The Long Way

by Ramsey Campbell

  The wheelchair twisted around, bumping into a sofa scattered with magazines. At first he seemed not to see me, then not to recognise me, and finally not to be pleased that he did. “What are you playing at?” he demanded. “What are you trying to do?”

  He waved away my answer as if it were an insect and propelled the chair across the room less expertly than usual. He struggled to shove the lower half of the window up, and his grimace didn’t relent once he had. “Speak up for yourself. Weren’t you here before?”

  “That was yesterday,” I mumbled. “Dad sent me. He—”

  “Sending an inspector now, is he? You can tell him my mind’s as good as ever. I know they don’t think that’s much.”

  “He tried to phone you. You didn’t answer, so—”

  “When did he? Nobody’s rung here.” My uncle fumbled in his lap and on the chair. “Where is the wretched thing?”

  Once he’d finished staring at me as if I’d failed to answer in a class he steered the chair around the room and blundered out of it, muttering more than one word I would never have expected him to use. “Here it is,” he said accusingly and reappeared brandishing the cordless phone. “No wonder I couldn’t hear it. Can’t a man have a nap?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you. I only did because I was sent.”

  “Don’t put yourself out on my behalf.” Before I could deny that he was any trouble he said “So why’s Tom checking up on me?”

  “They wanted you to come for dinner.”

  “More like one did if any. I see you’re not including yourself.”

  I don’t know why this rather than anything else was too much, but I blurted “Look, I came all this way to find out. Of—”

  One reason I was anxious to invite him was the thought of passing the house on Copse View by myself, but he didn’t let me finish. “Don’t again,” he said.

  “You’ll come, won’t you?”

  “Tell them no. I’m still up to cooking my own grub.”

  “Can’t you tell them?”

  I was hoping that my father would persuade him to change his mind, but he said “I won’t be phoning. I’ll phone if I want you round.”

  “I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant,” he said and gazed sadly at me. “Never say sorry for telling the truth.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  I might have tried harder to convince him if I hadn’t realised that he’d given me an excuse to stay away from Copse View. “Don’t bother,” he said and stared at the television. “See, now I’ve missed a goal.”

  He dragged the sash down without bothering to glance at me. Even if that hadn’t been enough of a dismissal, the night was creeping up on me. I didn’t realise how close it was until he switched on the light in the room. That made me feel worse than excluded, and I wasn’t slow in heading for home.

  Before I reached the woods the streetlamps came on. I began to walk faster until I remembered that most of the lamps around the woods had been smashed. From the corner of the triangle I saw just one was intact—the one outside the house on Copse View. I couldn’t help thinking the vandals were scared to go near; they hadn’t even broken the window. I couldn’t see into the room from the end of the street, but the house looked awakened by the stark light, lent power by the white glare. I wasn’t anxious to learn what effect this might have inside the house.

  The path would take me too close. I would have detoured through the streets behind Copse View if I hadn’t heard the snarl of motorcycles racing up and down them. I didn’t want to encounter the riders, who were likely to be my age or younger and protective of their territory. Instead I walked around the woods.

  I had my back to the streetlamp all the way down Arbour Street. A few thin shafts of light extended through the trees, but they didn’t seem to relieve the growing darkness so much as reach for me on behalf of the house. Now and then I heard wings or litter flapping. When I turned along Shady Lane the light started to jab at my vision, blurring the glimpses the woods let me have of the house. I’d been afraid to see it, but now I was more afraid not to see. I kept having to blink scraps of dazzle out of my eyes, and I waited for my vision to clear when a gap between the trees framed the house.

  Was the figure closer to the window? I’d been walking in the road, but I ventured to the pavement alongside the woods. Something besides the stillness of the figure reminded me of the trees on either side of the house. Their cracked bark was grey where it wasn’t blackened, and fragments were peeling off, making way for whitish fungus. Far too much of this seemed true of the face beyond the window.

  I backed away before I could see anything else and stayed on the far pavement, though the dead houses beside it were no more reassuring than the outstretched shadows of the trees or the secret darkness of the woods, which kept being invaded by glimpses of the house behind the streetlamp. When I reached the corner of the triangle I saw that someone with a spray can had added a letter to the street sign. The first word was no longer just Copse.

  Perhaps it was a vandal’s idea of a joke, but I ran the rest of the way home, where I had to take time to calm my breath down. As I opened the front door I was nowhere near deciding what to tell my parents. I was sneaking it shut when my mother hurried out of the computer room, waving a pamphlet called Safe Home. “Are you back at last? We were going to phone Philip. Are you by yourself? Where have you been?”

  “I had to go a long way. There were boys on bikes.”

  “Did they do something to you? What did they do?”

  “They would have. That’s why I went round.” I wouldn’t have minded some praise for prudence, but apparently I needed to add “They were riding motorbikes. They’d have gone after me.”

  “We haven’t got you thinking there are criminals round every corner, have we?” My father had finished listening none too patiently to the interrogation. “We don’t want him afraid to go out, do we, Rosie? It isn’t nearly that bad, Craig. What’s the problem with my brother?”

  “He’s already made his dinner.”

