The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘More like chanting. A long way off and too close into the bargain, if you know what I mean.’

  Nobody did, but Donna’s father said ‘Maybe something’s up with the rig.’

  ‘Picking up messages not meant for us,’ said her mother.

  ‘A lady at the lunch club used to know someone like that,’ Ethel said. ‘She thought she was going mad because she kept hearing voices, until the dentist found it was her filling picking up the wireless.’

  ‘Shame they can’t take a few more mad ideas out of people’s heads that easily,’ Donna’s father said.

  Dave looked unhappy when the notion wasn’t hooted down. ‘They used to think they could.’

  Donna hugged his waist as a promise of a reward later if he would just keep the peace, but the buzzer on the door intervened on her behalf. As soon as Pen responded to it, Dave’s parents and his Uncle Rodney broke into ‘We wish you a merry Christmas,’ agreeing on approximately half of the notes. ‘That’s what you must have heard, Pen,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Wasn’t,’ Pen said as she made way for the newcomers. ‘Sit yourself down for pity’s sake, Eth. You look like a turnstile stuck in that doorway.’

  ‘Fine thick carpets,’ Dave’s mother had been waiting to enthuse, which was sufficient not just to revive the theme but to set the guests competing to praise Dave’s and Donna’s professional taste and skill. By the time that was over Donna had managed to seat both families in the main room while Dave served drinks. Rodney brushed up his overhanging moustache with the back of his hand as a preamble to slurping the froth off his beer, then set the tankard down to be transformed into a variety of potions by the flickering lights of the Christmas tree. ‘I’m told you had some excitement round here while good Christian folk were tucked up in bed.’

  ‘Thought you were here. Saw your old heap,’ Dave’s father was saying to Donna’s, and turned away from him before he had time to retort. ‘What excitement was that?’

  ‘It was people from here, wasn’t it, Dave? Died and went crackers was the tale I heard from my friend who lives on the Row and came in the Scales for a festive pint.’

  ‘I don’t think you could be mad if you were dead,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Why not? Maybe that’s what Judgment Day will be, a madhouse.’

  ‘Don’t be so morbid, Pen,’ said Ethel, and raised the gin she’d dropped her stick for. ‘Here’s to their memory, whoever they were.’

  Glasses were elevated, and agreement was murmured, before Pen said ‘What a day to choose for popping off.’

  ‘He didn’t die at Christmas, the one who died,’ Dave told her. ‘The medics said it must have been days ago he had a heart attack. None of us had seen him for a week, not since he took everyone’s photograph.’

  Up to this point Donna had avoided thinking that the photographer had lain dead for days as close to her as the tree outside the window, but now the thought felt like a presence which had lingered in the building to wait for the dark. When the families had finished expressing shades of dismay her father said ‘Will it come out?’

  Donna shivered. ‘Will what come out of where?’

  ‘Come out. Be any good. Develop.’

  ‘Oh, the photographs,’ Donna said with an attempt at a laugh. ‘I expect there may still be the negatives, but he’d be on them.’

  Some sounds of understanding greeted this, and Rodney seemed to feel it was left to him to say ‘So who went mad?’

  ‘Those people who were playing whatever they were playing as we drove up looked a bit strange to me,’ Pen offered.

  ‘Which bunch was that?’ said Dave’s father.

  ‘They were spinning some old woman round and round downstairs, and she didn’t look too thrilled about it either.’

  ‘Nobody’s downstairs just now,’ Dave said. ‘The old chap who lives there with his son found the, you understand, the photographer, which you can imagine would upset anyone, Uncle Rod. His son’s had to take him away to relatives in Manchester.’

  ‘You nodded off on the motorway, Pen,’ Ethel said. ‘Too much sherry with your mince pies at mine.’

  ‘Are you saying there’s nobody at all under you?’ Pen demanded.

  ‘Not as we speak. Not just at present,’ Donna said, though changing the words didn’t help much.

  ‘I’m sure there’ll be someone down there before you know it,’ said her mother. ‘Odds Pen had been thinking about the games we’re going to play after dinner. Now I’m having a look at your bird, Donna, in case he’s squawking to be let out before he goes up in smoke.’

