The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  I met nobody as I tramped through the ruined streets to the church. I’d guessed that Mr Noble would need a vehicle to transport whatever he planned to house elsewhere, but there was no sign of one so far. When I came close enough to see the weeds crouching away from the church, I was tempted to go back to the phone box without investigating the vault myself. Was I too scared to venture there without Bobby and Jim? The idea infuriated me so much that I strode through the debris to the church and flung the door open, almost slamming it against the inner wall.

  So far as I could tell, the place was exactly as I’d left it. As I tramped along the aisle between the chopped-up pews and seats I glimpsed movement to my left, near the wall, and faltered while my mouth grew dry as ash until I realised I’d seen my own fragmentary reflection in a shard of broken window. The moment of panic renewed my fury, and I stalked past the demolished altar, having retrieved the axe from where I’d hidden it beneath the cloth. Gripping the shaft of the axe in my fists, I vowed that I wouldn’t give up before I’d broken into the room under the church. It took more than a dozen blows to dislodge the lock, by which time my arms were shivering. The last efforts sent an ache all the way from my fingertips to my shoulders, and I couldn’t help cursing Jim—I even said bloody and bastard. The blows had grown clumsily inaccurate, and the very last clanged against the lock instead of wood. The block of metal sagged inwards, and a shaky push with the head of the axe sent it clattering down the steps beyond the door.

  The door swung open, revealing the steps. The feeble rays of sunlight slanting into the church came nowhere near them, so that I couldn’t even see the step where the dislodged lock had ended up. I wanted to believe I was hesitating only to let my eyes adjust to the dimness beyond the door, but I was also listening for any hint of the sound I’d heard last time I was there. The basement was as quiet as the miles of devastation surrounding the church. As soon as I was able to distinguish the lock, which had lodged against the wall on the seventh step down, I shoved the door wide in the hope of admitting more light. This made no difference that I could see, but I made myself venture onto the steps. I’d heard one of the Nobles switch a light off down there, after all.

  The steps were barely wide enough for two people. I was enraged by wondering who would have gone first if I’d been with Bobby and Jim. However they were behaving now, I hoped bitterly that they were having a good time, not really a hope at all. As I stepped down past the fallen lock I saw where the stone stairs ended, in a darkness larger than I could define. It was as silent as it appeared to be still. Six more steps took me to the bottom, where I was just able to make out a switch on the wall to my right. I didn’t realize how shaky my hands were from hacking at the door until I fumbled to switch the light on. The shivering felt like a symptom of fear, which infuriated me so much that I seized my wrist to steady the hand. When my unwieldy fingers snagged the switch, three bare bulbs lit up beneath the subterranean roof, and I stared at the sight they’d revealed.

  I couldn’t have said how the vault had originally been used. It was a room as long and broad as the church, with unadorned stone walls and a floor set with large flagstones. A dozen token pillars were embedded in the walls, pairing to form rudimentary arches beneath the low stone roof. There were cracks in the ceiling and some of the pillars, no doubt from the blitz. I remember all this, but just then I was preoccupied with the contents of the vault—four trestle tables that you might have seen at a church fête, and the items on them reminded me of that kind of stall. They were plants in pots, perhaps a hundred of them.

  Though I suppose I must have expected something of the kind, the sight struck me as worse than grotesque: disappointing, frustrating, not worth all my nervousness, even less worth having lost my friends for. So these were the tributes Mr Noble exacted from his congregation, and presumably he chewed them to give himself visions, the way I’d read shamans did. As for the noise I thought I’d heard, no doubt that had been the wind through a ventilation system. I’d begun to feel childish again for imagining that I could have found some secret in the vault that would impress adults with my skills as an investigator—my search was just a last pathetic exploit of the paltry remnant of the Tremendous Three—when I noticed that the contents of the tables weren’t quite as banal as I’d originally thought. While I recognised some herbs as species that were grown in the more enterprising of the allotments near my house—sage, mint, rosemary—several of the growths in pots further from the steps weren’t quite or even very much like any that I’d seen.