  “He isn’t coming.” Perhaps my father simply wanted confirmation, but his gaze made me feel responsible. “So why did you have to go over?” he said.

  “Because you told me to.”

  “Sometimes I think you aren’t quite with us, Craig,” he said, though my mother seemed to feel this was mostly directed at her. “I was asking why he didn’t take my call.”

  “He’d been watching football and—”

  I was trying to make sure I didn’t give away too much that had happened, but my mother said “He’d rather have his games than us, then.”

  “He was asleep,” I said louder than I was supposed to speak.

  “Control yourself, Craig. I won’t have a hooligan in my house.” Having added a pause, my mother turned her look on my father. “And please don’t make it sound as if I’ve given him a phobia.”

  “I don’t believe anyone said that. Phil’s got no reason to call you a sissy, has he, Craig?” When I shook or at least shivered my head my father said “Did he say anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really or not at all?”

  “Not.”

  “Now who’s going on at him?” my mother said in some triumph. “Come and have the dinner there’s been so much fuss about.”

  Throughout the meal I felt as if I were being watched or would be if I even slightly faltered in cutting up my meat and vegetables and inserting forkfuls in my mouth and chewing and chewing and, with an effort that turned my hands clammy, swallowing. I managed to control my intake until dinner was finally done and I’d washed up, and then I was just able not to dash upstairs before flushing the toilet to muffle my sounds. Once I’d disposed of the evidence I lay on my bed for a while and eventually ventured down to watch the end of a programme about gang violence in primary schools. “Why don’t you bring whatever you’re reading downstairs?” my mother said.

  “Maybe it�
��s the kind of thing boys like to read by themselves,” said my father.

  I went red, not because it was true but on the suspicion that he wanted it to be, and shook my head to placate my mother. She switched off the television in case whatever else it had to offer wasn’t suitable for me, and then my parents set about sectioning the Sunday papers, handing me the travel supplements in case those helped with my geography. I would much rather have been helped not to think about the house on Copse View.

  Whenever the sight of the ragged discoloured face and the shape crouching over its sticks tried to invade my mind I made myself remember that my uncle didn’t want me. I had to remember at night in bed, and in the classroom, and while I struggled not to let my parents see my fear, not to mention any number of situations in between these. I was only wishing to be let off my duty until the occupant of the derelict house somehow went away. My uncle didn’t phone during the week, and I was afraid my father might call him and find out the truth, but perhaps he was stubborn as well.

  I spent Saturday morning in dread of the phone. It was silent until lunchtime, and while I kept a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese down too. I lingered at the kitchen sink as long as I could, and then my mother said “Better be trotting. You don’t want it to be dark.”

  “I haven’t got to go.”

  “Why not?” my father said before she could.

  “Uncle Phil, Uncle Philip said he’d phone when he wanted me.”

  “Since when has he ever done that?”

  “Last week.” I was trying to say as little as they would allow. “He really said.”

  “I think there’s more to this than you’re telling us,” my mother warned me, if she wasn’t prompting.

  “It doesn’t sound like Phil,” my father said. “I’m calling him.”

  My mother watched my father dial and then went upstairs. “Don’t say you’ve nodded off again,” my father told the phone, but it didn’t bring him an answer. At last he put the phone down. “You’d better go and see what’s up this time,” he told me.

  “I think we should deal with this first,” said my mother.

  She was at the top of the stairs, an exercise book in her hand. I hoped it was some of my homework until I saw it had a red cover, not the brown one that went with the school uniform. “I knew it couldn’t be our work with the community that’s been preying on his nerves,” she said.

  “Feeling he hasn’t got any privacy might do that, Rosie. Was there really any need to—”

  “I thought he might have unsuitable reading up there, but this shows he’s been involved in worse. Heaven knows what he’s been watching or where.”

  “I haven’t watched anything like that,” I protested. “It’s all out of my head.”

  “If that’s true it’s worse still,” she said and tramped downstairs to thrust the book at my father. “We’ve done our best to keep you free of such things.”

  He was leafing through it, stopping every so often to frown, when the phone rang. I tried to take the book, but my mother recaptured it. I watched nervously in case she harmed it while my father said “It is. He is. When? Where? We will. Where? Thanks.” He gazed at me before saying “Your uncle’s had a stroke on the way home from shopping. He’s back in hospital.”

  I could think of nothing I dared say except “Are we going to see him?”

  “We are now.”

  “Can I have my book?”

  My mother raised her eyebrows and grasped it with both hands, but my father took it from her. “I’ll handle it, Rosie. You can have it back when we decide you’re old enough, Craig.”

  I wasn’t entirely unhappy with this. Once he’d taken it to their room I felt as if some of the ideas the house in Copse View had put in my head were safely stored away. Now I could worry about how I’d harmed my uncle or let him come to harm. As my father drove us to the hospital he and my mother were so silent that I was sure they thought I had.

  My uncle was in bed halfway down a rank of patients with barely a movement between them. He looked shrunken, perhaps by his loose robe that tied at the back, and on the way to adopting its pallor. My parents took a hand each, leaving me to shuffle on the spot in front of his blanketed feet. “They’ll be reserving you a bed if you carry on like this, Phil,” my father joked or tried to joke.

