The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘You don’t,’ Amy said, and slapped his bare side. ‘Maybe not think, maybe remember. I don’t want to talk about it any more yet, that’s all I know.’

  ‘If you need to talk later…’

  ‘You’d better be here.’ As she spoke she knew her fierceness was a substitute for admitting her instinct that whatever she was striving to recall, she wouldn’t be able to speak to him about it while her father could hear. ‘If I don’t phone you by midnight, call me in the morning.’

  ‘I was going to try and finish off Cromwell.’

  ‘Go on then.’ When he looked guilty she kissed his wounded side. ‘I don’t want to be the bitch who messed your grades up. Call me when you’re ready to.’

  That sounded like a sly rebuke, but all the explaining had begun to clutter up her brain. She flipped her cap onto her head as she led the way to the front door, where she held onto Rob’s shoulders while she gave him a tongue-filled kiss, after which they gazed so awkwardly at each other they might have been auditioning for the old film. ‘Well,’ she said to move them, and opened the door.

  ‘See you.’

  ‘Hear from you.’

  ‘I said.’

  ‘I know,’ said Amy, and that was the end of their words. She flashed him a smile with her mouth shut and picked her way along the ageing road. When she looked back from the bend at which it sloped down sharply he sent her the wave he’d been waiting to release. Then the door was shut, and she tramped down to the main road, only to learn that being alone wouldn’t help her think.

  Trees leapt about in windows on Moor View, houses muttered to themselves in television voices, and she wondered how many of the locked-up unseen people she was passing had heard her on the radio. Her hands and feet felt manacled with cold, so that she had to assume she was still experiencing some effects of the pipe. With every step she took, Nazarill inched a little more of its shadowy bulk into the frame of the top of the street to await her. She shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets and set down her feet hard enough to make the house-walls ring, to remind herself of the town at her back.

  An icy wind caught at her wrists and ankles and lips as she emerged onto Nazareth Row. A railing rattled in its socket, and beside the gateposts, in the additional but unreliable glow from the illuminations around the marketplace, ranks of spindly shadows were prancing on the grass. The drive bared its gravel at her all the way to the glass doors, on either side of which the ground-floor windows looked alive with darkness. She remembered telling Rob that nobody lived there, which seemed even less reassuring now that she was about to venture into the corridor. On reaching the gateposts she took a slow cold breath which she didn’t intend to release until the security lights had tried to take her unawares. She stepped onto the drive and gasped as Nazarill glared at her.

  It wasn’t meant to do that yet. It was supposed to restrain itself until she was she didn’t know how many yards closer. She felt as though it had been aware of her all the way from Rob’s, and so eager to spring its trap that it was no longer able to pretend. She mustn’t think that, or she wouldn’t be able to go forward. Either the Housall representative had reset the lights or—of course—the oak was no longer blocking one of their sensors. ‘Nearly,’ she made herself scoff at the building, and kicked gravel in its direction as she marched herself up the drive.

  A wind like an exhalation from a huge stone mouth came for her, and sawdust began to dance around the rooted stump of the oak with a sound like the faintest whisper of foliage. She watched it alight on the sprawl of sawdust that encircled the roots, and was about to return her attention to Nazarill when she came abreast of the patch. She halted, peering at it—at the blurred tracks in the sawdust. Some creature appeared to have walked several times around the stump.

  It must have been a dog, she thought; the prints were about the right shape and size. It had gone to the remains of the oak and ambled three times anticlockwise, no doubt searching for somewhere to pee. The glare of Nazarill deepened all the prints which weren’t overlaid by the black shadow of the stump, and showed her where they ended, between two roots that looked as though a convulsion of the tree had clenched them in the earth. Perhaps the animal hadn’t been a dog; she could see how it had clawed at the niche formed by the roots, splintering it wider. An object that wasn’t part of the stump was protruding from the niche.

  She felt she ought to recognise it. It was black as a beetle, and appeared to glisten like one as she set foot on the grass. She would only go close enough to put a name to it, she told herself and then she made it out. It was the corner of a book.

