Alone with the Horrors

by Ramsey Campbell

  "I'll reimburse you when we get back to the car," his father told her, joining them as Ian craned over the rim. He couldn't see the round gleams now. His mother gripped the back of his trousers as he stretched his arm out and let go of the coin, then closed his eyes at once.

  He didn't want anything for himself except for his parents to stop fighting, but he didn't know what to wish in order to bring that about. He thought of asking that they should have their deepest wishes, but wouldn't that be at least two? He tried to make up his mind who deserved a wish more or whose wish would be more helpful, then he wondered if he'd already had his wish while he was thinking. He opened his eyes, as if that might help, and thought he saw the coin still falling, within reach if he craned over the rim, still available to be taken back. His mother pulled at him, and the coin had gone. He heard a plop like breath rising to the surface of water or mud.

  "Step out now, we must be nearly there," his father said, taking his mother's arm, and frowned back at Ian. "I've told you once about lagging. Don't try my patience, I'm warning you."

  Ian ran after them before he'd had time to make sure whether the stones with the words were as loose as they looked, whether they could be placed along the rim in a different order. He wasn't sure now, as he shoved himself away from the glade where the ingots no longer were; he didn't want to be. He was suddenly terrified that he had already lost his way, that he would wander through the winter forest until he strayed onto the path he'd taken that day with his parents, until he ended up where it led, as the short day grew dark. He couldn't shake off his terror even when he stumbled back onto the sandstone path, not until he was in the car, gripping the wheel that his hands were shaking, sitting and praying he would regain control of himself in time to be able to drive out of the forest before nightfall. He mustn't wonder if the gold had brought his wish. He mightn't know until he died, and perhaps not even then.

  His father never looked back, not even when the trail he was following out of the glade forked. He chose the left-hand path, which was wider. It continued to be wider until Ian's mother began to glance about as if she could see something besides trees, or wished she could. "Keep up," she said sharply to Ian, and to his father "I'm cold."

  "We must be near the stream, that's all." His father spoke as though he could see the stream among the crowding trees, which were so close now that whenever you moved it seemed that someone was moving with you, from tree to tree. When Ian looked back he couldn't see where the path had been wider. He didn't want his mother to notice that; it would only make her ------------------------------------362

  more nervous and start another argument. He struggled through a tangle of undergrowth and ran ahead. "Where do you think you're--was his father demanded. "All right. Stay there."

  His change of tone made Ian peer ahead. He'd almost reached another glade, but that was no reason for his father to sound as if he'd meant to come here all along; there was nothing in the glade but several heaps of dead branches. He took a few steps forward to clear his eyes of sunlight, and saw that he must have been mistaken. There were several picnic tables and benches, and no heaps of branches after all.

  He cried out, for his father had caught up with him silently and was digging his fingers into Ian's shoulder, bruising it. "I told you to stay where you were."

  His mother winced and took Ian's hand to lead him to a table. "I won't let him do that again," she murmured. "He may do it to his pupils at school, but I won't have him doing it to you."

  Ian didn't quite believe she would be able to stop his father, especially not when his father dumped the knapsack on the table in front of her and sat down, folding his arms. Ian could feel an argument threatening. He moved away to see what was beyond the glade.

  There was another picnic area. He could just see a family at a table in the distance; a boy and a girl and their parents, he thought. Perhaps he could play with the children later. He was wondering why their picnic table looked more like one than his, when his father shouted "Come back here and sit down. You have made enough fuss about wanting a drink."

  Ian dawdled towards the table, for the argument was starting: it made the glade seem smaller. "You expect to be waited on, do you?" his mother was saying.

  "I did the carrying, didn't I?" his father retorted. Both of them stared at the knapsack, until at last his mother sighed and undid the straps to take out the cups and the bottle of lemonade. She sipped hers as his father emptied his cup in four equal swallows punctuated by deep breaths. Ian gulped his and gasped. "Please may I have some more?"

