Ancient Images

by Ramsey Campbell

  The projection room was at the far end of the corridor, past the deserted office. As she reached the room, she heard a sound like claws on metal. It was the cooling of one of a pair of projectors that occupied much of the space in the room. She smelled hot metal, and told herself hastily that it smelled nothing like blood. She hurried to the carton Barclay had brought in. She clattered open the round can that lay uppermost in it, lifted the spool off the projector, lowered it carefully into the can. She fitted the lid onto the can and closed the cardboard flaps, and straightened up, her arms laden with the carton. A blurred face rose up in the auditorium and peered at her through a window.

  It was her own face, reflected in the glass. She clutched the carton to herself and stumbled into the corridor, feeling as if her burden were dragging her forward, forcing her almost to run so as not to drop it. The dark foyer swallowed her shadow, and she staggered past the double doors, one of which was propped ajar by a fragment of plaster. She leaned on the box office sill for a moment while she took a firmer grip on the carton, and then she launched herself toward the glass doors. A shadow half as tall again as she was came to meet her, towering among the shredded posters stuck to the outside of the doors.

  It shrank to fit its head and hands around the face and hands that pressed themselves against the glass. "I can't open the door," Sandy called.

  Barclay opened it for her and insisted on carrying the film to her car. "I didn't mean you to have to deal with this all by yourself. The shop was shut and I had to go further. Was it good? Did I miss much?"

  "Nothing you should regret missing."

  He frowned rather wistfully at her; he must think she was trying to cheer him up. "Will you keep me in mind when it's going to surface? Maybe an invite?" he suggested, miming writing, and looked disappointed by her noncommittal murmur. As she drove away she saw him on the steps of his cinema, waving tentatively, and she was taken aback to find herself envying him. She was beginning to realize that managing to make her way safely out of the darkened cinema didn't feel at all like an escape.

  ***

  She was driving around the outskirts of Lincoln, and debating whether to head back into the town for dinner, when she switched on the radio in search of company. Among the interchangeable rock stations, whose drums always emerged from the static ahead of any melody, she found a Lincolnshire voice reading the news. Seamen were on strike, and a lorry had overturned on Erskine Street, the Roman road north out of Lincoln. Enoch's Army would be traveling all night and would arrive at Redfield early tomorrow morning.

  Sandy had expected them to rest somewhere overnight, and her informant at the AA must have. Either the police were keeping them on the move or Enoch and his folk were anxious to arrive where they believed they would be welcome. Did that mean Roger had failed to convince them of the danger? He still had more than half the night, he could be biding his time. All Sandy knew was that she had to be at Toonderfield before dawn.

  She wouldn't be much use unless she ate. The first two pubs she passed on the increasingly lonely road had stopped serving dinner, but several miles further on she found one that hadn't quite, the Poacher. She ate jugged hare and gazed at polished oak and brasses. A hunting horn shone dully on a beam above her head. The strong beer she was drinking, and the respite from driving, loosened her thoughts and let them wander, but not far. Had there ever been poachers at Redfield? Once upon a time, wouldn't they have been shot on sight? That kind of bloodshed used to be taken for granted. If it had happened at Redfield during one of the fiftieth years, would it have satisfied the land?

  She made her pint of beer last until shortly before closing time, and was on her way out through an ungainly passage of fat bricks when she noticed that the worn stone stairs beside her led to guest rooms. The idea of resting on a bed in a warm room for a few hours was almost irresistible, but in order to be certain of reaching Toonderfield ahead of the convoy she would need to be up earlier than the staff of the pub. Besides, how could she even dream of taking a room when Roger was out there on her behalf? She marched herself out of the pub and breathed in the chill of the night, as if its sting would keep her more awake.

  Other cars were departing, fanning out across the landscape. One followed her northeastward for a few miles, then its lights turned aside into a dip where they were extinguished so quickly that she thought there had been a crash until they reappeared in her mirror. They shrank like a spent match, and then there was nothing behind her except darkness and the cans of film.

