The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘Fine,’ Amy said, regretting that she hadn’t saved herself a headache if he found the margins easier to read than she had. She caught the eye of the younger milkmaid, who looked away. ‘We’d like two coffees when you can spare the time,’ Amy said.

  The request for coffee had earned a disparaging blink all by itself. ‘You’re not the only people here, you know,’ the waitress told her.

  ‘We’d noticed,’ Amy retorted, and became more aware of the girl’s profile, which appeared to have devoted itself mostly to producing a sharp nose. ‘I know you. Weren’t you a prefect when I was in the second year? You wanted to confiscate a book I’d brought to show how my mother bound them because you said I must have stolen it.’

  Silence had gathered around her voice, but then she heard a comment which might have floated over from any of the surrounding tables. ‘Like as not she did.’

  Amy might have reacted so that the entire clientele would hear, but that would be to let her mind be shrunk to the size of Partington’s pettiest attitudes—the kind, she thought, which must have permitted the activities at the asylum to continue unchecked. Before she could speak, the waitress intervened. ‘She didn’t. It looked so expensive, that was the mistake.’

  In a tone of support for the offending comment a woman in a helmet white as marble and bristling with pearly knobs said ‘Perhaps you could serve us our cakes.’

  Amy gave the waitress an encouraging grimace and glanced at Rob in case the incident had distracted him, but he seemed unaware of it; he was twirling the Bible and peering at the margins, his frown of concentration now transformed into a frown of some uneasiness. She glanced towards the market as the bell above the door allowed itself a modest ping. Her body jerked, clattering the china on the table. In the doorway were Shaun Pickles and her father.

  Pickles saw her first, and pointed. His scraped face looked blotchier than ever, no doubt with righteousness. ‘I knew I’d seen her come in here, Mr Priestley. I’ll wait, shall I?’ he said, and all but sneered at Rob. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘I foresee none. She’s still my child,’ said Amy’s father, striding between the tables. ‘Come along now, Amy. You were instructed to come home.’

  ‘It’s the wrong kind of home.’

  ‘Even if your friend encourages you to talk nonsense, please don’t do so to me,’ he said, and further acknowledging Rob: ‘Did your parents ask you to escort my daughter?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I thought not,’ Amy’s father said triumphantly, and his gaze fell on the Bible. His face writhed, and Amy saw his eyes redden. ‘What are you about with that?’

  ‘Reading it,’ Rob barely admitted.

  ‘I had no need to worry where she was. This is a Bible reading,’ her father called across the tearoom to the guard at the door, then relinquished his irony and more of his self-control as he turned to her. ‘Have you no shame, displaying that in public? If it isn’t still a crime it should be, defacing the word of God. Perhaps before you leave us you would like to tell me how you’re involved.’

  The last part was addressed to Rob, who said ‘I’ve only just seen it. Aim brought it to show me.’

  ‘Which is to say she could rely on you to indulge her and encourage her.’

  ‘You haven’t read it,’ Amy said. ‘Rob has. You’ll tell him, won’t you, Rob? You can tell him what it says about that place.’

  ‘God forgive you, and me for letting you stray. I’ve read enough of your crazed unholy nonsense.’

  ‘You haven’t even looked at this, but Rob—’

  ‘I saw it yesterday when you abandoned it in the midst of the rest of your leavings. I saw how you’ve scrawled in the Bible you had deluded me into thinking was for the good of your soul.’

  ‘You went in my room.’ She hadn’t time to pursue that now, not least because the elder milkmaid had emerged from the kitchen and looked poised to intervene. ‘You should have read it properly, then you’d have seen it wasn’t my writing. And you’d have read the truth about Nazarill. Rob has, haven’t you, Rob?’

  Rob was gazing at two pages of Lamentations. He’d read more than enough to be able to answer, she thought, and stared at him until he raised his head and blinked slowly twice at her. ‘Don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘How can’t you know? What did you read?’

