Born To The Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  “I’ve understood enough.” This sounded so pitifully inadequate that it drove me to declare “I’ve already stopped you once.”

  “Mr Sheldrake showed my musings to the headmaster at the school, Christopher.” As the child’s eyes appeared to deepen and grow even darker Noble said “Can you really still believe that could have hindered me in any way, Mr Sheldrake?”

  I’d said too much, and I attempted to make flinging my hands wide the whole of my answer. I saw three pairs of eyes find it insufficient before Noble said “I don’t think he does. What else can he mean?”

  I was appalled to fancy that I glimpsed a hint of a response in the baby’s eyes, but it was his mother who answered. “Could it be the church?”

  “Well, Mr Sheldrake? Do demonstrate the courage of your convictions.”

  “Yes.” Having been provoked to say that much, I had no reason not to admit “I didn’t destroy everything. Just what needed it.”

  I had an uneasy sense that, like all the watching eyes, the room was somehow growing darker. “Your friends were involved, were they?” Noble said.

  “They weren’t even there, and I don’t know who was. I expect someone who’d read Eric Wharton’s column smashed up your church.”

  “Ah, Mr Wharton, that devious fellow. I think he may have been surprised by what he found he’d invited. I suspect that may be your case as well, Mr Sheldrake.” Once his lips and Tina’s and the baby’s had twisted into faint simultaneous smiles Noble said “So are you owning up to nothing?”

  “I broke into the vault. I’ll let you guess the rest.”

  For a moment, unless it was far longer, I couldn’t separate the silence from the darkness that seemed to have crept indefinably closer. “Well, Mr Sheldrake,” Noble said, “you’ve earned yourself some attention. Do acquaint us with your plans.”

  I didn’t know how intimidated he meant me to feel, and I hadn’t time to care. “I told your daughter, you’ve seen the last of my son.”

  “Is he all you care about?” Before I could risk admitting that I wouldn’t be satisfied until I’d lost the Nobles all their young victims, Noble said “I’m afraid you’ve exhausted our hospitality. We won’t allow you to disturb the children who have been entrusted to us.”

  This almost left me incapable of speech, but I managed to ask “How do you propose to get rid of me?”

  “Shall we call the police?”

  Tina gave this a tentative nod, but the child looked disappointed, as though he’d been robbed of a treat. Though I had a dreadful sense of knowing why, I said “You don’t mind the police hearing what I have to tell them.”

  “Mr Sheldrake, the police we would call know more than you do.”

  I thought I grasped why he hadn’t bothered threatening me with worse. I was tempted to make the Nobles summon the police so that I could learn who else was implicated in their operation, but suppose this prevented me from rescuing Toby? “You haven’t won,” I said as I rose not entirely steadily to my feet. “I won’t be going away.”

  “You’ll leave our property, Mr Sheldrake. You have five minutes to be gone and then we’ll be making sure you are.”

  I was disconcerted when none of them followed me, simply turning their heads in unison to watch me leave the room. I could well have imagined I was being trailed on their behalf. I hurried along the dim corridor and glanced up the deserted stairs before letting myself out of the house. As I made for my car I saw all three Nobles watching from their seats beyond the window. I’d climbed into my car when they began to speak.

  Though I couldn’t hear a word, I saw they were chanting together, emphasising a trinity of syllables that they repeated more than once. While I felt worse than childish for letting this unsettle me, I drove away at speed. Was a wind causing trees to stoop towards the avenue and shifting the earth of some of the mounds in the grass? It seemed odd that the trees were leaning towards the car from both sides, and I hadn’t time to judge how restless the mounds might be. Surely the Nobles wanted me off the property, and so it made no sense for anything to hinder me. I reached the gates in well under five minutes of leaving the room, and as soon as they opened I drove onto the road.

  I saw the bus at once, turning a bend on the far side of several fields. I sped out of sight of the camera by the gates and waited with my engine running. When the bus swung around a bend a few hundred yards ahead I flashed my headlights. The bus began to slow down, and I glanced in the mirror, which showed me only the empty road. I was about to switch off the engine and step in front of the bus when a hand closed over my face.

