The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  The scents of her house-plants came somewhat feebly to meet her. She’d left the hall light on, and so was able to close the door behind her at once.The corridors and staircase had laid a chill on her despite the central heating. Usually before bed she would have a pedal on the exercise machine in the spare room followed by a shower, but tonight her walk would have to be enough. She tugged the heavy wooden buttons of her overcoat out of their fat holes and hung the coat on its personal hook on the skeletal pine cylinder next to the reproachful exercise machine, then she made for the most perfumed room.

  She didn’t stay in there any longer than was absolutely necessary, and she couldn’t help blaming George’s father for making her so conscious of how the plumbing sounded. The water running out of the sink aroused a sympathetic mumble in the plughole of the bath, as if something under her floor was attempting to address her with very little, although just too much for comfort, of a voice. When she began to be tempted to listen for words she rushed herself across the hall to her bedroom, having wrested all the taps tight. The abstract white rectangles of the wardrobe and chest of drawers, and the pastel green one of the bedspread, looked no better than disinterested, but she could live without more of a welcome if she had to. ‘Get your head down,’ she advised her triplet selves in the winged mirrors of the dressing-table, and watched them begin to obey as she sank back, relinquishing the light-cord once it had released the dark.

  At first she couldn’t sleep for listening. Once the plastic weight at the end of the light-cord had finished tapping against the wall above the pillow, she had to overcome a tendency to hold her breath. As she fell into a fitful doze, she thought she should have left the inner doors open to confirm there was silence throughout the apartment. She was just too drowsy to leave the bed, and in any case, she reflected with a slowness that was close to merging with sleep, what she would most like to have heard wasn’t silence but George on the phone to tell her that he and his father had decided to return to Nazarill—indeed, were already downstairs. It seemed to her that this series of increasingly less wakeful thoughts was why she dreamed she slipped out of bed to go down and look.

  Since it was a dream, she didn’t need to get dressed. She was mildly surprised to find herself padding into the spare room, to fetch not her coat but her keys, which she would hardly need in a dream. They felt like a not especially detailed lump of metal in her fist as she moved to unchain her door. While the chain persisted in swinging against the doorframe with a small vague distant clank, she stepped into the corridor.

  She knew she’d shut the door behind her only when she remembered having let go of the outer handle, but she didn’t have to be aware of all her actions; the dream would look after her. If the corridor appeared to be withholding even more of its light than usual, that was because she was dreaming it. The carpet under her bare feet couldn’t be bothered to feel any different from the one in her bedroom, though perhaps it never did. What was it again she was clutching in her fist? Keys, of course, despite her momentary notion that should she examine her handful she would see a bunch of flowers, a peace offering to George’s father. When she glanced at her hand she was somewhat bewildered that the dream hadn’t produced them. Still, she couldn’t control her dreams, and here were the stairs, to which she apparently had to devote some attention.

  She wondered why she had to hold onto the banister in a dream. Perhaps, she was just able to think, the need was a residue of some uneasiness which she wouldn’t suffer if she reminded herself why she was going downstairs. It felt as though she had been called down, though she was unable to remember having heard a voice. Of course she mightn’t in her sleep, and by the time she turned the corner of the grudgingly illuminated stairs she was happy to follow the dream to its end.

  It was growing impressively detailed. As she descended the last flight of stairs, with each step she saw an extra portion of the dark grey drive extending itself past the splash of sawdust on the lawn to the gateposts, beyond which the jumpy Christmas illuminations around the marketplace were lowering themselves into view. Between her and the vista the trios of doors faced each other across the corridor, which would have been brighter with the security lights. She could see well enough that every door was shut, and in any event there was nothing to fear, not in this dream.

  As she stepped off the stairs she had the odd idea that it wouldn’t matter which door she approached. Even in a dream that made no sense, especially given her impression that she’d been summoned to George’s flat. If all the dead eyes of the doors seemed to be aware of her, that needn’t trouble her as long as she kept to the middle of the corridor. She padded almost to the exit before veering with hardly any hesitation to George’s door and thumbing the bellpush.

  She couldn’t hear the bell, and because this was a dream it took her some indeterminate length of time to recall she wouldn’t have been able to do so. All the same, the button she’d pushed felt less than entirely convincing, insufficiently present, as she stared at the pink fingerless lump of the back of her fist protruding its thumb horizontally as though attempting a secret sign. Clearly that would achieve nothing by itself. ‘Abracadabra,’ she told the door, and then ‘Open sesame,’ which proved as ineffectual. Then she found herself pronouncing another formula, a bunch of words which she hadn’t known before they were put into her head somehow and which she forgot in the process of uttering them. No doubt they would have revealed themselves as nonsense once she was awake, and so she didn’t miss them. She pushed the door with her thumb, and it swung inward.

  Plainly this was the stage at which the dream became more of a dream. When she reached into the hall for the light-switch, just to the right of the door as hers was, it wasn’t there. If this hadn’t been a dream she doubted that she would have ventured into the dark, particularly when, in a clumsy attempt to sidle past the door, she bumped it shut behind her.