  My shadow ventured between the nearest tables before I did. They were halfway down the crypt, presumably leaving space for more. As I went forward, dropping the axe beside the steps, I might have been challenging the place to reveal more than it had, since it appeared to have so little to offer. The herbs I’d identified were closest to the entrance to the vault, and beyond them were some of the same, except not quite. Their growth was more profuse, and that wasn’t all. The stems that spilled over the rims of the pots and rose towards the roof were entwined in patterns so elaborate that my vision couldn’t disentangle them. Somehow they put me in mind of algebra, of equations far too complex for me even to begin to grasp, and I felt as though I had to decipher their secrets before I could move on. I loitered until I began to feel as though the unreadably intricate structures of the scrawny stems were imprinting themselves on my brain. Perhaps they were rooting themselves there as I lost awareness of anything except them. I no longer knew where I was, but I felt as though I were about to be somewhere else—somewhere vast and dark and unimaginably inhabited. My sense of it was less than a glimpse, just an impression that I was in danger of rousing a presence somehow even vaster than the dark, but it was enough to send me fleeing back to ordinary consciousness. As I grew aware of the vault again I felt as if I were lurching awake from a dream that had swallowed my mind.

  Having lost so much awareness brought me close to panic, but I wasn’t about to retreat. I needed evidence, not least to show my one-time friends that I’d braved the crypt. Once I’d shown them, I might have nothing more to do with them. I could let them believe that their refusal to help me investigate the crypt was why—the death of the Tremendous Three, and I didn’t care how childish they might think I was being. That would just be another excuse—no, a reason, and a good one—to avoid them.

  My thoughts were distracting me as much as the patterns of the stems had, and I made myself focus on the situation. I ought to be quick, since I had no idea when Mr Noble might return to the church. As I stepped forward my shadow shrank back, having met the light from the second naked bulb. The further I advanced, the more elaborate the plants on either side of me appeared to have grown, the stalks so intricately entwined above each pot that I avoided looking directly at them for fear of becoming entranced again. Instead I stopped between the pair of tables furthest from the steps.

  At first the items on the tables didn’t seem as disconcerting as the herbs. Each pot contained a flower, some of them in bloom. If I was unable to identify any of them, I wasn’t a florist or even a botanist; we didn’t learn about flowers at school. Perhaps one was a species of rose, although the petals were usually plump, and infused with a bluish glare that made it impossible to judge what colour they should be. Was that a daffodil across the aisle? An unhealthy greenish tint had invaded the irregularly swollen petals, which looked as though the contorted stem was infecting the blossom. Those were the only two plants I came anywhere near identifying, because those beyond them were more distorted still.

  I thought it would make sense to take one of the worst away with me, but I wasn’t prepared for how malformed the flowers closest to the back wall of the crypt would prove to be. Some had adopted shapes that I felt should never have belonged to flowers: more than one exposed set of roots resembled a miniature hand clenched in the soil, and one bloom the colour of pale flesh contained a swelling that reminded me of a somnolent lidded eye, while next to it a set of greyish petals cupped li
ke stubby fingers surrounded a slit like a tiny fat-lipped mouth. By now I was under the bulb at the far end of the crypt, where my shadow looked desperate to hide beneath my feet. The stillness of the plants around me, not to mention between me and the steps to the outside world, had begun to feel ominously unnatural, and the journal I’d copied put an idea into my head. Perhaps the herbs and flowers were hinting at the shapes of whatever they were meant to body forth, while the ones with human traits had been deformed by the efforts of the dead to regain substance wherever they could find it. I didn’t want to examine the notion until I was out of the crypt—indeed, well away from the church. I grabbed the nearest plant pot, which contained the greyish growth. With its malformed bloom and its moist obese glistening leaves, nobody was going to mistake it for a natural flower.

