Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

The edges of the carpet on the narrow stairs were turned up against the walls. Eames hoisted himself upward using the banister, planting both slippered feet on each step. At the top he beckoned her with a gesture that looked as if he were trying to dislodge an object stuck to his skinny forefinger.

  As soon as she stepped through the skewed doorway he said like a challenge, "Well, here I am."

  She wondered if he also meant the low room, the two worn armchairs draped with clothes, the window that overlooked a similar window across the street, the vintage typewriter exhibiting a page on which a single I was typed, the neat pile-of typescripts beside it on the stout oaken desk. Sandy pointed to the typescripts. "Is one of those your script for Giles Spence's last film?"

  "That film, that film! Do you think that twaddle is the only thing I ever wrote?"

  "No, of course not," Sandy said and trailed off, at a loss.

  "But it's all you know of me, isn't it? You should do a bit of homework before you start using up my time." He sucked in his wrinkled cheeks and sounded grudgingly forgiving. "I suppose when I was your age there were several great writers whose work I didn't know. The older I become, the more I regret having penned that last scenario for Spence."

  "Did you ever see the film?"

  "I did not, and I know nobody who did. I'm surprised so many of you are after it now."

  "How many?"

  "You and before you, your friend whose trail you said you were following. How many should I mean?"

  "Just the two of us, I'm sure," Sandy said, now that she was. "But there's quite a lot of interest in the film. Weren't you at all proud of your work on it at the time?"

  "At that age? Far too much so. I congratulated myself on my professionalism. Perhaps you don't know that Spence originally wanted me to write about a tower that was so high it brought the dead back down from heaven like a kind of aerial? Then he hired that Hungarian and I had to change the script to explain his accent, and then Spence went away somewhere halfway through the film and decided that there should be more of a conflict between the two stars. He became quite impassioned about rendering the aristocrat more unsympathetic, I remember. And after all that, not only was the film taken out of circulation but I've borne the stigma ever since. Nobody would hire me to write anything but horrors, nobody would stage my plays, and now it turns out that your generation ignores everything else I wrote."

  "Have you any idea who took possession of the film?"

  "Someone with a lot of money and a grudge against us, I imagine. What does it matter now?"

  "If I could find out who, it might be worth my trying to persuade them to release the film."

  "I'd stay well clear of anyone who has the power to make something they don't like disappear." Unexpectedly he laughed, a birdlike chattering. "Still, I've almost been wiped from the face of the earth, haven't I? If you find your film then at least the public will be able to judge, and perhaps I may be invited to talk about it and my body of work."

  "I'll do my best to see you are," she said, hearing the appeal he was too proud to acknowledge. She indicated the typescripts, intending to cheer him up further. "Have any of these been published?"

  "Haven't been and aren't likely to be."

  "Oh dear." She suppressed a giggle at herself for getting her approach so wrong. "What would you want the public to appreciate about your work? Did Spence ask you to make any other changes?"

  He turned away so abruptly that she was afraid he found her single-mindedness insulting. He brushed past her to the desk and sat down with his back to her. He grabbed the edge of the desk with one hand to keep his balance while he groped in his hip pocket and produced a key with which he unlocked the desk drawer. "You can sift these for yourself."

  When he didn't reach in the drawer, Sandy stepped forward. Lying at the bottom of the drawer were a few brownish pages torn raggedly from a notebook. In the shadow of the drawer the penciled scribble on the topmost page looked too faded to decipher. "Take them if you want them," Eames urged her. "They're the notes Spence gave me. They won't bite."

  He hadn't opened the drawer very wide. As Sandy reached in, she had the irrational notion that he meant to close the drawer on her wrist like a trap. She touched something cold and small that made her think of uneven teeth until she realized they were paper clips. She lifted the pages out by one corner. "Will you help me read them?"

  "Didn't I begin by telling you I'm busy?" He flapped his hand at the pages. "Take them with you. You can read them if you put your mind to it. I had to."

