The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  She could have been making her voice even louder to hide any wistfulness, but I had an uneasy sense that it was meant for her husband to hear. I tried not to recall my encounter in the cinema or the unnatural marks within the mirror. As the water in the kettle began to grow agitated Mrs Norris seemed to gain awareness of my mother’s task. “I’ll have to get a fridge one of these days,” she said. “And a television now they’re on hire purchase.”

  “I expect it’ll be company for you.” Apparently my mother felt obliged to add “Dominic’s father doesn’t believe in buying things on tick. Our parents never did, so he doesn’t think we should.”

  “You’ve got to let go of the past sooner or later.”

  I wasn’t sure that Mrs Norris had convinced herself. “Forgive me if I carry on with this,” my mother said as she shut the refrigerator yet again. “You aren’t supposed to keep these open any longer than you have to.”

  “That’s right, you don’t want things going bad.”

  Did her eyes shiver as if they were anxious to avoid a memory? I was glad when the shrilling of the kettle gave me a job. As I let the tea stew in the pot, the way my parents liked it and assumed every visitor did, my mother said “Are you having a drink, Dominic? Would you like some orange now it’s cold?”

  Perhaps she felt I was sufficiently mature to join in any conversation or at least to listen, but I wondered if she might prefer not to be alone with Mrs Norris until she’d verified that all was well. “Yes please, mum,” I said and thought Mrs Norris overstated her coo of approval.

  My mother poured me a glass of juice and arranged some of the best china on a tray—two cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. “Let’s all go in the front,” she said, politeness having supervened over her task.

  The radiogram had a companion now—a wooden stand that held more than a dozen twelve-inch samples of classical music sleeved in flimsy paper. Once she’d sipped her tea and nibbled at a custard cream Mrs Norris examined a few of the records, murmuring over Liebestraum and Beethoven’s moonlit melody. I wondered if she meant to put in a request, but when she sank back into her armchair without a word I suspected she was trying to prepare to speak. Rather than wait I was anxious to learn “How’s Winston?”

  Her gaze came back from wherever it had strayed, “I’m sorry, Dominic, he’s gone.”

  I found the word hard to pronounce. “Gone.”

  “He ran off while I was away. Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault even a tiny bit. The lady who was looking after him, she ought to have kept him in her house and not ours.”

  I was wary of asking why, but I said “Can’t you tell the police? I mean, to look for him?”

  “Maybe I ought to. Or maybe somebody’s adopted him and he’s happier with them.” She sounded impatient to be done with the subject, “Mr and Mrs Middleton told me he’d gone,” she said to my mother. “They came to see me from our church.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t visit you,” my mother said.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to. I know you had your boy to think of. I’m just saying they told me what was going on.”

  “About your dog,” my mother said, and I sensed that she hoped this was all.

  “And the man I was telling you I took to our church. He isn’t there any more.”

  “Oh.” It was plain that my mother would have liked to leave it at that, but she said “Will that be a good thing?”

  “A lot of them think so. They didn’t like what he was doing with the people he brought back.”

  I saw how little my mother wanted to hear about this. “So long as you’re happy with what your church does, Mrs Norris.”

  “They can’t do much.” In the same dismayed tone Mrs Norris said “He’s started his own church.”

  My mother seemed to have or want to have no answer. “What’s it called?” I said.

  “The Trinity Church of the Spirit, Dominic. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Where is it?” I said as my mother made to speak.

  “We don’t want to know,” my mother informed anyone who needed telling. “And I shouldn’t think you’d want to go anywhere near it, Mrs Norris.”

  “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.” Mrs Norris took a sip of tea, and the china emitted a shrill jitter as she replaced the cup on the saucer. “I was hoping you could help me,” she said.

  My mother’s lack of zeal was clear before she said a word. “How could we do that, Dominic’s father and me?”