  My fingers were clumsier than I expected, still unwieldy from using the axe. The pot wobbled in my grasp, and I seized it with my other hand as well. I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to steady it—some kind of movement was continuing in my hands—until I realised they were still. It was the article they held that was moving. The greyish flower was nodding towards me, parting its plump lips in the middle of the greyish bloom.

  Before I could react, a bunch of swollen leaves groped to close around my wrist. They felt as I imagined a cluster of slugs would feel, cold and slick and uncertain of their shape. I cried out with disgust and stumbled backwards, dropping the object that was squirming in my hands. As the pot smashed on the floor I blundered against the table behind me and knocked it over. Pot after pot shattered on the floor or against the wall, and the crypt came awake.

  It was the sound I’d heard when Mr Noble had brought Tina down here, and later when I’d been outside the door. I’d been right to think it resembled a chorus of voices without words. Now I saw it was an unnatural attempt at speech, since even those plants that hadn’t developed anything like mouths were opening and closing their petals in a grotesque mimicry of lips. The fallen plants squirmed like crippled worms amid the debris of their pots, and the contents of the table opposite were writhing too, while the herbs wove new patterns with their restless stems, adding to the wordless whispers and inhuman murmurs growing more articulate beneath the vaulted roof.

  The oppressive clamour and the sight of all that monstrous restlessness left me almost unable to think, I staggered towards the steps, frantically rubbing my wrist, where the feel of swollen groping leaves still lingered. I caught sight of the axe, and my loathing found a focus. Grabbing the axe, I stalked back through the crypt to chop every herb and plant to pieces, flooring the tables as well. Mixed with my abhorrence was disgust at how I’d caught Bobby and Jim. Wherever I saw a growth still moving—some of them tried to hump like grubs out of reach of my fury—I hacked at it until it was in bits too small to move any more. I was so intent on destroying even the slightest sign of life that I didn’t notice the shadows until I heard them.

  At first I thought the sounds were the last wordless pleas of plants that weren’t just plants, and then I realised the noise was more like the swarming of insects. It was all around me, and I was almost too afraid to look. Shadows not unlike the outlines of the plants I’d chopped to bits but considerably larger and to a dismaying extent more human were streaming over the walls of the crypt with a concerted murmur that was only just substantial. They appeared to be searching for a way out, and as I watched they found the junction of the walls and floor, and lost shape as they vanished into the earth.

  I let myself believe I’d liberated whatever had been tethered to the vegetation. Perhaps I’d achieved more than I’d meant to, even if I had nothing to show for it. The flight of the shadows had mesmerised me, but now I found I was exhausted, my arms throbbing from wielding the axe. I dropped it between the splintered remains of the tables and lurched towards the steps. Even my mind was tired out, because as I took the first step upwards I automatically did what my parents had trained me to do at home: switch off the light whenever I left an empty room. The instant I did so, a presence that might have been waiting for the darkness to let it take shape clutched at my back.

  I twisted to face it, almost falling backwards on the steps. Though I could see nothing, I felt far too much—a distended body at least twice my size but with far less of a shape. It had lost its imprecise hold on me, but now it fumbled at me with hands that felt plump as tripe, yet insubstantial. They seemed to be trying to separate their wads of flimsy boneless flesh into fingers, altogether too many of them. Worse still was the sense of an unseen face about to press itself against mine—perhaps even into my head, given the unnatural nature of its substance. The prospect drove me beyond panic, and I thrust a flinching hand at the face. I felt its huge features not just writhe but relocate themselves, and my fingers dug into two of the eyes. I felt the eyes retreat deep into the sockets, which closed around my fingers, fastening masses of tendrils on them.

  I don’t know what kind of cry I uttered. Flinging myself backwards, I flailed my arm to find the light switch. Despite my clumsiness, my free hand encountered the switch, and the bulbs lit up. Apart from all the destruction I’d caused, the crypt was empty. I floundered up the steps into the church. I could still feel how the innumerable fleshy tendrils had seized my fingers, but nothing followed me. Perhaps the light kept it back, unless it was still tethered to some item I’d failed to rob of life.

