The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  Either Bobby couldn’t speak for chortling or was unprepared to, but Jim muttered “What, Dom?”

  “Someone laughing. Listen, there.”

  “Everybody’s laughing.” Jim stared at me, and I saw he resented having to look away from the film. “Everyone but you,” he said.

  “Not like them,” I murmured desperately. “Not like a person. Like someone trying to be one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The shrill giggling was almost lost amid the general mirth, and our discussion made it even harder to hear, but I was starting to think that it sounded like a different species of hysteria, however much it yearned to be amused. I was striving to think how I could bring it to Jim’s attention and Bobby’s when a woman seated two rows ahead twisted round to glare at us. “Less of the chitchat, you,” she said twice as loud as we’d been. “Some of us want to hear.”

  A flashlight beam poked at us before she’d finished speaking. The usherette who’d warned us about noise was sending a reminder. It and the irate member of the audience silenced me, and I felt more alone than ever, cut off from my friends not just by the admonition but by their unwillingness to listen. The laughter of the audience subsided, isolating a few final chuckles, as Kaye finished clowning with the car, and I couldn’t tell when the high scarcely human noise had ceased. I wanted to believe I had never actually heard it, but my panic had left me a symptom that needed relieving. “Just going to the bog,” I mumbled.

  I was rather hoping Jim would follow so that I wouldn’t be on my own, but he was too engrossed in the film even to respond. As I stood up the flashlight beam jabbed at me, and stayed with me all the way to the side aisle before abandoning me in the dimness by the wall. I was heading for the Gents when a faceless shape swelled up beside me. Just in time to escape attracting the attention of the usherette I saw the shape was made of light and smoke.

  The Gents was a tiled white room with cubicles and urinals and a sink beneath a mirror. A fluorescent tube hummed intermittently to itself, jerking at the shadows, so that one of the cubicle doors appeared to keep inching open. I should have been happy not to think this looked as though someone kept peering out, just too surreptitiously to be visible, I hurried to the nearest urinal, above which graffiti had been imperfectly erased, leaving outlines that tried to seem sketchily human. I couldn’t stop glancing over my shoulder, which meant that I came close to missing the urinal more than once. The room at my back was deserted and silent apart from my outpouring and a higher sound—a trickle in a pipe. An abrupt shrill stutter like a voice too eager for speech to form words was just a build-up of water that a tap let fall in a sink, and the stealthy movements here and there in the room were the fault of the nervous light. Once I was sure of having dripped my last I shook off a lingering drop and fumbled to button myself up. I was turning to the sink, though I didn’t mean to spend much time there, when someone took hold of the back of my neck.

  The grasp didn’t feel quite like a hand. I thought it hardly could, since nobody was visible behind me in the mirror. While the chill clutch was at least the size of a man’s hand, it felt no more substantial than fog. Perhaps the fog had condensed on my skin, because in the time it took me to suck in a shuddering breath it gained some of the substance of water. In a moment it grew still more solid—more like cold unstable gelatin—and I began to see a presence in the mirror. While at this stage it was ominously vague, I had a sense that it was struggling to resemble a man, if with as little success as the graffiti behind it on the wall. It had a pallor rather than a colour, though even this looked more like a notion or a memory of pallidness. For the moment the limb that ended with the object growing firmer on my neck was clearest, but the features on the gibbous bulb of a head were on their way to regaining or at any rate taking a shape. I had the nightmarish notion that the intruder meant to keep hold of me as an aid to assuming some form. I felt my skin crawl, and then I realised this wasn’t the whole of the sensation. The substance of the hand was as restless as a multitude of tiny grubs, ranging about my skin as if they were eager to fasten on my flesh.