  ‘Let’s both look.’ As soon as they were in the kitchen Donna murmured ‘I was going to tell you and daddy what happened. I just didn’t want it spoiling the day’

  ‘We’ll make sure nothing does,’ her mother said so lightly Donna almost thought she wasn’t put out because Dave’s family had heard first, and slid the turkey into view to perforate it with the fork. ‘Seven hours should do, even for such a plump feller.’

  ‘I’ll start seeing to the vegetables.’

  ‘Don’t talk about your aunts like that.’

  The clatter of plates started the families vying to help, and only the provision of more drinks persuaded them to resume their seats, apart from Ethel, who levered herself to a dining-chair and directed the servers like a sedentary housekeeper. Half an hour after Donna and her mother had repaired to the kitchen, everyone was seated at last around the laden oval table. As Dave flourished the carving-fork and knife, Pen appeared to waken from one of her dozes. ‘Is anyone going to say grace?’

  ‘Grace,’ Rodney said.

  Dave made the first incision, and then it was too late, though Donna would have taken up Pen’s suggestion if she had been able to remember the words. ‘Couldn’t have done better myself,’ her mother said after a mouthful, and surely those words were enough of a blessing. ‘To the chef.’

  ‘The chef,’ the guests chorused more or less distinctly, elevating their drinks, and Donna set about enjoying her own meal as much as everyone else was. Only the dance of flames on the pudding when Dave lit the brandy on it disconcerted her, or perhaps it was the way Pen’s face jerked up beyond them which did, her face blinking and wavering as though the flames were as close to it as they momentarily appeared to be. Pen took refuge in another doze once the meal was over, various people having declared ‘I couldn’t’ before they did, and the families began to disagree over who was entitled to clear the table and wash up. A deal was ultimately struck by which all the men saw to these tasks, leaving the women to talk across Pen and speculate how long it would take her paper hat to slip off her lolling head. When Donna closed the curtains, the clash of wooden rings roused Pen to mumble in her sleep. Ethel thumped the floor with her sticks, which only brought the men to see if there had been an accident. ‘What’s your weird sister saying?’ Rodney wanted to know, or at any rate asked.

  ‘Even less sense than usual.’

  Pen raised her head blindly, and the paper hat crackled as if her hair had caught fire. ‘Coming up the house,’ she announced.

  ‘Good job we know her or we’d be having her locked up,’ Rodney said, projecting his voice at her. Perhaps in some way this caused her to protest ‘Don’t want that bath.’ Nothing else she mumbled seemed worth a guess before the men returned from the kitchen again, looking virtuous. ‘Are we leaving Pen in her trance?’ Donna’s father said.

  Ethel thumped the floor so hard it shook, and Donna imagined the vibrations invading the unlit empty room beneath. She was about to ask her aunt to stop when the sleeper blinked herself awake and peered about her. ‘We’re at Donna’s. What were you dreaming?’ Donna’s mother said.

  ‘Nothing at all. I just nodded off for a second. Are we going to play now? Let’s have the game where we put bits of a body together.’

  ‘That’s fun,’ Donna promised herself aloud, and went to fetch a foolscap pad and a handful of ballpoints from the spare room, which smelled of the glossy brochures she and
Dave kept for consulting at home. The lack of a window trapped the smell, and so did the door as it crept shut, withdrawing the sounds of the families from her. She shoved a pile of brochures under one arm and snatched the door open, feeling as though she was releasing herself from a cell she hadn’t known the apartment contained. ‘Here you are, everyone,’ she called as she hurried back to the party. She held out the pad for each person to tear off a sheet, and once the ballpoints and brochures had also been distributed, sat on the arm of Dave’s chair. ‘You start us off, Pen.’

  Pen took her time with the face. She crouched over the sheet spread on the brochure until it seemed that rather than ensuring nobody could see what she was drawing, she was unable to straighten up from staring at it. Abruptly she folded the strip on which she’d drawn and thrust the page at her sister. ‘Shoulders,’ she said.

