The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  It was the weekend after I’d been under the Trinity Church. On Saturday I had indeed gone to see Apache with the others, though I’d felt they were offering me compensation they might not even recognise as such. For whatever reason, Bobby sat between Jim and me, and I couldn’t help growing tense every time they turned to each other. Now that the film had migrated to the Majestic at the top of London Road it had acquired a different second feature, which meant I could tell my parents I’d wanted to see that without lying too much. When we went for our Sunday stroll in the park I didn’t feel unduly nervous, even of meeting Mr Noble and his family while I was with my parents—but it was a small wide woman in a fur coat and matching brimless hat who bustled up to us. “Excuse me,” she said, “weren’t you friends with Mrs Norris?”

  “We still are,” my father said, I thought more from duty than conviction.

  “Oh, then you haven’t heard. I’m afraid she passed away last week.”

  My parents crossed themselves, and I tapped four points on my chest. “That’s sad news for a Sunday,” my mother said. “We’ll pray for her.”

  “We’ll do that,” my father declared. “Was she ever discharged from the hospital?”

  “She never was,” the woman said and turned to my mother. “You brought me her dog. I’m only sorry it ran away.”

  “Of course, you’re Mrs, please don’t tell me.” Once the woman had refrained from doing so for some moments my mother said triumphantly “Mrs Brough.”

  “I hope Mrs Norris had a peaceful passing, Mrs Brough,” my father said.

  “She was calling her hubby’s name, they said.”

  “Well, let’s pray they’ll be together,” my mother said, “and at peace.”

  “I don’t think she was calling quite like that,” Mrs Brough said and glanced at me. “Is it all right to speak?”

  “Dominic has to grow up,” my father said. “He’ll be a young man soon enough.”

  “Well, they said—” Mrs Brough lowered her voice as a family came towards us from the playground. “Supposedly she wasn’t calling for her husband so much as about him.”

  “What about him?”

  “Dominic,” my mother said, and I thought she’d hushed Mrs Brough as well until the woman murmured “She didn’t seem to like what she thought she was going to find.”

  “That’s that Noble fellow’s doing,” my father said. “The character who ran that travesty of a church she was mixed up with.”

  “I read about it in the paper. I wish it had been exposed sooner. Let’s hope something is done about it,” Mrs Brough said, pinching her fur collar tight as if she’d been assailed by a chill.

  I nearly betrayed that I knew something had been done, but I needed to learn “When did she die?”

  “Last Saturday afternoon. A week yesterday.” As though my parents had asked her a pointed question Mrs Brough said “I’d have let you know sooner but I’d no idea where you lived.”

  I hadn’t meant to imply that she’d been remiss in telling us. I’d been hoping that my fears weren’t true—that Mrs Norris hadn’t died about the time I’d destroyed the contents of the crypt or shortly after. I had an anguished sense that I’d released whatever had stopped Mrs Norris’s heart, and that far from calling to her husband, she had been trying to drive him away. When I mumbled “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” I could have been apologising to her at least as much as I was to Mrs Brough.

  “It’s all right, son,” Mrs Brough said. “I know you cared. I saw how you looked after her dog.”

  This only made me feel I’d failed there too. “Well, I’ll leave you to your constitutional,” Mrs Brough said to my parents. “I just wanted you to know you needn’t worry any more.”

  Once she’d ambled away my father said “God help anyone who dies believing what Mrs Norris did.”

  “That man has a lot to answer for,” my mother said, “and God help him.”

  I no longer had much faith that God helped anyone. I was still hearing Mrs Brough contend that there was no more need to worry when in fact she’d given me an extra reason. Was the creature that had once been Mr Norris on the loose now? That night in bed I prayed more fervently than ever to be left alone, and kept my eyes tight shut so as not to see if I wasn’t, a stratagem that very belatedly let me sleep. My fervour decreased as the weeks passed, but I didn’t quite dare to stop praying. It felt like abandoning too much.

  Guy Fawkes Night brought weeks of ripraps hopping about the streets—fireworks that leapt in every direction, spraying sparks and emitting bangs as they challenged you to avoid them, and made even Bobby scream. On the night itself bonfires and rockets were everywhere, not to mention fire engines and the clangour of their bells. As I watched distant tardy fireworks from my bedroom window I forgot to be afraid of the dark. Some days later I thought I had another reason to forget, which my father found in the morning paper. “Here’s an early Christmas present for us all,” he said.

  He passed it across the marmalade jar for my mother to read. I still recall how the breakfast smell of toast seemed to celebrate our owning our first toaster. When I’d finished my sugary cereal they let me read the item, which was a single paragraph in Eric Wharton’s latest column. I’ve kept the page, along with his other column and the copy I made of Christian Noble’s journal and the rest of the evidence. I no longer know what difference I imagined keeping all this would make, if I ever did.

  Loyal readers of my ramblings may remember how some weeks ago I wrote about the Trinity Church of the Spirit, a local cult which travestied Christianity and even spiritualism. At the time I challenged its founder, who is pleased to call himself Christian Noble, to respond to my comments and offered him space in this very column, but apparently he prefers to up sticks and skedaddle. He and his family have moved away from our part of the world, and I fancy many of my readers will join me in wishing him a considerable journey. I gather that the church in Joseph Street has been destroyed by persons unknown. My readers may decide for themselves why this has not been reported to the police. “O, Mr. Eric, sure and you’re not responsible,” Kitty Malone assures me, “but” (here’s some Irish logic for us all) “you ought to be proud if you are.”

