The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  The bus shook itself along the motorway and struggled onto the moor. Before long Amy couldn’t ignore the sight of Nazarill squatting above the town. Ten minutes, and the building ducked behind the houses to await her while the vehicle entered Partington. ‘Here we are,’ Deborah advised Amy as a wind cold as stone flapped the doors open, and Zoe said even more helpfully ‘Home.’

  A wind sent the giggles of the trio and bits of their words after Amy up Moor View. Not much less than a gale, which felt as though Nazarill was drawing an inhumanly protracted icy breath, was carrying her forward. Under a sky crawling with darkness the lane resembled a corridor whose ceiling was unstable with damp. At its end the pale bulk of Nazarill forced the gap between the cottages wider with each involuntary step she took. She saw her destination waiting in its cage of railings, and remembered the day her father had made her look in the windows, and was dismayed to find she preferred the memory. At least back then nobody had helped the place to pretend it wasn’t as she’d seen it, hollow and rotten and yet full of secret life.

  It crowded the rest of her surroundings out of her vision as the gale marched her across Nazareth Row. As she stumbled onto the drive a railing rattled, then another, suggesting that eagerness to confine her was shaking the bars of the cage. Beneath the darkening sky the facade appeared to tremble with the imminence of its own light, which in a moment leapt on her, erasing her shadow from the gravel. She saw the ground-floor windows pinch themselves thinner against the glare, the better to watch her. Sawdust had begun to dance in a ring on the flattened patch where the roots of the oak used to be, scraps of bark raised themselves and crept over the grass, and she knew at once that if any witches had been hanged in Partington it would have been from the oak. Perhaps they had danced around it when they were alive—perhaps not only then. As her thoughts and impressions, no more under control than the dancing sawdust, teemed about her head, the gale hustled her to the steps of Nazarill.

  As the livid stone reared above her and closed on the edges of her vision, the glass doors showed her the dim corridor pretending that the ground floor was deserted. Her chilled shivery fingers fumbled in her bag, only to leave her keys where they were. If she was admitted to Nazarill rather than letting herself in she mightn’t feel quite so alone. She closed her fist to reduce its shaking and knuckled the doorbell.

  The glass doors quivered as though Nazarill was preparing to open them itself. She was about to ring the bell a second time when the grille beside the twin columns of nine buttons emitted a hiss that turned into a cold thin version of her father’s voice. ‘Amy.’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘You may be surprised what I know,’ he said in a tone she couldn’t identify for the distortions of the microphone. ‘Come.’

  As the grille went dead the front doors buzzed, a sound that made her feel a trap had been sprung. She took a breath which the gale did its best to snatch from her, and strained her hand towards the doors. Its palm had barely met the icy metal plaque of the lock when the doors yielded. The next moment she was fleeing through Nazarill.

  She heard the wind falter, and the low tolling as the doors shut, and then she was surrounded by an unnatural silence invaded by the subdued thuds of her feet on the carpet, a noise she wished were either louder or not present, because the ground floor was no longer bothering to keep up any pretence for her. She could sense more rooms around her than the apartments were supposed to contain, an impression that made the corridor seem unbearably prolonged and rendered the already muffled illumination unequal to it. She thought she glimpsed the door beyond which the photographer had died beginning to creep open—she thought she heard a scrabbling at the doorknob. She hurled herself at the stairs and fell up them, bruising her knees, and was almost at the bend when she became aware that a large object was thumping slowly down towards it. As she reached out a hand to the wall for support and jerked her arm back for fear of how unlike their appearance the panels might feel, Donna Goudge appeared, lugging a suitcase.

  The sight of her wasn’t nearly as much of a relief as it ought to have been, especially since her husband was following her with more luggage. ‘Where are you going?’ Amy said, too dismayed to care if she sounded childish.

  ‘We’re off for our dose of sun,’ said Donna with a smile sufficiently lopsided to be apologetic.

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘We won’t be much more than a couple of weeks.’

