Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

  At least there were plenty of signs beside the tangled streets to guide her out to the route north. The retirement home where the stuntman lived was close to an exit from the motorway. Sandy thought the location might be inappropri ately noisy, but though she saw the sign for The Dell almost as soon as she left the motorway, the land had already cut off the rumble of traffic. She swung the car between the globed gateposts and coasted up the wide drive.

  The Dell was an extensive three-story house, sporting a weathercock on an ornamental tower. Nurses dressed in blue and white uniforms patrolled the gravel paths that wound about the lawns. Some were wheeling patients, one was shaking her finger at an old man in a wheelchair who had been surreptitiously feeding birds behind a tree. As Sandy parked on a rectangle of gravel she noticed a play area, swings and slides and a seesaw. They must be provided for visiting grandchildren, she thought, not for inmates who had entered their second childhoods.

  A receptionist was reading a hospital romance behind a desk in the hall, at the foot of a wide staircase. She placed the book open on the desk and broke its spine with the heel of her hand as she said, "May I help you?"

  "I called earlier this week about speaking to Leslie Tomlinson."

  "Oh yes. Would you like to wait a moment? I'll fetch nurse."

  Sandy sat on a leather couch with rolled arms opposite the desk, where the hospital romance was trying feebly to raise itself. Upstairs an old woman was crooning "Tooraloooraloora tuppence a bag," while in the ground-floor lounge several old people were watching a war film; a man wearing a beret waved his stick every time the enemy were hit. Soon the receptionist came back with two nurses, whose blue and white uniforms had begun to make Sandy think of fast-food waitresses. "Just see to Mr. Hunter. We don't want him wearing his hat indoors, do we?" the older nurse said to her colleague, and sat by Sandy on the couch. "You wanted to visit Mr. Tomlinson?"

  "Please."

  "You're not a relative?"

  "Just a researcher," Sandy said, displaying her staff card. "I wanted to ask him about one of his films."

  "Have you come far?"

  "From London."

  "A fair way." The nurse brushed a speck, so minute Sandy couldn't see it, off her knee. "We certainly didn't anticipate problems when we discussed your visit with you. Mr. Tomlinson was most responsive. But shortly before our lunch period today he took a turn for the worse."

  "Because I was coming, you mean?"

  "No, I'm sure that's not the case. He wasn't just overexcited. Something upset him rather badly, and we haven't been able to persuade him to say what. To be frank with you, he won't open his mouth."

  "I'm sorry," Sandy said, and stood up. "I won't keep you any longer. I hope he gets better soon."

  "I was thinking you might be able to help."

  "If I can," Sandy asked, feeling as if she should first have asked how.

  "He never talked much about his career, and none of us knew enough about it to get him talking. You may be able to remind him of something that will start him off."

  "I only really know about the film I'm researching, and I believe he injured himself making that one. Would it be wise to remind him of that just now?"

  "It doesn't have to be a pleasant memory," the nurse said as if Sandy were questioning her professional judgment, "so long as it brings him back to us." She clapped her hands at the old man in the television lounge, who was clutching his stick with one hand and pressing the beret to his scalp with the other. "Look, we've a visitor. What must she think of you? Behave yourself, now, or there'll be no outing for you tomorrow," she called, and marched upstairs.

  Sandy hesitated long enough to make it clear that she was choosing to follow. The nurse padded briskly to the end of a corridor on the middle floor, where a window overlooked the play area. "We think Mr. Tomlinson may have seen someone climbing on the children's frame. One of the staff thought she saw someone running away. You'd wonder what they've got between their ears, someone who won't even leave our old folk in peace." She pushed open the last door in the corridor and motioned Sandy forward. "Here's someone to see you, Mr. Tomlinson," she pronounced in a slow clear hearty voice.