  Her directing had been part of the game ever since Donna was little. ‘Chest and a bit of the arms… Belly and elbows… Hipbones and wrists…’ Donna was in charge of feet for this round, and gave them hobnailed boots whose toes pointed in opposite directions. She handed the long thin wad to Pen, who unfolded it and held it up. ‘Oh,’ she said, not quite the cry of surprise with which she usually greeted the result of the game, and not all the other players laughed.

  The various sections of the figure weren’t supposed to match, but somehow the joke had gone wrong. The grinning wild-haired face seemed determined to ignore its elongated scrawny body, which was either performing a grotesque knock-kneed dance or dangling from the cocked head on the stretched neck. Even the hairy ankles protruding from boots far too large for them no longer struck Donna as amusing. ‘I used to go out with her,’ Rodney said, which allowed Donna to find a laugh within herself and Pen to propose another round.

  This one was almost a success. The head Ethel drew with a bobble hat perched on top of its bald pate was sticking out its tongue, and most of the players guffawed at that, although Donna could have done without the dribble from a corner of its mouth where her aunt’s ballpoint had slipped. Rodney started next, but the head he produced was so pop-eyed that nobody liked it much. ‘It’s looking at me,’ Pen complained. ‘Cover it up.’ After that she found some aspect of each figure to dislike, and when she took issue with a pair of skinny hands which appeared to be digging their nails into the page in order to bestir the body they had patched together—hands which Dave’s mother couldn’t recall having drawn to look like that but which she must have—Donna thought it time to call a halt. ‘Let’s play Consequences now.’

  ‘There can’t be any harm in that,’ said Pen, and wrote the first line. ‘The man she met,’ she reminded her sister to write, and accompanied each passing of the folded sheet with a direction: ‘The time… The place… He said… She said… Then she… And he… And the consequence was…’ Donna wrote the most optimistic consequence she could think of and handed the sheet, now little broader than a wand, to her aunt. ‘The Queen met—’ Pen said, and then ‘What’s this wormy thing?’

  ‘Napoleon,’ her sister interpreted, not without some pique at having her handwriting questioned.

  ‘The Queen met Napoleon at thirteen o’clock on the blasted heath. She said “I can teach you to fly,” as if she would, Rodney, and he said “Shall we dance?”, I don’t think. Then she ran three times round the oak tree, I expect that’s the one outside here, and he, is there someone you’d like to do this to, Dave? He locked himself in the smallest room, best place for him. And the consequence was, I can’t read this word either. They both lived something ever after.’

  ‘Happily,’ said Donna.

  ‘I thought it said hoggily. They both lived like pigs for evermore.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t,’ Donna objected, and heard herself making too much of a fuss. ‘Auntie Ethel, you start this time.’

  ‘Can’t we play something else now? All this scribbling won’t help my joints.’

  ‘Let’s play the game where I’m always the old boot.’

  ‘That’s Monopoly, Pen.’

  ‘I know what it’s called. I haven’t lost my senses yet, whoever else round here may have.’

  ‘We can be spectators,’ Dave’s mother said to him. ‘We’ll have to be homing before it’s finished, or I’ll never be ready for the family tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll see to the coffee,’ Rodney said as though he’d been given the excuse none too soon.

  Dave fetched the game from the spare room, but it was less of a success than usual. Perhaps because she was tired, Donna found Pen’s commentary chafed her nerves. ‘Better make sure nothing’s living in those,’ Pen said when the plastic buildings started to appear on the board, and when she managed to buy some, shook them vigorously and squinted into their hollow interiors. A quirk of the dice sent her to jail three times in succession. ‘Back in my cell again. May as well lock me up and throw away the key,’ she complained, and as the other players moved their symbols around the track ‘Dance round, go on, don’t mind me.’ Before she had a chance to release her miniature boot from jail she’d nodded off and was talking in her sleep again. ‘Round and round, stop it, you’re making me dizzy,’ she mumbled, and ‘Keep it away, I’ll be quiet, I will.’ When she began to moan on a rising note Ethel shook her awake, for which she was uncharacteristically grateful, and Donna’s mother said ‘I think we should all be moving. Our hosts have had a long day. Let’s say they’ve bought us.’

