Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

  She flinched and peered upward, and saw a line of daylight narrow as a knife-edge. It was the outline of a trapdoor, from which hung the iron ring that had touched her. She shoved at the trapdoor with her left hand, then with both hands, until her neck felt as if a weight were threatening to sprain it and her body was a mass of prickling. The trapdoor didn't even creak.

  She braced herself on the next higher step, legs wide apart, and tried to throw her whole weight upward. The trapdoor stirred, rose, tottered and fell open with a hollow thud beneath the sky, and Sandy heaved herself onto the crown of the tower, onto stone that felt unexpectedly warm. She sat there, eyes closed, to recover from her climb and her struggle with the trapdoor. After a while she crawled to the parapet and used it to help herself to her feet.

  The landscape rose with her, flexing its fields of wheat. She grasped the parapet with both hands, feeling as if the sky might sweep her from her perch. If the wind hadn't already snatched her breath, the view would have. Fields that the afternoon had polished yellow as honey stretched to the rim of the world, where the land and the sky turned pale. At the eastern limit she saw the sea, the edge of an enormous scythe-blade. A flight of birds swooped glittering from above the bunched town on her right toward the palace on her left. There was a chapel beyond it, she saw, a squat gray building that looked older than the palace, old as the tower. The birds flew up from the chapel like scraps of a fire and wheeled toward the distant sea, but Sandy's attention was still on the chapel. Redfield had said that every one of his forefathers had a place there, and he'd told her to go wherever she liked. She could see nothing about the tower to suggest why the Redfields had objected to the story she'd read earlier, but there might be some explanation at the chapel.

  She gripped the parapet and walked around the tower for a last view. She felt as if her senses were raising the top of her head to let it all in. Clouds poured by above the tower, and she sensed the turning of the world; for a dizzy moment she felt herself clinging to the tip of the tower protruding from the world, racing through the sky. The thought of climbing higher made her throat tighten. She let go of the parapet and crossed to the trapdoor.

  A faint stale smell rose to meet her. Rain must have seeped around the trapdoor and watered some growth on the steps. If she didn't close the trap behind her on her way down, the steps wouldn't be safe for anyone who came up after her. She climbed down as far as the dark, to see if there were any patches of vegetation she would need to avoid. Having found none, she went back to shut the trapdoor.

  She closed both hands around the scaly ring and hauled at it. When the door ignored her, she took a step down and threw all her weight backward. The ring shifted in its socket, and she lost her footing and swung into space. Her weight on the ring heaved the door up. She had barely time to duck, pressing her chin against her collarbone so hard she couldn't breathe, when the door crashed into place, blotting out the light like a fall of earth.

  Her feet scrabbled at the dark that smelled of rot, her wrists aching from the slam of the trapdoor. At last she found a foothold. She let herself down onto the step and crouched there trembling and hugging her knees, cursing the Redfields for building their tower exclusively for men, with a trapdoor no woman could manage without endangering herself. The steps were male too. She gathered herself, breathing as deeply as she could bear with the stale smell, and stood up.

  This section of the steps would be the longest stretch of darkness before she reached a window. She pressed her hands against the cold close walls and stretched one leg out, groping downward. She stepped down, steadied herself, groped again. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a task; her body was establishing a rhythm. But she had climbed down fewer than ten steps when she faltered and held her breath.

  She had to go down, there was no other way. The sound like hollow irregular breathing below her must be wind through the first of the slits in the wall, a wind that was intensifying the stale smell. All the time she had been at the top she had seen nobody within a mile of the tower. She mustn't imagine that someone was waiting for her just beyond the turn. She thrust her hands against the walls as if the stone might lend her a little of its strength, and made herself go down.

  Ten steps, eleven, twelve. Each one felt like the absence of a step just before she found her footing. It didn't feel as if someone unseen were waiting below her to grab her foot and jerk her off balance, she told herself fiercely. Another step, and her eyes began to flicker with glimpses of the curve of the outer wall. She hopped down, almost losing her hold on the walls. The steps ahead were deserted. She climbed down into the light, as far as the highest window.

