The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘Give her hell,’ Derek said as Oswald reached the door, and the women uttered sympathetic murmurs—sympathetic to whom, Oswald wasn’t sure. He stepped onto the escalator and closed his hand around the rubber banister, which felt like a weapon restless with eagerness. The tethered angels rose beside him, and all at once they seemed false, absurd as his nostalgia for Amy and her mother, which wouldn’t help him deal with Amy as she was now. That was his task, he thought as he strode out of the mall—only his.

  The moors had pulled the sun down. The motorway was busily stringing its lights. He joined them for two miles to the Partington exit, from which he saw that the town had begun to glow like a fiery tribute to its highest building. As the Austin nosed between the gateposts, the building lit itself to greet him. The gravel kept up its welcoming sound all the way to the car park, where Lin Stoddard and her daughter were unloading their Celica. Oswald had climbed out of his vehicle when Lin rested a carton of bottles on the roof of hers and half turned to him. ‘Mr Priestley…’

  ‘All secure. Your endowment policy’s in the system, and the money to keep you when you go to university, young lady, younger lady. I had to spell your name the way you were christened, perhaps I ought to mention.’

  ‘I wasn’t christened,’ the girl said indignantly, and tried to hitch her loaded carton higher on her chest, only to bump a corner against the underside of the tailgate. ‘And I’m Pamelay now.’

  ‘There can’t be much left for her,’ Oswald said to Lin, which earned him the merest glimpse of a smile, and to the girl ‘Here, let me take that.’

  She let the carton fall into his hands so readily he only just caught it. Lack of sleep had thumbed darkness beneath her eyes, he saw. ‘Little Miss Sleepwalker, is it?’ he said to her mother. ‘Season of excitement and late nights, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s some of it. Pamelay, would you like to let us in and run up to open the door?’

  ‘Mummy…’

  ‘Just do it, please. Mr Priestley and I will be right behind you.’

  The girl sucked in her lips and hesitated until Lin nodded sharply at her; then she unlocked the glass doors and held one open. ‘I’ve got it,’ Lin said.

  The heat of the building embraced Oswald as she let the doors meet behind him. As the girl sprinted along the corridor and up the stairs the subdued light appeared to make her part of itself. He hefted the carton, setting bubbles swarming in the plastic bottles. ‘Are you entertaining tonight?’

  ‘Librarians and a couple of our daughter’s friends. Feel free if you aren’t booked.’

  The invitation seemed polite rather than enthusiastic. ‘I’m not sure what my child’s doing,’ Oswald said.

  ‘Are you not?’ Before he had time to answer this reproof or even to acknowledge that he didn’t know how, Lin said ‘I’ve got to tell you, Mr Priestley, she was why I sent ours on ahead.’

  ‘We’re speaking of Amy. You’re saying she was the reason…’

  ‘The reason why ours has been losing her sleep.’ Lin went to the foot of the stairs to ascertain that the girl’s running footsteps had reached the top corridor; then she propped a corner of her carton against the banister and fixed her quick eyes on Oswald. ‘She’s imaginative enough without having it encouraged.’

  ‘What has Amy been saying to her?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Didn’t you hear?’

  He was beginning to sweat with the heat and his burden, which thumped him under the chin as he tried to settle it more comfortably in his arms. ‘When she went on the ether, do you mean?’

  ‘Ah, so you do know.’

  ‘This afternoon was the first I heard of it. I’ve come home to take it up with her. What did she say?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea, Mr Priestley.’

  ‘But I understood you to—’

  ‘I know our daughter’s friends told her yours said she’d seen a ghost down here. Not just a ghost either, more like something out of one of the videos we won’t have in the library. I wouldn’t have thought you’d let her watch that sort of thing, but it must be where she got the idea.’ Lin raised her tall body into its usual stoop and lifted her carton away from the wall. ‘We’d better be making our way up. I don’t want another panicky scene.’

  Oswald felt unreasonably accused of having delayed their progress. At the first bend he said ‘I can’t tell you how much I regret Amy’s behaviour. What would you have me do?’

