Born To The Dark

by Ramsey Campbell

  I couldn’t see the sun. I might have fancied that I couldn’t even see the sky, given the utter lack of colour it displayed and how the featureless overcast lay almost as low as the treetops. At that moment my car seemed considerably more important, and I was making for it when Jim spoke. I was in the doorway—I was nearly out of the house—when he said “Hold on, Dom.”

  26 - The Way Into The Dark

  Escaping the ominous gloom of the house appealed to me so much that I was tempted to pretend I hadn’t heard. If I headed for the car, would Jim feel compelled to follow? Then it occurred to me what he must have remembered—that he’d meant to bring the serpentine carving we’d found—and I was unhappily sure it wasn’t wise for him to go back by himself. I was turning away from my car and the promise of release when he said “Is that another door?”

  I had to send the flashlight beam in the direction of his gaze to locate the door, which was almost indistinguishable from a section of the panelling that boxed in the stairs. How had Jim seen it in the gloom? Presumably he must have been straining his eyes to make certain we hadn’t overlooked anything significant, but I could have thought the door had waited to be noticed until we were about to leave the house. “It’ll be the cellar,” I said.

  “We ought to take a look.”

  Perhaps I was simply reminded of the crypt beneath the Trinity Church of the Spirit, but I didn’t find the proposition too enticing. Unable to think of any objection Jim was likely to accept, I trudged across the lobby as he advanced to the cellar door. By the time the light closed around the doorknob he had already twisted it and pushed the door inwards. I couldn’t help listening for the kind of sound I’d heard from the crypt under the church, but the space beyond the doorway was as silent as it was lightless. I ventured forward to stand beside Jim and sent the flashlight beam into the dark.

  It illuminated nothing but itself until I shone it downwards. Stone steps caged by wooden banisters descended about twenty feet to a floor that looked black with grime. When I raised the beam it petered out before reaching any wall, and I had an unpleasant fancy that the limits of the cellar were recoiling from the light as a slug would shrink from salt. “I don’t think it’s worth going down,” I said.

  “I will, though. Hang on here if you’d rather, or you could wait outside.” Would any of the Tremendous Three have behaved so pathetically? Certainly not in my stories and probably not in real life. I didn’t know which was more childish, my thinking or my nervousness. Since Jim was here at my behest, how could I even consider abandoning him? “Let’s just be sure the batteries hold out,” I said, which didn’t ease my apprehension at all.

  As soon as I set foot on the top step I felt close to losing my balance. Though the step looked level it felt warped, and I grabbed the banister. I kept my hand on it all the way down, because the steps persisted in feeling crooked, however straightforward the flashlight made them appear to be. I tried to think the sensation was illusory, not the sight, since Jim plainly had no problem with the steps. As I illuminated his way down he flourished the exercise books. “I could have left these up top,” he said, “but I thought I’d keep them safe.”

  The idea that Christian Noble’s thoughts would be down there with us didn’t help my nerves, but I didn’t want to risk losing the journal again. Once Jim left the steps I turned the beam away from him to find we were surrounded by darkness too large for the light to define. “Do you think there’s any point in going on?” I said but didn’t hope.

  “Never leave a scene till you’ve investigated every inch of it, Dom.” While I wanted to think his official self had spoken, I couldn’t avoid knowing that he might have said much the same in one of my old tales. “Let’s go this way,” he urged, pacing straight ahead.

  Despite the beam he looked ready to challenge the dark, and I hastened to keep up with him. I nearly lurched against him, because the floor wasn’t quite as horizontal as it looked, unless my vertigo was back. The flashlight wasn’t capable of resolving the impression, and I sent the beam further ahead, to be consumed by the dark. “Brace yourself, Dom,” Jim said and immediately shouted “Hello?”

  The eager darkness swelled towards us, surely just because I’d let the flashlight waver. “Who are you talking to?” I wished I didn’t need to learn.

  “Nobody I know of. Only trying to hear how big this place is.” Louder than before he yelled “Hello?”

  The shout was dwarfed by a space too large to see. I was reminded— unnecessarily, I very much hoped—of the void into which I’d been drawn from the sleeping room. “It sounds empty to me,” I tried saying.

  “We’ll find out,” Jim said and kept on.

