The Overnight

by Ramsey Campbell

  "Will it be the power?" Mad suggests.

  "Whatever it is I don't like it. Can one of you start her car?"

  "What's wrong with yours?" says Jill.

  "It's further round than someone else's. If they start theirs we'll be able to see."

  A shiver tries to propel Jake into the dark. "We can all go together, can't we?" he says in case that's reassuring.

  "Mine's nearest," Mad says impatiently and tramps into the murk.

  Jake has time to feel pitifully grateful that all the women are wearing trousers with pockets for their keys as he leaves behind the last of the suffocated glow along the alley. Past the side of Texts he's just able to distinguish Mad lowering herself into a block of darkness. As it shuts her in he hears a huge voice muttering, but not its words. The Mazda emits a rasping cough that adds to the fog, and then the engine roars and the headlights slap a luminous patch on the concrete wall. "Shall I drive over to yours, Connie?" Mad rolls her window down to ask.

  "I hope I'm not quite that incapable just yet. There are only a few years between us, you know. I can still walk."

  "I meant I could bring you more light," says Mad, but only Jake hears. Connie is already at her Rapier. Jill hurries past it to her Nova, which is less certain of its shape and colour. As Jake waits for someone to offer him a lift he feels as though the frustration he experienced on sparing Greg has accompanied them under cover of the fog. The way Mad's car keeps flaring its lights while it roars like an infuriated beast aggravates the impression, even when she explains "I'm seeing it doesn't die of cold."

  Connie's engine acknowledges its key with no more than a click. A second try produces even less of a response, a third no sound from the engine at all. Connie opens her door and leans out, looking diminished. "I don't know the first thing about this. Can anyone help?"

  "Not as capable as you thought, hey?" Mad lets her hear.

  The oppressive imminence seems to close around them, and Jake fears they'll act it out somehow. "Sean doesn't like to get his hands dirty, so I'm the mechanic," he says with more confidence than he feels. "Can you open your bonnet, Connie?"

  She stares at him as though she wonders if he's suggesting she's unable to perform the task, and then she reaches under the dashboard. A different kind of click indicates she has released the bonnet as Jill thinks better of entering the Nova, instead peering past it. "Isn't that Ross's car?"

  Jake sees it is but has no idea what to say. He's hooking his fingers under the metal edge when Mad climbs out of her car and joins Jill behind the vehicles. "There aren't many ways he could have walked," Mad reassures everyone. "One of us should find him if we keep our eyes open."

  The hood flies up and Jake leans over the engine, scraping his shoulder against the wall of the bookshop. The light is dim, and the metal innards are further obscured by his shadow, so that all he can immediately distinguish is that the engine appears to be clogged by a greyish mass. He stretches one hand along the rim above the radiator grille and stoops closer. Just as he begins to see what he's ducking towards, Mad's engine cuts out, and so do her headlamps.

  "Sorry," she calls, and runs to the Mazda. Jake's eyes have adjusted enough to let him separate outlines from the dark, but he isn't sure if he's seeing or remembering or, his entire being pleads, imagining that although the humped mass is sufficiently fluid to have oozed over the whole of the engine, it's well on the way to having a face. At least, low down on a rounded lump that's no longer flattened by the bonnet, a gap like a slit in jelly is widening in an unmistakable if mindless grin. Such a violent shudder overwhelms him that he's terrified his arm will yield, thrusting his face against the gleeful swelling. As he flings himself backwards, skinning his elbow on the concrete wall, his hand slips. He doesn't know if anything reaches out to detain it, but he feels as if he has stroked a slug. He stays within range barely long enough to slam the bonnet as Mad revives her engine and her lights.

  At first he thinks all the women are gazing at him because they know what he glimpsed, but of course it's worse than that: they want him to tell them. He can only cling to his first impression and wish it were the case. "It's frozen. Burst, I mean," he babbles. "It burst because it froze and now it's frozen again."

  Connie waits until she's certain this is over and says "So are you just going to leave it?"