  I might not have known it was a hand, given how the swollen fingers squirmed. Although I couldn’t see it, I felt the cold bloated fingertips grope everywhere on my face as if they were searching for a way in. Panic left me only remotely aware that I could still see the road and the bus. At least, I could until the fingers found my eyes and slithered into them. I felt the filaments of which the fingers were composed swarm deeper, and in a moment I was blind, or else my brain was no longer able to process my sight. My whole body convulsed, and the car lurched forward at speed as my foot slammed the accelerator down. I was terrified of colliding with the bus, and had just enough presence of mind to wrench the steering wheel to the left. I felt the car tilt into a ditch, and thought at least this much was safe. Then an impact flung me sideways, and my head struck the window so hard that the glass shattered, or my skull did. That last moment of consciousness felt as if the sky had collapsed to let in the dark.

  13 - Hard Words

  When I awoke I heard Lesley and our son in the room. This seemed more reassuring than I understood, and I didn’t need to open my eyes. It had to be the weekend, or Lesley would be telling me that it was time to go to work. The day must be well advanced, given how bright it was, and it felt muggy too. Which aspect of this was a relief? Of course, it had to be past the time when Toby would have left for Safe To Sleep, and so either it was Sunday or we were keeping him at home. The oppressive heat was less welcome, even though Lesley had put a thinner quilt on the bed. In fact, the bed itself felt oddly thin, both the mattress and the equally ungenerous pillow. This bothered me enough that I reached out an arm to recapture how the mattress ought to feel. The bed was scarcely half the width it should be, and my fingers bruised themselves against a wall.

  At once I remembered the car crash, and I was afraid to open my eyes. It wasn’t only that the driver of the bus must have brought me back to Safe To Sleep. The memory had revived the sensation that had caused the accident—the swarms of filaments writhing deep into my eyes. I was terrified that some remnants might be buried in there, lying dormant until I roused them. Yet I had to look, because Toby was at Safe To Sleep despite all my efforts, and had the Nobles lured my wife here too? I took a breath that made my chest ache and seemed to cleave my skull with pain, and then I forced my eyes wide.

  The white wall in front of me was as blank as amnesia. At least I was able to see it, and so far as my headache let me judge, my eyes were undamaged. I heard voices at my back, too low for me to recognise or understand them, and I turned hastily over. One of the fluorescent tubes I’d mistaken for sunlight sailed past overhead, and then the long room full of supine figures started to plunge downwards so uncontrollably that I squeezed my eyes shut and grabbed my mouth. While this just about saved me from puking, it didn’t quell the savage pain in my head. I kept my eyes closed tight until the sensation of plummeting began to subside, and then I risked slitting them to look for my wife and our son.

  I was at the end of a row of beds on the left side of a hospital ward. Although all the beds were occupied, no visitors were to be seen. I was turning my head towards the doors to the entrance lobby, which were beyond the foot of the bed—I felt as though moving even a fraction faster would set the room spinning once more—when my immediate neighbour raised his voice. “Nurse, this one’s woke up.”

  He was a stocky red-faced man with almost as much stubble on his chubby jowls
as on his broad flat scalp. The reverberations of his shout had scarcely died away when he sat up in bed to deliver another, but the doors swung back to let a small muscular wide-hipped nurse into the ward. She gave my neighbour an admonitory look before trotting to my bedside. “How are you feeling, Dominic?” she said. “Or should we call you Mr Sheldrake?”

  “Ominous willed ooh.”

  I heard myself say that, though perhaps it wasn’t even so distinct. The nurse gave me a sympathetic look that revived unwelcome memories of Tina Noble, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t be in the hospital where she worked. “Whereof Myfanwy?” I was anxious to learn.

  The nurse looked as confused as the antics of my speech made me feel, and I tried again. “Myth Amelie,” I said more fiercely than the words that came out warranted.

  My jowly neighbour tapped his temple with a finger and pointed at me. “He’s asking where his family’s gone.”

  “Visiting’s over for today, Dominic. They’ll be here again tomorrow.”