  The slant of the floor helped send me after him. While the beam persisted in levelling it, I could have thought the floor had tilted a little to coax us into the dark. Or perhaps the pressure of the blackness was driving us onwards—the blackness that massed at my back and beneath the ceiling, which the light didn’t reach. Underfoot the floor felt somewhat softer than the stone it was composed of, and I assumed it was darkened by fungus rather than grime. I couldn’t judge how far we’d gone when Jim halted, planting his feet wide in a stance that looked defiant if not ready for a confrontation. “Something isn’t right here,” he said.

  I might have laughed at the understatement if I hadn’t been nervous of asking “What in particular?”

  “We can’t still be under the house. We’ve gone too far.”

  His dim face darkened as I swung the beam around us in a vain attempt to find a wall. Surely I needn’t wonder if the extent of the cellar was a means of enticing victims away from the way out—a trap. “I don’t understand why anyone would build a place like this,” Jim said.

  “I’m afraid Christian Noble might have found a use for it.”

  “That’s not my point, Dom. He didn’t build it, did he? You said someone gave him the house. I can’t see what a cellar this size could have been for.”

  I had an uneasy sense that we mightn’t care for the answer—that perhaps it wasn’t even the right question. “We won’t learn anything by standing here,” Jim declared and stalked forward.

  I was about to follow doggedly when I realised what I was seeing. Trying to make sense of it kept me silent for too long before I blurted “Wait, Jim. Wait.”

  “No need to say it twice.” He turned just enough for his indistinct face to show me a frown. “What’s the problem?”

  “This place doesn’t just go too far. It’s going down.”

  Jim peered along the flashlight beam, which lit up a stretch of the floor until it was overwhelmed by the dark. “I don’t see it, Dom.”

  “Look at me. Aren’t I higher than you now?”

  His frown became a squint until he tried to clear his face of both. “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “You have to see it,” I said in desperation. “You’re lower down than I am.

  In fact our faces were level, which wasn’t as it should be, since Jim was half a head taller. Just the same, the floor appeared not to slope, a contradiction that felt worse than vertigo. In a moment I couldn’t judge our relative positions, which was more dismaying still. “Come ahead and you’ll see we aren’t going down,” Jim said.

  “I honestly don’t think we should go any further,” I said and was inspired, however nervously, to swing the beam upwards. “You must be able to see that,” I said, not far from pleading.

  “I can’t see a thing there, Dom.”

  “That’s what I mean. Where’s the ceiling? Why can’t the light reach?”

  “Maybe it’s the batteries.”

  I brought the beam down. Raising it had let the darkness rush at us, and I had a decidedly unwelcome impression that lowering the beam failed to drive all the darkness back where it had been. “Then we shouldn’t risk going on,” I said.

  Jim hesitated and came to me, and I saw his head rise higher than mine. I was about to draw his attention to this when he said “Let me have a look.”
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  He turned the flashlight towards his face and then shook it at the floor. “I’m sure it’s got a good few minutes in it yet. Come on, Dom,” he said and, handing me my exercise books, tramped after the beam towards the dark.

  I was suppressing a childish impulse to demand the return of my flashlight when I saw what he was being made to do—not simply to descend a slope, however it was disguised. “Jim,” I said, but perhaps he didn’t hear, because the sight had parched my mouth with panic “Jim,” I said so loud that my voice seemed to collide dully with the dark, “for Christ’s sake stop.

  “No need for that kind of language, Dom.” My urgency hadn’t even slowed him down. “I’m not stopping just yet,” he said. “Come on, catch up.”

  “Jim.” Seeing him recede into the dark trapped too many of my words in my throat. “You aren’t just going downwards,” I forced out. “You’re going skewed as well.”

  As though articulating the situation had brought it into focus, I saw with awful clarity what was taking place. Jim was following a spiral route that might have been forced on him by an immense shell, unless he was tracing the path of a kind of frozen vortex in the floor. The notion of a shell, however invisible, suggested the presence of some form of life that was nesting beneath the house like an insect under a stone, and I wondered if it was the reason why the house had been so suddenly abandoned. I saw Jim tramping unawares to meet it, perhaps to rouse it, unless we already had. “I’m not, Dom, I promise,” he was saying. “You’re letting the place get to you. Catch up and you’ll see you’re mistaken.”