  My whole body convulsed, so instinctively that at first I didn’t realise I’d jerked free. I dashed to the exit, skidding on the tiled floor, almost sprawling back into whatever the intruder had for arms. At the door I couldn’t help glancing around. The presence hadn’t followed me. The naked whitish hulking shape was at the mirror, pressing its hands or the approximation of hands against the glass. While the face was dismayingly incomplete, now it had eyes, which were intent on the reflection—so intent that they were widening to take it in. They would have looked more human if they hadn’t been twice as large as any man’s eyes—no, bigger. They were swelling bigger still, and even from across the room I thought their substance was growing unsettled, separating into a mass of filaments that twitched with eagerness to grasp the sight in the mirror. Or was that a sign of distress at the spectacle? My panic was enough to send me fleeing into the auditorium.

  The flashlight beam blinded me as I ran to my seat with a muffled rumble of floorboards. Jim and Bobby were too busy laughing at Kaye’s latest escapade to acknowledge my return. Once I’d blinked my vision clear of the blurred patch the flashlight had left I watched the entrance to the toilets. Whenever shadows shifted there, disturbed by the light from the film, or yet another mass of smoke rose out of the dimness, I was afraid that the malformed unfinished shape with the inhumanly distended eyes was about to come for me. At least I wasn’t on my own, and wouldn’t my friends have to see what came? Nothing did while the film capered to its end with a succession of routines I was only peripherally aware of, and as the wall lights illuminated the auditorium I determined to be brave. “Jim,” I blurted, “come and see something.”

  “Can’t I as well?” Bobby protested.

  “It’s in the Gents.”

  “Well,” she said with enough defiance not to need to add “I’m going to the other one.”

  We all trooped to the toilets, where I let Jim go ahead of me. The tiled room was deserted. Even the pipes were silent, so that I wondered if I’d ever heard the shrill whisper that I’d thought was coming from the pipes. The shadows were still edging back and forth, but that was all. “What am I supposed to see?” Jim said.

  “Maybe it’s gone.” I nerved myself to shove the cubicle door wide, revealing just the usual. Had I really fancied that an intruder of the kind I’d glimpsed would hide in there? “Something was here,” I said, jerking my hand at the room. “Cross my heart there was.”

  “Well,” Jim said with a touch of Bobby’s resentment, “if you aren’t telling I’m having a slash.”

  That was a strong word at our age for urinating. I had a token one as well and trudged to wash my hands. I was wary of approaching the mirror, since it was where I’d last seen the intruder. I peered at the glass and leaned gingerly closer. “Jim, look.”

  He didn’t until he’d finished at the urinal, and then he came to squint where I was looking. “What’s it meant to be?”

  “Can’t you see? They’re finger marks.”

  I was sure they were, despite their swollen size and lack of whorls that would have proved they were fingerprints. Two sets of five misshapen blobs discoloured the mirror, just where I’d seen the shape resting or pressing its hands. As Jim stared doubtfully at the marks Bobby called “Can I come in? Can I see?”

  “Come in,” I shouted, “quick.”

  As she pushed the door open I indicated the marks, telling myself that despite my parents’ admonition it was only rude to point at people. Bobby nudged Jim aside, which he seemed quite to like despite uttering a token protest. She was reaching to touch the marks on the glass when the door swung wide to reveal the usherette. “What do you think you’re up to in here?” she said as if she’d caught us all in some intimate activity.

  “We—”

  This was all I managed to say before she brandished her flashlight like a club. “Get out,” she cried. “Ri
ght out, the lot of you. Out of this cinema.”

  “We’ve seen the film we wanted anyway,” Bobby retorted.

  This enraged the usherette, who herded us up the aisle and as far as the outer doors. “We’ll be watching out for you,” she vowed, though the doors trapped her last word with a thud as they shut behind us. I looked back to see her talking to the manager, waving the flashlight for emphasis.

  We were tramping defiantly homewards, and I’d begun to let the sunlight reassure me that we weren’t bring followed, when Bobby said “They were weird, those marks, weren’t they?”

  “I don’t know what was so weird,” Jim said, less like a doubt than a denial.

  “I do. I touched them.” As I grew nervous of hearing what she might have encountered—all at once the sunlight seemed less protective than I’d hoped—Bobby said “They were inside the mirror.”