  His mother shared what was left in the bottle between the three cups and reached in the knapsack, then stared in. "I'm afraid that's all we have to drink," she said, as if she couldn't believe it herself.

  "You could have fooled me." His father squirmed his shoulders ostentatiously. "What the devil have I been carrying?"

  She began to unpack the containers of food, cold chicken and salad and coleslaw. Ian realised what was odd about the table: it was too clean for an ------------------------------------363

  outdoor table, it looked like. ... His mother was peering into the knapsack. "We'll have to eat with our fingers," she said. "I didn't bring the plates and cutlery."

  "What do you think we are, savages?" His father glared about at the trees, as if someone might see him eating that way. "How can we eat coleslaw with our fingers? I've never heard such nonsense in my life."

  "I'm surprised I packed anything at all," she cried, "you've got me so distracted."

  It was like a table in a cafe, Ian thought, and looked up as someone came into the glade. At least now his parents wouldn't be able to argue; they never did in front of people. For a moment, until he blinked and sat aside out of the sunlight, he had the impression that the eyes of the two figures were perfectly circular.

  The two men were heading straight for the table, purposefully. They were dressed from head to foot in black. At first he thought they were some kind of police, coming to tell his parents they weren't supposed to sit here, and then he almost laughed, realising what their black uniform meant. His father had realised too. "I'm afraid we've brought our own food," he said brusquely.

  The first waiter shrugged and smiled. His lips in his pale thin face were almost white, and very wide. He made a gesture at the table, and the other waiter went away, returning almost at once with cutlery and plates. He was coming from the direction of the well, where the trees were thickest and the stray beam of sunlight had dazzled Ian. Ian wondered what else he'd failed to notice in passing.

  The waiter who'd shrugged opened the containers of food and served it onto the plates. Ian glimpsed a pattern on the china, but the plates were covered before he could make out what it was. "This is more like it," his father said, and his mother pursed her lips.

  When Ian reached to pick up a chicken leg, his father slapped his hand down. "You've a knife and fork. Use them."

  "Oh, really," Ian's mother said.

  "Yes?" his father demanded, as if he were speaking to a child at school.

  She stared at him until he looked away, at the food he was brandishing on his fork. They couldn't argue in front of the waiters, Ian thought, but feeling them argue silently was worse. He set about carving his chicken leg. The knife passed easily through the meat and scraped the bone. "That's too sharp for him," his mother said. "Have you another knife?"

  The waiter shook his head and spread his hands. His palms were very smooth and pale. "Just be careful then, Ian," she said anxiously. ------------------------------------364

  His father tipped his head back to drain the last trickle of lemonade, and the other waiter came over. Ian hadn't realised he had slipped away, let alone where. He was carrying an uncorked wine bottle, from which he filled Ian's father's cup without being asked. "Well, since you've opened it," Ian's father said, sounding ready to argue the price.

  The waiter filled Ian's mother's cup and came to him. "Not too much for him," she said.

  "Nor for
her either," his father said, having rolled a sip around his mouth and frowned, then shrugged approval, "since she's driving."

  Ian took a mouthful to distract himself. It was distracting enough: it tasted rusty, and too thick. He couldn't swallow. He turned away from his father and spat the mouthful on the grass, and saw that the waiters were barefoot. "You little savage," his father said in a low hateful voice.

  "Leave him alone. He shouldn't have been given any."

  To add to Ian's confusion, both waiters were nodding, agreeing with her. Their feet looked thin as bunches of twigs, and appeared to be gripping the earth; he saw grass and soil squeezing up between the long knuckly toes. He didn't want to stay near them or near his parents, whose disagreements felt like thunder. "I want a proper picnic," he complained. "I want to run around like I used to."

  "Just don't get lost," his mother said, a moment before his father said "Do as you're told and stay where you are."

  His mother turned to the waiters. "You don't mind if he stretches his legs, do you?"

  They smiled and spread their hands. Their mouths looked even wider and paler, and Ian could see no lines on the palms of their hands. "Just you move from this table before you're told to," his father said, "and we'll see how you like the belt when you get home."

