know. That’s how Brother Treanor was when I brought my mum and dad in.”

  “But you said Nobbly’s dad hid it before Trainwreck saw him.”

  “Maybe he was afraid someone else would see it. Maybe someone that was mixed up with his son. I’m not saying there was really anybody watching.”

  “Maybe he thought someone dead was,” Bobby said.

  She’d borrowed the idea from hearing us talk about Mr Noble, of course. All the same, the remark left me uneasy, and not just because her voice had grown an echo as she joined us in the chill shadow of the bridge—not even because she’d given me the grotesque image of a dead face peering unnoticed from among the spectators at the sports day. We were in sight of the Norris house, where the rooms looked excessively dark despite the August sunshine, no doubt from dust inside the windows. Did a weed nod at me out of a pot in the narrow garden? A butterfly or a small bird must have weighed it down, though the colourless object that fluttered away from the house looked too tattered for either—a dead leaf, then, which I could no longer locate. “Let’s hurry,” I blurted, “or the big film will be on.”

  We’d hardly left the shelter of the bridge when the Norris house was at my back. I found myself listening for Winston and thinking that I hadn’t seen the dog for months, not to mention Mrs Norris, who I gathered from my parents’ wary references was still in hospital. Was her neighbour looking after the dog? I strained my ears to hear a bark, but none came. I imagined Winston tying in his basket and hoping for company, and then I wondered if he might be cowering there, too afraid to bark, because he had some. I did my best to expel the notion from my mind, because it felt too capable of alerting a presence I wasn’t anxious to identify—or bringing it after me from the secretively silent house.

  Beneath a blue sky patched with small white clouds a road twice as broad as ours led to the Essoldo cinema. A few more cars were parked beside the kerbs than there would have been last summer. Black bubbles swelled from the surface of the road, and we would have trodden on them to pop them if we hadn’t been hurrying to the film. From behind some of the larger houses I heard the murmur of grazing lawnmowers. Otherwise there was silence apart from the flat slap of three sets of sandals on the flag-stoned pavement until Bobby said “When are we going to try and get into an X?”

  An old lady in a deckchair on her small front lawn flapped her newspaper like a reproof as I said “We did, remember.”

  “That wasn’t proper trying. We never even asked.”

  At the start of the summer holidays we’d ventured into the Mere Lane Picture House, a local cinema that always smelled of the old gas lamps in the auditorium. It was showing a film in which Kirk Douglas played a detective, apparently so savagely that no-one under sixteen was supposed to watch, and the stare of the woman in the pay box had warned us not to bother trying. “That old cow wasn’t going to let us in,” Jim said. “She might have told our school if we’d said we were sixteen.”

  “My dad says if you don’t try what you think you can’t do you won’t try what you can.”

  This sounded wise, and Jim’s confession of cravenness was scarcely worthy of the Tremendous Three. How long would we have to wait before we could bluff our way into some of the films the local paper serialised? I was distracted by a sense that something not much more substantial than a wind was close to touching my neck, but when I glanced back the pavement was deserted. “Some of the girls in my class have got in,” Bobby said.

  “What did they see?” Jim was impatient to learn.

  “The one with the monster ants, and they said you see all the ants get burnt up at the end.”

  While this sounded irresistible, I was preoccupied with our shadows on the pavement. I had the impression that another shadow, if rather less of one, kept dodging between them as though it was eager to catch hold of them. Or was its source struggling to take hold of theirs? A succession of clouds must be casting a series of shadows, of course, and I refused to look back. “And they saw one where some people find a thing, that’s what it’s called, under the ice,” Bobby said. “They dig it up and the ice melts and the thing gets out and starts drinking people’s blood.”

  I was less taken with the prospect of something disinterred and set free, and I was also troubled by glimpses in the windows of the houses we were passing. Reflected clouds were languidly unfolding in the sky that had settled in some of the bedrooms, while many of the downstairs windows framed temporary tableaus of the Tremendous Three, but I kept feeling that a cloud was about to appear behind our reflections as well—a presence unsure of its shape. Nothing of the kind let itself be seen, and so I had even less reason to glance back. “We’re just going to have to look old, that’s all,” Bobby said.

  “You’ll need to look like the other girls, then.”

  We were approaching a post-box that a postman was emptying, and Bobby didn’t speak until he drove off in his van. “What do you mean by that, Jim Bailey?” she demanded.

  For once Jim’s face and hers were vying with mine for redness, if not with the post-box as well. “You know,” Jim mumbled, “how girls get. You don’t want to hide them is what I’m saying.”

