The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  He gave her a frown and a sample of a grimace. “What are you saying, love?”

  “Don’t look or he’ll see us. It’s that teacher of Dominic’s.”

  I glanced past them to see Mr Noble striding fast along the path from the gate closest to his house. He looked so preoccupied that I thought he mightn’t notice us, but as he glared towards the playground he recognised my parents. I glimpsed contempt flickering on his face, to be replaced by indifference and then by an emotion not far short of loathing. He must have detested feeling forced to approach my parents, but as he made for us I saw him leave all expression behind, apart from a faint smile gracious enough for a Sunday. “Why,” he said, “it’s Mr and Mrs Sheldrake.”

  For once I didn’t resent feeling excluded by adults. My parents turned to face him as though they hadn’t realised he was there and wished they’d stayed ignorant. “Mr Noble,” my father said.

  “And how is Mr Sheldrake?”

  “I’m quite well, thank you.”

  “No,” Mr Noble said and stooped snakelike in my direction. “The forthcoming generation.”

  “They’re happy with him at his school,” my mother said.

  In case this was insufficiently pointed my father said “They’re still teaching him what’s right.”

  “So long as you believe that.” As Mr Noble’s smile shrank he said “Just tell me, have you seen my daughter?”

  “I don’t think we ever have,” my mother told him.

  “Not you.” Courtesy was deserting him. “Mr Sheldrake,” he said and stared at me.

  “I haven’t today, sir.” I wondered if my parents would have rebuked me if I’d omitted the last word, “Not for weeks,” I said.

  “How old is she?” my father asked him.

  “She’s two,” Mr Noble said with an emphasis I didn’t understand. “She’s much older than her age.”

  My mother was concerned now. “Has she run off? What does she look like? What’s her name?”

  “It’s Tina, and she’s very much like me.” Before he’d finished speaking Mr Noble swung around to survey the park. “Tina,” he called at the top of is voice. “Tina.”

  Everybody in the playground stared at him, and so did people further off, but these were the only responses I could see. “When did you lose her?” my father said.

  “When I was about some business and she was meant to be asleep.” With enough resentment to be aiming some of it at us for learning of the situation, Mr Noble said “I’m looking for her and her mother.”

  I could see my parents wished he hadn’t told them, but my father said “Why, what’s happening?”

  “My wife,” Mr Noble said, visibly restraining his answer. “She’s been in something of a state since my father left us.”

  My mother gave a sympathetic murmur while she and my father crossed themselves. I didn’t know whether they glimpsed the disdain in Mr Noble’s eyes, which made my hasty version of the gesture feel even less meaningful. “Please accept our condolences for your loss,” my father said.

  “It’s no loss.”

  My mother parted her lips so sharply that the noise was a comment in itself. “How can you say that about your own father?”

  “No,” Mr Noble said. “I mean I haven’t lost him.”

  I saw my parents were reluctant to argue with his beliefs under the circumstances, but my father said “Is that why your wife’s in a state?”

  “I think you’ve hit upon it,” Mr Noble said as if he were praising a minor effort by a pupil. “So many people aren’t equipped to see the truth.”

  Before my father could respond my mother said “Are you saying she’s run away with your daughter?”

  “I fear she may have. She has no appreciation of how I’m bringing Tina up. I know what’s best for my own child, and I won’t be hindered by ignorance.”

  I saw that my parents felt bound to let the subject go, and I made a desperate bid to rescue it. I was remembering his journal as I said “Mr Noble, what did your dad think?”

  “I won’t discuss my private matters with you any further.”

  This could have been aimed at my parents as well, since he was gazing at us all. In a last attempt to prompt them I said “You heard what happened to Mr Noble’s dad.”

  “We did.” My mother gazed at Mr Noble. “It seemed so unnecessary,” she said.

  “That’s the word for it.” Perhaps my father was close to confronting Mr Noble too. “Was he on your wife’s side?” he said.

  “This doesn’t concern my father,” Mr Noble said so coldly that I for one knew it did. “If you can’t help you must excuse me. Sheldrake, if you see Tina or her mother, kindly let me know at once.”

  He’d abandoned his old pretence of respect, and my mother seemed offended on my behalf. “How is Dominic supposed to do that? Are you on the telephone?”

  “I’ve felt no need for one, and nobody else has.” As I wondered if this could be a way of hindering his wife from speaking to her friends, Mr Noble said “I trust you won’t object if your son comes to my house.”

  “To be honest, Mr Noble,” my father said, “we’d prefer him not to.”

  “Then I hope you realise you may be putting my daughter in danger.”

  “Of what?” my mother protested.

  “Of leaving her at the mercy of a woman who’s unbalanced,” Mr Noble said and turned his back to stride away along the path.

  My parents exchanged an unhappy look. “We don’t really know, do we?” my mother said.

  “Maybe their neighbours would.”

  “You’re never saying we should talk to them.”

  I saw the outrageousness of the proposal catch up with my father. “I don’t see what else we can do,” he said.

  I was hoping this expressed determination rather than defeat when my father muttered “Watch out, he’s coming back.”

