Thieving Fear

by Ramsey Campbell

  It crept across the floorboards and spilled over the brink of the trapdoor to grow dimmer on the stairs. 'Hugh,' Charlotte called down. 'Ellen.' She didn't know whether she was more afraid to find out why they didn't answer or to descend into the house. She succeeded in recapturing some of her anger as she clung to the spade, which she wasn't about to leave behind when it was the nearest thing she had to a weapon. She lowered it through the skylight at arm's length and let it fall with a thud that resounded through more levels of the house than she could judge. Without going after it she wouldn't have a weapon. She slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and nestled the bag under her arm, and turned to set foot on the ladder.

  Beyond the cliff and the foreshortened river the Welsh coast glittered as if to communicate a message she had neither the time nor the ability to decipher. Perhaps it was simply reminding her how much light she was leaving behind. Under her foot the topmost rung felt treacherous with rust. She mustn't take these as excuses not to proceed, and a flare of anger was enough to send her onto the next crumbling rung and the ones beneath, taking her up to her waist in the lightless house. The flashlight beam shrank from the edge of the cliff as she groped for the next rung with a foot, and she was aware of the gaping space beneath her and closing in at her back. She gripped the highest rung with her free hand, and as scales of rust scraped together under her fingers she brought the flashlight to waist level. Darkness flooded across the common, blotching her vision, so that when the flashlight beam jerked downwards with her uncertain descent she wasn't sure how many shadows were fluttering around her among the rafters. She planted both feet on a rung and closed her fist on another while she aimed the light at the floor. The beam wobbled across the boards until it encountered a shape that had been lying low. The light seemed to rouse the thin twisted limbs as the object glared at her with its solitary orb.

  It was a telescope. Either its stand had collapsed or, to judge by its position, it had been toppled from blocking the trapdoor. Suppose it had been dislodged from beneath? Charlotte clutched at the ladder and swung the light around the space under the roof. Shadows started out of the corners and sank back, but apart from the telescope and the spade and a scattering of earth, the attic was bare. Nevertheless she was feeling more than reluctant to step down into it, never mind the rest of the house, when she heard a noise beyond the trapdoor.

  Despite its faintness, she couldn't mistake it. It was a groan, and although it was muffled by distance or some other cause, she recognised the voice. 'Ellen,' she called, scrambling so hastily down the ladder that the shadows of the rafters appeared to collapse the roof. She must be too concerned for Ellen to have time for claustrophobia, but she retrieved the spade in a bid to feel less vulnerable on her way to the trapdoor. 'Ellen,' she called down into the house.

  There was no reply, and no movement apart from the uncontrollable roving of the flashlight beam, which had found the second ladder. It was wedged between the frame of the trapdoor and the verge of the stairs, and looked all the more precarious for the unstable light. Other than the stairs that led down from a landing to an enclosed windowless bend, nothing else met her eye. How many of her burdens was she going to cart through the house? She transferred the mobile to a hip pocket and dropped her handbag through the opening, followed by the spade. She was certainly announcing her presence, but what might it sound like? 'Ellen, it's me,' she felt forced to call as she turned to descend the ladder.

  It wasn't just the sight of the telescope that halted her, although for a moment she thought it was crawling with insects. They were symbols etched on the barrel. The wavering beam had lent them movement, and she shouldn't linger to examine them. She was more concerned with the tracks that led from the trapdoor, tracing how the heavy telescope had been dragged or shoved across the loft to clear the way down. Ellen must have shifted it, but if she'd managed that in her condition, how desperate had she been to hide? The thought sent Charlotte downwards as fast as she dared clamber, into the house that smelled oppressively of earth.

  The wooden ladder wasn't staggering towards the edge of the stairs. She couldn't really feel the movement – at least, not as much as the antics of the flashlight beam encouraged her to see. All the same, the vibrations came close to paralysing her until she sprinted down the last few rungs to sidle none too confidently onto the floor. She was glad to let go of the ladder, which had felt surreptitiously moist, but the carpet yielded like soft earth, as if the floor it covered were no more solid. That wasn't as unsettling as the sight ahead.