  My uncle blinked at me as if he were trying out his eyes and then worked his loose mouth. “Nod, you fool,” he more or less said.

  I was obeying and doing my best to laugh in case this was expected of me before I grasped what he’d been labouring to pronounce. I hoped my parents also knew he’d said it wasn’t my fault, even if I still believed it was. “God, my shopping,” he more or less informed them. “Boy writing on the pavement. Went dafter then.” I gathered that someone riding on the pavement had got the bags my uncle had been carrying and that he’d gone after them, but what was he saying I should see as he pointed at his limp left arm with the hand my mother had been holding? He’d mentioned her as well. He was resting from his verbal exertions by the time I caught up with them. “Gave me this,” he’d meant to say. “Another attack.”

  My parents seemed to find interpreting his speech almost as much of an effort as it cost him. I didn’t mind it or visiting him, even by myself, since the route took me nowhere near Copse View. Over the weeks he regained his ability to speak. I was pleased for him, and I tried to be equally enthusiastic that he was recovering his strength. The trouble was that it would let him go home.

  I couldn’t wish he would lose it again. The most I could hope, which left me feeling painfully ashamed, was that he might refuse my help with shopping. I was keeping that thought to myself the last time I saw him in hospital. “I wouldn’t mind a hand on Saturday,” he said, “if you haven’t had enough of this old wreck.”

  I assured him I hadn’t, and my expression didn’t let me down while he could see it. I managed to finish my dinner that night and even to some extent to sleep. Next day at school I had to blame my inattention and mistakes on worrying about my uncle, who was ill. Before the week was over I was using that excuse at home as well. I was afraid my parents would notice I was apprehensive about something else, and the fears aggravated each other.

  While I didn’t want my parents to learn how much of a coward I was, on another level I was willing them to rescue me by noticing. They must have been too concerned about the estate—about making it safe for my uncle and people like him. By the time I was due to go to him my parents were at a police forum, where they would be leading a campaign for police to intervene in schools however young the criminals. I loitered in the house, hoping for a call to say my uncle didn’t need my help, until I realised that if I didn’t go out soon it would be dark.

  December was a week old. The sky was a field of snow. My white breaths led me through the streets past abandoned Frugo trolleys and Frugoburger cartons. I was walking too fast to shiver much, even with the chill that had chalked all the veins of the dead leaves near Copse View. The trees were showing every bone, but what else had changed? I couldn’t comprehend the sight ahead, unless I was wary of believing in it, until I reached the end of the street that led to the woods. There wasn’t a derelict house to be seen. Shady Lane and Arbour Street and, far better, Copse View had been levelled, surrounding the woods with a triangle of waste land.

  I remembered hearing sounds like thunder while my uncle was in hospital. The streets the demolition had exposed looked somehow insecure, unconvinced of their own reality, incomplete with just half an alley alongside the back yards. As I hurried along Copse View, where the pavement and the roadway seemed to be waiting for the terrace to reappear, I stared hard at the waste ground where the house with the occupant had been. I could see no trace of the building apart from the occasional chunk of brick, and none at all of the figure with the sticks.

  I found my uncle in his chair outside the front door. I wondered if he’d locked himself out until he said “Thought you weren’t coming. I’m not as speedy as I was
, you know.”

  As we made for Frugo I saw he could trundle only as fast as his weaker arm was able to propel him. Whenever he lost patience and tried to go faster the chair went into a spin. “Waltzing and can’t even see my partner,” he complained but refused to let me push. On the way home he was slower still, and I had to unload most of his groceries, though not my Frugoat bar, which he’d forgotten to buy. When I came back from returning the trolley he was at his window, which was open, perhaps because he hadn’t wanted me to watch his struggles to raise the sash. “Thanks for the company,” he said.

  I thought I’d been more than that. At least there was no need for me to wish for any on the walk home. I believed this until the woods came in sight, as much as they could for the dark. Night had arrived with a vengeance, and the houses beyond the triangle of wasteland cut off nearly all the light from the estate. Just a patch at the edge of the woods was lit by the solitary intact streetlamp.

  Its glare seemed starkest on the area of rubbly ground where the house with the watchful occupant had been. The illuminated empty stretch reminded me of a stage awaiting a performer. Suppose the last tenant of the house had refused to move? Where would they have gone now that it was demolished? How resentful, even vengeful, might they be? I was heading for the nearest street when I heard the feral snarl of bicycles beyond the houses. Without further thought I made for the woods.

  Arbour Street and Shady Lane were far too dark. If the path took me past the site of the house, at least it kept me closer to the streetlamp. I sidled through the gap in the railings and followed the track as fast as the low-lying darkness let me. More than once shadows that turned out to be tendrils of undergrowth almost tripped me up. Trees and bushes kept shutting off the light before letting it display me again, though could anyone be watching? As it blazed in my eyes it turned my breaths the colour of fear, but I didn’t need to think that. I was shivering only because much of the chill of the night seemed to have found a home in the woods. The waste ground of Copse View was as deserted as ever. If I glanced at it every time the woods showed it I might collide with something in the dark.