  “Bow rhythm.”

  “Both of them, yes, I think so.”

  “Lucerne swat cheese head.”

  When the nurse cocked hers as though an oblique view of my words might clarify them, my neighbour wagged his finger. “I reckon he’s asking if you’re certain that’s what his lady said.”

  “Dad’s wry.”

  “I believe she did, Dominic.” The nurse peered into my eyes. “Now can you tell me how you’re feeling?”

  I raised my fingers to my forehead but flinched from touching the section that had hit the window of the car. “Bah heady. Verbid,” I did my best to emphasise. “Ann dinners.”

  “I’ll give you painkillers for your head and I’m sorry, what was the rest of it?”

  “Dinners. Dinners,” I said with increasing desperation.

  “If you ask me he’s saying he’s dizzy,” my neighbour said.

  I began to nod a confirmation and instantly regretted it. “Soy. Cunts peak brolly.” Having heard myself apparently say this, I thought it best to add an apology that emerged as “My apocalypse.”

  “Don’t worry your head over that, Dominic. It’s quite a common symptom.”

  “Howl on we ill ass?”

  “We can’t predict that. Generally a few days. I’ll get you those killers, and doctor will be round soon.”

  I rather wished she’d used some less informal term for the medication. As she made for the lobby my neighbour said “If you’ve got any more to say for yourself, remember you’ve got an interpreter.”

  “Ankh hoover image,” I mumbled, not even knowing how much I meant the thanks I’d struggled to pronounce.

  I let my head sink back on the meagre support of the pillow and closed my eyes. I was drifting close to unconsciousness when the nurse murmured in my ear “Here it is now for you, Dominic.” I parted my lips while she tilted a dinky plastic cup, and then I tried to regain unawareness. The medicine took its time over assuaging the vicious pain in my skull, but perhaps my thoughts helped. If Toby had visited me he couldn’t be at Safe To Sleep, and the nurse had reassured me that he wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Whatever harm I’d done myself, it had to be worthwhile if it had saved my son.

  I saw no urgency to think beyond that, and quite soon I was so thoroughly asleep that I resented being roused. A surgeon’s attentions wakened me, and more than one offer of meals that I incoherently refused did. As night fell, not that I was aware of it while my eyes were shut, the uninvited heat turned me sweaty and restless and prone to being woken by various hospital sounds—groans, coughing fits that played at coming to an end much sooner than they did, muted discussions that might have been professional but annoyed me with the suspicion that they weren’t, the squeak and bump one lobby door produced every time it closed, just not faint enough for me to be able to ignore. Eventually waiting for the next repetition of the noises kept me awake, and I had to call for pay colours—the medicine, I meant. Daybreak multiplied the noises, and I was still subsiding into a vague version of sleep only to keep resurfacing when Lesley murmured my name.

  She was speaking so quietly that I could have thought she preferred to leave me asleep. Opening my eyes wide opened up a headache too. It felt as if the fluorescent glare had penetrated my softened skull, and my eyes winced shut. I’d had time to see Lesley sitting by the bed—her face looked as if she was trying to balance determination and concern—but that was all, and not enough. “Ways to be?” I heard myself ask.

  Her pause was almost an answer, and one I was dismayed to imagine, before she said “What did you say, Dominic?”

  “Tow bee.” I left such a gap between the syllables that I might have been mocking the question or the name, though I was simply ensuring it was clear. “Where?” I persisted.

  “He’s at school. It isn’t Judith’s day but she’s picking them both up.”

  “So long he snow whereas.” Frustration with my speech aggravated my headache and turned my voice harsh. “Nowhere else,” I managed to articulate.

  “I’ve said so once. Can’t you look at me?”

  “Pain. Canoe corn hers?” I squeezed my eyes tighter in case this helped me pronounce “Nurse.”

  “I’ll come back in a moment,” Lesley said, and the door preceded its muffled bump with a squeak. For a change the sounds were welcome, and so was the kiss of the plastic cup. As I swallowed I heard Lesley murmur “How is he?”