  ‘All sorts of stuff.’ He seemed uncertain whether to address her or her father, and let his gaze sink to the Bible instead. ‘About witches, and how it used to be a mental hospital, and how there was going to be a fire. But Aim—’

  Amy was watching her father, who was visibly taken aback; some of this had got to him. ‘You ask them at Housall. I bet they’ll have to say there was a fire,’ she said. ‘Or if they won’t let on they know about it, there’ll have to be something about it somewhere. I’ll look.’

  ‘Aim.’

  Rob had lowered his voice, and that made her inexplicably nervous. ‘Yes, what?’ she almost snapped.

  ‘Maybe all that happened if you say it did, wherever you got it from. But—’

  ‘I got it where you just did.’

  ‘You can’t say that. I don’t know why you’re saying it. It doesn’t help, it screws things up.’

  That brought a disapproving murmur from the adjacent tables. ‘What are you pussying around?’ Amy demanded. ‘What are you trying—’

  ‘It’s no use telling him you didn’t write it when he can see you did.’

  All the sensations of the room seemed to close in on her: the heat laden with the smells of powder and desiccated flesh and pierced by a thin aroma of too-sweet tea; her surreptitious observation by everyone who wasn’t openly watching her; the scrape of a spoon within a teacup, a sound like the turning of a rusty key in a lock. ‘I didn’t,’ she said as though the words could fend everything off.

  ‘Look, Aim, this is you. It doesn’t start off like your writing, but that’s how it ends up. See, the writing round these pages is the same as on the sheets. Why did you write it twice? So that…’

  As soon as he trailed off she knew why he had. He must think and not want to admit thinking that she’d set out to pretend to have transcribed the secret journal. She stood up with a screech of her chair on the boards and folded the sheets around the Bible, which she shoved into her bag. ‘Thanks I can’t tell you how much, Rob,’ she said into his face, so close her breath fluttered his eyelids. ‘You’ve really helped.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been much use if I’d said I couldn’t see it, would it, Aim? Anyone else could too.’

  ‘I used to think you weren’t anyone else.’

  ‘Tell me what else I can do.’

  He must have seen her answer in her eyes, because the hand he was holding out wilted. ‘I believe we are finished here,’ her father said.

  She supposed she was. The smells and metallic sounds and neurotically shadowless light of the tearoom were drawing themselves into a headache which was about to render them unbearable. She moved around the far side of the nearest table from her father and picked her painful way towards the door. The guard opened it, letting in the hubbub of the marketplace, and stood outside looking smug. Rob had followed her, his eyes pleading for a second chance to aid her. She hated him more than Pickles now. Not much more than conversationally she said ‘Just fuck off, Rob.’

  There was a chorus of shocked cries and gasps from the customers, and a stifled giggle from the younger waitress. The elder advanced purposefully on Amy as Rob faltered. Amy’s father was closest to her, however, and taking her by the elbows, steered her out of the tearoom. ‘I apologise for my daughter,’ he said away from her. ‘Please be assured that you will never witness such a scene again.’

  Pickles waited until the door shut, springing the hammer against the bowl of the bell. ‘I don’t want to worry you, Mr Priestley, but why I had my eye out for her in the first place besides looking out for her generally was I’d had a complaint about her going down the street using filthy
language to herself.’

  ‘That will be seen to, you can tell anyone who heard her.’ Amy’s father relinquished her right arm so as to close both hands around the other. ‘God bless you for your help in her hour of need.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you take her home?’

  ‘I’ve the impression that she won’t be any further trouble now she has had to acknowledge the error of her ways. That’s so, isn’t it, my dear?’

  Amy managed, agonising though it was, to focus on the marketplace. Everyone in sight was watching her. She ignored Rob, who was standing inside the tearoom like a trophy stuffed by the customers, and turned her throbbing stare on a butcher whose attention looked especially voyeuristic. Soon he glanced away, but only to lift half a raw rib-cage off a hook and remark to a customer ‘That’s the crazy girl who went for that guard here last week. She’s from the place on the hill, wouldn’t you know.’