  "Have to. Nobody can do anything"

  Both Mad and Jill look inclined to disagree, and he's terrified they'll go further than arguing. Can he hear a bulk slithering about under the bonnet in anticipation that someone will insist on seeing? "Honestly, it needs a proper mechanic," he hears himself pleading rather than simply maintaining. "We'll just have to go two in a car."

  The idea is received with so little apparent enthusiasm that he wonders if it could be unwise, but what alternative is there? He shivers with silently urging Connie to put some distance between her and the Rapier. At last she emerges from it, saying almost as reluctantly "I'll ride with Jill if you'll have me. You're the closest to me. Where you live is."

  Mad's lights flare again, staining the murk faintly red and encouraging it to grow more solid. "So who's heading which way?" she calls.

  "You take the motorway," Connie says. "Don't forget you're looking for Ross as well as a phone."

  Mad plainly resents the implication that she needs reminding. Jake is suddenly afraid Jill's car won't start, which is yet another reason why he shudders uncontrollably as he asks "And then what?"

  "Go home and wait to hear. I'll ring the shop later if nobody's rung me. Don't worry, I'll be defending everyone the best I can. Greg as well."

  That sounds like the germ of another argument that could keep them trapped in the fog. Jake suppresses a retort as he watches Connie open the passenger door of the Nova. He must be loitering out of some sense of protectiveness, since he's alone in knowing what has invaded Connie's car. Jill's engine utters a choking sound and dies. He's about to urge them both to travel with Mad when the engine of the Nova splutters and revs up. He and his ill-defined shadow that looks half absorbed by the fog dash to the Mazda. "All right," he gasps as he slams himself in.

  "I should think we must be now. No rush, is there, when it's like this?"

  "Maybe not," he says with far too many syllables, "but what are we waiting for?"

  "You to put your seat belt on, I hope."

  As Jake drags the belt across himself his elbow stings as if the fog has penetrated an open wound. The Mazda begins to withdraw from the patch of light, which dims as it grows more diffuse. He's only dreaming that the shop is determined not to release it; perhaps the blurred web that one splintered headlamp lens is casting on the wall has given rise to the idea. Is the fog behind the car retreating less than the wall? He tries not to fancy he's helping it trap them by saying "Shall we wait a moment?"

  "That isn't your idea of being female, is it, changing your mind."

  He has to tell himself she isn't like Greg. "I want to see the others get away, don't you?"

  "I was going to till you distracted me."

  He mustn't argue. She needs to concentrate on driving, however unreasonably she's behaving, even if fighting to stay quiet beside her feels like trying to breathe underwater. The Mazda swings backwards in an arc, illuminating how Connie's car is holding itself so still it could almost be mistaken for deserted. When a dark glistening shape inches out of hiding beyond the Rapier a cry begins to prise his lips apart, and then Jill reveals it's her car by remembering to switch her headlamps on.

  He doesn't know if Mad is taking her time so as to pay him back for suggesting she ought to. She doesn't follow Jill's rear lights until they're smouldering with fog. As the Mazda cruises past Connie's car he seems to glimpse the bonnet raising itself a fraction, like a trap about to be sprung. He does his best to find it again in the mirror without alerting Mad, but the fog hides it before she steers around the corner of the bookshop.

  As the cars veer away from the shopfront Jake thinks he hears an incomprehensible vo
ice as muffled as it is enormous. He sees Greg, a greyish silhouette that ducks and shelves a book and ducks again so fast it looks determined to finish all the extra work. Is the voice manipulating it like a puppet? The silhouette rears up and either sends the cars an ironic salute or shades its eyes to watch them, only for the fog to deny it the pleasure, if that's what it's having. Then the nearest saplings drift by, dripping as though they have been dredged up, and the Mazda puts on speed. It creeps so close to Jill's angry lights that Jake wonders if Mad wants her to feel threatened for guiding them so close to where the Mazda ran Lorraine down. Until the fog swallows the broken tree-stump and Mad eases her foot off the accelerator, he has to restrain himself from treading on the brake.