  My mother followed his gaze past me, and I saw Mr Noble marching towards us even more purposefully than he’d left us. I was afraid he’d overheard my parents until I realised he was staring past them at a black car on the main road alongside the park. While it put me in mind of a funeral, the unlit sign on the roof showed it was a police car. As it passed the park gates I saw a woman and a toddler in the back. The car slowed as it approached the Noble house, and Mr Noble broke into a run. “It’s Tina and her mum,” I said. “They’ve brought them back.”

  My mother stood up. “Let’s walk home that way.”

  “We don’t want to get too involved,” my father said.

  “I’d just like to see all’s as it should be. No harm in that, Desmond.”

  Mr Noble was already past the gates and sprinting across the road with little regard for the traffic. By the time we trotted at some speed to the gates, the police car had halted outside the Noble house. “Stay on this side at least,” my father hissed.

  He led the way along the pavement bordering the graveyard as the driver climbed out of the police car and opened the kerbside door. I saw Mr Noble slow down to a purposeful stride as his wife emerged from the car. Her broad face tied up in a headscarf that was failing to contain a good deal of her hair looked not so much placid as slumped into dullness. Tina came next, helped onto the pavement by a policeman who’d been sitting with them in the back. Mrs Noble glanced at her husband and stooped to their daughter, lifting her in a hug that even from across the road I could see was fierce. She turned away from Mr Noble and began to retreat along the pavement not quite at a run. She hadn’t reached the nearest side street when the long-legged driver easily overtook her and held up a hand. “One moment, madam,” he said and called to Mr Noble “Is that your house there?”

  Mr Noble pointed with both hands as if he was celebrating its existence. “Our family home.”

  “That’s what your little girl told us. You aren’t going the right way, madam. You need to go home.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mrs Noble said in a voice that shivered with the effort to stay calm and
reasonable. “They shouldn’t be together.”

  “Didn’t this young lady say your husband teaches at St Cuthbert’s?”

  “That’s where I’m employed,” Mr Noble called. “I’m in charge of their history.”

  “I’m sure the gentleman can’t be any kind of danger to children, madam, or he wouldn’t be in such a trusted position. Be a good lady and don’t give us any more trouble. You don’t want your neighbours to see you making a scene.”

  I willed my parents to point out how Mr Noble had been fired from his job at my school, but they would have had to shout across the road, and I knew they never would. As Mrs Noble turned, still clutching Tina, and trudged back to the house, Mr Noble said “Please let me apologise for any inconvenience. My wife has been upset since my father died.”

  Surely this was another cue for my parents, but we still weren’t close enough. “Will that be affecting your little girl?” the other policeman said.

  “Not in any way I wouldn’t want. Truth helps her grow.”

  “You don’t think she’s a bit young for that kind of truth.” I was urging the policeman to pursue the issue, but Mr Noble’s silence seemed to win him over. “I expect as a teacher you’ll know if she is,” he conceded. “She’s certainly a credit to you. She told them at the railway station that she was being taken away without your consent. She didn’t make a fuss, but she was so convincing that the ticket office called us.”

  “Mummy,” Tina said, “that’s too tight. You’re hurting.”

  “You can put her down,” Mr Noble said. “She won’t run away.” As both policemen moved towards his wife, she planted Tina on the pavement and opened her hands in a mime of despair before clawing at the emptiness between them. The little girl marched to her father purposefully enough for someone several times her age, and I saw the policemen take this as resolving any doubts they might have had. Mr Noble swept Tina up in his arms as if he meant to launch her towards the sky, and the policeman who was lifting out the contents of the car boot—the pushchair but no luggage—watched with an approving smile. Something distracted his attention, and he said “Is someone in your house?”

  Mr Noble followed his gaze to the window above the front door. “Just the wind.”

  As he turned back to the policeman he saw us across the road. Disdain pinched his face so briefly that it seemed we weren’t worthy even of contempt. “In you come, Tina,” he said, slipping his key into the lock. “Dear, you bring the pushchair.”

  “Will you need us any further, sir?” the driver said.

  “I’m sure I can deal with any situation now. If I may I’ll write to your chief constable commending your professionalism.”

  Couldn’t the policemen sense his sarcasm? Wasn’t it their job to see through deception and disguise? I watched helplessly as Tina ran into the house and swung around to smile at the police. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she said out of the dimness of the hall.

  The police stayed close behind Mrs Noble until she plodded along the path, which she made seem considerably longer than its few feet, and tipped up the pushchair to send it into the house. Her husband stepped aside for it and her before sending us a last scornful look as he shut the front door. When the policemen noticed us they seemed to share his view. No doubt they took us for idle spectators, and they plainly made my father feel that way. “I hope you’re happy now,” he told my mother. “I’m for home.”

  “So long as the little girl was happy I am.”

  I could only follow them, though not without more than one backwards glance. I didn’t know whether they’d seen what I had, but I knew they would dismiss it, just as the policeman had. He’d been right to question Mr Noble, but too ready to accept the answer. The curtains at the upstairs window had been more agitated than the breeze along the main road could have made them. While it had swayed a few branches in the cemetery, it couldn’t have produced the glimpse of an unpleasantly lopsided shape blundering like an enormous moth against the curtains and fumbling at the pallid fabrics—a shape with little in the way of hands but, to judge from the asymmetrical mass that was pressed against the inside of the curtains, altogether too large a face.