  Sandy shaded her eyes and leaned close to the gray writing. "Does this say 'biblical parallels'?"

  "I believe it does," Eames said with another of his unexpected laughs. "You'll have less trouble with them than I had. He had too many ideas too late, it seems to me. Some of this stuff I didn't even try to incorporate."

  "You'd have liked to stay closer to the story the film was based on."

  "No, just to know at the outset what was expected of me. That story was nothing special. Have you not read it? I found the book for tenpence recently, below in the shop." He fumbled under the suit draped over a chair and produced a book. "My sometime friend downstairs seemed glad to be rid of it. You may have it."

  The pages hung out of the binding, which was so shabby that she couldn't make out the title or even what color the boards had once been. "It's very kind of you," Sandy said. "Did you show this to Graham Nolan?"

  "I hadn't found it then, nor the notes. Don't forget those."

  Sandy picked up the ragged pages and thought she heard the doorbell stir. The restless clatter must have been a bird on the roof, for Eames didn't respond to it. She slipped the pages inside the book and realized that he was smiling at her. "Do you know," he said, "I'm quite glad I changed my mind and let you come. It must have been a relief for me to talk. I certainly feel better."

  "I hope it helps you with your lecture."

  "I'm sure it will. I'll be more encouraging. These aren't mine, you should know," he said, patting the pile of manuscripts. "They're from the writers' group I have to lecture to, thanks to the bookman downstairs. Who knows, there may just be one among them I can guide into the career I should have had."

  He watched her make room for the book in her handbag and snap the clasp. "Are you bound for the coast now?" he said.

  "Not that I'm aware of. Should I be?"

  "Didn't you say you aimed to talk to anyone connected with the film? Tommy Hoddle is in Cromer, in a show at the end of the pier. I heard him being interviewed on their local station on the wireless."

  "Tommy Hoddle…" She remembered the name from Graham's list.

  "The comic relief. He and Billy Bingo used to play two timorous policemen. I quite enjoyed writing their scenes. Billy died some years ago, but Tommy's still performing a solo version of their stage routine. It must be the only life he knows."

  "You wouldn't know if Graham met him?"

  "I believe he already had when he came to see me."

  In that case she ought to meet him, however unlikely he sounded as the owner of a copy of the film. She could drive east to Cromer now and still be in time for her next appointment, in Birmingham tomorrow. "Thanks for all your help," she said to Eames. "I'll be thinking what I can do to keep your name alive."

  He grinned down at her, his false teeth glinting in the dimness at the top of the stairs, as she closed the outer door. She was pleased that she'd cheered him up. The sunlight felt like a smile on her face as she hurried to her car. She thought she might have some fun at the end of the pier.

  ***

  Two hours later she was in the midst of Norfolk, and reminding herself never to rely on the map. A road drawn almost taut on the page seemed in practice never to run straight for more than a few hundred yards. She ought to be in Cromer in plenty of time to catch Tommy Hoddle before the evening show, but she thought she had better do without lunch. When she found herself at the tail end of yet another cortege unwilling to overtake a slow-moving car,
she shifted down a gear as soon as she saw an uncurved stretch of road ahead, and was past the four cars before any of them had started signaling.

  In her mirror she saw them trundle into a side road, and then she was alone. A doughy cloud half the size of the sky lowered itself over the horizon until the sky was clear above the fields. Although the landscape was flat, she could never see far ahead, because of the hedges that bordered the devious roads. Sometimes the roads named on signposts at junctions weren't the roads the map would have her believe they were. Once she reached Cromer she would make time to relax, she promised herself.

  She braked at curves, gathered speed, braked again. Fields of grain stirred beyond her open window. She glanced at the mirror in case the movement she'd glimpsed back at the last curve meant that someone intended to pass her, but the road was deserted, shivering with dust and heat beneath the glaring sky. She swung around another curve and looked to see what was coming up fast behind her. It must have been a trick of perspective, a shrub of the hedge appearing to leap onto the tarmac as the curve shrank in the mirror before disappearing from view.