  ‘Pamelay’s friends nearly wouldn’t come tonight, they’d been got so worked up about this place. Leonard was for keeping them away, except that might make her think there was something to the nonsense.’ Lin tramped up to the middle floor and murmured ‘It’s got her hearing noises in her room.’

  ‘What manner of noises?’

  ‘Noises she can’t be hearing when there’s nobody below us.’

  ‘She couldn’t even if there was anyone. We have Mr Kenilworth beneath us, and I’ve never heard a note. You can’t hear us, can you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’d know if you could. The way Amy listens to what she calls music, it’s a miracle she still has all her senses left.’

  ‘I suppose Leonard and I have that to look forward to.’

  ‘Nothing quite so diabolical, I hope.’

  For the moment they were united by the complicity of parents, and he was trying to frame another promise or apology to strengthen it when instead he had to pant after her to the top of the stairs. ‘Pamelay?’ she called. ‘Pam.’

  The girl appeared from the apartment at once, tying a pink bow on the crown of her head as if she was making a present of herself. ‘I was coming to find you.’

  ‘Mr Priestley has something to tell you,’ Lin said, and tramped along the corridor to shoulder the door wider, broadening the mat of brightness on the dim carpet. ‘Haven’t you, Mr Priestley?’

  Oswald risked holding the carton with one hand long enough to backhand moisture from his forehead. ‘Pamela, Pamelay, rather. If I’ve any control over it, and I intend to have, she’ll tell you herself she’s sorry for whatever poppycock she dreamed up, and I hope you’ll also accept my sincere—’

  ‘About not being able to hear.’ Lin dumped her carton on a kitchen surface and marched back along the hall. ‘Mr Priestley was going to explain to you you can’t hear a sausage through these floors. It’s as your dad and I said, it must be your hamster. Take that from Mr Priestley, there’s a girl, don’t leave the poor man staggering.’

  The girl dug her fingers between the carton and Oswald’s chest with such force it drove his gallantry back into him, so that he let her load herself. ‘Ufe,’ she said, and ‘It wasn’t Parsley. It wasn’t just a scrabbly noise. I heard someone laughing like a witch.’

  ‘Then you were dreaming, or thinking too much when you should have been asleep,’ her mother said. ‘Shall we take Parsley out of your room if he won’t let you sleep?’

  ‘Don’t. He’ll be lonely all by himself in the dark.’

  The girl sounded close to tears, not a spectacle Oswald was anxious to watch. ‘Let’s see if we can find the one responsible. She can tell you she was being foolish, telling fairy stories they shouldn’t have allowed on the wireless.’

  ‘Give me that before you drop it,’ Lin told her daughter as Oswald flexed his aching arms and unlocked his door. He was about to call to Amy, despite the lightlessness of all he could see of the apartment, when he noticed she had covered up the nearest picture in the hall. Had she blotted out the eyes so as not to feel watched? In that case, what had she been doing? He switched on the light and saw that the sheet of paper taped to the glass was a note to him. Gone to hairdressers then Rob’s. Don’t make me any dinner.

  ‘Well, after all that, she isn’t even here.’ Oswald felt disobeyed and made a fool of. ‘She must know to keep out of the way, mustn’t she?’ he said, and when the youngest Stoddard didn’t so much as nod ‘I’ll bring her to you as soon as she deigns to return. I’ll see to it she gives
you back your sleep.’

  As the girl darted back into her hall she was clearly taking refuge from the dimness of the corridor, and Amy was to blame. Oswald hung his overcoat on his bedroom door, then stood absolutely still while he tried to remember her boyfriend’s last name. Robin, Robin, Robin—He clenched his hands prayerfully together and had it: Robin Hayward. Now he had to find the phone number.