  I didn’t quite believe that the Nobles had gone until our Sunday stroll let me see the distant house, outside which a board said SOLD. At first I felt pathetically relieved, and then my thoughts began to swarm. Mr Noble might have moved away from anyone who knew him, but I very much doubted this meant he would change. Oughtn’t I just to be glad that I wasn’t responsible for dealing with him? I saw this was how my parents felt, and on Monday I found out how Bobby and Jim did. “Hope you read the paper,” Jim said. “Noble’s gone for good and we didn’t have to do anything after all.”

  This might have provoked me to tell them the truth, but I didn’t feel they’d earned it, given how they’d behaved when they thought I was investigating him. “You don’t think he’s going to stop what he does,” I protested. “And he’s still got his daughter.”

  “She’ll have her mum as well,” Bobby said. “Mrs Noble will be able to tell people if she doesn’t like what he does now he’s been in the paper.”

  “Bobs is right,” Jim said. “Now she’ll have evidence.” I tried to find this reassuring, and to an extent I succeeded. At least I felt safe to stop praying at night, and embarrassed by how craven my pleas had been. While I couldn’t think I’d destroyed all the presences Mr Noble had summoned, surely he would have taken them with him. That night I slept more soundly than I had for weeks, and it occurred to me that praying had kept me awake.

  My doubts hadn’t finished with me, however. Not many nights later I was wakened by a dream that felt composed of thoughts. Now that Mrs Norris was dead and Mr Noble had no doubt moved well away, suppose I was the only way Mr Norris could anchor himself to the familiar world, to the image of himself he yearned to have? “Good boy,” I could almost hear him whispering, which made me think of a dog. It wouldn’t be a p
enny he was proffering this time, and I preferred not to imagine what the gift might be. The whisper was so close that I dreamed his face was only inches from mine. I lurched awake to avoid seeing what it had become, and opened my eyes before I had time to feel afraid to look.

  It wasn’t far from dawn. A greyish twilight lay beside me on the pillow, and so did a face. I was able to believe it was an illusion until it moved. The larger of the eyes widened, swelling out of the lopsided head, and beneath the flat patch where a nose should have been, the lips that occupied just the left side of the face writhed like worms. Even if it was composed of an uneven section of the pillowcase, it had a body too, which resembled a snake except for an uneven pair of armless hands, not even opposite each other on the elongated torso that stretched into the dimness of my room. Despite all this, I recognised the intruder from its voice, even though I heard it only in my head. It was indeed repeating “Good boy” as if the words might revive a memory it could grasp.

  I think the worst thing might have been the hands, which were waving in a feeble mime of unutterable helplessness. I couldn’t move, and panic had cleared all thoughts out of my head. The solitary instinct I still had—childish if not primitive—was to squeeze my eyes tight shut and pray that my visitor would disappear. For a time during which I couldn’t breathe I thought the face was crawling closer to mine. Certainly in some way it came so close that I shared a little of the contents of its invaded mind.

  It felt like having a nightmare while I was awake—like the effect of a hallucinogenic, as I would learn later in my life. I was watching an unkempt wild-haired man dash through a maze of derelict streets beneath an ominously solid sky the colour of raw liver. He dodged from ruined house to house, peering from behind the incomplete frontages in preparation for his next sprint. He looked desperate to hide but worse than uncertain where he could. Over this spectacle hung a sense of dreadful watchfulness, as if he was being observed with inhuman amusement that felt close to a vast unconcern. He faltered short of an open space that might have been a square, and as he broke cover I saw what was watching him, and cowered within myself.

  The raw sky was indeed solid: so substantial that it was able to open a colossal bulging eye that had been peering through a slit I’d taken for a gap in clouds. It was more than an eye, that pupilless gibbous protrusion, for it stretched down from its socket to fasten on its prey. By the time it reached him, the tip was no more than a scrawny pointed tendril that thrust deep into his skull. I saw him jerk in a helpless dance, flailing all his limbs, as it drained him of whatever it craved. When the tendril withdrew into the mass that occupied the sky miles overhead, he was no more than a withered remnant that pranced away through the devastated streets, giggling in a shrill voice that no longer even sounded human. The noise was almost blotted out by another: a rumbling that might have been the preamble to an earthquake. In a moment I recognised it as a monstrous chuckling, a gargantuan utterance of satisfaction after feeding. It was so gigantic that it seemed to swell past definition, so that it might have come from many mouths or from a single unimaginable orifice.

  The spectacle appalled me so much that I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. The room was brighter now, and there was no face beside me on the pillow, just a crumpled patch of the pillowcase that I dared to rub smooth with my forearm. I lay watching more light gather in the room, and tried to get ready for the day—to maintain my pretence that everything was normal, even banal. In time, when I’d gone through another series of desperately prayerful nights without suffering another visit, I managed to persuade myself that the incident had been wholly a dream brought on by thoughts of Mr Norris. As for the ruined streets, of course they were based on the wasteland beyond the Grafton. Just a nightmare, I managed to think, but now I know better, that ironic word. I was being treated to a glimpse of a future that was hungry to be born.

  Acknowledgements

  Jenny was there first, as ever. I’ve a special thank you to Tony Snell and his Radio Merseyside show, on which he reminisced about starting at a new school and brought back all sorts of memories I lent to Dominic Sheldrake.

  The climax of the novel was written over two weeks at a favourite accommodation of ours, the Marina Apartments in Pefkos on the island of Rhodes.

  My old friend Keith Ravenscroft kept me supplied with good things, not least the fine French Blu-ray of my favourite horror film. “Maybe it’s better not to know…”