  Amy supposed he was right: she must be crazy—Rob had shown her she was. That, and his having let her down, felt like the worst that could happen to her, so that it no longer mattered where she went, not that she appeared to have left herself any choice. The headache was lowering itself like a massive stone to crush her thoughts, and she was almost glad when her father steered her towards Little Hope Way. At least in a few minutes she would be able to lie down in her room.

  Shops wavered by like ill-hung pictures in a gallery. The voices of the market, all of whose comments seemed to be directed at her, turned into a stony wind along Nazareth Row. A dog ran out of the grounds of Nazarill, carrying a ball a boy had thrown for it to catch, and Amy saw it silenced by a rubber gag. The gateposts nodded towards her to greet her, first one and then the other, as the gravel bit into her feet—as Nazarill fitted itself into her vision as though it had made itself a niche there as wide as her head. Although it was too early in the day for the security lights to be more than dormant, she saw Nazarill brightening jerkily as it lurched towards her with each step she took.

  Perhaps it was borrowing the dead glare from the sky. She had to close her eyes against it as her father brought her to the doors. She looked again as he halved his grasp on her arm so as to twist the key in the lock, and found that the dimness beyond the twin glass rectangles coated with a reflection of the drive seemed actually welcoming. That dismayed her, and so did being grateful for her father’s presence, perhaps even grateful to have her choice of direction taken away. As soon as the doors tolled behind her she headed for the stairs so fast her father lost his hold on her. Let him think she was anxious to be home—let him think whatever he liked. If she told him what she was feeling he would only think she was mad, but she sensed figures pressing themselves against the inside of each door along the corridor to greet her, peering through the spyholes at her if they had anything left with which to peer.

  18 - An answer to a call

  By the time she reached her room Amy’s headache was so savage that she could only take it to bed. She even swallowed the brace of paracetamol tablets her father offered her, which allowed her to fall into a fitful doze. Whenever she awoke she found him sitting at her bedside, watching her. Once, when she was delirious, her mother had sat all night by this very bed, and his presence made Amy feel as she’d felt then, little and ill and cut off from a world which resembled a dream. If everything was as distant as it seemed, it surely couldn’t harm her, in which case only she could do that, and perhaps by not thinking she could avoid doing so. Perhaps her mad thoughts were the source of her headache; if she tried to make any sense of them the ache redoubled itself. She could only retreat behind her eyelids from the blaze of the room.

  At some point her father turned off her light and sat in the patch of illumination from the hall. The first time she awoke to see his faceless silhouette watching her she flinched against the pillows so hard the glow through the doorway appeared to flare twice as bright, but soon she grew so used to his being there that she didn’t even speculate about how his face might look. Sometimes when she turned over in bed, moving with infinite caution so as not to rouse her headache, he leaned close to her and asked if she wanted anything. Since all she wanted was for his hot breath on her face to go away, she mostly answered no, except when he brought her more paracetamol. That happened twice, but it didn’t occur to her to measure the passage of time by it; even such meagre thinking might hurt. It was incalculably later, on the far side of at least one prolonged sleep, when he stooped to her in the changed light from the hall and murmured ‘Do you feel up to walking?’

  She found she’d been expecting his face to have changed while it was invisible—hoping it had lost some of the grimness with which he’d confronted her over the Bible. To some extent it had, but its blankness looked grim. She shifted her head gingerly on the rumpled pillow and watched him step back beside the dining-chair for which he’d somehow cleared a space. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Why, to church.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In a few minutes. As soon as you can be up and dressed.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because it’s past ten of a fine Sunday morning. The Lord’s Day. Can you not tell?’

  Amy wondered how she was expected to tell anything of the sort without windows, then saw that wasn’t the kind of awareness he felt she ought to have. Besides, the quality of light in the hall should have shown her it was day. That by no means attracted her; it was the threat of everything she’d managed not to remember while she was asleep. ‘I still don’t feel right,’ she said, truthfully enough.

  ‘I see that. Would you like anything to eat brought to you? There should be time.’

  ‘Before you go, you mean?’

  ‘Before we both do.’