  She did indeed seem determined to suppress her breasts or at the very least conceal how they were burgeoning. “You don’t know what I want,” she retorted but stopped short of adding a punch.

  “We know you’d like to see those films, don’t we, Dom? We can look old enough, so you’ve got to.”

  “You think you two look that old.” Perhaps Bobby thought better of scoffing, since she didn’t quite. “Well, I don’t need to now,” she declared. “I want to see this film.”’

  We were in sight of the Essoldo, where rakish plastic letters spelled Knock on Wood along the edge of the marquee. By myself I wouldn’t have bothered with the film. Bobby was the Danny Kaye fan, and would come away from his films gabbling the patter that he sang. This one had a U certificate, which made me think it would be more childish than I liked, although at least we wouldn’t have to ask an adult or worse still an older teenager to take us into an A, and we weren’t risking the humiliation of being turned away from an X. “Shut up now,” Bobby said to spur us onwards and, I suspected, to leave the discussion behind. “It’s nearly on.”

  She was first into the cinema. A manager uniformed like the kind of waiter I’d only ever seen in films was standing by the pay box. “Just starting,” he warned us, and we ran to buy our tickets before dashing to the auditorium, where an usherette at least my mother’s age brought us to a halt. “You behave yourselves and don’t make any noise,” she said as she tore our tickets in half.

  I liked cinemas with balconies, but this Essoldo didn’t have one. Ranks of folding seats sloped down the auditorium to end nearly beneath the screen. The lights went down as the usherette watched us find seats towards the back. The scrape of a match on the side of a box greeted the appearance of the censor’s certificate on the screen, and the first puff of someone’s cigarette groped into the edge of my vision as a jolly tune accompanied the title of the film.

  Danny Kaye played a ventriloquist unhappy with his job. On a flight to London he contrived to trap the leading lady in his seat belt, which was enough to send Bobby and then Jim in the direction of hysterics. I produced a few titters that were lost in the general mirth, but I was beset by a notion that there was something it wouldn’t be wise to remember. How could I evade it if I didn’t know what it was? If I managed to identify it, wouldn’t that lodge the memory in my head?

  A spy hid a microfilm inside the ventriloquist’s doll to smuggle it to London, where he tried to retrieve the microfilm. As he searched Kaye’s room his adversary caught up with him, pinning him to the door with a knife. The sight o
f the corpse looking like a hat and coat, the hat fallen over its face, reminded me of far too much. I remembered thinking that Mr Norris’s coat on the hook in the hall wasn’t empty enough. Bobby and Jim and dozens of people around me in the dark were laughing at Danny Kaye’s failure to realise it wasn’t just a hat and coat, but I was hearing Mr Noble’s final words in Brother Treanor’s office. Had he meant that I deserved to be reminded how to behave? What sort of reminder might he think I’d earned?

  Now I knew why I’d been wary of remembering—in case thinking of it brought it. I was afraid to think of the Norris house too, and for much the same reason. Perhaps they were connected, and I couldn’t help flinching as a colourless presence loomed into sight at the edge of my vision, flickering with the unstable light from the screen as it groped to take shape. It was only a cloud of cigarette smoke, but since it reminded me of the glimpses I’d had in the windows of houses on the way to the cinema, it didn’t reassure me much.

  On the run from the police and the villains as well, the ventriloquist took refuge in an Irish pub, where he had to sing a comic song to pass for an Irishman—the kind of song Bobby would do her best to perform all the way home. The rapid words plucked at my nerves, not least because they seemed to be obscuring another voice. It was surely only in my head, and yet I could have thought it was struggling not merely to form words but to keep hold of them, as if this might help to ground their source somehow. I was both afraid to hear and desperate to be certain what I was hearing, and so anxious for Kaye to finish pattering that I almost shouted aloud.

  The song ended at last, but I could no longer hear the thin shaky voice repeating a few blurred words about a boy and pence, if I ever really had. Soon Kaye had to impersonate an English car salesman, rattling off nonsense while systematically mistaking the functions of all the controls, and Jim and Bobby competed with the rest of the audience for the loudest laugh. Was there another—a high giggle so scrawny that, despite its willingness to join in, sounded as if its owner scarcely had a mouth? A pale object in search of a shape nodded close to my shoulder, and I barely managed to swallow a cry before I identified it as another cloud of smoke jittering with light. Just the same, I blurted “What’s that? Can you hear?”