  That didn’t just trap her in the unlit hall; it robbed her of her sense of where she was supposed to be. At first she was relieved when her eyes began to adjust to the dark, for all that she considered this to be an unnecessarily realistic detail. Before long she was able to identify that the hint of illumination, so faint it made the walls appear to glimmer with moisture, was seeping through a doorway a good few yards ahead to her right. Though it didn’t much resemble any doorway of her own flat, and so oughtn’t to be here either, she seemed bound to head for it. The sooner she dealt with this part of the dream, the sooner she hoped she would be off this floor, which felt like cold damp stone. So did the wall when the knuckles of her left hand brushed it, and she had to remind herself not to drop her keys. They jangled as she renewed her grip on them, and she thought she heard a sound that wasn’t quite an echo beyond the doorway she was approaching. She padded forward, grateful that at least the dream was keeping the sensations of a stone floor at a bearable distance, and looked in.

  She was at the entrance to a cell. At the far end smudged black clouds were dragging themselves past a high narrow glassless window, and patches of the stone walls of the cramped rectangular cell appeared to have turned that movement on its side. If the patches were of damp, it was also crawling over the solitary object in the cell, a shape which, as she began to distinguish it, Hilda took at first to be a large plant or small tree which had withered after thrusting itself up through the floor and against the wall to the right of the window. Then she saw the remains of hands at the ends of both branches fastened to the wall on either side of a shrivelled lolling head. There was no question they were hands, because as she located them in the dimness they began to writhe all the fingers they had left, beckoning her into the cell.

  Knowing this was a dream, she had no reason not to obey—indeed, every incentive to finish with the unpleasantness as soon as possible. The figure was jerking its fingers at itself and drawing its contorted legs up towards a rib-cage patched with skin, all of which activity communicated its requirements without its having to speak—not that it seemed likely to wit
h the very little that remained of its mouth. Once she released it from the shackles she’d heard rattling in the dark, she thought, surely she herself would be released from the dream. She went to the left-hand manacle, keeping her gaze well away from the incomplete face and in particular the glistening contents of the eye sockets. Holding her keys between her teeth, she gripped the iron ring with both hands.

  It would have seemed reasonable of the dream to let such a rusty manacle snap in her grasp at once. Failing that, it could at least have dispensed with any taste of metal in her mouth. The fleshless legs were clacking against the wall, the torso and the hairless skull were straining towards her; the left hand was continuing to twitch its fingers, and the dream was having trouble in distancing her from the notion that they might touch hers. She wrenched at the manacle with all her strength, hurling herself backwards, and lost her grip before finding it again, at which point something broke.

  She saw what that was, and retreated, her hands fumbling at her mouth. The left arm as far as the elbow was dangling from the manacle. The figure swung against the wall, wagging the half of its arm, then sagged towards the floor. Its weight tore most of the right hand through the other manacle. Fragments of skin and bone flew away from the ring, and it was free.

  At the moment when it rose from its crouch as though discovering that it could extend itself to its full height, which was a head taller than Hilda, she found she could move. She was able to withdraw in time only to glimpse the figure groping across the wall to fetch the rest of itself. As she backed through the doorway she saw a vertical thread of light away to her left. The outer door hadn’t closed as tightly as she’d imagined.

  Her sense of dreaming was secure again before she emerged into the familiar corridor—so secure that as far as to the stairs the carpeted floor felt like stone. She trudged up to the next level and admitted herself to her flat, where she dropped her keys in her coat pocket. At least the dream ended there rather than conducting her all the way back to her bed.

  When she awoke, it was still dark. An unpleasantly metallic taste was in her mouth. She wobbled upright to grab the light-cord and kept on going, out of bed. In the bathroom she made to cup a hand beneath the tap, then washed her hands instead. Once they felt clean she scooped up a palmful of cold water and gargled with it before drinking a handful. This done, and the toilet used, she plodded back to bed and fell asleep almost at once, exhausted beyond thinking. The taste was out of her mouth, the gritty sensation of her hands was washed away, and in honour of the new year she resolved that by the morning she wouldn’t even remember the dream.

  12 - First words

  ‘I’ll be off out now then. Amy. You’ll be forging ahead with your homework, will you?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘So it does. Getting up to date for going back on Monday, eh? I’ll just be a couple of hours with some clients. I shouldn’t be long.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’ll be all right then, I take it? Is there anything you need?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Anything I can bring you back.’

  Amy thought of the evening before the Sunday he’d lifted her up like an offering to Nazarill. She’d played Snakes and Ladders with her parents until she’d grown so tired the ladders had begun to wriggle, and she’d been unable to distinguish them from the snakes. When she’d started to nod over the board her father had carried her upstairs to bed, where her mother had sat beside her and told her a story Amy couldn’t now recall. She felt her lips part and her tongue move. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I’d best be off, then. Can’t be back until I’ve gone, can I? I’ll see you when we’re older. Let’s hope we’re wiser too. It looks as if you ought to be, at any rate, with all that reading.’