  “Doctor’s satisfied, but we’ll be keeping him in for at least a few days.”

  The door repeated its noises, and then I heard only a generalised mutter of patients. I had to slit my eyes to see that Lesley had returned to the skeletal metal chair. “Better?” she said.

  “Will be.” I sensed her gaze was prompting me to ask “How stow bee?”

  “How on earth do you think he is? He saw his father smash up the car and have to be taken away in an ambulance. What did you think you were trying to do?”

  “Ahead to stub Grenoble’s.” With a furious effort I brought out “Had to stop them.”

  “I can’t understand you, Dominic.”

  My stubbly neighbour leaned towards her out of his bed. “Bet I can tell you what he’s saying, love.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lesley said, “this is a private conversation.”

  “Well, excuse me for having a heartbeat,” the man said and returned to mumbling at his wife.

  “I mean I can’t understand your behaviour, or at least I hope I don’t.” Before I could find words and try to utter them Lesley said “Why do they say you’re speaking like that?”

  “Symptom.” Heartened by pronouncing that, I added “Fewer wurzel bear.”

  “Don’t try to explain if you can’t.”

  I suspected that she didn’t have just the indistinctness of my speech in mind. “Said few err words bet err,” I took some time to articulate. “Short err too.”

  “Just say what you did.”

  “Saw no bull.” This was a waste of effort, since she already knew. “Met him,” I said. “Talked.”

  “When did you? Where?”

  “At their house. Beef or docked or sweet came.”

  As my neighbour’s wife smiled across his bed, presumably assuming she’d overheard an endearment, Lesley demanded “What was said?”

  “There you sing chilled wren, like I toll dew.”

  Lesley gazed at me as if my syllables took even longer to arrive than to produce. “Someone told you that.”

  “No bull. Said much more. Tell you it all when I can.”

  “And why the crash?”

  “Meant to stop bus. Not with crash. Meant to flag him down.”

  “Then do what?”

  “Take tow bee home. Won’t have them may king him inn too one of them.”

  Speaking at such length threatened to renew my headache. “But you crashed,” Lesley said.

  I thought bemusement had slowed her voice down until I grasped that she was trying to ensure I understood, and then I realised she
’d been simplifying her language too. “No knee to tall kike sat,” I protested and had to make it cleaner. “Don’t speak like I’m child. Mind’s not gone, just pro nun see a shun.”

  “Then please tell me what caused the accident.”

  My headache felt more imminent, making me careless with my words. “Thing they put in car. Stop dyes were king.”

  “What sort of thing, Dominic?”

  I shut my eyes in case this helped fend off the headache, and heard myself mutter “Hand.”

  When the headache shrank, subsiding into a dull throb, I saw Lesley waiting for me to reopen my eyes. “You’re going to have to see someone,” she said.

  “See ying you.”

  “You know what I mean,” Lesley said almost too low for me to hear. “We can’t go on like this any more, especially where Toby’s concerned. We need to get you some help.”

  “No body Mick’s dup with the no bulls.”

  “I’ve no reason to suppose he has anything to do with anyone you might object to.”

  More than my condition hindered my speech now. “You’ve bin disgusting, disc cussing me wish woman, with someone.”

  “I had to talk to someone, Dominic. I couldn’t be alone with all that any more.”

  “You warn tall own.”

  “You know I didn’t mean that, but I couldn’t talk to you, could I? Or I could have, but you wouldn’t have known. The man I’ve been told about has worked with people like us. He was Rose Tierney’s psychiatrist when she was in your department.”

  “Dint helper mush, cuddy? Kill der sell.”

  “Her husband said Colin Hay wasn’t to blame, if you remember. I believe she was the only patient he ever lost.”

  I was searching for words to pronounce when the ward sister bumped the door open. “Start saying your goodbyes to your visitors now, everyone.”

  “Not been here long,” I concentrated on objecting.

  “I have,” Lesley said, “but you were asleep.” Before I could try to retrieve the discussion, she stood up and bent to kiss my forehead. “You get some more rest. We’ll both be here later, I promise.”