  17 - The Call

  That night as I tried to take refuge in sleep I heard a dog start to bark, and then another and another. Each one was closer to my house. Whatever had set them off was approaching, and I felt sure it was coming through the graveyard. As I did my best to nerve myself to look, the closest dog fell silent, and the clamour trailed away into the distance. With no lessening of panic I blundered out of bed and stumbled to the window.

  A full moon was sharing its pallor with the gravestones. By its muted light I had no more than an impression that some activity had just subsided in the graveyard, perhaps only a feeble stirring of vegetation in the midst of the moonlit stillness. The longer I peered through the window to locate whatever I might have glimpsed, the more the plots in front of the stones appeared to shift as if they were eager to release their tenants. Eventually I retreated to bed, where my nervous thoughts took some time to let me sleep.

  I was young enough to hope the worst was over, since nothing had followed me out of the cinema, but it didn’t help that I couldn’t be sure why I’d suffered the encounter. Had the intruder been a warning to stay clear of Mr Noble and his secrets, or might I have attracted it by feeling apprehensive near the Norris house? If my fears were responsible, could they bring it again? I did my best to stifle them, but they lay in wait each night when I went to bed. Going on holiday helped me to recover. That year we stayed in in a Scarborough hotel on top of a cliff. I still recall the tastes of those English summers—dinners that consisted pretty frequently of cold sliced ham and salad served with triangles of bread and butter alongside the inevitable pots of tea, and then a cornet as a treat down by the fishing boats, the lump of ice cream that you needed to be swift to lick before it dripped down your wrist, the crunch of the cone between your teeth, the last scrap of ice cream that you had to reach with your tongue or else bite off the tip of the cornet to suck it out. At first the cries of gulls above the harbour kept me awake in bed, but they seemed less ominous than the barking of the dogs had. Before our week in Scarborough was over I was sleeping all night without, so far as I could remember, even a dream.

  On a day trip to Whitby I bought a paperback of Dracula like an unofficial souvenir of the town. I found it comforting to the extent that it reduced the supernatural to a manageable threat, permanently destroyed on the last page. Perhaps the symbols of religion—here and in The Devil Rides Out, another lurid paperback my parents let me buy only because it was said to be a classic—had some power after all, at least while you were reading a book. I rather wished the journals in the Stoker novel wouldn’t keep reminding me of the material I had yet to show Bobby and Jim, and I was starting to grow critical as well, since I wasn’t too impressed with how Wheatley made his characters lecture others on the occult instead of talking like real people. The book that caught my fancy most was Lucky Jim, which I found in a second-hand bookshop and which my parents barely approved of my reading. It seemed both to suggest my potential future and to engage with everyday reality in ways I’d never dreamed a book could.

  It made me want to write, and to some extent the others did. By the time we returned home I was pregnant with ideas. I’d begun to find my earlier tales childish, and so I sent the three friends to university—Don and Jack and Tommy short for Thomasina, all of them renamed so as not to embarrass Jim. Don was the first to notice oddities about Professor More-Carter, their tutor—the old books whose titles he hid with brown paper covers, the unknown words he sometimes murmured when he thought nobody could hear, the way just a look from his piercing eyes could make students do his bidding. In time Tommy grew suspicious of how students who went to his room for a private tutorial would reappear paler and rubbing their necks. She and Don had to convince Jack that More-Carter was a black magician if not worse, and they’d all sneaked out of the house they shared to follow the tutor wherever midnight took him when they were interrupted. At least, I was, and before long I wished I were still in my tale.

  I was at the table in my bedroom, working on The Devil Wants the Three while my mother loaded our very first refrigerator. Once she’d finished she would go downtown to the Co-op to collect her dividend, which everybody called a divi, and I was still young enough to relish watching the clerks in the department store on London Road shut bills in metal cylinders to be sucked along vacuum tubes to the office. I was halfway through persuading Jack to wait and see where the tutor was going, since I hadn’t much idea myself, when I heard a voice. “Come here,” it said.