  She rested and peered out of the tower. She would have liked to see someone in the fields, not to call out to them but simply to know they were near. She mustn't linger, or she might lose the will to keep descending. She pushed herself away from the window, and was stepping into her own shadow shen she froze. She'd heard a rattle of metal above her. It was the iron ring.

  The trapdoor hadn't been quite closed, she reassured herself. It must have fallen belatedly into place. There couldn't be anyone above her, but just the idea of it brought the darkness below her alive as well. A stale sour taste of fear grew in her mouth. She felt sick, and then furious. She thumped the walls and let herself down onto the next step.

  When she could no longer see where she was going, she began to kick out before stepping downward. The thin irregular breaths of the wind, only the wind, were both above her and below her now, as the rotten smell seemed to be. She would have dug the whistle out of her handbag, but then she wouldn't be able to hold on to the wall. She controlled the urge to lash out with her feet, for fear of overbalancing, but she was climbing down so determinedly that more than once she almost fell.

  She made herself climb past the next window without stopping, so as not to be dazzled, nor to be tempted to stay in the light. There were only another six windows to go, almost twenty turns of the spiral which led into darkness that felt poised to leap or just to let her walk into its arms. Each stretch seemed a little darker than the last, and in each the hollow windy sounds above her seemed to be strengthening. Wouldn't they, since there were more and more windows above her? The steps felt as if they were growing taller, especially where it was dark, but that simply meant her legs were tiring. By the time she had counted five more windows her palms were throbbing from the roughness of the walls, her legs felt scarcely capable of holding her up.

  She stumbled past one more window. She groped down through darkness that felt as if it were turning sluggishly and 194

  sneaking the steps away from her reaching feet. Something was wrong; the light from the doorway should be visible by now. The breathing darkness seemed to lurch toward her. She floundered downward and saw light, too faint, too narrow. Even the sight of the window that was its source wasn't reassuring. She had miscounted, she told herself: this had to be the last one, she couldn't go on laboring downward past window after window; that could happen only in a nightmare. She scraped her palms on the walls as she ventured down toward a darkness that seemed suddenly to be holding its breath. When she saw the edge of the daylight that lay within the doorway, her relief was so great that she almost missed the next step.

  Once she reached the bottom of the steps she sat on them, ignoring the darkness at her back, and gazed at the sky until her legs ceased shivering. At last she pushed herself to her feet and limped outside. The road was still empty, and so were the fields as far as she could see, except for a scarecrow in the wheat near the grass. Its ragged head was a dark blotch against the sunlight that glowed through holes in its torso and gleamed dully through the bunches, which looked disconcertingly sharp, at the ends of its arms.

  She was halfway to the town before it occurred to her how odd it was to place a scarecrow so near the edge of a field. She had to assume that someone inexpert had put it there, for when she glanced over her shoulder it was no longer to be seen. It must have fallen and be lying low in the wheat. S
he headed for the houses as fast as she could limp, not looking back.

  ***

  "Will you be-"

  "I'm still not sure," Sandy said. "Are you quite certain there's no message?"

  "I've been here ever since you went out, Miss Allan," the receptionist said with a hint of testiness.

  "And nobody new has come in?"

  "They couldn't have, or I'd have seen them."

  "Thanks anyway," Sandy said, and made for the bar to check, in case there was another entrance. There wasn't, and in any case the bar was locked. She hurried upstairs, feeling as if she were dodging another repetition of the question about dinner. Dodging it infuriated her, and so did the receptionist's maternal interest in her welfare, if only because it made Sandy feel childish-childish enough to have panicked in the tower. Her behavior there enraged her most of all. It was one reason why she wished Roger were here, so that he could scoff at her.

  She slammed her bedroom door and phoned Staff o' Life. Nobody had been looking for her there or left a message for her. She called Roger's flat, and cut off the ringing when she'd had enough. His book must have delayed him, but why couldn't it have delayed him long enough for her to reach him now? At least his absence gave her time to visit the Redfield chapel.