  “That’s true, he’s involved as well.” If the mention of my father was intended to deter Mrs Norris, it didn’t work. “Last time we met,” she said, “he was saying he’d be seeing Mr Noble.”

  “Yes, at the school.”

  Mrs Norris looked bewildered if not tricked. “Which school?”

  “Dominic’s.” Rather than remind her that she ought to know, my mother said “We hadn’t realised till you said his name that your Mr Noble was his teacher.”

  “He’s getting everywhere. Does he want to take over the whole world?” Mrs Norris found a smile that looked not merely nervous but despairing, and then it grew firmer. “Well then,” she said, “I should think you’ll want to help me deal with him.”

  “You still aren’t saying how.”

  “The school can as well. They’ll have to when you tell them what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Mrs Norris, he isn’t there any more.”

  Mrs Norris sounded as if she’d been promised a treat only to have it rescinded. “Where is he, then?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve really no idea. I’m sorry, but we were just concerned that he shouldn’t influence our son.”

  “We’ll have to find out where he’s gone. Is it another school?”

  “I believe so, but I’m afraid we won’t be—”

  “You mustn’t let it go like that, Mrs Sheldrake. People who know about him have to stop him while we can. He’s doing worse things than he used to do.”

  My mother wouldn’t let herself be prompted, but I was. “What things?”

  “He’s taken my Herbert away and I can’t get him back.”

  I thought of the version of a hand that had clutched at my neck and the shape I’d seen groping at the mirror, and remembered the street party, where Mrs Norris had been desperate to avoid the touch of an unseen companion. “I thought you didn’t like him any more,” I blurted.

  “Dominic,” my mother cried. “Think what you’re saying.”

  “He’s right, though, Mrs Sheldrake. Don’t stop him telling the truth.” As my mother parted her lips in a wordless rejoinder Mrs Norris said “I don’t like what your Mr Noble’s made him into, Dominic, but he’s still my Herbert and I want him back.”

  “Has Mr Noble done it to anyone else?”

  “I couldn’t say. I’ve been away, you know.”

  I was aiming to suggest that she and his other victims ought to get together. “Isn’t that why they didn’t like him at your church?”

  “They just didn’t like how he’d started talking to their loved ones.” With a visible effort Mrs Norris recalled “Like they belonged to him. Like they had to say what he wanted them to say, and if you got on the wrong side of him he wouldn’t let them talk to you.”

  “But where have they gone now he’s gone?”

  “That will do, Dominic,” my mother said, putting her cup down almost hard enough to crack the saucer. “Mrs Norris, you say you want help.”

  “Any you can give me, Mrs Sheldrake.”

  “Then just you come with us to our church.”

  Mrs Norris looked as though she hoped she didn’t understand. “How can they bring my Herbert back to me? Can they make him how he was?”

  “Maybe praying can.” My mother went that far only to retreat. “If you speak to our priest,” she said, “maybe he can bring you something better.”

  Somewhere between protesting and pleading Mrs Norris said “What’s better than my Herbert used to be?”

  “Peace, Mrs Norris. If y
ou’ll just let Father Kelly talk to you about your loss—”

  “You don’t understand what’s happening. You do, don’t you, Dominic? You’re starting to.”

  “Please don’t involve him, Mrs Norris. That really isn’t fair. Dominic, weren’t you busy in your room?”

  As I made to stand up, Mrs Norris beat me to it, brushing crumbs off her lap onto the tray. “Don’t trouble,” she said. “I’ve bothered you long enough. Thank you for your hospitality and everything else you’ve done.”

  The reversion to normalcy seemed to abash my mother. “I do wish you’d give Father Kelly a chance,” she said. “He won’t mind that you aren’t with the church, I’m certain.”

  “I don’t think I’ll risk it, thanks. I’ll have to find someone else.”

  Mrs Norris didn’t make too fast for the hall, but the sight of her stubborn back deterred any further conversation. By the time my mother and I followed her she was opening the front door. She strode onto the path, only to falter and start to turn back. “Why, Judith, there you are,” a woman called across the road.