  By now Amy was wondering how much of this speech and the preceding dialogue was simply his method of keeping himself there, and if he was just uttering as many words as possible, what he was actually thinking. She gazed at him across her notepad surrounded by Shakespearian material and saw a furtively anxious old man in an out-of-date grey overcoat and black scarf. His face seemed to have devoted its recent years to producing more of itself, its lower cheeks bellying on either side of the jaw and pulling down the corners of the mouth, while the underside of the chin had settled for adding itself to the throat. His eyebrows had always been prominent, but their greyness made them appear heavier, and to be weighing down his eyes. At that moment he reminded her too much of the old man who’d refused to be coaxed back into Nazarill, and she didn’t want to aggravate his condition. ‘Go on then, before it gets dark,’ she said, which sounded more like a covert plea than she’d intended. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  He gave a laugh which sounded closer to the opposite of one. ‘I’m afraid that comes with the job.’

  ‘What, insurance?’

  ‘The job your mother left me with.’

  Even if he didn’t mean her to, Amy felt accused. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘you won’t have to do it much longer.’

  ‘Only until I die.’ He rubbed his forehead hard, flattening his eyebrows, and frowned, not necessarily at her. ‘Don’t let us become ensnared in another argument. You carry on improving as you have been and I’ll have no grounds to worry. Carry on, there’s a good, a good teenager,’ he said, swinging one upturned hand to indicate her work, and buttoned his collar over his scarf as he strode into the hall.

  He hadn’t meant her schoolwork to begin with. When the door at the end of the hall slammed, shaking its chain, she listened to be sure he hadn’t lingered in the flat for any reason, and then she took the Bible out of her canvas handbag. It had been what he’d meant, but he wouldn’t be so pleased if he knew why she had it. She opened it to Genesis and turned her notepad over. Maybe this time her attempts to transcribe the writing in the margins of the book wouldn’t give her such a headache.

  She lowered her head until her nostrils filled with the smell of old paper and she could see nothing but the cramped script. She shaded her eyes with her left hand, pinching her brows together with finger and thumb, and ran the tip of a pencil under the writing, a fraction of an inch short of marking the page. ‘I,’ the writing began, and repeated that a few words further on, where it was once again followed by—never mind the raised wand of the third letter—‘must’. That seemed to unlock the handwriting for her, and all at once her pencil was dodging between the Bible and her notepad as though lifting the words off one page onto the other.

  ‘I must set down my thoughts that they keep firm. I must not count myself abandoned by God as well as by my family in’ (so said the top margin, and Amy had to lean still closer as she turned the right-hand margin upwards) ‘this place. That there were such places I knew; that they were such as this I could not have dreamed in my worst fits. Certes no other book would be’ (Amy inverted the Bible) ‘allowed me by the fiends my captors, yet to use God’s word as concealment for my own until the day comes for them to be read—’

  Amy straightened up in order to turn the page, and wished she hadn’t moved. Her headache had been waiting to be noticed as she emerged from her trance of concentration. Her forehead felt as though she’d clamped a metal band around it, her cropped scalp felt raw, her neck not merely stiff but stretched. She closed her eyes until the aches dwindled a little, then she read what she’d written. She couldn’t help being pleased with her achievement, especially with having deciphered ‘certes’, a word she understood only now she had written it down. More to the point, the passage was evidence that something had been wrong with Nazarill in the past, and she had to read on to discover what that was.

  Not today, however. When she tried to read the first words in the next margin, her headache closed around her brain. She sat back, working her shoulders in an attempt to relax, and leafed through the Bible to see how much she had to transcribe—page after page. As well as writing in the margins, the owner of the book had underlined parts of the text. ‘Saul had
put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards…’ These words were underlined shakily three times, and so were fragments of another sentence: ‘There shall not be found among you… a witch… or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer.’ The underlining had left alone a reference in the midst of this to ‘any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire’, but Amy had an impression she couldn’t quite grasp that the words ought to have some significance for her. A third underlined passage appeared with a whisper of stale paper. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

  She copied that, and the rest of the underlined words, and gazed at them. What had they to do with anything? All that she was aware of knowing about witches derived from Shakespeare and from rhymes she’d read half her lifetime ago. When her headache began to renew itself in proportion with her attempts to think, she flipped the pad back to her schoolwork notes in case her father came home early, and buried the Bible in her canvas bag as she stood up. For several reasons it made sense for her to get out of Nazarill.

  She zipped herself into a black suede jacket that came down to her hips, and let herself into the corridor. She wasn’t going to allow its insinuating glow to daunt her, not the dimness nor the rest of the place. She went quickly downstairs, scowling hardest at the doors on the ground floor, daring the rooms to be other than empty. By the time she began to wonder how that could have any effect, she was out of Nazarill.