Born To The Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  At least she wasn’t proposing to keep Toby away from me, and for the moment this was enough. Once she and my neighbour’s wife had gone he winked at me. “Was your Judy aching your ear like my ould girl? And they say it’s men are all the same because they’re men.”

  “She’s doing her best when it must be hard for her,” I made the effort to articulate before sinking warily back on the pillow.

  Once the dizziness faded along with some of the headache I found I didn’t want to think much. No doubt I could visit a psychiatrist if this reassured Lesley, because Toby was far more important than me. Although she hadn’t said so, I had a sense that my intervention or the car crash if not both had ended his visits to Safe To Sleep. The thought let me wander into unconsciousness, and nothing wholly woke me after that until I heard his voice. “Do you think dad’s come back again?”

  I propped up the pillow behind my head and set about raising myself as the doors from the lobby swung back. The walls and beds began to sink like an unstable image on a screen, and then they grew steadier. I turned my eyes but not my head towards my family, to see that Toby was outdoing Lesley for concern. I could only hope this was as uncomplicated as it looked. “Dad,” Toby called “you’re back.”

  “Hour shunt relic on.” My words were as treacherous as ever. “Wars hunt real lee gone,” I more or less repeated.

  “Mum said you’d started talking funny.” He giggled while he asked “Are you going to all the time?”

  “Shoed stop soon.”

  “Maybe reading books will help you talk like it helped me.” As though offering further encouragement he said “They’ve brought your car home. It wasn’t very wrecked.”

  “It must be hard err than my nog in.”

  This authorised Toby to giggle again. “Your plaster’s nearly as big as grandad’s.”

  I hadn’t realised I bore one. When I gingerly fingered my temple I found it owed some of its unfamiliar tightness to a dressing. The injury wasn’t as tender as yesterday, though Lesley winced on my behalf, but my gesture roused Toby’s concern. “Why did you wreck the car, dad? Were you trying to drive like people do in some of your films?”

  I saw Lesley prepare to intervene if the look she sent me wasn’t enough of a warning. I felt acutely frustrated, not just by the prohibition but because of my unwieldy speech. “Not a stunt,” I said. “Just care less ness.”

  “But why were you there? I’d got the bus.”

  As Lesley’s look grew yet more eloquent I said “Had a talk with some one. That Saul.”

  I wasn’t sure what made him ask “Are you sleeping lots, dad?”

  “Quite a lot. Why?”

  “Because you’ve got a room with all these people. It isn’t fair if they keep you awake when you and mum fixed it up for me to sleep.”

  I didn’t need to glance at Lesley to know how little she wanted me to respond. I had to restrain myself so fiercely that my head began to pound. “They don’t,” I told him.

  “Shall I tell you a story, then?”

  My neighbour’s wife gave this an appreciative sigh. I did my best not to sound ungrateful but felt childish for saying “Don’t want to sleep yet.”

  “I can tell you one for you to remember when you do.”

  “That’s kind of him, isn’t it, Dominic?”

  I heard Lesley willing me to indulge him, and I couldn’t very well not say “Tell me, then.”

  “Once upon a time there was a boy who thought he was a comet.” Toby’s voice took on a rhythm not unlike an incantation. “Every night he flew past the sky and went round all the stars,” he said. “And then he flew out where there aren’t any stars and they’re so far away you can’t even see them. It’s so big out there that things have to get giant to fill it, and it’s so dark they can be anything they like. So the boy got longer and longer till he met himself, and he could go all the way back to when nothing was alive, except it’s really a kind of life people don’t know about yet. And because he could meet himself he came back every morning without anyone knowing he’d gone, and that’s what he did till the things he met came to find everyone.”

  The noise my neighbour’s wife made presumably expressed some version of approval, but I was more aware that Lesley was awaiting my response. “Thanks for may king that up for me,” I said.

  While this appeared to placate his mother, I thought Toby was about to argue, but he said “Shall I tell grandad as well?”

  “You can when you see him next.”

  “I can now. He’s in the other room.”