  I stumbled down the aisle and out of the church. The sun looked as if it wouldn’t need to grow much weaker to succumb to the dark. I was trudging shakily through the demolished streets, feeling as if my mind was too damaged to risk thoughts, when I saw a vehicle chugging across the opposite side of the wasteland towards the church. It was a jeep or some kind of army truck, and I guessed Mr Noble was driving. I lingered out of sight until I heard the vehicle halt and the distant church door open, and then I held my breath. All at once I heard a muffled roar of rage that sounded capable of shaking the foundations of the church, and I managed an unsteady grin as I turned my back on him.

  27 - Something Like A Sky

  “So what was your film like?”

  “Good, except he ought to have died at the end. Bobs thought so too.”

  “You both of you wished he was out of the way, did you? I didn’t know that was like you.”

  “We just thought it’d have made more sense if he’d died. I expect they couldn’t let him because he’s the star.”

  “That’s someone else’s trick, keeping people alive when they ought to be dead.”

  “You’re in a funny mood, Dom. It was still good, though. You should have seen it. Maybe we can go again.”

  “You’d have wanted me to come, would you, Bobby?”

  “Why wouldn’t we? What’s the mood for?”

  “I think he’s mad because we didn’t find out what Nobbly was up to. Did you go and watch his house, Dom?”

  “I followed him to his church.”

  “You didn’t let him see you, did you?”

  “Don’t bother worrying about me, Bobby. He never knew I was there.”

  “What happened, then? Did anything?”

  “Someone smashed up all the church, even the stuff underneath. I went in when he’d gone off in a fit.”

  “I’ll bet he was. His church was all wrong, but who’d do something like that?”

  “Must have been someone who read what Eric Wharton wrote. Somebody who cared.”

  “I expect they were religious, the way our school makes people, Bobs. Only what did you mean, Dom, the stuff underneath?”

  “Just a lot of plants, that’s all. Plants in pots on tables.”

  “You look like you think they weren’t just plants.”

  “The ones people brought him that they’d grown on graves. Maybe now they won’t be so eager to trust him.”

  “What do you think he’ll do? Do you think he’ll give up now everybody knows about him?”

  “I’ve stopped caring what he does since you two don’t. Just so long as he stays a
way from me and all his stuff does.”

  It would have been truer to say that I’d stopped wanting to talk. I’d seen how Jim had wanted to question me after mass on Sunday, but our parents hadn’t given us the chance. At least meeting Bobby on our way to school meant I only had to tell my sly lies once. Did she notice that I’d just said me rather than us? She seemed less than happy as she said “I’ve got to catch my bus.”

  Jim and I caught ours, and I set about rejoining everyday life as best I could, even to the extent of treating him as if I hadn’t seen the two of them necking in the cinema. Just now this seemed insignificant, however much it nagged at me, compared to the other things I had to come to terms with.

  I don’t know how long I wandered through the devastated streets after I’d fled the church. I kept rubbing my fingers on my sleeve in a frantic attempt to rid them of the memory of tendrils clinging to them in sockets vacated by eyes. The end of daylight drove me home to pretend the day had been normal. Telling my mother that the film had been all right let me escape to my room. At least my father didn’t quiz me during dinner, but afterwards I was required to enjoy the Saturday evening radio variety show as visibly and vociferously as my parents thought I should. I was all too aware that it only postponed my having to lie in bed in the dark.

  I would have left the bedroom light on if this wouldn’t have called for more of an explanation than I could provide. As soon as I switched it off I remembered how darkness seemed to have summoned or let loose the presence under the Trinity Church. I could only squeeze my eyes shut and pray even more fervently than I had in the dentist’s chair. Did I still retain enough of my lost beliefs for prayers to work? I knew only that I wasn’t visited before I succumbed to exhaustion and sleep. After that I prayed every night in bed and devoted most of Sunday mass to repeating the same silent prayer, though the communion wafer still tasted flat as an absence. I might have been reassured by an entire week of nights in which I was left alone if it hadn’t been for the encounter in the park.