  Pen shoved the boot away with a fingernail, knocking over several raw red houses. ‘They’re welcome to the lot of those squashed places.’

  Eventually all the guests had their coats on, Ethel refusing to be helped with hers and Pen following suit, and Donna’s mother kissed Dave hard, then her daughter. ‘Thank you both for making the day special.’

  Once they’d seen their guests out and watched the cars up the drive, the two pairs of brake-lights flaring red as firebrands before swerving out of the grounds, Donna let go of Dave’s waist and closed her hand around the icy metal bar of one glass door. ‘What kind of Christmas was that really, do you think?’

  ‘It isn’t over yet.’ He took her free hand in both of his, which were almost warm enough to counteract the chill of the metal. ‘Here’s what I think. I think we shouldn’t let what happened to those poor people ruin our first Christmas here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You aren’t having second thoughts, are you? Don’t sit on them. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere you don’t.’

  ‘It’ll be better when there are more people again.’ If the heat of the ground floor felt somehow illusory, that was only because the chill of the night had reached deep into her. The ruined carpet in the photographer’s hall would have to be replaced, she thought, which touched off a memory as she hurried ahead of Dave to the stairs. ‘Do you remember when we came to measure?’

  ‘How could I forget? Coldest day of the year, it felt like. So much for May.’

  ‘It was only cold in here though, wasn’t it? I wonder…’

  ‘So will I unless you tell me.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what made us go wrong, the cold? We’ve never been that careless.’

  ‘We must be turning into an old married couple. We’ll have to look after each other.’

  ‘We’ve always done that, haven’t we? I still don’t understand how we could have thought there were so many rooms in this place.’

  ‘Trying to be too clever. You remember, we figured since all the apartments had the same floor plan we could multiply one. I seem to recall someone kept saying “God, it’s freezing” and “Get a move on”. Does it matter? We got it right in the end between us. That’s what being together’s about.’

  ‘One of the things.’ Donna was attempting to identify when they’d decided they would like to move to Nazarill themselves—surely not that cold confused first day here, and yet as far as she could tell it had been then the idea had entered her mind. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

/>   ‘I didn’t mean for that.’

  ‘I just thought it might make you feel better after everything. We won’t if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do,’ she decided by the time they reached their door. As soon as it was closed she showed him how much she did, pulling him to her and finding his tongue with hers as she lifted one thigh between his legs. When she and Dave parted for breath he said ‘Let me just unload some of the drink.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  In the bedroom she closed the heavy curtains, beyond which the oak tree was groping for the light of the room, and lay on top of the quilt. She heard Dave turn off the bathroom light, and the kitchen light, and the one in the main room, and in the hall. It was their own dark, they would make it so by being together; she mustn’t let herself feel as though he was inviting the darkness up from below them. When he came into the room she didn’t speak until he went to the chest of drawers. ‘Dave…’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘It’s my turn, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only if you like. It never has to be, you know that.’

  ‘I like.’ Putting themselves in each other’s power only made them feel more certain of each other. ‘I do,’ she said as though repeating the marriage vow, and stretched her arms and legs wide as he brought the four silk scarves out of the top drawer. ‘Tighter,’ she said when he tied a scarf to her left wrist with a knot from which she could free herself with the merest tug. ‘Make it real,’ she insisted, and used her other hand to tie a knot on top of the first and haul it as tight as she could.

  ‘Don’t cut off your circulation.’

  ‘If I do you can get it going for me,’ Donna said, swinging her scarved wrist towards the bedpost for him to secure. She tugged at all her bonds when he’d finished tying them. ‘Now you can do what you like with me,’ she said.

  A delicious tingling spread up her torso and down her thighs as he began to unbutton the front of her almost ankle-length dress. He kissed each part of her body he found, and each kiss made her feel a little younger and more eager for him. When he’d laid her dress open he snapped her bra open between its cups and lingered over kissing each of her breasts. Kneeling on the floor, his elbows on the quilt, he shuffled down the bed, tonguing her stomach. He popped the stud of her panties, and she felt herself open in anticipation of his mouth. At that moment the phone rang in the main room.