  The hedge nearer the car was growing taller, throwing the noise of the engine back at her. The noise seemed so like a choked growling in the hedge that she braked in case the engine had developed a fault. She was glad when the hedge and the noise sank, and she was able to hear that nothing was wrong with the car. A breeze rushed through a swath of the grass of the field she was speeding past-either a breeze or an animal. The airstream of the car might be causing the restlessness in the grass: surely no wild animal would stay so close to a moving vehicle. She trod hard on the accelerator as the road continued straight. It must be the car that was disturbing the field, for the movements were still pacing her. She reached a long gradual curve along which the hedge reared high, and didn't brake at first. She came in sight of the next straight stretch, and jerked her foot off the accelerator. Where the road curved again, a police car was waiting.

  "Exactly what I needed," Sandy sighed. "Thanks so much." She would have more to say to her imagination if it had brought her trouble with the police. She was a hundred yards from the police car when it flashed its lights to halt her.

  As she pulled onto the verge, the driver climbed out and shut his door with a chunk like the stroke of an ax. His shoulders were so wide that they made her think of American football. She wondered if walking slowly was part of police training, intended to give their quarry a chance to quake. He pushed his peaked cap higher on his ruddy forehead that looked dwarfed by his shoulders, and glanced up from her number plate. "May I ask where you're going to?"

  "Cromer."

  He nodded as if he was weighing her answer. "Where from?"

  "Cambridge."

  "You're a bit lost then, aren't you?"

  "I shouldn't be surprised, the way you signpost your roads."

  She didn't mean him personally or even the police force, but his face drooped like a hound's. "Actually," she said, "I'm sure this will take me to Cromer."

  He tramped around her car and took hold of her door, resting the ball of his thumb on the groove into which her window had sunk. "I'd like to see your driving license."

  She imagined him playing hockey instead of football, in a girl's gym suit, and felt somewhat better as she opened her handbag. "I believe you'll find that's in order," she said, flicking through the transparent plastic pockets until she found the one that held her license.

  He scrutinized both sides of it, and made to hand the wallet back to her. As he did so, her staff identity card flipped up. He stared at it with such distaste that she had the absurd notion that the ubiquitous Stilwell had even managed to prejudice him. "I'd watch out if I were you," he said.

  She would have asked what for if she had thought he would tell her. He went back to his vehicle, walking slowly in the middle of the road, as if warning her not to overtake him. He'd made her so tense that when she passed the junction he must have been watching she neglected to read the sign. It was a minor road, surely no use to her, and besides, there was a signposted crossroads a few hundred yards ahead.

  A dull sound of engines had begun to weigh down the air. She thought it must be farm machinery, though she could see none in the fields. Now she could read the signpost, which confirmed that she was on a road to Cromer. Lights across the field that met one angle of the junction caught her eye, and she braked. Whatever was rumbling toward her from the southwest, it had a police escort.

  She stopped at the junction to watch for a minute. It was Enoch's Army, still roving England in search of a hospitable county. The decrepit vans and caravans and mobile homes crawled across the landscape slowly as a funeral, boxed in by police cars with blue lights throbbing on their roofs. Despite the police escort, the convoy seemed for a moment old as the land, a nomadic tribe without a time or place to call its own. Its time had-been the sixties, Sandy thought, and watching it wouldn't get her to Cromer. She started the car and shot across the junction, which was clear for hundreds of yards. She was just past the crossroads when a boy of about seven ran out of the long grass to her right and into the road, straight in front of her car.

  She slammed on the brakes. The car skidded across the tarmac, almost into the ditch the child had jumped over. As Sandy turned into the skid a woman in a kaftan ran out of the grass after the child. She made to leap the ditch, stumbled backward as she saw the car, slipped on the muddy verge and fell awkwardly at the edge of the field. When she tried to rise and then lay wincing, one hand on her ankle, Sandy parked the car on the opposite verge and went to her.