  Sunlight was streaming into the room beyond the door, through pink curtains drawn back toward wallpaper printed with baskets of flowers. In the midst of the brightness, which all the white bedroom furniture appeared to be directing at him, an old man lay in bed, smiling at the sky. The flowered quilt was pulled up to his plump mottled chin. His hands lay slack on the quilt, and between them were several childish paintings of the sun above yellow fields. "Were his grandchildren here recently?" Sandy whispered.

  The nurse looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh, you mean the pictures? He painted those."

  Whatever made him happy, Sandy thought-but it didn't seem as if she had much chance of communicating with him. She was disconcerted to see that though he had performed stunts for both Karloff and Lugosi in the film, he didn't resemble either of them. Still, his face had puffed up with age, and the weight of it had dragged it and his vague smile slightly askew.

  The nurse strode over to the bed as if she meant to heave him out of it. "Now then, Mr. Tomlinson, aren't we going to say hallo to our visitor? We'll have her thinking we've forgotten our manners. She wants to talk about one of the films we made."

  Even her casting herself in the film didn't startle him into awareness. His hands moved on the quilt, but only as they might while he was asleep. His gaze seemed empty as the sky. The nurse gestured Sandy to step closer. "Look, here she is," the nurse wheedled, and directed Sandy to stand where he was gazing.

  As she moved into his gaze Sandy felt uncomfortable, tongue-tied, out of place. She felt compelled to speak, to counteract the absence in his eyes, the meaningless brightness of the room. "I'm Sandy Allan, Mr. Tomlinson. I'm a friend of Graham Nolan's."

  "You remember Mr. Nolan. Mr. Nolan," the nurse repeated as if he were deaf. "The nice gentleman who's seen all your films."

  The names, his own included, seemed to fall unrecognized past him. "You remember," the nurse said almost accusingly. "He was interested in the film Miss Allan wants to talk to you about, the one where you hurt your back."

  Though he appeared not to react, Sandy felt resentful that he should be reminded of his accident while he was gazing at her. She turned deliberately and followed his gaze. "It's a lovely view," she said, though the climbing frame out there made her unexpectedly nervous-she thought that if an adult stood on the top rung, their face would be level with Leslie Tomlinson's window. She had just realized that when a voice, composed as much of indrawn breaths as exhalations, bayed behind her. "Made me fall," it said.

  Sandy swung round. The stuntman was still gazing as if there were nothing between him and the sky, but his mouth had fallen open, its corners sagging. "Who made you fall, Mr. Tomlinson?" the nurse demanded. "When did they?"

  Sandy's impatience with the nurse overcame her determination not to trouble him. "While you were making the film, do you mean?" she said. "While you were standing in for Boris Karloff?"

  To her surprise and rather to her dismay, the name made his eyes gleam and then roll in their sockets. He glanced around him at the flowered walls and the flowered quilt, as if he were searching for somewhere he could bear to rest his gaze, then he looked beseechingly at her. "It looked through the window," he said, never closing his mouth.

  Was he someone else who'd been distracted by intruders on the set of the film, or at least by the director's paranoia? "I was Mr. Karloff," he said loosely. "I fell off the tower."

  She had to go on, even if it disturbed him. "What did you see at the window?"

  His gaze began to rove again, so desperately she wished she hadn't asked. He stared at the walls and the quilt, and his hands began to pluck at the latter as if he wanted to tear the images of flowers off the cover. He stared past her, and she glanced nervously out of the window. The only figure in sight would be out of his, an old woman on a lawn chair, reading a book printed
so large that Sandy could read it at that distance if she strained her eyes. When she turned to the stuntman, his gaze had quietened and was back in the sky. "The dogs," he mumbled like a last trace of an answer.

  "What about dogs, Mr. Tomlinson?"

  "Mr. Lugosi. He was worried about the dogs."

  "Oh, his pets," Sandy remembered. "He couldn't bring them to England because of the quarantine regulations."

  For the first and only time, Tomlinson looked directly at her. His face quivered with strain, whether to call a memory to mind or to fend it off she couldn't tell. The quivering spread to his lips, which fell open. By the time he finished speaking, his gaze had drifted back to the sky, and neither Sandy nor the nurse was able to provoke any further response. "Not his dogs," he said windily. "The dogs he saw and I did. The dogs with a man's face, and things growing in their eyes."