  “The ward along the corridor, Toby means,” Lesley said.

  “You me nobly toad—” took a breath and tried again. “You didn’t think to tell me we’re in the same hoss spit tall.”

  “There wouldn’t have been much point if you weren’t able to get up, would there? He can’t come to you just now. He still has his infection.”

  “Well, maybe I can go.” I dug my fingertips into the mattress to lever myself up, only to sink back as the room slipped awry at once. “Maybe I will later,” I conceded. “Tell him I will as soon as I can.”

  Toby undertook to, a promise he repeated at the end of visiting. He hugged me so hard that I could easily have fancied he was striving to encompass me, and Lesley gave me more of a kiss than she’d left me last time. “I’ll bring him after work tomorrow,” she murmured, and the thump of the door put a full stop to her sentence.

  Once all the visitors had gone my neighbour turned to me, propping his prickly chin on a fist. “He’s got some weird ideas in his head, your lad. Gets them off you, does he?”

  “Not from me.” The idea dismayed me so much that I demanded “Why me?

  “Seeing as how you make films I reckoned he might of been watching them.”

  “Don’t make films. Teach them.”

  “How’s that work? They wouldn’t let me train up any lads if I didn’t have my engineer’s certificate.”

  Arguing would have required too many words, and I restrained myself to an open-handed shrug. “Weird films, are they?” my neighbour persisted.

  “You might think some. Just now”—I assumed they were still being shown to my students—“they’re re lid jus.”

  He peered at me as if I might be mocking him by splitting up the syllables. “So you’re with the God brigade.”

  “No need.”

  Presumably he felt he’d made his views about qualifications plain, because he only shook his head. “I don’t know where we’re going, me. Where we’ll all end up, like. Still hanging round for somebody that knows.”

  Did this prompt thoughts of Christian Noble? At first I was glad when my neighbour’s ruminations turned to films. The recent Scarface was a favourite: Al was the man, and the Judy was gear, and there was some good shooting in the film but (my neighbour lowered his voice to inform me) too much fucking language. I murmured noncommittally, feeling much as I did when a dentist’s attentions blocked my speech. I seemed to have invited an account of most if not all the films the stubbly man had seen, and we’d regressed as far as Gone with the Wind, where he enthused about the scene in which Rhett Butler carried the protesting Scarlett to his bed, before I had an opportunity to interrupt by catching the attention of a nurse. Yes, they would keep me informed about my father’s condition, and I could visit him as soon as I was able to walk along the corridor. This gave me an excuse to shut my eyes in a bid to recuperate faster, though my neighbour called as if quite a distance separated us “Missed Lee Marvin out. He was in a weird film I reckon you’d like. We can talk about it later.”

  The prospect of another monologue helped the heat to keep me restless, and so did the nocturnal noises of the ward. I was afraid that lack of sleep would exacerbate my dizziness, but when I risked a trip to the toilets I found that I could walk not too far from straight. After breakfast I felt safe to ask a nurse “Can I go and see my father down the core rid door?”

  She examined me and told me to be sure I was up to the exp
edition. As I made my practically steady way past several trolleys and an impromptu conference of doctors I caught a tang of nicotine from a smoking room. When a nurse let me into Intensive Care I thought at first I couldn’t see my father. Quite a few supine figures were tethered to monitors and bottles, but surely none of the wasted shapes belonged to him—except that the man in the third bed on the left bore a simplified variant of his face, less colourful and fleshy than last time I’d seen it. He caught sight of me and succeeded in lifting the arm that wasn’t burdened with a tube. “What a family for getting in the wars,” he said. “The blackie told me you were here as well.”

  His voice was as feeble as his gesture and the smile he tried to raise, but I made for him carelessly fast and had to grab the rail at the foot of his bed. “Don’t keep using that word, dad,” I murmured.

  “There’s a lot worse, son. I don’t know how they expect us to keep up with what they want us calling them.” As I tried again to hush him he said “Anyway, she’s one of us, not like these Allah wallahs that we’re getting now. At least she’s got a cross round her neck.”