  She padded across the lawn onto the sawdust rug. Her shadow reached for the book before she did, and then her fingers closed on the binding, only to find that the book was trapped in its hiding-place. Even when she compressed the small volume with both hands it wouldn’t shift. She worked it back and forth, trying to detect a way to ease it loose. All at once it seemed to squirm in her hands. She must have twisted it how it needed to go, because without further ado it flopped out of the stump.

  It was exactly as long as her hand and as wide as the heel of it. Both covers were indented with a black cross, and before she turned it upright she identified the book. Squatting among the roots, she lifted the front cover gingerly, expecting the pages to have rotted. But the title page proved to be intact as it turned itself back, exposing words she’d once read: ‘In the beginning…’ There was handwriting in the margins, a script so old that, along with the print, it was full of esses like worms. She leafed through the Bible, finding page after page that had been written on. Then a handwritten sentence seemed to focus itself for her, the spidery script turning a charred black in the light of Nazarill.

  It had nothing to do with the Bible. Someone had used the margins as a diary. Perhaps it was a wind as well as the sentence she’d deciphered that sent a shiver through her; perhaps it was that, and her own state, which made Amy hear leaves rustling above her. She had to glance at the unobscured sky overhead before she could stand up. She wobbled to her feet and almost dropped her keys as she fumbled them out on her way to the entrance to Nazarill.

  She tried to close the glass doors silently behind her, but they emitted a note like a stealthy alarm. As she hurried down the corridor the sunken eye of each door glinted at her, the light within it swivelled to follow her. Surely nothing had pressed itself against the inside of any door to watch her, but she tripped on the stairs in her haste to be at the top of the building. Wasn’t the Bible supposed to protect you? She pressed it against her stomach as she clutched the clammy banister to haul herself around the first bend, and ran up the next flight, to be confronted by exactly the same corridor.

  Of course it wasn’t, but there was nothing to demonstrate that unless she went close enough to read the numbers of the apartments. She had an impression of too many rooms that were less deserted than they pretended to be, and she fled up two more flights into the corridor she’d fled. Except it wasn’t, she could prove that by unlocking her door if her sweaty hands didn’t drop the keys that felt warm as flesh and not much firmer. She ran to the end of the corridor that was oozing light from its panelled walls and jammed her key into the Yale lock, and twisted it so hard she was afraid it might snap. It turned, and the door fell away, and there was her hall full of eyes, and her father’s voice beyond it. ‘Is that you?’

  Who else could it be? She had to shrug off a shiver. She couldn’t tell which room he was in; all of them seemed to be dark. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she called.

  ‘That’s sensible. Give your mind a rest. You see, it doesn’t hurt to do as you’re told now and then.’

  He was in the main room, which mustn’t be as dark as the crack between its door and frame made it appear. She dodged into her bedroom and switched on her light with one elbow while closing the door with the other, and hung her cap next to the three already on the wall, and arranged her necklace over the other two adorning the dressing-table mirror; then she sat on the
stretch of her mattress she’d uncovered when she’d got out of bed, and opened the Bible on her lap.

  A hint of decay touched her nostrils and faded away as she bent her head to the book. The handwriting on the early pages was much smaller than the sentence she’d managed to understand, and even when she succeeded in locating that to remind herself how the handwriting read, it didn’t help. Best to wait for daylight and copy out everything she managed to decipher. She closed the Bible and cleared a space for it next to the bed, and wished she hadn’t reminded herself of the single legible sentence just as she was about to try and sleep. Must survive until they take me from this place, it said.

  10 - Lifting up the voice

  Oswald hoisted his briefcase out of the Austin and strolled across the car park of the Everybodys Shopping mall. A wind sharp as the cutout edges of the clouds that were puffed up above the moors roamed the square mile of concrete, raising the blurred voice of the motorway and rattling trolleys outside the supermarket. One of the pairs of glass doors of the mall greeted him with a sigh and edged out of his way, releasing two storeys’ worth of crowd noises and a giant jingle of bells accompanying the tune named after them. A security guard bade him ‘Many of them’ and wagged a walkie-talkie trimmed with holly at him as Oswald crossed the chessboards of the floor to the escalators, beside which a Christmas tree towered to the roof.