  She was with a man who looked just as parental, though they were both decades younger than Mrs Norris. As she hesitated on the path they crossed the road at not much less than a march and opened our gate wide. “Judith, that will never do,” the man said. “You’ve come out without your shoes.”

  “You come back with us now,” his companion said, “and we’ll find them.”

  As the man sidled behind Mrs Norris while the other nurse took her arm to lead her on the path, he gave my mother a concerned look. “Has Judith been disturbing you?” he murmured.

  “Not a bit,” my mother said, but her composure wavered at the sight of the nurses ushering Mrs Norris to a discreetly white vehicle near the railway bridge. “Come inside, Dominic,” she said like a denial that she had been watching as well, and once the front door was shut she rounded on me. “Just you forget all that nonsense. She still isn’t right in her head. I hope you didn’t make her worse,” she said, and I felt more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.

  18 - Mother and Child

  Every church is a mask which hides the truth. All religions are lies told to control the ignorant, but some of them embody codes which the enlightened may decipher. The Christians are given feeble hints of the ancient rite of the three, and the Mohammedans come trailing after them, desperate to pretend there is a solitary god. Perhaps their insistence on converting the world to their view betrays a secret fear that the world is poised to regain its primal state. The multitude of spiritualists never glimpsed the path on which they shone their tiny uncertain light, and mistook for truth the scraps of life which their efforts brought back. The likes of Conan Doyle were deluded into thinking that only the dead live in the farther dark. As the days of Daoloth draw near and the future grows ever hungrier for incarnation, perhaps the time is ripe for a religion which may speak to the enlightened while it herds its worshippers. Tina, while our minds grow equal to the unmasked truth, we shall continue to send explorers voyaging on our behalf. However weak they prove to be, their transformed shapes bring us hints of reality. Perhaps we should found a church to which they can be sacrificed in the service of the truth…

  “Dom, you ought to show someone what he wrote about his church.”

  “They’d only think Dom wrote it,” Jim said. “That’s how it looks.”

  “You’re never thinking I did,” I protested.

  “I’m saying anybody else would. We believe you if you say Nobbly did.”

  I could only hope that my friends weren’t simply humouring me. Arranging for them to read my transcription of the journal had been hard enough. We’d had to pretend that Jim was helping me with homework in my room and then that Bobby had happened to come looking for us. It felt like one of the games we’d outgrown years ago, when somebody would tell the other two what to pretend—most often Bobby had been the director, since I’d been shy of proposing ideas and Jim’s tended to earn him a punch. I still disliked lying to my parents, but only because it would give them further reason to distrust me. Like quite a few of the ways I’d started to behave, I no longer felt it was much of a sin, particularly since it seemed to be in an honourable cause. “If nobody’s going to believe us,” I said, “we’ll have to stop him by ourselves.”

  We were in the park opposite the graveyard. That Saturday in late September we’d gone to the Essoldo in the hope of being let into an X, only to retreat when we saw that the usherette who’d previously chased us out was standing by the pay box. We’d loitered on the swings in the playground until some children half our age wanted a turn, which made me and very probably my friends feel more childish than ever. Now we were on a park bench near the playground. “Stop what?” Jim said.

  “You read all the stuff he wrote. He’s using people even when they’re dead.”

  “You said he told old Trainwreck it was just a story he’d written.”

  As Bobby snorted at his name for the headmaster now that she was too grown-up to giggle, I said “That’s only what he wanted everyone to think. You saw what he did to Mrs Norris.”

  “Maybe that’s how you end up if you believe all his rot.”

  “That’s not all.” I might have reminded Jim of the field in France and the prints within the mirror, but he would only have rationalised them, growing more stubborn if Bobby had sided with me. “She wants us to help,” I said.

  “She never asked me. Did she ask you, Bobs?”

  “Give up calling me that,” Bobby said, which sounded like a substitute for an answer.