  I let this go in the hope he would as well. “How are you fee ling?” I said and tried to make my words less sluggish. “How are they saying you are?”

  “They’re still chasing my bug. They think they’ve got it on the run, and then I’m praying I can go home.” His last word barely reached the surface before giving way to a clogged laborious breath. “I’m not as bad as that sounds,” he wanted me to hear.

  “You keep your en err gee for getting better and don’t worry about me. Just a knock on the head, and I’m over the worst.”

  “They said you had a crash. How’d you leave the other feller?”

  I had an unhappy sense that my father wanted anyone else involved to have come off worse. “There was only me,” I said and tried to rein the truth in. “I was diss track ted.”

  “You shouldn’t be like that at your age. Don’t say I was taking your mind off the road.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him what had done so—even the threat of memory revived a crawling inside my eyes—but I said “I’d been putting things right for Toby.”

  “What’s the matter there, son? Is it mixed up at all with that thing the nurse let him tell me? Seemed like he thought I needed a bedtime story. I don’t want anybody thinking I’m ungrateful, but it didn’t sound quite right to me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I know you used to enjoy making stories up, but it wasn’t like any of yours. He had a boy flying out past the edge of everything, and when I told him God must be there, do you know what he said to me?”

  “No.” I found this easier to say than “What?”

  “He made out it was full of things that people used to think were gods when they got a hint of them. And he said we’ll all find out what they really are, because they’re coming back or coming here. He’d got some idea it was both, but he couldn’t sort it out in his head, and no wonder.”

  Despite my unease I thought this could be useful. “What did Lesley make of all that?”

  “She didn’t hear it. She was talking to the nurse.” As my flare of hope went out my father said “Where’s he getting stuff like that from? Don’t say from you or his mother.”

  “I promise it isn’t.” I felt as though my words were set free by saying “It’s Christian Noble and his family. They’re back.”

  “Christian.” His thoughts seemed to snag on the name. “Who’s he again?”

  “He taught at Holy Ghost. He drove Mrs Norris out of her head. You and some of the other parents got him fired from the school.”

  “So we damned well did, and good riddance.” My father’s eyes had regained a gleam. “And didn’t someone who wrote for the paper drive him out of town?”

  “Eric Wharton, that’s right. Only then he was drown din an accident, if you believe that’s what it was.” When my father showed no interest in this I said “But now Noble’s back, and his daughter is. She has all his beliefs, and she’s hell ping him feed them to chilled wren.”

  “Are you telling me he’s doing that to Toby?”

  “I only just found out they run the place we’ve been sending him for treatment. You thought it might be Buddhist, but it’s their kind of spirit yule lissom.”

  “I hope to God you’ve got him out of there.”

  “Of course we have, but there are dozens of children.”

  “Was he why you had your crash, son?” When I risked a careful nod my father said “Just let me get better and you can count on me if you want someone by your side.”

  I couldn’t help thinking of the Tremendous Three. “Dad, I wasn’t trying to involve you. You don’t want to cross them, believe me.”

  “Don’t fret about me, Dominic.” The mission seemed to have lent him strength, and he raised his voice. “I’ve dealt with your Mr Christian Noble once,” he declared, “and I can dakh wakakh agh agakh.”

  This was just the start of a coughing fit, and as I mimed helpless sympathy a nurse hurried over. “We said you mustn’t get excited, Desmond. Say bye-bye to your son now and you can see him later.”

  I couldn’t judge whether he was parodying her instruction as he went to some trouble to articulate “Byakh bakakh.”

  “I’ll come back soon, dad,” I said, and the nurse gave me a look that sent me out of the ward before he’d finished coughing. I heard him all the way along the corridor and even after I sat on my bed. When my neighbour wondered whether Lee Marvin returned to Alcatraz in Point Blank only after he was dead I hushed him, which he took as a rebuff. Whenever anyone in another ward began to cough I did my best to hear that it wasn’t my father. At last I felt sufficiently reassured to doze and let my latest headache drift away. Perhaps those were the final hours in which I was able to believe all could be well.