  He's increasingly unsure whether he's continuing to hear a wordless mutter underneath the fog. The impression refuses to fade, which aggravates his sense that the cars are being held back. The tarmac oozing from beneath the Nova resembles a stream of mud so closely that he has to keep renewing his belief that the vehicles are advancing, though far too slowly to outdistance the memory of his glimpse inside Connie's car. When Jill's brake lights brighten he's afraid to learn why until he sees that her headlamps have lit on the diner, which is shut and unilluminated from within. "So Ross couldn't have called from there," Mad says.

  Just now it's more important to Jake that they're at the exit from the retail park. Shadows as low as the furniture parade through the diner while Jill's headlamps turn towards the gap. As the Mazda follows, Jill drives across the deserted road into the lane between hedges bristling their tarry spikes as though the beams have roused them. Jill sounds her horn, and she and Connie wave at the mirror above the windscreen. Mad echoes Jill, and she and Jake both wave, but he isn't sure the others see this before the fog extinguishes the rear lights of the Nova. With a sigh he prefers not to interpret, Mad steers left behind the diner.

  He won't be able to breathe easily until he can be certain what he glimpsed behind Texts isn't pursuing them under cover of the fog. He peers nervously towards the buildings and the open space they're helping the fog to obscure. He has to clench his teeth until they ache so as not to urge Mad to drive faster. The diner is succeeded by an unfinished block with polythene for windows, which he tells himself are nothing like eyes so weighed down by cataracts they sag out of their sockets, and then there's even less of a building, mostly a roofless cage of metal. It lets more of the glare of the floodlights reach the car, but why is a portion of the light so close to the ground? Because it belongs to a vehicle that lurches between the incomplete buildings into the path of the Mazda. "Watch out," Jake deafens himself by screaming as he clutches at the wheel.

  The car is almost in the hedge on the far side of the road before Mad regains control. "What the—" She remembers she's a lady and demands only "What are you trying to do to us, Jake?"

  "Didn't you see? You must have seen. There was a car or something."

  "Where?" To his dismay she tramps on the brake. "Show me where."

  He wants to plead with her to drive away, but he twists in his bonds to stare through the rear window. One skeletal corner of the building under construction is visible, but there's as little sign of another vehicle as he has to admit he saw when he grabbed the wheel. "It must have been the fog," he says.

  "Yes, well, whatever you think you see from now on, can you leave the driving to me? I'd expect Greg to try and take over, not you."

  She eases the car back across the road and picks up almost no speed. The unfinished buildings crouch lower as if the earth is swallowing them. The murk settles over the last of them as the tunnel under the motorway yawns ahead, a cave daubed with giant drooling symbols and inhabited by wakeful fog. As Mad steers up the ramp to the motorway, which Jake was expecting to be blocked off, she says "Do you think it's because we're so tired we've all been getting at each other?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  In fact he believes tiredness is the least of the reasons, but can't be bothered thinking about it when she has accused him of resembling Greg. The car ventures onto the motorway, having hesitated at the top of the ramp, and she matches Jake's resentment. "Maybe you can speak up if you see a phone or Ross for that matter."

  Jake is tempted to retort that Ross would hardly have wandered onto the motorway, but is that the case? He might have in search of the nearest phone. The lights of Fenny Meadows fall away below the car, and it appears they were diluting the fog, which closes down in front of the windscreen as though a skyful of unshed rain has settled on the blanked-out landscape. The rays from the headlights butt it with a feebleness not far short of exhaustion, but the car must be maintaining its progress, because a marker of some kind has loomed into view beside the road. Is the fog beyond it thinning? No, Jake is seeing another of the lights he saw in the retail park, and now he knows what they are. A fen is a marsh, and marshes sometimes emit will-o'-the-wisps. As a child he read about them and wished he could see one, and he has been granted his wish. He's about to point out the phenomenon to Mad when she frowns across him at the marker. "Is that for the next phone? How far does it say—"