  Only her sense of the absurd let Sandy approach the reception desk at the hotel. She'd already canceled one booking today, and now she was going to cancel another. She told the receptionist that unexpectedly she had to visit her parents. It wasn't quite a lie, more a way of making herself seem less unreliable. She'd meant to visit them soon anyway, she told herself. They lived less than an hour away from her route to the Lakes. She wanted to make her peace with them if she could, but wouldn't she also welcome the chance to be safe with her family while she tried to think over the last few weeks? Once she admitted that to herself, she was so uncertain of her motives that she didn't call her parents before she set out from Birmingham.

  She drove out of a bunch of lorries on the motorway and sped north for an hour. As soon as she grew used to the speed, a song began to run through her head: "D'ye ken John Peel in his coat so gray?" She'd left Tomlinson singing that line over and over almost tunelessly as he smiled at the sky and feebly tweaked the quilt. The song was part of the score of the film, but knowing that didn't help her dislodge it from her brain. It had been too bloodthirsty for her taste when she was a child, and now the tune dredged up lines which she was perhaps remembering inaccurately but which still made her uncomfortable: "… from the chase to a view, from a view to a death in the morning…", "… and the cry of his hounds would awaken the dead…" and one she had never understood: "D'ye ken that bitch whose tongue is death?" Sounds like another case of blaming the female, she thought, but the thought didn't help much. When she reached the division of the motorways, she followed the route to Liverpool.

  She cruised through the town for a few minutes. Many of the buildings she remembered from her childhood had been ousted by anonymous shopping malls, and she felt so disoriented that she headed for the tunnel at once, though driving under the river made her claustrophobic. Midway she glimpsed a figure emerging from the subterranean wall onto the walkway alongside the road. He must have been a workman, and of course he wasn't chasing her; he must have gone down on all fours to examine something. She was glad to be back on the motorway beyond the toll booths and racing, however briefly, before she turned off toward the sea.

  Beyond Hoylake the houses and their grounds grew larger, more aloof. At West Kirby the peninsula rose to show a panorama of the Irish Sea beyond an obelisk. A tanker gleamed on the horizon and eased itself down over the edge of the world. Sandy took the road opposite the obelisk, toward the farms and the common. Her parents lived just out of sight of the sea. She parked outside the small detached white house, and was opening her door when her mother ran to her along the garden path.

  She hugged Sandy and kissed her and called past her, almost deafening her: "See, I told you it was Sandra's car. Didn't I tell you this morning I could feel we were going to have a visitor?" She touched Sandy's ear and grimaced apologetically, the wrinkles around her large brown eyes and at the corners of her wide dry lips multiplying, before another smile fluttered across her broad face. "I knew it was going to be you," she whispered, "but there's no use trying to persuade your father."

  He came to the front door and peered over his reading glasses, and ducked his head to his hand as always to remove the glasses. Because Sandy remembered him as reading throughout her childhood, to himself or to her, his topheavy face with its pale blue eyes blinking at the low sun looked unprotected; his small ears seemed to have nothing to do now that the heavy earpieces weren't hooked over them. He screwed up his eyes and limped forward, and gave her a hug that smelled of tweed and pipe tobacco and a hint of rosin. "This is a treat. We were hoping to hear from you. You'll be staying, won't you? As long as you like."

  "I thought overnight, if it isn't too much trouble," Sandy told her mother.

  "How could you ever be too much trouble? You know your room is only the guest room when you aren't here. Where will you be off tomorrow?"

  "Up to the Lakes."

  "The good old Lakes. Your father and I stayed there once for a dirty weekend," Sandy's mother cried, and glanced about in case the neighbors had heard.

  "We hadn't realized you were due for a holiday," Sandy's father said, "or is this work?"

  "They've given me time off to recover."