  ‘I’m not going. I want to rest my head,’ she told him, and let her eyelids fall shut to terminate the discussion. When she heard no movement she peered through her eyelashes at him. He was exactly where he had been, digging the fingertips of his right hand into the back of the chair hard enough to pale the upholstery. ‘I see you spying, Amy,’ he said. ‘Church is the best medicine to cure you.’

  ‘Not now. You go,’ Amy said, and identified another chance she might have to escape if she had the energy and could think where to head for. ‘Maybe I’ll go later.’

  ‘In that event we both will, and meanwhile we can pray together. That should remind you of the benefits.’

  ‘I just want to be quiet.’

  ‘Quiet comes from prayer, Amy, you ought to remember that. Either God sent you your headache or it must be something you’ve visited upon yourself. Whichever is the case, prayer is the answer.’

  ‘Pills are better. Can’t I have some more?’

  ‘Perhaps when we’ve prayed, if you still feel the need. Come along now. Our Father…’

  ‘You do it for me.’

  ‘Don’t you think I have?’ There were tears in his eyes until he rubbed their gleam brighter. ‘I want to hear you join in. You used to when you were small, before you started your foolishness about our home. It will help to bring us back together apart from anything else. Don’t you want that?’

  ‘Suppose,’ Amy said, no longer knowing.

  ‘Then let us be about it, and no more nonsense. Your mother liked Gracie Fields singing it, if you recall. Our Father…’

  By now all she wanted was for him to go away or at least to shut up, and the quickest way to achieve either seemed to be to respond. ‘Our Father,’ she mumbled, feeling embarrassed and trapped and absurd, and kept her next few words to herself. ‘It hurts,’ she protested instead.

  ‘How can praying hurt?’ The gleam in his eyes grew momentarily cold and suspicious. ‘You aren’t applying your mind to it. Just remember how. Close your eyes and put your hands together and concentrate on what you’re saying. Remember the idea you used to like, that your fingers are an aerial sending your prayers up to heaven.’

  None of this soothed Amy’s head. Both the effort of trying to pray and the strain of suppressing the words that ins
isted on suggesting themselves were hurtful, and his shouts certainly would be if she uttered the version which had lodged in her brain. ‘My father who fart whenever, horrid be thy name…’ Perhaps he was making her think these things by refusing to leave her alone, but mustn’t she expect to suffer such thoughts if she was mad? ‘Doesn’t work,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Of course it works. All that can get in the way is wilfulness. Eyes shut and hands together and submit yourself to God. Feel your prayer go up like a flame to Him.’

  Amy closed her eyes as tight as they would go without setting off the flicker of her vision, and pressed her hands together as if to crush some insubstantial prize. She felt smaller than ever, but that was no longer comforting: she seemed shrunken around the core of herself, which was a charred aching useless lump. She couldn’t prevent her father’s voice from probing into her head. ‘Our Father… Speak up now so He can hear you. Our Father who art in heaven… I still can’t hear. There could hardly be a lesser reason to be shy in front of your own father. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed, which means holy if by any unfortunate chance you have managed to forget what you were taught, hallowed be Thy name.

  ‘My kingdom come, my will be done.’ In a moment Amy thought she might say the words out loud, and the hell with whatever followed. She had a fleeting notion that the result mightn’t just be yet another argument but some event she was unable to conceive—another mad idea, she concluded. She felt her lips parting, and her eyes strayed open. Before she could speak, the buzzer chirred in the hall.

  ‘Who’s that now?’ Her father dragged his fingers apart to brandish them. ‘If it should be that wretched interfering woman with her quackery… You stay there, Amy, seeing that you’re too unwell to get up for church.’

  ‘Leave my door open, though.’

  He hesitated outside the doorway, staring rather blankly at her, so that she wondered if he meant to shut her in. He tramped away without touching the door, however, and a jingle of keys denoted that he was unlocking the mortise after rattling the chain back. ‘Why, Mrs Stoddard,’ he said, ‘and is it Pamela again? Bound for mass?’