  She was facing a bedroom. The door was wide open, framing the dim bulk of a capacious four-poster bed. She grabbed the spade before she sent the flashlight beam into the room. A dark ill-defined shape scrambled backwards across the discoloured quilt and obese greyish pillows to its lair beneath the sagging canopy, but it was just the shadow of the humped bedclothes. Although they were rumpled enough to be outlining worse than uneasy sleep, the bed was empty. None of this was why she found it hard to breathe. With the heavy velvet curtains open, as they were now, the occupant of the bed would have seen a panorama of the Welsh coast and mountains beyond the large window, but the view consisted of brownish clay packed against the glass.

  She felt as if her claustrophobia were poised to engulf her. Indeed, she didn't understand why it was holding back. Glancing up in search of reassurance, she saw a fitful star beyond the portion of skylight visible through the trapdoor. What else had she glimpsed? She lifted the flashlight and was managing to ignore the blackness that rushed at her out of the bedroom when she saw the marks around the trapdoor.

  They were scratches. However old they were, age hadn't faded their desperation. The small dull oval object lodged in the deepest scratch might very well be a fingernail. Only its shadow made it appear to be trying to work free of the ceiling. Charlotte was drawing a breath to prove she still could when it almost blotted out another sound. It was Ellen, distressed beyond words.

  Was she further down the house or in one of the rooms off the landing? There was another open door to Charlotte's right and two of them shut at her back. 'Ellen,' she repeated.

  At first she wasn't sure that the response was a word, if it was even a response. She was so anxious to locate it, still more when she failed, that she only belatedly recognised it. 'No,' Ellen had said – groaned, rather.

  Did she want to keep Charlotte away or to deny her own identity? 'Yes, I'm here,' Charlotte told her. 'I've come to help. Don't make me wander about in here. Say where you are. And where's Hugh?'

  She was talking so much in the hope of provoking an answer, but she hushed for fear of covering one up. There was no sound other than the abortive flattened echo of her voice in the open rooms and down the staircase. 'Ellen,' she persisted as she crossed the spongy carpet to the second room.

  It was crowded with objects standing still in the dark. She saw the shadows of their heads first, swelling across the carpet towards another buried window. They were orreries, six of them, and it took her some moments to realise why there needed to be more than one: they didn't represent the familiar solar system. Two of the stars orbited by planets were so black that the flashlight seemed unable to illuminate them, while another was encircled by nothing more than jagged fragments of itself. Quite a few of the planets were misshapen to a degree that Charlotte could hardly believe was cosmically possible. The orrery closest to the window suggested not just a diagram of a planetary system but, in the relationships of its thirteen globes and less globular bodies, some larger and more ominous meaning. She imagined the owner of the house gazing from the window at night or through the telescope until he discerned all these vagaries of the universe, and then she had the disconcerting notion that he'd constructed them as a means of sending forth the visions they portrayed. 'Ellen,' she urged, struggling to disengage her mind from the thoughts that had invaded it, and sent the flashlight beam around the room. There was nowhere for Ellen to hide among the sluggish dance of shadows, and she hadn't made
another sound. Charlotte swung around to stride across the landing and, before her apprehension could prevent her, grasped the icy scalloped brass doorknob to open the third room.

