Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

  Soon the pub sign came into view, swaying on a forked pole above a car park so meager it looked in danger of being reclaimed by the fields. The pub was called the Ear of Wheat. She parked under the sign, whose faint repetitive squeal she took at first to be the sound of a fault in her car engine. It was swaying in the incessant wind, the irregular breath of the land, a breath that smelled of soil and decay and growth. The wind, or the effect of so much driving, or her period made her shiver. She steadied herself with one hand on the muddy car and hobbled, dragging her suitcase, toward the pub.

  It wore its thatch pulled low above its small windows. Though she could see lights within, hers was the only car. She lifted the latch and sidled into the porch, the wind chasing her as she shoved the door shut, bills announcing dances and amateur productions fluttering on the glass of the porch. She turned the shaky knob of the inner door and stepped over the stone threshold.

  Black oak beams stood out from the walls and the low ceiling of the only room. A paunchy man with a pencil perched behind one ear was fitting an inverted bottle of whiskey in front of the mirror behind the bar, a squarish woman with her red hair in pigtails and wearing slippers in the shape of a cartoon tiger's feet was dealing ashtrays onto the oak tables that were scattered about the room. The only door besides the one to the porch was unmarked. "Excuse me," Sandy said, "is there a loo?"

  "Aye, we've a pair of those for customers." The landlord glowered at her in the mirror as if she had accused him of being unduly primitive. "What can I get you?"

  "Leave the lass now, Alan. You don't want him hindering you, hon, we girls know how it is. Come through here."

  The woman ushered Sandy through the door next to the bar and closed it behind her, leaving her in a short passage narrowed by a bare stone staircase. Sandy jerked the stiff latch of the Ladies', a stone cell with barely enough room for her to open her suitcase. At least she'd had the foresight to buy tampons in Manchester. Even in here she felt spied upon, presumably because the landlord must know what she was doing. She yanked her skirt down and stalked into the bar to buy a drink.

  She carried her half of beer that smelled of grain to a corner table, and was sitting down when the woman sat on the stool opposite. "Bound anywhere special, are you, dear?"

  "Redfield. Is it far?"

  The landlord looked up from polishing a tankard and said unwelcomingly, "You're there."

  "The town, I meant."

  "Straight on. There's no missing it. Nowhere else to go." A frown tweaked his eyes. "Not looking for work, are you?"

  "Just visiting."

  He grunted and recommenced polishing. "Never mind him," the woman said, "it's his way with strangers. Living all your life where you were born makes some of us like that. Me, I like a new face now and then."

  "Do you see much passing trade?"

  "No more than we need to," the landlord said, and muttered an addendum: Sandy was almost sure she heard, "And that's bloody little."

  "I expect you're crowded when they're working in the fields," Sandy said. "I don't suppose Lord Redfield ever comes in for a drink."

  The landlord raised his head like an animal disturbed while feeding. "He knows our place."

  His quiet pride sounded like a warning to her to be careful what she said. She emptied her glass and lifted her suitcase. "You just carry on the way you're going," the woman said, opening the porch door for her, "and you'll see Redfield before you know."

  Sandy made herself as comfortable as possible in the driver's seat and eased the car onto the road. A wind shook the dormant windscreen wipers; the fields surged at her like a wheaten sea. Ripples hundreds of yards long came through the fields to meet her as she drove. For a while she thought they were confusing her sense of perspective, making her unable to determine how far ahead a lonely tree stump was. Then the town appeared, thatched roofs like clumps of mushrooms, and she realized that the stump was beyond the town. It was a tower, a gray watchtower so tall that it seemed to command the town and the yellow landscape. For a moment she felt dwarfed by being watched, tiny as an insect ready to disappear into the earth.

  The road sloped gradually upward to the town, and brought the tower rearing higher. As she reached the outskirts of the town she thought she saw a figure at the top of the tower, but it must be growing there: the colors were wrong for a face. She slowed at the town sign, which stood quivering slightly on the trim verge, its four legs planted in the soil.