  The beams of her headlights nudged the dark, touching hedges, signs striped with arrows where the road curved, infrequent trees. Very occasionally she passed a handful of cottages, always unlit. At first she could hardly distinguish the flat land from the sky, except for the faint blur of mist where they met. Close to midnight a lopsided moon edged above the mist. It looked like a flaw appearing in a sky of black ice that weighed down the landscape. It turned the fields into a monochrome patchwork that made her feel surrounded by the black and white of the film. Her headlights seemed almost as valuable now for the glimpses of color they snatched from the dimness as for lighting her way. She would have preferred the road behind her to be completely dark; she wasn't enjoying the way trees and hedges in her mirror were barely visible. Too often they looked as if part of them was threatening to reveal another shape.

  She trod on the brake, and a hedge flared red behind her. "There's nothing there, all right?" she cried in a rage, and flung herself out of the car to stare about. The silent empty land seemed paralyzed by the weight of the sky, except for the part of the hedge which the brakelights had stained, the shrub which had then appeared to sneak aside into the dark. She couldn't identify which thin shrub it was; she might almost have thought it was no longer there. She slammed her door defiantly loud and wound the windows as tight as they would go before she drove off. "Don't you dare start looking in the mirror," she snarled at herself.

  However much she concentrated on the road, it left her alone with her thoughts. Now and then a bump in the tarmac rattled the cans of film. They were safest with her, she told herself, and where else could she have hidden them? Even if she had arranged for them to be locked away at her bank she would have had to take them there personally. She wouldn't have had time. Nobody who was likely to betray her knew she had them, and the boot of her car was the last place the Redfields would think of looking for them. Why did that thought make her feel suddenly more vulnerable? She felt as if she might prefer not to know until she was somewhere less lonely, less dark.

  The horizon was rising. There must be a main road to the uplands, but she had missed it somehow. The road she was on wound back and forth as if it didn't want to arrive where it was heading. At least she had plenty of fuel, and several hours in which to drive to Redfield. She still had several hours out here before the dawn.

  At last the road looped upward, so gradually that she was hardly aware of climbing. The land spread out below her in the moonlight like an icebound sea, patchily misted as if areas were melting. There wasn't a headlight other than hers in the entire landscape. From a crest of the uplands she saw an even wider loneliness, and found she was shivering. Of course it would be cold up here, and the smell of earth came from the fields or from the ditches that bordered the road. She couldn't close the windows any tighter to keep the smell out of the car.

  A bump in the road shook the cans of film. The sound made her glance in the mirror. The road glistened emptily in the wake of the car. There was nothing behind her to be afraid of, nothing but the film. Even if it had disturbed her while she was watching it, it was locked away. It was nothing but two spools of celluloid packed into cans, it was just a series of images deadened by the dark. Without light and machinery to give them life, they were no threat at all.

  But she couldn't help reflecting that the image she had seen in the Redfield vault was locked in the boot of her car-the only faithful reproduction of that image which had ever been seen outside Redfield. If the car
ving had been incorporated into the vault, did that matter? It might be as old as it looked, centuries older than the vault; it might have been carved in the days when the land was first fed with blood, but why should that make her nervous of the cans of film?

  The road dipped, putting out the moon. The cans rattled as though the sudden shadow had wakened them, though of course it was the fault of the irregular surface of the road. Spence must have entered the vault in search of secrets he could use against the Redfields, or to find names to include in his film as a petty revenge. He'd seen the carving and had had Charlie Miles design an extra set in which it figured-and after that, more fear had attended the filming than could be accounted for.

  Later Spence had been killed at Redfield, by natural causes or otherwise. Natural causes could scarcely account for all the violence she had read about in the graveyard; those responsible for the inscriptions clearly hadn't thought so. That wasn't to say that over the centuries there wouldn't have been bloodshed in the ordinary course of things, and some of this might well have coincided with the cycle she'd identified. Perhaps it was only in those years when human nature didn't feed it that the Redfield land sent out its servants to shed blood.