  It seemed that as well as leaving schoolwork strewn across the dining-table and three mugs, not to mention several plates, drowning in the sink, she’d hidden the directory. When at last he found it, face down beside the hi-fi and with an empty cassette box on its back, he felt as if she’d blinded him to its presence. At least its Haywards were few, and only one in Partington was listed. The paper gave beneath his fingernail as he dialled the number.

  ‘Defy me as long as you wish. I shall be here when you tire of it.’ The ringing seemed to take him at his word, and he’d begun to wonder whether Amy could have lied to him about her whereabouts when the bell made way for the voice of her accomplice. ‘Hel,’ it said before it disappeared into a trough between syllables and had to raise itself. ‘Lo?’

  ‘I wish to speak to my daughter.’

  ‘Is this Amy’s dad?’

  ‘This is he. That’s who I still am.’

  Silence was the answer, and he imagined Robin miming, especially when he heard Amy let slip a giggle that infuriated him. Without further preamble her voice arrived at the phone. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Where shall I start?’ Oswald demanded, and controlled himself. ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I can quite see why you would prefer to keep away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  At first he couldn’t understand her tone, which sounded close to hopeful. Of course, she must be hoping he’d been impressed by her balderdash. ‘After your play-acting on the radio,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you know about that.’

  ‘You’d rather I stayed ignorant, would you? That shows your lies for what they are, that you didn’t want your own blood to hear them.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have believed me.’

  ‘You’re right in that, but someone you chose not to consider did. Your young friend from next door. Was it too much for you to spare a thought for her age?’

  ‘I was younger than her when I saw what I saw.’

  ‘How young? If you mean—’

  ‘Right, when I was little and you tried to throw me in a window of that place. Seems like you wouldn’t be happy till you got me in there.’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell such lies about me for your friend to hear. I remember exactly how it was. I was lifting you up because you wanted to look in, and you leaned too far and nearly fell. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have had a better hold on you, though I would have expected you to know I was sorry. But if you imagined you saw anything in here that shouldn’t be, that was you taking after—’

  He was on the verge of saying too much before they were face to face with nobody else to hear. ‘You ought to have spoken up at the time,’ he went on quickly. ‘However, that’s by the way, and no excuse for broadcasting such claptrap now.’

  ‘I’ve only just remembered what I saw.’

  ‘What you imagined, if even that, and why didn’t you confide in me instead of displaying yourself to people who don’t know you and won’t understand?’ His anger was fading; he wanted to reach her before it might be too late. ‘Come home so we can talk.’

  ‘I may in a bit.’

  ‘See to it it’s no longer, will you, please? I’ve undertaken to your follower that you’ll speak to her.’

  ‘What do you think I’ll say?’

  ‘It’s your duty to make her see there is nothing to fear.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’

  Her tone was so flat he couldn’t judge how mocking she intended to sound. ‘At the very least be certain you’re home before midnight,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this thing you’ve got about midnight?’

  ‘It’s the start of the forthcoming year.’

  ‘Oh, that, right. New Year.’ Her voice retreated while it added the explanatory phrase, then returned. ‘You’re staying there, are you?’

  ‘Most certainly, for our first New Year in our best home.’

  She released a sound that was little more than an expulsion of air and cut him off, leaving him to wonder if her question had been meant to establish he wasn’t planning to go to her. What might she be up to where he couldn’t see? For the moment that troubled him less than the memory she’d roused. If he had frightened her as badly as she claimed the day he’d lifted her up to look inside Nazarill, it had been in the process of demonstrating there was nothing inside for anyone to fear—that she couldn’t scare him.

  If she was still trying, it wouldn’t work. So long as he kept the apartment spotless, his fears would have nowhere to breed. He fetched dusters, a cloth and a bunch of bright green feathers on a stick from the cupboard under the sink, having decided not to cook just for himself: an evening’s fasting would do him no harm. He dawdled along the hall, flicking at the tops of the picture-frames, and pushed his bedroom door open. Before he could switch on the light he glimpsed an object in the left-hand bottom corner of the window, a twitching many-legged silhouette.