  He could get up, his mother had said. He gobbled coleslaw, since he couldn't eat that away from the table, and peered at the fragment of pattern he'd uncovered on the plate. "You won't lay a finger on him," his mother had whispered.

  His father took a swallow that made his lips redder and thumped his cup on the table. His bare arm lay beside a knife in the shaft of sunlight, the blade and his wiry hairs gleaming. "You've just earned him a few extra with the belt if he doesn't do as he's told."

  "Mummy said I could," Ian said, and grabbed the chicken leg from his plate as he stood up. His father tried to seize him, but the drink must have made him sleepy, for he lolled over the table, shaking his head. "Come here ------------------------------------365

  to me," he said in a slurred voice as Ian dodged out of reach, having just glimpsed more of the pattern on the plate. It looked like something large trying to escape as it was chopped up. He didn't want to stay near that, or near his parents, or near the waiters with their silent smiles. Perhaps the waiters didn't speak English. He took a bite of the chicken leg as he ran towards the children, who had left the distant table and were playing with a striped ball.

  He looked back once. A waiter stood behind each of his parents: waiting to be paid, or to clear the table? They must be impatient for their toes to have been scratching at the earth like that. His father was propping his chin on his hands as Ian's mother stared at him across the table, which looked oddly ramshackle now, more like a heap of branches.

  Ian ran into the clearing where the children were. "Can I play with you?"

  The girl gave a small cry of surprise. "Where did you come from?" the boy demanded.

  "Just over there." Ian turned and pointed, and found he couldn't see his parents. For a moment he wanted to giggle at how he must have surprised the children, then suddenly he felt lost, abandoned, afraid for his mother, and his father too. He backed away as the children stared at him, then he whirled and ran.

  The boy's name was Neville; his sister's was Annette. Their parents were the kindest people he had ever known--but he hadn't wished for them, he told himself fiercely as he started the car now that his hands were under control; he didn't know what he had wished at the well. Surely his mother had just been drunk, she and his father must have got lost and gone back to the car on the road through the forest to get help in finding Ian, only for her to lose control almost as soon as she'd started driving.

  If only the car and its contents hadn't burned so thoroughly that nobody could tell how his parents had died! He might not have felt compelled to wish on the gold that what he thought he'd seen couldn't have happened, had never happened: the trees separating ahead of him as he ran, then somehow blotting out that last glimpse of his mother scraping at her plate, more and more quickly, staring at the pattern she'd uncovered and rising to her feet, one hand pressed to her lips as she shook his father with the other, shook his shoulder desperately to rouse him, as the thin figures opened their growing mouths and they and the trees closed in. ------------------------------------366 ------------------------------------367

  367

  Seeing the World

  At first Angela thought it was a shadow. The car was through the gates before she wondered how a shadow could surround a house. She craned over the garden wall as Richard parked the car. It was a ditch, no doubt some trick the Hodges had picked up in Italy, something to do with their gardening. "They're back," she murmured when Richard had pulled down the door of the garage.

  "Saints preserve us, another dead evening," he said, and she had to hush him, for the Hodges were sitting in their lounge and had grinned out at the clatter of the door.

  All the same, the Hodges seemed to have even less regard than usual for other people's feelings. During the night she was wakened by Mozart's Fortieth, to which the conductor had added the rhythm section Mozart had neglected to include. Richard mumbled and thrashed in slow motion as she went to the window. An August dawn glimmered on the Hodges' gnomes, and beyond them in the lounge the Hodges were sitting quite as stonily. She might have shouted but for waking Richard. Stiff with the dawn chill, she limped back to bed.

  She listened to the silence between movements and wondered if this time they might give the rest of the symphony a chance. No, here came the first movement again, reminding her of the night the Hodges had come over, when she and Richard had performed a Haydn sonata. "I haven't gone into Haydn," Harry Hodge had declared, wriggling his eyebrows. "Get it? Gone into hidin'.was She sighed and turned over and remembered the week she and Richard had just spent on the waterways, fields and grassy banks flowing by like Delius, a landscape they had hardly boarded all week, preferring to let the villages remain untouched images of villages. Before the Mozart had played through a third time she was asleep.

