The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  ‘We are soon, yes.’

  ‘We would accompany you, only my young blessing is sick in bed.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Lin Stoddard with no sympathy that Amy could distinguish. She didn’t need it from the Stoddards, and was lowering her head onto the pillow when Lin added ‘We were hoping for a word with her. I wonder if we could still have it.’

  ‘What would it concern?’

  ‘I’d like her to finish the job you said she’d do.’

  ‘I’m certain she will if I said so. Remind me if you would.’

  ‘Persuading this one there’s nothing to be scared of.’

  ‘Good heavens, most assuredly. Why, did she not?’

  ‘Not the way this poor little girl was last night.’

  ‘Then come in by all means. Mine isn’t so ill as she acts, I suspect. Perhaps exerting herself to perform good works may help her back to health.’

  The muffling of the pillow was allowing Amy to pretend that none of this had much to do with her, but when she heard an assortment of footsteps bearing down on her she pushed herself up with her elbows, fitting her head into a tight dull ache. She’d propped her spine against the plump headboard when Pam, which was all of whatever her name was now that Amy intended to acknowledge, appeared in the doorway with her mother holding her shoulders. She was more beribboned and trimmed with lace than ever, but these apparently weren’t the only reasons why she looked fragile. When her mother gave her an enlivening shake her face prepared to crumple. ‘Go on, Pamly,’ Lin said. ‘You tell her.’

  ‘You.’

  ‘It’s you it was supposed to have happened to, young lady,’ Lin said, then sighted across the topmost ribbon at Amy. ‘She was upset for a start. Her little Parsley died last week.’

  Amy felt unfairly accused. ‘Sorry,’ she nonetheless said.

  ‘No fault of yours, that wasn’t. He was ancient for a hamster. But then—your turn now, Pamly. Up to you to say.’

  The girl bit her lip, then clasped and unclasped her hands in front of her as though trying to choose which of them to rub with the other. ‘I thought I heard him in my room last night. It woke me up, and I was going to put the light on when I remembered it couldn’t be him.’

  ‘And now you know it couldn’t have been anything,’ Lin said straight at Amy.

  ‘I did hear it, I was sure I did. Running about like him when I had his cage in my room, only it was too big to be him, and it sounded like it kept falling over.’ The girl’s stare dodged about, but that failed to rid her of the memory. ‘It sounded…’

  However much Amy didn’t want to know, she had to. ‘What?’

  ‘Excuse me, Amy, but you’re supposed to be telling her—’

  The girl mustn’t want to be alone with the memory; she raised her voice to interrupt her mother. ‘It was making noises with its mouth. It sounded like it wanted to be fed.’

  Lin breathed out loudly through her nose. ‘You’d have been thinking about Parsley when you went to sleep, of course you were, and that’s why you had a bit of a nightmare. That’s all it could have been. Amy will tell you.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Amy asked Pam.

  ‘No, oh no.’

  ‘I should think not,’ Lin said. ‘We all of us know, don’t we, Mr Priestley, there was nothing to see.’

  Presumably the group referred to was meant to include Pam, but Amy had seen that it didn’t—had seen Pam’s face writhe at the notion of having had to watch the thing she’d only heard. ‘You know that, Amy, don’t you?’ Lin insisted.

  ‘I don’t know what I know.’

  ‘Not much of a way for someone who’s supposed to read so many books and want to go to university to be.’

  ‘If you don’t believe I know anything, why do you care what I say?’ Amy was tiring of the contest of words; she wanted to be alone, to see if she could think despite the ache. ‘I don’t know if she heard anything or not. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Your influence was.’ Her father’s face sidled into view beyond Lin’s shoulder. ‘Do as you are asked for once.’

  ‘Better listen to your mother, Pam,’ said Amy, ‘if you want some peace.’

  ‘But do you think there was anything?’ the girl pleaded, clutching her left hand with her right to keep them still.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Pam’s face attempted to decide how that made her feel as the faces of the adults hardened. ‘She’s saying that because she isn’t well, because she can’t be bothered,’ Lin told her daughter, firming her grip on her shoulders to emphasise the point. ‘I hope her room’s like that because she’s ill, don’t you? It’s not like yours, is it? An untidy house means an untidy mind, my mother used to say. We shouldn’t have expected to get any sense.’

  As she began to pilot Pam along the corridor Amy’s father lingered in the doorway, glaring at her. He turned away when Lin said ‘Thank you, Mr Priestley, for at least trying to help.’

  ‘I wish I could have been more. Perhaps I shall. In the meantime, may I ask you while you’re at your worship to pray for us?’

  ‘Well, ah, yes,’ Lin said, audibly embarrassed by so direct an approach. ‘You can, Pamly, if you like.’