  She hadn't reached the woman when the boy flew at her, brandishing a jaggedly pointed stone he had picked up. Sandy was already shaking with the effects of the near miss, and the way the boy clearly felt he needed to defend his mother from her turned her cold all over. "I'm not going to hurt her," she assured him. "I want to help."

  The woman raised her face, which looked scrubbed thin and pink. Though her uneven hair was graying, she was about thirty years old. "Are you not from round here?" she said in a broad Lancashire accent.

  "No more than you are," Sandy said. "Would that matter?"

  "People don't like us going near their homes or their land."

  "Pretty unavoidable, I'd say."

  When the woman smiled gratefully at her, the boy dropped his stone in the ditch with a splash. Sandy helped the woman to her feet. She took two steps and moaned through clenched lips, and tottered against Sandy. "We ought to get you to a hospital," Sandy said.

  "No hospitals. They make us wait until they've dealt with anyone who's got a home address. We've herbs and a healer in the convoy."

  "Do you want to wait here for them, or shall I drive you back?"

  "I want to go back," the boy pleaded, and slapped the roof of Sandy's car. When Sandy supported his mother to the vehicle and let him into the back she saw he had left earthy handprints on the roof. He was the first small boy she'd met who smelled as grubby as he looked, and his mother seemed to have no use for deodorants either. Sandy turned the car and said, "What was he running away from?"

  "Arcturus? All he wanted was to go in a hedge because we've no toilet in the van, and the farmer let two dogs chase him."

  "What did the police do?"

  The boy hissed at the mention of the police, and the woman laughed curtly. "Looked the other way. They don't want to know about us except to try and destroy us because we might make people see there are other ways of living besides theirs. Enoch says anyone who wears a pointed hat must be a dunce or a clown. One lot of police down south smashed all Arcturus's toys while they were pretending to search the van for drugs. They remind me of his father. He used to like to smash our things until we left him and joined Enoch."

  "Enoch's our daddy now," Arcturus said.

  Sandy felt lightheaded with so much unexpected information. "The dogs didn't hurt you, I hope."

  "No, Enoch chased them off, but Arcturus didn't realize. And do you know, the farmer starte
d shouting, 'Don't you hurt my dogs'? Enoch says that people caring more for animals than humans shows how we've lost touch with the old ways but can't do without them. Society wants us all to dress in hides and skins now, but it used to be the priests who put on skins so they could communicate with the animals they shared the land with."

  "Hmm," Sandy responded, playing safe. She was on the side road now, and the foremost police car flashed its headlights at her. As she pulled half off the tarmac and felt her left-hand wheels sink into the verge, she saw Enoch Hill marching at the head of the convoy, behind the police. She hadn't realized he was so big: six and a half feet tall at least, with a black beard that hung onto his chest, and hair that streamed as low on his back. He wore a vest and trousers that appeared to be woven of rope. Sandy found the sight of him so fascinating that at first she didn't notice that the police were gesturing her to make a U-turn. "I've brought an injured woman back to her van," she called. "She fell on the road."

  "I'll take her," Enoch said. His voice was so big that it crowded out any trace of where he came from. He strode around the police escort and waited, breathing like a bull. Sandy helped her passenger out of the car, and he lifted the woman in his arms. "Vaggie's driving your van. She can drive while Merl sees to your leg."

  "I'll walk with you in case there are any dogs about, shall I?" Sandy said to the boy, and his mother gave her a grateful look.

  The van was at the rear of the parade of some forty vehicles, which were still moving, herded by the police. Men with piratical earrings stared out, and children with straw braided in their hair. Sandy had to trot so as to keep up with Enoch. She felt as if she were being borne along by his energy and presence, the smell of sweat and rope, the veins that stood out on his leathery arms, his hair and beard gleaming like wire. "Thanks for looking after these two," he said. "Sorry to be pushing you, but this isn't the place for a stroll."

  "Absolutely," Sandy panted. "Have you far to go?"

  He turned his huge weathered head and stared keenly at her without breaking his stride. "As far as we have to until we find somewhere that needs to be fed and that won't make us its slaves."