  She wished she hadn't thought that now. It made her feel hunted-more hunted than she had been trying not to admit to herself she already felt. If she imagined that the land was able to send something to hunt victims on its behalf, she might wonder if the inclusion of the image in the film had brought the guardians of Redfield past the boundaries of the land, to ensure that the secret of Redfield wasn't betrayed. She might imagine that whoever saw the image in the film was in danger, or even anyone who helped revive the film. Suppose Graham had fallen because he was fleeing in terror from what he'd found he had chased? Suppose it hadn't been her cats that had torn up his notes?

  "Shut up, don't be so stupid!" The night was thinking for her, she tried to tell herself. These were the kinds of thoughts you had when you wakened at the low point of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but being unable to stop thinking them out here was worse. The more they raced the more convincing they seemed. The dark on either side of the lit patch of road and of the wake of her taillights was so thick that she could imagine parts of it were solid, pacing her on both sides of the road.

  The road dipped toward the flat lands, and she let out a shaky sigh. A few hundred yards ahead it curved out of the oppressive shadow of the higher ground. If she couldn't hold her breath until she reached the sloping field of moonlight, surely she could hold her thoughts still. She pressed the accelerator, wishing that she didn't feel as if she were trying to outrun the dark.

  She shivered as a smell of earth and staleness seeped into the car. The dark that flanked the vehicle was restless; she glimpsed movement at both edges of her vision. There must be a chill wind that was forcing the smell into the car. The moonlight was less than two hundred yards ahead. She sucked in a breath which she vowed she wouldn't release until she was in the light. How faint it was, and yet how reassuring it promised to be! She trod harder on the pedal as her breath built up in her throat; she felt as if she couldn't swallow. Here was the fringe of the light, and now it spilled like diluted milk over the bonnet of the car. The vehicle raced out into the moonlight, and so did the two figures that had been pacing it in the dark.

  Though they were on all fours, they weren't animals. That much she saw as her hands wrenched at the wheel, as her leg jerked and shoved the accelerator to the floor. Their heads looked swollen, too large for their naked scarecrow bodies. Grayish manes that might be hair or vegetation streamed back over their sticklike necks, over their ribs where gaps were encrusted with shadows or earth. As she floored the pedal the two figures raced past the car, their muscles flexing like windblown branches, and turned their faces to her as they ran. She saw how their grayish manes grew out of ragged eye sockets, from one of which a clenched flower dangled as if it had been gouged. The sight made her forget to breathe, shrank her mind around her panic, shrank it too small for thoughts. When a long curved sign appeared at the limit of her headlights, she didn't immediately recognize the danger.

  She stamped on the brake as the beams of her headlights plunged over the drop beyond the sharp bend. The car skidded, its rear wheels screeching toward the drop, and zigzagged out of control along the winding road. Somehow she managed to keep the wheels out of the ditch. She must have cried out in rage and terror, for she was breathing again. The car juddered to a standstill before she thought to change gears. She gripped the steering wheel and pressed herself back in her seat, her body shaking, her breaths huge and helpless. She was struggling to regain enough control of herself to be able to drive when a figure padded in front of the car and reared up in the glare of the headlights.

  Its mottled limbs looked both lithe and horribly thin. Its torso had shrunk around its ribs, its greenish penis had withered like a dead root. Almost worse than all this, she recognized the face. Perhaps she was recognizing that the eyes, when it had had eyes, had been set so wide as to make the forehead seem lower than it was, but the vegetation that patched the skull had grown into a misshapen parody of the face that had once been there-the Redfield face.