  Most of the next day was given over to violin lessons, her pupils making up for the lost week. By the time Richard came home from lecturing, she had dinner almost ready. Afterwards they sat sipping the last of the wine as evening settled on the long gardens. Richard went to the piano and played La ------------------------------------368

  Cathedrale Engloutie, and the last tolling of the drowned cathedral was fading when someone knocked slowly at the front door.

  It was Harry Hodge. He looked less bronzed by the Mediterranean sun than made-up, rather patchily. "The slides are ready," he said through his fixed smile. "Can you come now?"

  "Right now? It really is quite late." Richard wasn't hiding his resentment, whether at Hodge's assumption that he need only call for them to come-- not so much an invitation anymore as a summons--or at the way Hodge must have waited outside until he thought the Debussy had gone on long enough. "Oh, very well," Richard said. "Provided there aren't too many."

  He must have shared Angela's thought: best to get it over with, the sooner the better. None of their neighbours bothered with the Hodges. Harry Hodge looked stiff, and thinner than when he'd gone away. "Aren't you feeling well?" she asked, concerned.

  "Just all that walking and pushing the mother-in-law."

  He was wearing stained outdoor clothes. He must have been gardening; he always was. He looked ready to wait for them to join him, until Richard said firmly "We won't be long."

  They had another drink first, since the Hodges never offered. "Don't wake me unless I snore," Richard muttered as they ventured up the Hodges' path, past gnomes of several nations, souvenirs of previous holidays. It must be the gathering night that made the ditch appear deeper and wider. The ditch reminded her of the basement where Harry developed his slides. She was glad their house had no basement: she didn't like dark places.

  When Harry opened the door, he looked as if he hadn't stopped smiling. "Glad you could
come," he said, so tonelessly that at first Angela heard it as a question she was tempted to answer truthfully. If he was exhausted, he shouldn't have been so eager to have them round. They followed him down the dark hall into the lounge.

  Only the wall lights were on. Most of the light surrounded souvenirs--a pink Notre Dame with a clock in place of a rose window on the mantelpiece, a plaster bull on top of the gas fire, matches stuck in its back like picadors' lances--and Deirdre Hodge and her mother. The women sat facing the screen on the wall, and Angela faltered in the doorway, wondering what was wrong. Of course, they must have been gardening too; they were still wearing outdoor clothes, and she could smell earth. Deirdre's mother must rather have been supervising, since much of the time she had to be pushed in a wheelchair. ------------------------------------369

  "There you are," Deirdre said in greeting, and after some thought her mother said "Aye, there they are all right." Their smiles looked even more determined than Harry's. Richard and Angela took their places on the settee, smiling; Angela for one felt as if she was expected to smile rather than talk. Eventually Richard said "How was Italy?"

  By now that form of question was a private joke, a way of making their visits to the Hodges less burdensome: half the joke consisted of anticipating the answer. Germany had been "like dolls' houses"; Spain was summed up by "good fish and chips"; France had prompted only "They'll eat anything." Now Deirdre smiled and smiled and eventually said "Nice ice creams."

  "And how did you like it, Mrs. ... Mrs. ...8 They had never learned the mother's name, and she was too busy smiling and nodding to tell them now. Smiling must be less exhausting than speaking. Perhaps at least that meant the visitors wouldn't be expected to reply to every remark--they always were, everything would stop until they had--but Angela was wondering what else besides exhaustion was wrong with the two women, what else she'd noticed and couldn't now recall, when Harry switched off the lights.

  A sound distracted her from trying to recall, in the silence that seemed part of the dark. A crowd or a choir on television, she decided quickly--it sounded unreal enough--and went back to straining her memory. Harry limped behind the women and started the slide projector.