  He’d let that happen, he thought. He hadn’t prayed hard enough—perhaps hadn’t really prayed at all. His mind seemed to shrink around the idea as he groped for the light-switch. The bulb came on, and the spider froze. Its body was withered, its legs were haphazardly splayed, yet he’d seen it move just now. He thought it was shamming until another flicker of the illuminations around the marketplace twitched it again. He crossed the room quickly, and had grasped two soft handfuls of the curtains to shut out the sight when he saw what the spider had done. Beside it, trapped within the double glazing, was a small round white shape that reminded him of the pills Beth Griffin supplied to his daughter.

  Even if the cocoon hatched, he told himself, anything that might emerge from it would die between the panes. He forced his head towards the window to convince himself there was no movement in the glass prison. He didn’t realise how close to the pane his face was until the edge of the fog of his breath spread to the spider’s forelegs as though they were drawing it towards the shrivelled mouth. The cocoon appeared to shift wakefully as the illuminations ran through their sequence yet again, and he hauled the clammy curtains together before retreating from the window to grab the feathered wand and poke it into every crevice he could find in his room. ‘Please God,’ he heard himself repeating, ‘please God,’ as he progressed into the hall, where the pictures goggled at him.

  He was being irrational, he managed to think. He’d cleaned only yesterday, and nothing had been added to the main room since then except, on the table, the chaos of Amy’s schoolwork. Surely that wasn’t a strand of web joining a corner of her foolscap notepad to the volume of Shakespeare; it must be a strand of hair, even if it looked greyer than it should. He brushed it off the table and frowned at her work.

  ARE WITCHES SUPERNATURAL? must be a question on Macbeth, or at least a summary of one. Her answer was in a scribble so minute it might have been designed to be illegible to him, and was surrounded by doodles in the margins—pentagrams in circles, and long-haired laughing wild-eyed bearded faces. His gaze trailed down the page and snagged on a group of words that appeared twice, or almost. ‘Insane root that takes the reason prisoner,’ he read, and then ‘In ane root that takes the rea on pri oner.’ He gripped the edge of the table and squinted at her notes until the elongated letters which she must have written as some kind of secret joke writhed into a dance, having become suddenly visible all over the page. He straightened up with a jerk and tidied her schoolwork into a pile, and was dusting the table when a prayer broke out of him. ‘Please God don’t let me lose her. Please don’t let her go like her grandmother.’

  He could barely hear himself,
and made himself speak up. ‘Please, if she’s starting, let me be able to get her back. You should know if anyone does what it’s like to lose a child.’ He seemed to remember having sensed long ago—when he was younger than Amy, perhaps—whether his prayers were reaching their destination, but how could he expect that if he wasn’t devoting all his attention to praying? He laid the duster beside Amy’s heap and having drawn the curtains, switched off the light and fell to his knees. Since moving to Nazarill he’d found he prayed best in the dark.

  The floor felt harder than it would have looked. Along with his fasting, that ought to help him pray. He wouldn’t move until he sensed that he was—not answered, that would be presumptuous, but heard. ‘Please God don’t abandon us,’ he said at the top of his voice. ‘I only want You to do anything I can’t. I wouldn’t ask more of You than I’m asking of myself. If I have to change I will. I’ll be anything I need to be to save her…’

  He didn’t know how long he knelt there, shouting. When his thighs began to shiver he pushed his knees apart to steady himself. By now the floor was so hard it might as well have been uncarpeted, yet the sensation seemed inextricably bound up with the imminence of peace. At some point he had closed his eyes, and now he felt he was in a dark place no larger than it had to be. His voice was too big for it, and so he quietened his voice gradually, until he couldn’t even hear what he was saying. That was surely unimportant, given the promise of peace that surrounded him, a peace such as he’d never experienced. His whispered undertaking was a part of the peace, and he reiterated it until a thought intruded on his consciousness. He’d become so immersed in praying on Amy’s behalf that he had forgotten about her. His eyelids fluttered, and the green digits of the clock on the videorecorder swam into focus. It would be midnight in less than five minutes.