  "We discovered just the other week that two of your father's quartet were gay," her mother said before the silence could grow awkward. "They told us halfway through a Mozart recital. We were flattered they felt they could tell us."

  Her father gave Sandy another squeeze and stepped back. "Carry your bags, miss."

  "You settle yourself in, Sandra, and then we'll have a drink and a chat before we go out for dinner."

  Her father dropped her cases at the foot of the bed and waited until Sandy said, "I'll be down in a few minutes." She kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the counterpane she and her mother had made together one Christmas. The room still felt like hers, with the furniture and floral wallpaper and curtains that she'd chosen as a teenager, and being in it still felt like taking a breather. Today her parents were more emotionally overwhelming than ever, though perhaps by displaying their broadmindedness they were trying to convey obliquely that they were prepared to forget last week's disagreement. She seemed hardly to have lain on the bed when her father called, "What drink will you have?" She sighed and shouted her preference, and soon she went downstairs.

  Her mother was waiting to show her the work she was doing in the botanical gardens at Ness, sketches of rare plants in all their seasons. Sandy sat on a Queen Anne chair in the front room, which was moderately full of elegantly carved furniture whose lines seemed to be developed by the silvery Oriental patterns of the wallpaper, and sipped her gin while she admired the sketchbook. "That one was a little swine," her mother said as Sandy reached the last drawing. "I just hope your London shops won't think the book is too provincial when it's done at last."

  "I'll make sure every one of them stocks it. I'm looking forward to being able to say it's by my mother."

  "Yes," her mother said, so tentatively that Sandy wondered what she wasn't saying.

  "Here's to it," her father said, elevating his Martini.

  The three of them clinked glasses. "And to the Liverpool Philharmonic," Sandy said.

  "Long may they let me saw," her father said. "Which reminds me, I must buy some rosin."

  "Colophony prevents cacophony," Sandy said for him.

  "How old were you when you learned that? Too young to stay up for a concert, I remember. Lord, how many things we bury in our memories to be revived to brighten our declining years."

  "If you two are declining, the rest of the country may as well bury itself."

  "I suppose there's some life in us yet, right enough. Here's to yours."

  "Amen," her mother cried, and paused. "Someone in your line of business was asking to be remembered to you, Sandra."

  "Who was that?"

  "An old boyfriend of yours. Can't you guess? Why, Ian whatever his name was, who escorted you to one of your father's concerts. I should have thought you would know he's in television now."

  "Quite a few people are, you know. He wasn't really what I'd call a boyfriend. I never realized so
meone wearing so much after-shave could be so unshaven. I bore the scars for weeks."

  "He seemed quite polite and musical to me. Anyway, he's grown a beard now, and he's working for the BBC. He'll be moving back to Liverpool now that they've opened their dockland studio."

  "Good luck to him."

  "I wish you were staying long enough for us to show you round dockland. It's a real little village now, you know. Lovely shops and restaurants, and independent television have a studio there too."

  "We'll go next time, but I hope you won't be disappointed if it doesn't tempt me back from London."

  "If you've made your mind up in advance there's no point in showing you at all."

  She was angry with herself for being scrutable rather than with Sandy, and so her tone was only faintly injured when she asked Sandy her news. The conversation had become equable by the time the family went out for dinner. They drove along the peninsula to Parkgate and ate at Mr. Chau's, where colored lights swam in a fountain in the middle of the restaurant and vegetables were shaped like dragons. Halfway through the main courses Sandy's father said "How are Tracy and Hepburn?"

  Her mother chewed furiously, and said "Bogart and Bacall" as soon as she could.

  "They're feeding the weeds, I'm afraid. They were run over last week."

  Her mother reached for her hand. "No wonder you don't know what to do with yourself with all this death around you."

  "I do, honestly. Don't fret."

  "Well, perhaps you do. I can understand your wanting to go up somewhere by yourself. You can see all the way to Wales if you go up on the common, you know, if it's only solitude you're going to the Lakes for."

  "I want to do a bit of research as well."

  "For what?"