  Amy might have asked her to be precise, but Dave Goudge was looking less than pleasantly surprised by the urgency of the questions. ‘Will you come and see my dad,’ she said to Donna in some desperation, ‘and talk to him?’

  ‘What about, Amy?’

  ‘What we talked about. You know.’

  ‘Remind me when we get back.’

  ‘Couldn’t you now?’

  ‘We have to be out of here. We haven’t much time to the plane when we reach the airport. Don’t worry, I won’t forget you. I’ll send you a card.’

  ‘You won’t be able to say much on that.’

  ‘The rest will have to wait,’ said Donna, and more gently ‘Remember, things you only see can’t hurt you.’

  Amy remembered the elongated arm putting out the light in Dominic Metcalf’s room. She watched the Goudges bump their luggage down the stairs, and called ‘Have a good…’ As Donna hefted her suitcase into the ground-floor corridor with no indication that she found the place daunting, Amy heard her murmur ‘I’ll tell you about it when we’re in the car.’

  That referred to Amy, who couldn’t help feeling discussed like a patient who mustn’t be allowed to realise her condition. She trudged upstairs, trying to be aware that each step put more distance between her and the ground floor, though as the Goudges left the building she felt a huge cold breath pursue her. She had just reached the top corridor when her father stepped out of the doorway at the far end. ‘You were long enough. What kept you?’

  ‘Talking to Dave and Donna. Donna, anyway.’

  ‘And what did Mrs Goudge have to say for herself this time?’

  ‘They’ve gone away.’

  ‘What’s the old saw about sinking ships? Except we aren’t sunk by any means. That’s been seen to.’

  Or were his words ‘being seen’? She had an unsettling impression that although his gaze was aimed at her, he was talking less to her than past her to an audience. His gaze sharpened as he said ‘In you trot. Don’t loiter in the corridor. Dinner won’t be long.’

  Amy closed the door behind her and tried to judge how much that excluded of her sense of Nazarill. When her father turned away from his continued scrutiny of her, she made herself lay one hand on the nearest panel of the wall. It felt as it looked: like wood. That might be moderately reassuring, but it couldn’t change the whole of Nazarill. ‘I’ll have something later,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry now.’

  Her father pivoted in the kitchen doorway. His gaze was as oppressive as the rectangle of dark sky vacated by the branches of the oak. ‘I’ve cooked your favourite. All the vegetables you enthuse about are in it. There’s nothing wrong with fasting to a purpose, but we don’t want you starved.’

  ‘I’ll have it another time. I expect I’ll be eating with Rob.’

  ‘I think not.’

  The hand with which she’d touched the panel was suddenly cold and moist. ‘What’s going to stop me?’

  ‘I spoke to him earlier.’

  ‘So?’ When that only produced a look as patiently triumphant as his answer she demanded ‘Saying what?’

  ‘What was the burden of his message, do you mean?’

  ‘Right, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘The usual. The standard formula. The ritual. And when I informed him that he couldn’t because you weren’t here, he exerted himself to vouchsafe that you won’t see him tonight. I gather he has fallen in with the wishes of his family for once and is dining out to celebrate an unexpected visit by a distant relative.’

  Amy felt s
uffocated by so many superfluous words. ‘When did he call?’

  ‘While you were in the process of returning to the bosom of your family.’

  All at once she was convinced that meant while she’d been talking on the stairs. He’d known she was in the building but hadn’t asked Rob to hold on. She threw her bag on the nearest chair in the front room and grabbed the phone to poke Rob’s number out of it with her fingernails. When it had trilled long enough for anyone who was in any part of his house to have had more than enough time to stroll to it she recalled the number, and having listened as long again, gave up. The instant she cradled the receiver, her father leaned his ostentatiously patient face around the kitchen door. ‘When you’ve taken the opportunity to calm yourself, perhaps we can be about our dining.’