  REDFIELD HOME OF STAFF O' LIFE

  DRIVE CAREFULLY

  Beyond it a man was mowing the verge, and turned to watch Sandy as she passed. The ragged tongue that stuck out of his face and swayed in front of it was a stalk he was chewing.

  A few hundred yards past the sign, the town began. Terraces of small newish Tudor cottages gave way to thatched houses on both sides of the road. The front gardens looked as if they were competing for an award for neatness. Much of the western side of the town consisted of the Staff o' Life factory, and she headed toward it through the town square, in which women leaned on strollers full of children and groceries and gossiped beside a war memorial. The square gave Sandy a view of the tower beyond a thoroughfare, and as far as she could see, the top was deserted.

  A road of piebald cottages and thatched houses the color of stubble led straight to the factory gates, which were open and unattended. A wide drive curved past a sprinkler flinging rainbows at a lawn. A few cars were parked in the shadow of the long Victorian facade. Sandy tidied her hair in the driving mirror, but a wind that smelled of baking tousled her hair as soon as she climbed out of the car.

  A ring on the bellpush by a waist-high sliding panel in the wall just inside the entrance produced a bust of a young woman with heavy bluish eyelids. "Welcome to Staffolife," she said as if the name were a single word.

  "Thanks so much. I'm Sandy Allan, looking for Lord Redfield."

  "Yes, of course. Go to the hotel and there'll be a message," the young woman said with a horsey smile so bright it seemed to linger after the panel was back in place.

  Sandy assumed there was only one hotel. She drove back to the square and turned along the main road. The building two stories higher than the shops was a hotel, the Wheatsheaf. An arch that looked mortared with moss led into the hotel car park. She hauled her suitcase up the steps into the lobby, where chandeliers dangled fragments of light above carved oak banisters, settees like unwound leather scrolls, a reception counter inlaid with a rectangle green as a marsh. A plump pale girl with white hair was typing a menu behind the counter, and stood up to greet Sandy. "You may have a message for me," Sandy said, "but first can I have a room?"

  "What would your name be?"

  "Sandy Allan."

  "Your room's ready, Miss Allan."

  "Really?" Sandy swallowed her surprise and picked up the key the girl laid on the counter. "Shall I register?"

  "No need, Miss Allan. Your bill's taken care of. You're to let us know if there's anything else we can do for you."

  That sounded more like a command than Sandy cared for. "Is there a message?"

  "Wasn't that it?" When Sandy said she presumed not, the girl promised, "I'll call you the moment I hear."

  Sandy lugged her suitcase to the next floor up and stumbled along the corridor, past lamps budding in carved leaves that sprouted from the walls, to her room. A print of a harvesting scene hung above the bed. The patchwork quilt and padded curtains and ornate Victorian washstand made the room feel more like a guest room in a cottage than a hotel bedroom. Sandy dumped her case beside the bed, and was sinking back on the quilt when the phone rang.

  It was the hotel receptionist, stuttering with eagerness to deliver herself of the message. "Lord Redfield will see you this afternoon. You're to have lunch first if you've not already fed."

  "I've eaten, thanks," Sandy lied, feeling that an hour's rest would be more useful. "Where will he be?"

  "At the big house, of course."

  "And where's that?"

  "Why, yo
u can't miss it. Just go out of town and there it is." The girl took pity on her ignorance, and added a landmark. "Head for the tower," she said.

  ***

  Sandy went next door to the bathroom she shared with whoever else had a room in the corridor, and ran herself a bath. She lay in the water until she felt relaxed. Once the door rattled, and she called "Someone's in here" before she realized that it must have been a draft from the fire exit at the far end of the corridor, since she could see nobody beyond the frosted glass that formed the upper panel of the bathroom door. She scrubbed herself and climbed out feeling refreshed. As she toweled herself, a trickle of blood was sucked into the unplugged whirlpool.

  She dressed in a suit and pinned her grandmother's pearl brooch to the collar of her blouse, and strolled out of the hotel. She stood beneath the stained-glass awning for a few minutes, enjoying the freedom from driving, watching children skipping home from school with sunny paintings clutched in their hands, and then she made for the edge of the town.