  Though it was New Year’s Eve, most of the stores had begun their January sales, and there was hardly a group of shoppers in the mall without some kind of wrapped package. Children were challenging the directions of the escalators, and Oswald presented a tolerant smile to a little girl in a large mauve velvet hat, who was trying to race down the escalator that was carrying him upwards. ‘Look at the angels,’ he told her as he stepped onto the upper floor, and pointed at the muslined figures crowned with gilded lassoes and fluttering like moths the size of babies around the tree. He was expecting her to like them—Amy would have at her age—but as she clattered down the rising stairs she stuck out her tongue at the angels as though they made her sick. ‘Little devil,’ he muttered, and crossed the balcony to the offices of Pennine and Northern, where he worked.

  It occupied a unit between a china factory rejects outlet and a remainder bookshop. Anybody passing could see whoever was working at the six desks, an openness presumably intended to tempt in trade, though Oswald suspected that was achieved by the sight of blonde bare-armed Louise behind the reception desk. ‘Mr Daily Junior will speak to you himself early next year,’ she was promising the phone, and gave Oswald a pink-lipped smile and a glimpse of a frown as she returned the flat paddle to its recess. ‘Hello, Mr Priestley. Happy, well, it isn’t quite.’

  ‘I hope it will be.’

  ‘Oh, me too. I meant not new, not yet. Was your Christmas?’

  ‘New? I imagine it was now you mention it. First of many in the new place.’

  ‘I wasn’t really… I hadn’t thought of it that way. So long as you do.’

  ‘Weren’t you expecting to see me today?’

  ‘I’m sure we were, at least I should think so. Why, was there some…’

  ‘None at all as far as I’m concerned.’ Oswald had never before seen her flustered, and could only assume she’d encountered some problem in her private life. He patted her shoulder as he made for his desk in the middle of the left-hand row.

  Derek Farmer was at the desk in front of him, Vera Winstanley diagonally opposite. Both greeted him a little cautiously, he thought. As he took his neighbours’ proposal forms out of his briefcase and prepared to transfer the details of the Stoddard family onto the computer, Derek swivelled to face him with a loud creak of his overburdened chair. ‘So how did you fare with the Christmas spirit, Oh?’

  Vera finished empurpling her mouth in front of her hand-mirror and pursed her lips, with what intention Oswald wasn’t sure. ‘Derek.’

  Derek picked up the stubbly tweed hat he always kept ready on a corner of his desk and perched it on the upper bulge of his stomach. ‘Oh will tell me if I’m talking out of turn, won’t you, Oh? Bravest chap in the whole firm.’

  ‘I can’t see what I’m meant to be objecting to. Unless you mean we’ve forgotten the meaning of Christmas.’

  ‘See, I told you both. Nothing throws our Oswald. I should have put money on him. So you had a decent holiday, Oh, all things considered?’

  ‘Whatever they’re supposed to have been, yes.’

  ‘I’d call that brave as they come.’

  Vera tugged her tight skirt over her knees before walking her chair around to confront the men. ‘Does it matter as long as he’s happy? Isn’t that the main issue?’

  ‘It’s one of them, Vee, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘If you all know something I don’t,’ Oswald said with the little patience that remained to him, ‘you might have the grace to tell me.’

  Vera’s eyes met Derek’s, and at once they had no more than half an expression apiece. Louise gazed out at the topmost angel, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘Excuse me, Mr Priestley,’ she said, and was in the process of swinging her chair around when the phone rang.

  ‘Pennine and Northern.’ She listened and turned away from her desk again. ‘Mr Priestley,’ she said in a tone he couldn’t interpret, ‘it’s for you. A Mr Arkwright of Housall?’

  ‘I know him,’ Oswald said, and lifted his own receiver. ‘Mr Arkwright, hello. If it isn’t premature, let me wish you a happy new year.’

  ‘Same to you.’

  ‘And to your family.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  ‘So let me guess why you’re calling.’

  Whatever response Oswald might have predicted would have been more than none. Perhaps the Housall representative was suffering the after-effects of too much festive indulgence. ‘Have you found someone to join us in Nazarill?’ Oswald said.

  ‘Surprisingly enough, Mr Priestley, no-one has approached us.’