  ‘I’m as calm as I’m going to be, and I already said I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Amy, for heaven’s sake, child. You’re making no sense to me. I don’t think you know what you’re saying, or you’re saying it just to make a noise. First you were going to stay with a girl in Sheffield, and yet at the same time you proposed to eat with your friend who lives above the wall that’s falling down.’

  ‘I’d have called him from Sheffield. He’d have come, or if he wouldn’t, I don’t care.’ She felt suffocated by her own words now. ‘I’m not eating, I told you. I’ll be in my room.’

  ‘To cleanse it, I hope.’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘May I ask what?’

  ‘Would you believe a book?’

  ‘That depends on its nature.’ His voice had grown as thin and cold as it had sounded through the grille. His gaze tried to hold her, but she shoved her door open and scraped the light-switch on. ‘I’ll inform you when the meal is ready in case you change your mind,’ he said.

  Amy’s only answer was to close her door. She took off her uniform and dropped it on a pile of her schoolwork, feeling that the chaos of her room was some kind of a defence, some assertion of herself. She pulled on her holeyest jeans and her Clouds Like Dreams T-shirt, which bore a softer version of the portrait on her poster, and dug her notepad out from beneath the pile. Having retrieved the Bible together with the pencil that was nestling against it on the carpet, she sat on the bed. She was going to read the writing in the margins, however badly doing so made her head ache.

  ‘—yet to use God’s words as concealment for my own until the day comes for them to be read likens me in my own mind to the very wretches for one of which I am mistaken.’

  That took Amy over the page at last. As she scribbled on her pad she felt committed to a race between her understanding and whatever was waiting to happen in Nazarill. At least for the moment her head was light rather than constricted, and she’d begun to grasp the next words when her father’s voice pressed itself against her door. ‘Do you remember this, Amy? The Four Seasons by Vivaldi. You used to like it as much as your mother did. You used to dance to it for her.’

  He must be holding the remote control, because the music started at once. It had become the soundtrack of far too many films and advertisements. ‘I shall listen to it while I dine,’ her father said.

  ‘I won’t.’ Amy was wondering if it might have been composed close to the time of the writing in the margins. The notion that the anonymous writer could have heard the bright swift music as they wrote disturbed her, but suppose it helped her understand? She held the Bible so tight she smelled musty paper and turned it sideways.

  ‘I must pray that God will understand. I shall supplicate forgiveness and to be returned to my room where my possessions render my world small. Merciful God, allow me to shut Thy welkin from my sight lest it burst my brain. Now must I make myself plain and terse to fit the space God has allotted me in His margin.’

  A clatter of cutlery and plates had joined the dance of music in the air. Her father was making all the noise he could; he might even be wafting a vegetarian aroma towards her door. She swallowed her saliva and turned the inverted Bible the right way up.

  ‘Sick for a day. Thank God, now I have found space between the bricks to conceal my pencil. Yesterday, upon hearing Clay’s approach I could devise no ruse other than to close it in my mouth as he looked in. God grant my sickness save me from their purging me!’

  This was preceded by a cross, and followed by one—the writer’s way of separating entries. Amy saw. The lower stretch of the second cross was fractionally shorter than that of the first. She omitted the crosses from her copy, instead starting a new paragraph.

  ‘I am dressed and allowed into the grounds. At first I thought this was some new torment devised by my captors—God help me, I fear them more than I fear the wretches among whom I find myself numbered. But I am guided beneath a shade into the shelter of the spreading oak, whose aestival foliage masks the empyrean. There I may sit for hours, companied by this guard or that, for I alone of the women am let loose. Perchance the mockery of freedom which Clay accords me is merely my reward for pattering the Lord’s Prayer to him, the which Hopkins would require as proof of their faith from those he hunted down, but I pray that this concession signifies the imminence of him to whom I must prove I am unfairly judged a wronghead.’