  The shops that clustered near the hotel became infrequent as the terraces stepped back to make room for gardens. Children gazed at her from the houses, one group even turning away from a television to run to the window. Sandy flashed them a smile and wondered if everyone in Redfield knew she was a stranger. They must be why she felt watched.

  As soon as she stepped into the open she had a clear view of the building which the receptionist had called the big house. It was a Tudor palace on a broad strip of grassland which led through the fields of wheat to the tower. In the afternoon light the brick facade of the palace glowed like red clay freshly dug. Ranks of nine windows in the roof-high bays caught facets of the light. Chimneys spiraled up from the steep roofs, and in the midst of the long frontage the towers of a gatehouse rose above turrets and gables. There was no wall between the palace and the town.

  The road forked, one branch leading north to the tower, the other east to the palace. As Sandy walked eastward, the wind played around her legs and tugged at her skirt. Now and then it touched her face, bringing her the smell of sunlit grass. She would have been more alive to the walk if she hadn't kept sensing the tower at her back. Having once looked over her shoulder to see that there was nobody in sight she ignored the tower as best she could.

  It took her twenty minutes to walk from the edge of the town to the palace. As the palace bulked above her, her shadow rose like smoke up the red brick. She pressed the bellpush, the cold white pupil of a gleaming brass eye. Whatever sound it made was held fast within the massive walls. She thought she might have heard dogs bark, but now there was only the prowling of the wind. She was about to press the button again when the carved oak door swung open.

  A butler in livery stood there, his long smooth pinkish face politely neutral. "Madam?"

  "Sandy Allan for Lord Redfield."

  "If madam will follow me," he murmured, and closing the door tight behind her, led her beneath a stone-ribbed vault into a great room paneled in oak that reached almost to the exposed beams. Family portraits interrupted by paintings of hunting and harvesting were stationed on the panels. Logs blazed, a token fire, in the center of a huge arched fireplace. A carpet patterned with sheaves stretched from wall to wall. Here and there about the room, half a dozen sofas spread their arms. The butler indicated the sofa closest to the fire. "If madam will make herself comfortable."

  Once he withdrew, Sandy stood up and began to roam. She felt unreal, as if she were in a film: she couldn't help imagining the room in black and white. Some of the portraits were so old and dark that the Redfield faces seemed to be rising out of earth, large flat faces with eyes set so wide that they made the foreheads appear lower than they were, long broad noses linked to either side of their thin lips by deep grooves in the flesh.

  There was no portrait above the fireplace, only a carving of the Redfield coat of arms. Sandy glanced at that and passed on, then went back for a closer look. The shield was bordered by braids of wheat that curved up to form elaborate horns. She was trying to remember what they reminded her of, trying so hard that she ceased to hear the crackling of the fire, when a voice said, "Miss Allan."

  As she turned, her body seemed to flare up, prickling; she thought for a moment that the fire had. His face was the face of the portraits made fleshier, faint purple veins beginning to claim his cheeks like a sketch for a beard. He was about fifty years old, and a head taller than she was. He wore a suit so unobtrusively elegant it had to be expensive, with the cousin of his dark green tie peeping out of his breast pocket. His eyes were dark and calm, almost dreamy, but watchful. The grooves between his nose and the limits of his mouth deepened as he gave her a formal smile and unfolded one hand toward the sofa by the fireplace. "Please," he said.

  She wasn't sure if she felt hot or cold now, only unsteady. When she was seated, Redfield sat on a sofa diagonally opposite hers, pinching the knees of his trousers as he lowered himself. "Will you have a drink?" he said.

  "I'd love some tea."

  "Name your quencher."

  "Earl Grey?"

  "What else." He rang for the butler and ordered a pot, and detained him with a gesture so small it was practically invisible. "Have you dined," he said to Sandy, "or will you try a sandwich?"

  "That would fill a hole, if it's no trouble."

  "None at all." He sat back and crossed his legs as the butler departed. "Tell me then, how have you found it?"