  She made herself comfortable and went out of the hotel, half-expecting to see Roger or to hear him call to her. The children were quiet now, home from school. The next crowd would be of workers from Staff o' Life. As Sandy walked she heard the scrape of a spade in a garden, the rising shriek of a kettle, the voice of a children's television host, proposing a game with unctuous heartiness.

  The tower stepped back like a master of ceremonies, opening the fields to her. There was no sign of the scarecrow, no movements higher than the swaying wheat. Several hundred yards short of the palace she moved onto the grass, toward the shadow of wheat that lay like a seepage of mud along the border of the fields. She thought of skirting the palace widely, but why need she be surreptitious? She walked straight to the chapel.

  Curtains that looked too heavy to shift blinded the multiple eyes of the bays that swelled out from the palace, and she told herself that it was only her imagination that made her feel watched, a lone figure in the midst of the flat landscape. She resisted the urge to place the chapel between herself and the palace, and strolled to the entrance.

  The chapel was an early Norman building, squat and gray. The windows in the thick walls were narrow and arched, the stout oak door, studded and hinged with iron, was set in an arch bulging with rough pillars. She reached out to push the door, and glanced up at the palace. A naked woman with her legs spread wide and her fingers digging deep into herself was staring down from the corner of the chapel with eyes gouged out of the stone.

  She'd seen similar figures, apparently intended to rob the faithful of any pleasure in sex, on other Norman churches. She went to the corner and surveyed the corbel, where there were several other figures: a man with a chipped erection and a mouth stuffed with wheat, a face with hands pulling its lips wide to let out a grotesquely long tongue, a woman holding what Sandy hoped were two fruits in front of her chest to feed a pair of fleshless canine figures, which were biting and clawing at them. Sandy turned away, and a voice above her said conversationally, "Miss Allan."

  Lord Redfield was leaning out of an upper window of the palace, his large flat face almost bored, his eyebrows slightly raised, creasing his forehead. "Still getting the lie of the land?" he said.

  "You did say I could go where I liked. I saw your chapel from the tower and thought you wouldn't mind."

  "Nor do I. Steep yourself in our history by all means. You've done the tower, have you? I'm impressed."

  "It took something out of me, I'll admit. I wouldn't call it your main tourist attraction."

  "It was never meant to be. It was strictly for those with sufficient of our strength. I hope you will excuse me now if I leave you to your delving," he said, and closed the window.

  Sandy strolled back to the door of the chapel. There was no handle, only a rusty keyhole. One push told her that the door was locked. She supposed she could ask for the key, except that it seemed clear Redfield would have offered it to her or had the door opened for her. It was the family chapel, after all, hardly a public place. Perhaps he wouldn't mind if she looked in the windows, but she went round to the side of the chapel away from the palace, just in case.

  Beyond the first window, over which a man squatted with his penis in his mouth, she saw dark pews stained by the afternoon light and standing on a rough stone floor. Through the next window, beneath a figure which appeared to be splitting itself open from anus to chin, she could see more pews and a corner of the altar. Between this window and the one nearest the altar, mossy steps led down under the chapel.

  If she wasn't meant to enter the chapel, she could scarcely expect to go into the vault. She went to the top of the steps and shaded her eyes. The nine steps led down to an iron gate, so elaborate that she could see nothing beyond it. She listened for a moment in case anyone was nearby, then she picked her way down the softened slippery green steps.

  Gripping both uprights of the pockmarked arch, she ducked close to the iron tracery of the gate. Apart from the stirring of her own blurred shadow in the dimness beyond it, she could see nothing she could put a name to. She ventured forward another inch, and her foot skidded off the lowest step.