  It was empty, which should have been all that she needed to see. Nevertheless as her gaze was drawn to the circle of marks on the floor, the flashlight beam sank away from the heavy black curtains that covered the window. The circle encompassed perhaps half the square floor, and she suspected that its centre was precisely at the midpoint of the square. It consisted of symbols and ideograms that looked unnervingly alive, as if besides trembling on the edge of growing comprehensible they only awaited a signal to start crawling after one another. Indeed, the restless light seemed capable of rousing them. They were carved out of the floorboards, whereas the marks that filled the circle were less defined, though not too faint to suggest a series of frantic attempts to escape. Charlotte was forming the impression that the prisoner had been large and very leggy; in fact, she could think that it had been scrabbling at the limits of its prison with an unnecessary number of legs. Was the circle entirely deserted? Was that a stain on the floor in the middle, or a small dark lump? Perhaps it wasn't even as small as it had seemed at first glance, but her uncertainty about its size might be due to the tendrils it was extending across the boards. Surely only the movement of the light made it appear to flex them – and then she wondered if her own attention could be letting it take shape. The thought was enough to drive her out of the room with a slam of the door. 'Ellen,' she repeated to no avail, and so she had to twist the greenish brass knob to push the next door wide.

  The room was almost as bare as its neighbour. A single item occupied the carpetless floor in front of the secretively curtained window. Until she succeeded in steadying the flashlight Charlotte took it for a cage; it had bars on all sides and across the top. As their shadowy antics subsided she began to distinguish what the bars enclosed: a pillow, a small tangled blanket incongruously printed with fairies emerging from flowers, a contorted shape under the blanket. Just the upper portion of the withered head was visible, which was more than enough. The eyes peering at her across the pillow were far too large. Even if they were empty sockets they were twice the size they ought to be in proportion with the small head, and wasn't there movement in their depths? Perhaps only the light was troubling their shrunken contents; perhaps shadows were making the shrivelled form appear to be struggling feebly to raise its head and writhe out from under the blanket. All the same, Charlotte backed out of that room faster still and ensured the door was shut tight, however unlikely it seemed that anything could escape the cage that was a cot.

  Had its tenant been bred for some arcane purpose? Its deformity seemed too extreme to be accidental. She refrained from thinking how it might have been used or intended to be; there was enough to dread in the prospect of exploring further. 'Ellen,' she appealed. Any sound from her cousin might have helped her feel less alone, but she heard none.

  She was retrieving her handbag from beside the ladder when she realised that she didn't want to be encumbered on the stairs, the corner of which was entirely too blind. Her anger at having to leave the bag lent her the courage to venture downwards. As she reached the bend she lifted the spade like an axe, but below her were only more stairs. They or the carpet brown as clay yielded underfoot as she paced down to the middle floor.

  It contained another four rooms. Those that would have faced the river and Wales were open. Clay appeared to press itself more heavily against the window of the first room as the flashlight beam glared on the panes. Otherwise the room was walled with bookshelves, and piles of old books squatted on the floor, while a fat tome sprawled open on a reading stand in front of a leathery chair at the window. Charlotte might have fancied that the reader was about to return, and neither the impression nor the illustration on the left-hand page – a diabolically gleeful face whose eyes weren't opening so much as forming out of the pallid flesh – encouraged her to linger once she'd seen that Ellen could be nowhere in the room.

  There was more sense of a presence in the adjoining room. A desk that looked too bulky to have been carried upstairs stood in front of the window. Another black chair, its leather sagging like senile flesh, was turned half to the doorway as if its occupant had heard Charlotte and leaped to ambush her. She made herself step forwards to check that Ellen wasn't hiding out of sight from the doorway. There were only shelves as tall as the ceiling. They and the ones on the other walls were heaped with papers inscribed, she guessed from the one that was pricking up its corners on the desk, in a spidery introverted hand. Even more than its neighbour, the room smelled of old paper as well as damp earth, so thickly that she choked. The clay at the window was reminding her how much deeper she was buried. 'Ellen,' she called, which didn't save her from having to open the door opposite. At once she was blinded by the light shone into her eyes by the figure in the room.