  It was high and small but urgent, and it was in the graveyard. I might not have heard it if my window hadn’t been wide open on that first day of September. I told myself that it wasn’t meant for me—that someone was calling a dog, because what else would anybody call on such a sunny morning, even in a graveyard? “Come back,” the voice pleaded, and I thought I recognised it, which was enough to make me crane over the sill.

  Mrs Norris was indeed out there, wandering among the graves. While she was hatless—the first time I’d seen her away from her house in that state—she wore flat shoes and a long summer dress colourful enough for a nursery. She looked as though someone had tidied her up, a condition she was on the way to leaving behind. “Where are you?” she begged. “Come back to me.” As she spoke she started forward a few paces, only to falter and head off in a different direction, a performance that put me in mind of a bird searching for food. Then she darted towards the side of the graveyard nearest my house and halted, lifting her head. She might have been straining to listen, but she saw me at the window.

  I don’t know which of us recoiled further. No doubt a watcher would have found this comical. As I kept Mrs Norris just in sight she turned away and shuffled rapidly across the grass to the nearest path. I ducked my head out of belated politeness and stared at the sentence I’d been writing, but could still hear her pleas. “Aren’t you here? Where have you gone? Please come to me…”

  Wherever Winston might be now, I was sure she wasn’t calling to him, and I was by no means certain that I wanted her appeal to succeed. I found I couldn’t write until her voice grew inaudible, whether with distance or because she’d abandoned her desperate quest, and then my words were so clumsy that I crossed them out, a critical approach that it was past time I learned. I’d just written a substitute sentence that seemed to pass muster when someone knocked on the front door, hesitantly and then with some determination. “Can you answer that, Dominic?” my mother called. “I need to put all these in before they go off.”

  I capped my fountain pen and propped it against the spiral rings of my exercise book, and gave the page a last glance to fix my next thoughts in my head before I ran downstairs two steps at a time. I opened the front door and then bruised my fingers with keeping hold of the latch for want of knowing what else to do. “Oh, Dominic,” Mrs Norris said. “Isn’t your mother in?”

  I wondered how she could have failed to hear, and then I remembered she was deaf. I’d been distracted because now she was closer I could see that she was wearing slippers stained by grass. “Is that Mrs Norris?” my mother called. “Let Mrs Norris in, Dominic.”

  Ste
pping back felt like retreating from somebody I was no longer sure I knew. Despite having caught me at my window, Mrs Norris had greeted me as if we hadn’t seen each other for a while. Far back in her eyes I seemed to glimpse an appeal, and then it was gone. Did she want me to pretend I hadn’t seen her in the cemetery, or had she put the incident out of her mind? She appeared not to realise that the front door needed shutting, and I closed it once I’d stepped aside to let her along the hall. By this time she’d remembered to say “How are you doing at your new school, Dominic?”

  “All right, thanks,” I mumbled, feeling shorn of more than a year.

  Now that we had a refrigerator my mother was convinced that nothing even slightly perishable should remain in the larder. She was busy making room for a pot of lard as Mrs Norris shuffled into the kitchen, keeping her feet on the floor. “Sit down, Mrs Norris,” my mother urged. “How are you today?”

  “Just like I’ve always been, Mrs Sheldrake.”

  Our visitor took a seat at once, hiding her feet under the table. “How long have you been home?” my mother said.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Sheldrake. I should have come round sooner.”

  I thought this wasn’t even a vague answer to the question, but my mother said “So long as you’re well in yourself. Will you have a cup?”

  “I’d love a real one.”

  Presumably she meant the tea at the hospital hadn’t been to her taste. My mother was about to interrupt her task when I said “I’ll make it, mum.”

  “He’s still a good boy, isn’t he?” Mrs Norris said, an unwelcome reminder of her husband’s catch phrase. In fact my behaviour wasn’t much unlike a lie, since it was an excuse to linger so as to hear what she might say. As I stood the kettle on the stove and lit the gas ring before its smell could reach the level my mother would warn me was dangerous, Mrs Norris said “And he’s grown such a lot, hasn’t he? You’ve got two men in the house.”