  A movement in the mirror dragged her gaze away. The other figure was behind the car; its Redfield mask with the dangling eye looked raw in the glow of the taillights. She was trapped. If she tried to run them down they would easily dodge the car, and she already knew that she couldn't drive faster than they could run. They must be capable of anything their land needed them to do. She could feel her body preparing to get it over with, to step into the cold and the darkness so that they could finish her off with their long jagged nails. At least, unlike Graham, she would know why she was dying. Like him, she would be dying for the film.

  The overgrown faces lifted blindly toward her, as if they sensed her despair, and she let out a hiss of rage that made her teeth ache. She hadn't come so far to die alone out here. What would she be allowing to happen at Redfield, to Roger and the others, if she didn't go on? "Fuck you," she cried at the weedy faces, "and fuck your film! 8 Shaking with fury and terror, weeping at the thought of giving up all that she had achieved on Graham's behalf, she groped under the dashboard for the boot release. If she gave them what they had come for, mightn't they leave her alone?

  She tugged the handle, and the lid of the boot sprang up. The figure in the headlight beams poked its patchy face at her and crouched forward as if it meant to leap, and the car shook as something struck it from behind. She heard the cans of film begin to rattle violently, but the lid of the boot blocked her view. She reached stealthily for the ignition key, praying that however they were able to sense her, they couldn't hear her thoughts.

  Suddenly the cans of film were flung onto the road behind the car. The echoing crash made her draw a painful breath which she seemed unable to expel while the scarecrow figure blocked her way, its head turning slightly from side to side, its grassy mane waving in the wind, greenish blotches trembling on its cheeks and in one eye. It leaped, and she shrank back, even when she realized it was darting past the car.

  As she clutched the ignition key she saw the figures begin to worry the cans of film, scrabbling at the lids with their claws, nudging them with their swollen faces. One lid clattered away into the ditch, and the two figures converged on the opened can as if it were a plate of dog food. Sandy thought they might be about to fight doglike over it, and giggled uncontrollably. She twisted the key in the ignition, and the faces lifted toward her from the can of film.

  The engine spluttered, caught, coughed fumes at the two figures, obscuring her view of them. The fumes drifted away as the car jerked forward. The figures were still at the can. As the glow of the taillights gave them back to the dark she saw them clawing the film onto the tarmac and beginning to tear it to shreds.

  The other can would delay them for a few minutes, but then would they follow her? They mightn't hunt her down just for knowing the secret of Redfield, but would
n't they for seeking to prevent bloodshed there? She drove down onto the flat land, trying to keep her mind blank in case it betrayed her, forcing herself to concentrate on the route. More than once she missed her way on the lonely roads. She felt like a puppet able only to drive, capable of flying apart in panic if she let her thoughts even momentarily loose. She was afraid to glance in the mirror or out of the windows beside her, a fear that seemed to grip her tighter and tighter by the scruff of the neck.

  The edges of the landscape turned grayer as the approach of dawn raised mist from the fields. The dawn itself was muffled, but at least it allowed her to dare to glance around her. As far as she could see, she wasn't being followed, though there was no telling with the fields of wheat around her. Her head throbbed with reaction to all that she'd been through, a throbbing that spread through her body, threatening worse if she relaxed. She couldn't, she hadn't time. The sun rose through the mist, turning the fields red, and she was nearly in sight of Toonderfield, surely she was. She prayed that the convoy was approaching on another road, still safe over the horizon behind her. Then the road she was following sloped up to a crest that showed her Toonderfield, among fields that looked bathed in blood, and she saw that she was too late.

  ***

  The convoy was halted at Toonderfield. The line of vehicles wound back out of the small wood to the police car, the caution on the tail. She could see no vehicles on the far side of the trees. The sight of the convoy, lying still as a snake whose head had been cut off, made her desperate to find out what had happened. Perhaps it didn't resemble a beheaded reptile so much as a creature whose skull had been supplanted by the copse, a new green head that was too large. She managed to take slow regular breaths which just about kept her calm, and drove along the deserted open road as fast as she dared, toward the green clump that was darkened by the reddening of the landscape.