  “She asked me. I told you what she said and how she was. She needs us,” I insisted and felt driven to add “Aren’t we still the Tremendous Three?”

  “Maybe we’re getting a bit old for it,” Jim said.

  I tried not to let my silence seem too wounded, but a swing gave a squeal that might almost have been protesting on my behalf. “I’m not yet,” Bobby said and looked uncertain who if anyone to touch.

  “Well, maybe I’m not quite,” Jim mumbled, looking variously embarrassed, and regained distinctness to say “You still aren’t saying what we’re supposed to stop.”

  “Whatever he’s up to at this church of his,” Bobby said.

  “How are three kids meant to do that?”

  “Maybe we’ll know when we see what he’s doing.”

  “So where’s the church, Dom?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I looked it up in the phone box but it wasn’t in the book, and the operator said it isn’t on the phone.”

  “Tell us how we’re going to find it, then.”

  “We could watch his house and follow him,” Bobby said, “if we knew where he lives.”

  “I do know,” I said and jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Opposite the graveyard.”

  “Couldn’t be anywhere else,” Jim said as if he’d forgotten we lived near it too. “How long are we going to have to watch?

  “There’s three of us,” Bobby said, which felt loyal to me. “We can take turns.”

  “Suppose he goes to his church while we’re at ours?”

  “I don’t go any more. We never went that much.”

  Jim gave her a dismayed look. “Aren’t you scared what may happen to you?”

  “Nothing’s going to. My dad says religion is the opium of the people.”

  “That wasn’t him talking.” As Bobby readied a punch Jim told her “It’s what someone said who my parents don’t like.”

  “Doesn’t matter who says if it’s true, and if my dad says it is I know it is.”

  “And I know what mine says is.” I was trying to think how to head off the argument when I saw a woman wheeling a toddler in a pushchair towards the playground. “Look, both of you,” I whispered. “That’s Mr Noble’s wife.”

  Her broad face looked determined to be placid or at any rate expressionless, but the lines stacked on her forehead didn’t help. I wondered whether she’d pulled her headscarf low on her brow in
a bid to cover them up. When she glanced towards us I raised a hand in a gesture even more timid than the one I used to make in class, but she looked away at once. “She’ll know where his church is, won’t she?” Bobby murmured.

  “She’s never going to tell us,” Jim said under his breath.

  “She might,” I realised. “I don’t think she’d like it very much.”

  As the Nobles reached the playground I heard Tina call out “Swing.” Her voice was far stronger and clearer than it had been last year. I took her to be enthusing about the swings, though the word had sounded vigorous enough for a command. I could easily have fancied that her mother was flustering to obey, undoing the straps of the pushchair so that Tina could step out and march to the smaller swings like a child at least twice her age. She turned to gaze at her mother while she waited to be lifted in, and even from where I was watching across a lawn I thought her attitude looked little short of dictatorial. Her mother strapped her into a swing, and as Mrs Noble gave it a tentative push Bobby said “Well, are you going to ask her?”

  “Maybe Jim better had. She won’t know him.”

  “Who cares if she does?” Jim said, and not too quietly either.

  “We don’t want her telling Mr Noble we found out, do we?”

  In fact I didn’t want her telling him that I had, in case this brought a visit from the presence I’d encountered in the cinema. “Don’t ask her where the church is,” Bobby said as if she were organising us in a game. “Just ask what he’s doing now he isn’t at your school.”

  “I know what to do,” Jim said but sounded close to abandoning caution. “I don’t need anyone to tell me.”

  He shoved himself off the bench hard enough to be ready for a confrontation, and we hurried after him across the grass. Mrs Noble was pushing the swing at arms’ length now, but let it start to lose momentum as she frowned at the three of us. While most of her auburn hair was tucked under the headscarf, I thought the strands she hadn’t hidden were paler than last year. “I know you,” she said, focusing her frown on me. “You’re…”