  22 - A Shape in the Fog

  “I don’t understand my mum. It’s like she doesn’t care about Tina and her mother.”

  “How about your dad?” Jim said.

  “I don’t think he does either. Him and my mum won’t do anything. They say leave well alone.

  “Maybe they’re right and that’s how they care. Our dads and mums aren’t always wrong.”

  Under the circumstances I found his defence of my parents close to disloyal. “They couldn’t see what was really going on,” I protested. “You two ought to have, though.”

  “Sounds like Nobbly’s wife has flipped her lid a bit more,” Jim said. “So the kid’s best off back with him.”

  “But it’s him that’s done it to his wife just like he did to Mrs Norris and his dad.”

  “It won’t be him, will it? It’s the stuff he believes. I’m not saying it’s right or anything like, but it hasn’t driven him mad either.”

  “Do you want him teaching it to that little girl?”

  “He’s her dad. It’s up to him, don’t you think, Bobs?”

  We were on the corner of her road again, where it was darker than last time we’d met. Some of the traffic confronted the dusk with lights, and some cars left their headlamps dead. “If it’s what she wants,” Bobby said.

  “She’s too young to say,” I objected.

  “She says a lot. I thought she was amazing. She’s what girls ought to be.”

  “She’s only two.”

  “You’re saying her dad taught her, are you, Dom? Sounds like it wasn’t her mum.”

  I had a sense of losing the argument before it was even articulated. “Suppose, if it wasn’t his dad.”

  “It wouldn’t be him when he was crazy, would it? So maybe what her dad’s teaching her is good for her mind.”

  “It isn’t for her mum’s, is it?”

  “Then it’s good Tina’s like she is. She must have seen something was wrong with her mum, but you said she sorted it all out and didn’t even make a scene.”

  In a final effort to persuade at least one of my friends I said “Don’t you think she’s in danger with her mum in the house?”

  “Not when her dad’s there as well.”

  “He won’t be when he’s teaching. She might be alone with her mum.”

  I almost blurted what I’d actually come to think, except that I knew they wouldn’t be convinced—that one reason Tina had run back into the house was the presence of the tenant I’d glimpsed at the upstairs window. Had she been impatient to meet her grandfather, whatever form he took? Her father seemed eager to accustom her to encounters of the kind. If her mother sensed the presence, would she try to take the little girl away again? Perhaps this was why she had, but I suspected her failure had left her defeated. I was gazing at Bobby, hoping my doubts had reached her, when Jim said “I expect he’ll make arrangements if he’s got to.”

  To my dismay, this satisfied Bobby as well. “I’m going to watch their house,” I declared.

  “I’ve got footy training,” Jim said—he was in the school team now—“and then I’ve got homework.”

  “We’ve started rehearsing for the Christmas play,” Bobby said.

  Though I’d had an inkling they would find excuses, I felt let down. “Do you want me to tell you if anything happens?”

  “You ought to know we do,” Bobby said and only just withheld a punch. “We’re still friends.”

  “You won’t mind if I let my mum and dad think I’m meeting you, then.”

  “Just don’t say you are,” Jim said.

  At home I stayed upstairs with my schoolwork until dinner, for which my father had provided a treat. Sometimes he brought home jars of chicken breast in jelly, but today’s extravagance was tinned salmon, a favourite my mother celebrated by adding brown b
read and butter. I’d always enjoyed chewing the bones that the canning process softened, but just then I didn’t need to be put in mind of transformations death might bring. “Why are you leaving those?” my mother said, and inevitably “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I’m fine, mum. It was lovely. I’ve just had enough.”

  “Don’t start getting faddy with your food.” My father sounded more insulted than he was admitting. “We eat up what we’re given in this house,” he said.

  “Honestly, I’m full. Someone else can have my bones.”

  He gave me a look that offered a glimpse of the distrust I’d earned over Mr Noble’s journal. “Growing up, are we, son?” he said. “There aren’t two men in the house yet. There’s only me.”

  “There’s me as well,” my mother said, scraping the remains of my dinner onto her plate. “So you two see about getting on with each other.”

  My father didn’t seem too pleased with her exhortation or her action. He stared towards the hall as if he would rather hear the radiogram, where Ronnie Aldrich was playing the piano, than us. While I helped my mother wash up after dinner he adjourned to the front room to listen to What Do You Know?, shouting his answers to the quiz to ensure we caught them. “I’ve done my homework,” I told my mother. “I’m just going out for a bit.”

  “Where are you going, Dominic?”

  I felt under pressure from Bobby and Jim as well as my mother. “Just to see,” I said and found a guilty ruse, “you know, them.”

  Beyond the kitchen window mist was smudging treetops in the graveyard. “I don’t like you being out on a night like this,” my mother said.

  “I’ll be fine, mum.” Had I said that already, too recently? In a bid to forestall any more objections I protested “I said I’d see them.”