  I no longer welcomed his unawareness. Indeed, I’d begun to suspect it was letting the place gain some hold over him. “Just stop,” I begged. “Stop and look at me. Shine the light at me as well.”

  Perhaps he realised he was leaving me too far behind, and in the dark. As he swung around, the flashlight beam did, but not as it should. It appeared to snag on an insubstantial or at any rate unseen barrier—a wall far too close to Jim. Then it went out, and I was swallowing in preparation for calling out to Jim when it flared at me. Either Jim hadn’t noticed its momentary absence or he was ignoring the anomaly. He poked the beam at me and then past me, and I saw it waver as his face stiffened. More than darkness seemed to mass at my back, and I was afraid to look. “What is it, Jim?” I had to say instead.

  He didn’t speak while he paced towards me. Once he reached me he was silent for some moments, during which I couldn’t breathe. Gripping the flashlight with both hands, he ranged the beam about beyond me. At last he said “Where are the steps?”

  I turned to face the way we’d come and saw the beam of light trailing into empty blackness. “They’ll be where they were,” I said, which felt like an act of faith, not least that I hadn’t turned too far and lost my bearings. “Shall we go back now? We don’t want to lose the way out, do we?”

  Perhaps Jim paused because he didn’t want to have to ask “Which way are you saying that is?”

  I could only pray—at least, the closest I’d come to doing so for decades—that I was facing in the right direction. “Give me the flashlight and trust me, Jim.”

  “Are you saying you know?”

  “I’m saying I think so.” I might have been conveying hope or desperation as I said “Unless you’ve a better idea.”

  He handed me the flashlight and took the exercise books, and I felt as though he was abandoning the dependability I’d relied upon. He was prepared if not anxious to trust my instincts, but how much could I trust them myself? As I stepped forward, following the light into a blackness so oppressive that it seemed to gather not just on but within my eyes, I had to cling to the belief that I was retracing my progress. It didn’t help that however level the floor persisted in looking, I had a sense that the slope was growing steeper, as if it meant to send us sliding helplessly backwards into the dark. I didn’t care at all for how the floor had begun to feel: softer than a covering of lichen could account for. I could only pace doggedly forward, struggling to walk in a straight line. The sensations underfoot suggested I was doing quite the opposite, and the flashlight beam swayed from side to side as if it yearned to find the steps as much as I did. It found nothing solid except the floor, which looked ominously dormant, as if the blackened mass was about to stir. I was trying to steady the beam—surely it was causing the illusion—when Jim said “I don’t want to put you off your stride, Dom—”

  “Then don’t.” At once I felt worse than ashamed of the retort, but I dreaded learning “What were you going to say?”

  “Haven’t we come further now than we came in the first place?”

  This gave me the nightmarish notion that the underside of Safe To Sleep was so vast that we would wander until the light gave out and our bodies did. “I don’t believe so,” I said and did my utmost not to. “Don’t distract me.”

  I was afraid Jim might object to being sidelined—might insist on taking over, as a policeman surely would. When he didn’t speak I could only assume he felt as disoriented as I was striving not to feel I had a dismaying sense that the darkness we faced had grown solider while the floor became more treacherous, not merely tilted but capable of swarming like a mass of insects as wide as the dark. The impression brought me to the very edge of helpless panic, and I had to struggle not to run. Unless I controlled myself we risked becoming even more lost in the dark. All the same, I felt driven to pace faster, because I had a daunting fancy that any hesitation would let my feet sink into the floor. Was the thick swarming darkness able to hinder my progress somehow? Despite my efforts I’d failed to put on much speed, and I was dismayed to feel that the dark was clinging not just to my eyes but to the whole of me, gaining weight as well. The idea had begun to overwhelm my mind, leaving far too little space for thoughts, when Jim said “What’s that?”

  He wasn’t quite beside me, and I didn’t want to look back in case this left me yet more lost. His tone didn’t make me eager to ask “Where?”