  ‘Do you think it would benefit from a little more publicity? I’ve seen none since we met.’

  ‘Or heard any.’

  ‘That’s so. I meant that too.’

  ‘Or heard of any.’

  ‘I was including that as well, of course.’ At that moment Oswald became aware that while his colleagues had their backs to him, all three were pretending not to listen. ‘Why, has there been some I should be aware of?’

  ‘You really don’t know what this is about, Mr Priestley.’

  ‘Spot on, I don’t, so if you’d care to…’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you would have heard by now, one way or the other.’ Arkwright emitted a muted grunt which seemed to be intended as aural punctuation and said ‘You did say you’d try and quiet your daughter down.’

  ‘I’m doing my best, I assure you. At least, I’ve made a start at it, but I don’t see what that has—’

  ‘She was on the radio the other night, spouting about Nazarill.’

  ‘On the radio, my daughter? I don’t see how she could have managed that. Did you hear her yourself? How can you be sure it was my daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know of anybody else called Amy living there, do you?’

  ‘Nor is there, but I can’t understand how the radio…’

  ‘They’ll let anyone phone in who seems to have something to say. It’s cheaper than employing people who have.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking…’ Oswald began, until he caught himself in a last attempt to contradict Arkwright. ‘You’ve the right of it. So what did she, my daughter…?’

  ‘Apparently the sort of thing she was saying to me when I visited you, only worse. She claims to have seen something herself.’

  ‘She can’t have, or she would have told me. What night was she on? Was it the night of the day you very kindly came to visit us?’

  ‘I believe it was.’

  ‘I’ll lay odds it was, and I’ll tell you why. We had a disagreement after you left, her demanding more freedom as if she hasn’t already contrived herself far t
oo much at her age. This performance must have been her little revenge. I can’t apologise enough. I never would have expected such conduct of her.’

  ‘I hope you’ll impress upon her not to play any more pranks like that. I’ve been asked to point out that we take defamation very seriously.’

  ‘I understand. I’m wholly on your side. I’ll speak to her immediately.’

  ‘I rather think you’ll find she’s gone to the hairdresser’s. I tried to have a word with her when I rang you at home just now, but that’s all she would say.’

  ‘I can only apologise for her once again, Mr Arkwright. Please tell anyone who should be told that I’ll be taking the matter in hand.’

  ‘I won’t ask how,’ said Arkwright. ‘Here’s to a successful new year for all of us.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Oswald said, and having rung off, dialled home. His fingers were shaky with anger, and he wasn’t sure if he had misdialled, the silence which met each of the summonses of the phone was so absolute. He redialled more slowly, and imagined Amy staring at the phone, waiting for him to relent. When he’d relinquished the receiver at last he said ‘So may I ask who heard her?’

  He might have thought his colleagues had lost their tongues until Louise admitted ‘I heard the tail end of her. I didn’t realise she was yours.’

  ‘It sounds as if it was that end she was talking with,’ said Vera.

  ‘And—Well, you won’t want to hear that, Oh.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want to hear.’

  ‘I was going to say if I’d done anything like that my tail would have known about it, even at her age. I know, you can’t touch them these days for fear of the law. Used to be if you were dealing with a problem you were left to get on with it.’

  ‘I expect Mr Priestley will if we let him,’ Louise said.

  Oswald didn’t know whether that was meant to rebuke Derek or to encourage himself. How responsible was he? Had he done anything Heather wouldn’t have done and would have stopped him from doing? What mattered, he thought fiercely, was that since Amy had rejected everything he and her mother had made of her, she must be equally capable of changing back. The computer screen reminded him altogether too vividly of fog, and when he entered the Stoddards’ details he seemed unable to key in their address. He erased the luminous green gibberish, though not before a careless keystroke had set it repeating itself like a silent chant, and managed to type Nazarill correctly. Once he had completed the proposal and sent it onward he called home again. As the ringing prodded the resilient silence he grew more convinced than ever that the phone in the apartment was being watched. When he’d borne the impression as long as he could he switched off the computer and pushed himself away from the desk. ‘If anyone calls I’ll be at home. I just came in to process my neighbours.’