  I was awake before any evening visitors arrived, and able to discuss John Wayne with my stubbly neighbour. We were recalling his last film, in which the role of a gunfighter dying of cancer prefigured the actor’s own imminent death, when I heard Toby in the corridor. “Shall I give it to dad or grandad?”

  “If you like I can photocopy it at work,” Lesley said. “Then you can keep it and they’ll each have one.”

  “Then there’ll be three,” Toby said.

  He had to be restrained from running into the ward. “Do you want to see my picture, dad?” he urged. “It’s my best one.”

  “Of course I do. Give me a good look.”

  As he opened the pad he’d been holding under his arm, Lesley sat on the chair by the bed. She was watching for my reaction, but I didn’t grow tense until Toby turned the page towards me. For a moment I was afraid to identify the image, and then I saw what it portrayed: not Ouroboros but a comet whose tail vanished into its wide-eyed smiling face. The thin pale shape was almost circular, framing a yellow sun and a white moon and the earth, which was blue and green. “It’s the boy who thought he was a comet,” Toby said.

  “I see that. It’s very good, Toby.” While I was nervous of saying too much, I found myself asking “If he only thinks it, why is it how he looks?”

  “Because,” Toby said as gravely as only a five-year-old could, “he isn’t old enough yet to see what he is really.”

  My neighbour laughed and raised a thumb as if he’d stubbed it on the answer. “He’s got you there, mate.”

  “I shouldn’t show grandad just now,” I said.

  “Why not?” Lesley said with a hint of sharpness.

  “The nurse told me not to get him excited, that’s all.” I was afraid the last two words might have been redundant if not suspicious, and so I said hastily “Did you do that at Judith’s, Toby?”

  He glanced at his mother, and I glimpsed her terse nod. “Claudine’s, dad,” he said.

  I wanted to believe him, and very much wished I wasn’t hearing myself say “What was that about?”

  Lesley lowered her voice to indicate I should restrain mine. “What was
what, Dominic?”

  “That look just now. What don’t you want Toby to say?”

  “Nothing that we need to talk about right now.” When I started to protest she said lower still “Shall we save it until you’re home?”

  “It started here and I’d like to finish it. Toby, what were you going to say?

  “I said it, dad.”

  I had to fight to keep my voice down. “What would you have said if you hadn’t been told not to?”

  “Nothing, dad. I really was at Claudine’s.”

  “After you went home with her, yes? Where were you before that?”

  “Stop harassing him, Dominic. If you’re so eager for the truth you shall have it. He’s been where he needs to go, whatever you may think.”

  My voice came out as a savage mutter. “You sent him back to Noble and his crew.”

  “I sent him to Dr Sweet, and you have to realise—”

  “I told you who’s behind her.” I was additionally dismayed to realise “You’re teaching him to lie to me.”

  “Toby, go and see grandad for a few minutes. You remember where he is.”

  “Stay where you are, Toby.” My eyes might well have grown as fierce as my low voice as I said “You’re too fond of sending him off by himself. Can’t you understand he’s in danger?”

  “Do as I say, Toby, or we’ll have to be on our way. See if grandad wants to hear another of your stories.”

  “No, wait,” I cried and floundered across the bed as he took a hesitant step towards the corridor. I made a grab for his arm but missed, because a spike of agony had jabbed so deep behind my eyes that I might as well have gone blind. “Fuck,” I snarled, a word I’d never previously used in public and had very seldom said. “Fuck.”

  “I’m sorry, Toby, but we’re going home if your father’s going to behave like this.”

  “Go.” At once I was desperate to say more, though every word sharpened the pain in my head. “Take him home and keep him there. Don’t let him anywhere near Noble and the rest of them.”

  “Come along now, Toby,” Lesley murmured, and I was left with a kiss—just one, my son’s—on my forehead. As I heard the door thump shut and tried to lie as still as assuaging the pain might require, my neighbour’s voice came close. “I don’t know what kind of bad way you’re in, mate, but just keep an eye on the language.”