  “Over there. To your left. Put the light on it.” He was beside me now. “Is it…”

  I swung the beam in the direction all his fingers were indicating, and a dim thin shape reared up from the dark. It was made of wood. It was a post—the lowest upright of a set of banisters—and when the beam jerked higher I made out the steps. “Thank Christ you’re here,” I said. “I might have missed them.”

  I thought it showed how relieved he was that he didn’t protest at my profanity. I didn’t quite run towards the steps, but I couldn’t tramp fast enough to outdistance a sense that my feet were in danger of being engulfed, as if the twisted slope that I was desperate to cross in a straight line concealed a swamp. In my haste to reach the steps I almost sprawled headlong on them. They felt more skewed than ever, and indefinably unstable, as if they weren’t as solid as they had been. I clutched at the banister all the way to the lobby and turned at once to light Jim’s way up. I felt so concerned for him that at first I didn’t realise why he needed my aid, since he seemed to have no problem with the steps themselves. As I stepped back to let him through the doorway he said “Why the hell is it so dark?”

  I turned to see that the front door had shut again, but this couldn’t altogether explain the gloom. Shouldn’t it be lighter now that the day had advanced? I had a disconcerting notion that we’d lost all sense of time— that we’d been in the vast space under the house for so long that night had fallen. The darkness in the lobby was scarcely less oppressive than the blackness down below, and I had to fend off the notion that it might hinder our escape. “We’ve still got light,” I assured Jim, flourishing the beam. “Let’s hit the road.”

  I was urging myself as much as him. I disliked the dark as much as I thought he was trying not to admit he did, and I wasn’t far from feeling like an insect trapped in amber. Perhaps insects came to mind because my skin had started to crawl, a sensation rather too reminiscent of the swarming that I’d thought was imminent in the cellar. I marched across the lobby, keeping the flashlight beam
on the front door as steadily as I could, and glanced back to make sure Jim was following. How could the windows over the stairs have shrunk? A band of black cloud must be blotting out their lower halves, and it was crawling up the panes. I jammed the flashlight under my arm and closed both hands around the doorknob. It yielded with a harsh squeak, but the door didn’t budge, even when I hauled at the knob with all my strength. “Jim,” I said, “can you–”

  “Leave it to me.” As I moved aside, still training the beam on the door, he handed me the exercise books and seized the knob with both hands. He twisted it as far as it would turn, then tugged. The door creaked like a tree trunk but stayed wedged in the frame. “Don’t play games with me,” Jim muttered, planting his feet wide as an aid to heaving at the knob with all his strength. Perhaps he was driven to a fiercer effort because the lobby had grown darker still. I saw his shoulders quiver with exertion, and all at once the door gave in. It staggered towards us on its hinges with a soft sound I didn’t understand or care for, letting darkness spill into the house.

  The blackness wasn’t merely dark. I heard some of it slump across the carpet, scattering around Jim’s feet. As he recoiled he gasped “What in God’s name.” I had to overcome my fear of seeing what the open door revealed, and I clutched the exercise books under my arm and closed both hands around the flashlight before raising the shaky beam.

  It confirmed what I’d hoped the material strewn across the carpet couldn’t possibly mean. The entire doorway was clogged with black earth. I heard the mass of soil whispering against the doorframe, and saw that it wasn’t just cutting off our escape—it was inching upwards. Parts of it were restless, perhaps with worms or other insects, unless the earth itself was writhing eagerly. “We’re buried, Jim,” I blurted as though he needed to be told.

  I saw not just his dim face but his whole body stiffen with resolve, and he swung around. “Up, quick.”

  His voice sounded somehow enfeebled, which was how the flashlight beam had begun to look. As we dashed to the stairs I thought the floor lurched, and tried to believe only the beam had. The stairs felt warped, so that except for holding the exercise books I would have grabbed the banister, and softer than they should, at if they were on the way to being consumed or transformed, perhaps both. An unseen transformation might have explained why I felt not simply trapped but in some sense encircled by the house. Very little of the windows over the stairs was clear now—just two blurred meagre strips of dull sky were visible—and I could have thought the mounting blackness was determined to outrun us. The bend in the stairs felt more like a steep curve of a spiral, however it continued to look. I floundered around it and up a higher flight, and had barely reached the top when the windows behind me grew utterly dark, overwhelmed by earth. “Nearest room,” Jim shouted at my back.