  The light hurtles out of the fog and splits into the beams of a pair of headlamps on the wrong side of the motorway—in the same lane as the Mazda. Above them the windscreen of a Jaguar wags its wipers in reproof. Beyond one cleared segment of the glass the driver, a man whose forehead is bagged in a leather cap pulled down low, is grimacing at a mobile phone. As though to demonstrate he's even stupider than this suggests, he takes his other hand off the wheel to gesture drunkenly. Having time to assimilate so much detail convinces Jake that Mad is able to avoid the collision; she's already spinning the wheel. Then the speed of the Jaguar does away with the distance between the cars, which turn into a single explosion of metal and glass. In that instant Mad seizes Jake's hand, which he closes around hers. There's a moment in which he yearns for hers to be Sean's, and yet he's grateful for her closeness, because something that's delighted by the crash doesn't welcome their reconciliation at all. Indeed, it spews whatever's left of their intelligence into the dark.

  Jill

  She beeps her horn and Mad's car answers, which puts Jill in mind of the start of a hunt. When she waves at the mirror Connie imitates her, except there's no reason to think of it like that—no reason to suppose Connie's making fun of her or indicating slyly that she regrets not being in the Mazda. The fog drags the Mazda away by its headlamp beams, a reddish tinge fades from the glaring nothingness between the hedges, and then the mirror shows Jill only the gap, which continues to shrink between the hedges as the Nova coasts forward. "Shall we get going now?" Connie suggests.

  "We are."

  "All right then if you aren't comfortable driving any faster. I just feel uneasy leaving Anyes shut in any longer than we absolutely need to. Woody too, of course."

  Jill wonders about smiling at the dutiful afterthought but isn't sure that Connie wouldn't think she was presuming, a possibility Jill resents more than somewhat. "You can blame me if you have to," she offers instead.

  "Thanks, only it's really my responsibility."

  Jill isn't going to pretend to herself: she would rather have Jake as her passenger. Connie made it clear when she just about asked that she wished she needn't travel with Jill. The wet blackened spikes of the hedges close in behind the car. As they and the fog solidify into a single lightless mass, Jill says "So you'll take all the responsibility, you said."

  "I'm not sure if I can quite do that, can I? Not unless you want me to drive."

  "I certainly don't, thanks."

  "Then you'll have to be responsible for that, won't you? Some people think I'm not too bad."

  "I don't recall saying you were."

  Connie turns her head as if to force Jill to acknowledge her expression. When Jill concentrates on the illuminated scrap of road the veil of fog is doling out, Connie says "At driving."

  "I've got people like that too."

  "I expect your little girl's one."

>   "She'd be on my side, don't you worry." Jill grips the wheel harder while she tries to regain control of her words. "She's one reason why I asked how much blame you're going to take. She's the best reason."

  The moist hiss beneath the car fills another pause during which she refuses to look at whatever expression Connie's showing her. Eventually Connie says "None at all."

  The curtailed road seems to quiver with Jill's disbelief until she recovers her grasp on the wheel. "You'll never get away with that."

  "There's nothing to get away with. I didn't come along till a good while after you and Geoff split up. I hope you aren't telling your daughter I did."

  Jill feels as if her brain is growing maggoty with disagreements that hem the car in even more oppressively than the fog. She doesn't understand how she could have let the misunderstanding develop, yet part of her wants to use it as an excuse to confront the other woman now that she has her trapped. It requires quite an effort for her to say only "I was asking if you're going to tell whoever needs to know you were behind us breaking out of the shop. I wouldn't mind keeping this job."

  "I don't think we're too likely to do that, or Mad or Jake either."

  Now Jill feels like a child cheated out of a promise and stupid enough to protest "But we broke out for Woody as much as anyone."

  "Did we? He might think we were trying to get away from him."

  "You won't say that, will you? Who's it going to help?"

  "I'll be helping by phoning. That'll have to do till I've had some sleep."

  Jill no longer understands what Connie means, if her remarks signify anything except less oxygen in the car. "Just let me drive, then."

  "I don't remember starting the argument."