  She flung up a hand to protect her face, and inadvertently elbowed the gate. It groaned and swung inward. She hadn't thought to search for the bolt, taking it for granted that the gate was locked. Now she saw that part of the tracery was in fact the bolt, pulled back just short of the socket in the wall. She glanced up the steps, past the top where blades of grass trembled, and cupped her ear. The field was quiet as the clouds sailing by. She stooped under the arch, feeling as if she was being made to bow to all the Redfields, and stood waiting for her eyesight to catch up with her.

  Now that the gate was open, the vault was less dark. Beyond the fat gray pillars that supported the ceiling, which was so low she thought the present Redfield might have to duck if he ever went in there, she could see memorial plaques set in the greenish walls. She began to read the plaques to her left, starting with the first that didn't look too overgrown to decipher, inscribed to the memory of a fifteenth-century Redfield. She read four plaques before she admitted to herself she had been mistaken to suspect what she had half suspected. There was no pattern to the dates of death- nothing like the regularity of which "The Lofty Place" had made so much.

  She read one more plaque, to be absolutely certain. There was no need for her to venture into the darker reaches of the vault, which must extend beyond the chapel, toward the fields of wheat. The faint stale smell must be the smell of moss or something else that had grown in the dark, and the muffled hollow rustling had to be the wind in the grass at the top of the steps.

  She was on her way out when she noticed that a shift in the light had made another plaque visible, close to the gate. It was so old that it had cracked from corner to corner. She crossed the floor, the stones of which felt swollen, and squinted at the inscription. The plaque was so overgrown that most of the carved letters were stuffed with moss, which she thought must be one source of the smell of stale growth. She'd assumed that a shadow was making the diagonal crack appear wider than it was, but in fact it was wide enough to slip her fingers through. Strings of moss glistened between its lips. She moved aside a little so as not to block the light that was reflected from the nearest pillar, and squatted down to bring her face closer to the plaque. Eventually she managed to distinguish the date of death, which suggested no more of a pattern than the other carved dates had. "Sorry to bother you," she murmured, and grasped her knees to push herself to her feet, her dangling handbag nudging her like an old dog. Cramp in her thighs arrested her in a curtsy halfway to standing, and so she had time to see what she hadn't realized she had already glimpsed through the crack.

  It was only a hole,
a large hole that seemed to extend back further than would have been necessary to house a coffin. Presumably there had been a coffin which had rotted away at some time in the past. No doubt the far end of the niche had collapsed with age too, Sandy thought, trying to massage the cramp from her thighs so that she could move away. The object she could just make out beyond the crack must be a tangle of roots, and of course it wasn't really stirring. Roots must have broken through the collapsed wall of the niche, another proof of how fertile the soil was, and over the years they'd formed a scrawny shape that looked crouched, about to leap. Though her thighs were still aching, she had unlocked her muscles sufficiently to be able to stagger to her feet-but she staggered so badly that she needed to support herself, and the only support within reach was the plaque.

  She felt it give way. Perhaps the moss hid other cracks in the stone. The plaque was about to fall to pieces, opening the niche. She wavered backward, bumping into the pillar, before she realized that she hadn't felt stone giving way, only its pelt of moss. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, roughly enough to steady herself, and then she marched toward the steps. A face loomed out of the darkness above her, inside the arch.

  Her legs jerked together, bruising her knees, and she almost fell headlong. She retreated a few inches and saw that the face was a carving. "Panicky bitch," she snarled. It looked at least as old as anything in the vault, probably older. It was so eroded that she couldn't tell if it was meant to be a hungry face composed of wheat, or overgrown by it, or turning into woven stalks. It looked dismayingly threatening and primitive, and far more like the sketch Charlie Miles had made for her than the coat of arms carved above the Redfield mantelpiece had.

  She hurried to the steps and closed the gate behind her, and saw its vague shadow flood across the stone floor like an upsurge of soil. She scrambled to ground level, wondering why the rustle of vegetation had seemed louder in the vault than in the open. Just now she was more concerned that Lord Redfield might think she had been out of sight for too long. Once she was past the chapel she could see nobody watching, but that didn't make her feel less watched.