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "Why, our town. Our way of life."

  "It seems very…" Sandy said, and began again, determined not to be overawed by him. "It seems very orderly."

  "I believe so. Did you mean that as a criticism?"

  "Should I have?"

  "Surely you aren't electing me to tell you what you should do," he said, smiling slightly. "I was forgetting that you've only just arrived. Take your time and see if you can find any of our people that are unhappy with their estate."

  "I haven't thanked you for the accommodation," Sandy said. "Thank you."

  "My pleasure." His momentary frown made her feel she had committed a gaffe. "I want you to have time to see whatever you wish to see. The town and its history are yours. I wonder if you know how the town earned its name."

  "I don't," Sandy said, leaving her questions to bide their time. "Please tell me."

  "This was once the site of a battle which you may have learned about at school. You'll recall that after the Battle of Hastings, the north of the country rebelled against William of Normandy. The lord of this land offered aid to the north, and an army led by one of William's nobles marched on him here and took him unprepared."

  "It does sound familiar."

  "In a single day they slew the lord and his men, and every woman and child. The fields beyond the battlefield were laid waste, and every house and farm was put to the torch. Even the graves in the graveyard were dug up and their contents burned. I fear my ancestor suffered from an excess of zeal."

  "Sounds that way to me."

  "William made my ancestor the lord of all that he had laid waste and gave him the name that described what he'd made of the land. All that remained was the manor that stood where this house is now, and his men were billeted there while they worked the land and built homes for themselves. Perhaps William intended them to turn against my ancestor and join William's army as it marched north, and yet my ancestor had only been demonstrating his loyalty to his king. By our standards those were savage days, you know. I believe this land gave him and his men their just reward and redeemed them by allowing them to feed the populace. The soil made us its own, and we have been here ever since."

  Could hereditary guilt about the battle have made the family hostile to Giles Spence and his film? "The way you said 'the soil…' "

  "The Redfield soil. The marvel of pedologists. They've studied it over the centuries, but they never agree on the source of its fertility. We need only to know that we can trust it to produce the finest wheat in the country year in, year ou
t, no matter how poor the crops are elsewhere."

  "Won't it grow anywhere else?"

  "It was developed to be ideal for this soil. I think we have never forgotten the self-sufficiency we had to learn in the early days of Redfield. Not only wheat grows proudly here, all produce does, and the vigor of our people soon became a watchword. Our men hauled stone for many miles so as to build a tower to watch for danger to the kingdom."

  He glanced up at the darkest portrait, which hung closest to the coat of arms. "Sometimes I wish he could have foreseen how his land made our name. My grandfather used to delight in showing us an agricultural encyclopedia from more than a hundred years ago, which listed eighty-five different varieties of wheat and ignored Redfield out of pique. A variety called Squareheads Master was the leader then, but who has even heard of it today? Still, envy can't hurt us. Now you may have a taste of what we're envied for."

  The butler was approaching with a silver tray. He arranged the tea service and a plateful of cucumber sandwiches on a table beside Sandy, and went away. Redfield watched as Sandy poured herself tea and took a bite of sandwich. "Lovely," she said.

  "Worth preserving?"

  "Definitely." The bread tasted like a summer afternoon, she thought: at least, the taste was so rich and strong and lingering that it made you glad there were English summer afternoons to encourage you to take all the time you needed to savor it. "I've always liked your bread," she told him, "but here it seems even better."

  "I rather think it is. What you have there is the true Redfield taste, the bread that nowadays is baked only for our town and our guests."

  Sandy swallowed, but a faint flavor of iron stayed in her mouth. "You don't grow enough grain to make bread for the nation."

  "Not even Redfield is so fertile. When the cities began to demand our bread we bought grain to mix with our own, and so Staff o' Life was born. We never sell our grain to be mixed elsewhere. It may surprise you to hear that there has never been a strike or any kind of industrial dispute at Redfield, and we have the lowest incidence of crimes of violence in the country. Sadly, today's media have no room for that kind of story. They are too hungry for savagery and despair to see what is worth preserving, I sometimes think."