  All this occupied the margins of three pages, and was brought to an end by a cross whose upper bar was just shorter than the lower. The last word bothered Amy even more than the rest for some reason. She didn’t realise how long she’d spent in poring over the word and transcribing the passage until she heard her father tramping into the kitchen to rattle objects and then dull their sound with water. The music fell silent in the middle of a phrase, and at once he knocked on her door. ‘I’m about to deal with some of my clients.’

  Amy pushed herself off the bed and stumbled, employing the prickly lumps of her rudely awakened feet as best she could, to open the door. ‘Going out, you mean?’

  He and the bulging eyes on the wall behind him stared at her. ‘Why, would you wish me to?’

  ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘Are you asking me to stay in?’

  She couldn’t quite admit that, not until she was absolutely certain what she had to show him to read. ‘Asking what you’re doing, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m establishing that I want to speak to people without having to compete with noise from your room, or anywhere else in the home for that matter.’

  ‘So speak. I won’t be listening.’

  ‘That will be a blessing,’ he said, having presumably deduced that she meant listening to music, and glanced past her. Something in his eyes appeared to flatten until they reminded her of the eyes under glass. ‘May I know what you will be about?’

  ‘Reading. Writing.’

  ‘So I observe. What, may I ask?’

  ‘For school.’ She would have to take the lie back later—she hoped she would have to. ‘For religion. For Mrs Kelly,’ she said.

  ‘That good lady.’ For a moment he seemed about to say a great deal more. Then the lack of expression spread from his eyes, and he was turning away as he muttered ‘We must do whatever is required.’

  It was unclear to Amy how this included her. He jerked his head over his shoulder, so sharply she could have imagined he was trying to imitate somebody hanged, and settled his gaze on her for as long as it took him to say ‘It will do you no harm to stay in for a change.’

  That served to remind her not only how little he understood but also that it was Friday, when she would ordinarily celebrate the weekend. Reading the margins had driven that awareness out of her head. She closed her door tight and stamped her feet to revive them as she returned to the bed. She found it hard to recapture her concentration, not least because she felt as though her feet, grown swollen and leaden, were pinned to the bed. She wriggled her toes until the sensation of their being jabbed with needles became less unendurable and very eventually faded, and then she bent her mind upon the writing, larger and more careless now, that followed the previous cross.

  ‘One of my fellow sufferers has addressed herself to
me. Often I hear their screams as they are bled, or swung, or held in the bath of surprise, but never before have I seen the face of a single poor wretch. She must have within her some strength she has contrived to hide from our tormentors, for this afternoon she made shift to drag herself to the limits of her shackles, and that without attracting the attention of my keeper. She bore her head, as shorn as mine, above her window-sill while her eyes and bleeding lips pronounced words which caution forbade her to speak aloud. She is Alice, daughter of Hepzibah Keene.’

  Amy’s head rose as though it had been caught in a noose. Should the name Hepzibah mean something to her? She stared around the room, her attention catching on her four caps lined up on the wall, then finding her reflection behind the three black bead necklaces presently worn by the mirror. Her neck looked too slim to support their weight, and her face was as confused as she felt. When her gaze began to twitch she dropped it to the page.

  ‘—daughter of Hepzibah Keene. The surviving Keenes are within these barbed monstrous walls, as the Crowthers also are, the Whitelaws too, the Elgin family besides, and Jane Gentle and her girls. Those who had fled Partington returned to be captured by worse than they had fled. Such places as our prison are refuges not for the sick and the vagrant, but for the tortures of the witch-finders re-christened treatments. This and her name she conveyed to me, and that now I have heard her voice within me I shall do so again. Then she lowered herself into her cell, her face bespeaking the agony of her stealth.’

  Amy laid the pad and pencil down beside her. Her fingers had begun to twist against each other, with strain and with the memory of the figures she’d seen rising up in the dark of Nazarill. The notion that they’d suffered—were perhaps still suffering—made them more dreadful, not less. When the pencil rolled against her she retrieved it and the pad, though she was growing uneasier about the revelations she might encounter. Indeed, the next sentences almost caused her to relinquish the pencil.