  Instinctively she raised the flashlight and her weapon, and so did the imitator. She had to let the beam sink to be mimicked, by which time she'd identified her own reflection. What about the crowds of dimmer silhouettes brandishing feebler lights on either side? They were Charlotte too. All four walls of the room were mirrors, and she suspected that the back of the door was one, which would turn the entire room into a mirror once it was shut. She had the sudden terrible notion that Ellen was cowering in a corner, trapped by her aversion to seeing herself. Charlotte had to take several increasingly reluctant paces forwards to be certain Ellen wasn't there. It wasn't just that the multiplied dazzle made it hard to see; her first step had revealed that the floor and ceiling were also mirrors. Advancing into the room felt like setting out across a void peopled with a multitude of reproductions of herself, and she thought the inventor might have imagined he was creating a universe in his own image. Or was there more to it? Although she'd halted, she seemed to glimpse movement that couldn't be wholly ascribed to the nervous swaying of the countless lights. In the black distance beyond her most minuscule images, had something grown restless? She could imagine that it was attracted by the light or by her arrival. It appeared to be taking vast dark shape in the process of closing around her from every side, as if she were already in its mouth or paw or some monstrously unidentifiable part of it. All at once she was terrified that the door was about to shut behind her, rendering the void complete. Wasn't it inching towards its frame? Even if this was an illusion produced by the wavering of all the lights, she headed for the doorway so fast that she almost slipped on the glass floor and fell into the arms of her inverted self. The swollen carpet gave her back some equilibrium, and she slammed the door with such force that she might have hoped to hear the mirrors shatter. Before the episode could discourage her from proceeding, she hurried to the next room and shoved the door wide.

  Her first impression was that the room was packed with soil, but the flashlight showed that the darkness wasn't quite so solid, although sufficiently thick to absorb much of the beam. The light grew dimmer as it crossed the threshold and petered out towards the middle of the room. The thought that Ellen could be submerged in the depths of the blackness was so dismaying that Charlotte was hardly aware of leaning through the doorway. 'Ellen,' she shouted as if her voice had to penetrate the medium that filled the room.

  In a moment, as she swung the flashlight beam from side to side in an attempt to illuminate the limits of the room, she felt the blackness settle on her face and hands. Even though it was less substantial than cobwebs laden with soot, those were the sensations it resembled, and it was as cold as water too deep for the sun to reach. These weren't the only reasons why Charlotte almost dropped the flashlight and the spade. She'd heard Ellen moan, but not in the room. Otherwise she would have been unable to judge whether Ellen was lost in the blackness, which was absorbing the flashlight beam so fast that it had shrunk to the length of her arm.

  The medium seemed greedy to engulf not just the light but her. She slashed at it with the spade while she backed out of the room, and almost
let the spade slip out of her grasp as she clutched at the doorknob. Having dragged the door shut, which took more effort than she'd used to open it, she dashed for the stairs. Her retreat was so instinctive that she'd reached the next bend before she remembered why she was descending. 'Ellen, I'm coming,' she promised.

  While her cousin didn't answer, perhaps noises did. They were beyond the stairs and the shakily illuminated section of the ground-floor hall the staircase framed. Although they were barely audible, whether by intention or because there was so little to them, they were footsteps. They sounded disconcertingly uncertain of themselves, but they were approaching. In a moment Charlotte felt less sure of this, though she couldn't judge whether they had turned aside or were employing more stealth. 'Ellen?' she hoped aloud.

  The footsteps halted, and she imagined someone waiting for her just around the corner in the dark. She was no longer convinced it was Ellen, not least because an aspect of the house had at last become apparent to her: she hadn't seen a single light or even a fitting for one. Who could have lived in so much darkness? Who still could? Ellen was somewhere below, and Charlotte ran down the last flight of stairs to have done with any other confrontation. As she left them she jerked the flashlight up as if the beam rather than the spade were her defence.

  The hall was deserted except for shadows that fled in all directions to lurk wherever there was concealment. Of the six doors leading off the hall, the broad front entrance seized her attention first, if only because the thought of opening it to let in a landslide reminded her how thoroughly she was buried. The door under the stairs must belong to a cellar, which she very much hoped she wouldn't have to enter; the whole house felt far too reminiscent of a basement, and smelled like one too. Instead she made for the closer of the open doors, the one at the front of the building. As the light found it she saw that it wasn't simply open; it was held that way by the mass that filled the doorway if not the entire room.