  Amy heard the door shut after the Stoddards and the chain dragged across, and then her father must have as good as run along the corridor. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ he said, blocking her doorway, ‘now you have succeeded in distressing a young girl.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think you’d want me lying when you keep going on about all this holy stuff.’

  His face grew mask-like, forcing more of the gleam into his eyes. ‘I prefer not to know you while you are like this.’

  ‘Fine. So take your chair out of my room, and after you’ve done that you can close the door.’

  His initial response was to push the door open wider; then he advanced into the room, so slowly and purposefully that without knowing why, Amy reached up and pulled the light on. The brightness seemed to flatten his eyes, so that they resembled the pressed glazed eyes of the picture behind him in the hall. He took hold of the chair by its back and raised it from the floor, and she was reminded of a circus trainer facing a dangerous animal. He didn’t turn away from her until he was out of the room and depositing the chair beneath the pop-eyed gaze of the old woman being tossed in a basket, and at once he swung to watch her. ‘I shall leave you to ponder your ways for a little,’ he said, and shut her in with her thoughts.

  She gazed at the faces of Clouds Like Dreams, but they were no more use than the helpless old woman. Whatever the truth about the writing in the margins of the Bible might be, Pam had reminded Amy she wasn’t alone in having seen something on the move that shouldn’t have been. Old Mr Roscommon had, and he’d read in her eyes that she had too. Dominic Metcalf must have seen it, and the sight had stopped his heart. Now the desertion of so many of the apartments was giving the unquiet tenants the run of the building, or had Amy’s and her father’s exploration of the ground floor attracted them? She was tempted to open her door, because she no longer knew if her room was a sanctuary or a cell, but first she wanted to examine the Bible again while she was unwatched by her father.

  She leaned gradually over the side of the bed and let her hand trail to the floor. Her fingertips encountered the round moist toothless mouth of a coffee mug before touching the rough porous skin of a misshapen object. This was her canvas handbag, which she hauled onto the quilt so as to fumble out the Bible wrapped in the pages torn from her pad. The book fell open halfway through Genesis, and immediately she saw what Rob would have been unable to realise. He’d never seen much of her handwriting until yesterday, and so how could he have judged the evidence she’d shown him? But as she spread out the sheets from her pad she became aware that although the handwriting in the Bible wasn’t hers, hers grew more like it as the transcription progressed.

  She felt as though the past she’d dreaded for so long had crept deep into her while she was distracted by the events within Nazaril
l. The ache forced her head down, trapping her gaze on the pages until she leafed to the pencil embedded in the upright of the last and biggest cross. She dug out the pencil and resting the final, mostly blank, sheet from the pad on the back cover of the Bible, set about writing her name.

  Her signature had changed so much over the years that she found herself struggling to recall how it was meant to go. Eventually she thought she remembered how she had most recently decided it should look. Trying consciously to reproduce it stiffened her hand, however, and even when she’d covered the blank paper with her name, none of the dozens of signatures looked quite like hers. Besides, hadn’t her signature changed since she’d moved to Nazarill? She didn’t want to reflect on that, any more than she liked the appearance of all her signatures; she’d been unable to make any of the esses small enough to reassure herself, and each of the pair of e’s resembled eyes spying on her. She crumpled the pages and stuffed them together with the book into her bag, which she kicked onto the floor. She didn’t want to see them any more, and especially didn’t want her father to do so; he would only think she was going mad. He could think so all he liked once she had convinced herself that she was nothing of the kind. There was one person she could talk to, and as soon as her father was out of the way at church she would.

  She wouldn’t be comfortable staying in her room until then. She squirmed out from beneath the quilt and stood up. Feeling the paracetamol coming to an end, she swallowed two of Beth’s tablets before pacing to the door and edging it open. Her father was muttering to himself somewhere out of sight, presumably praying. She dodged into the bathroom and turned on the bath taps and the extractor fan that was the only break in the outer wall. The water had hardly started to rumble into the fibreglass bath when the doorknob rattled, followed by a harsh knock. ‘Amy.’

  ‘I’m having a bath.’

  ‘Best unbolt the door in case you need help.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t notice, but I was bathing myself before we ever came near here.’

  ‘In case you take a turn for the worse was my meaning.’

  ‘I’m fine. Just leave me alone,’ Amy said, peering at the door to confirm it was bolted. Once the bath was full almost to the trunks of the taps, the way she liked it, she turned the water off and listened at the door. She was unable to sense him, and so she padded to the bath and plunged her hand in. She didn’t realise she had braced herself until she recognised that she was trying to be prepared for the possibility that the water would be icy cold. It was hot, only just bearably so on first contact, and she lowered herself by degrees into it and closed her eyes.

  Usually she enjoyed letting herself float in the bath. When she was little she used to imagine herself in a sea with the sun on it, on her way to a magic island. Now, however, she felt in danger of somehow drifting too far if she lost awareness of herself. Every so often a wind caught the fan, which responded with a noise like claws scrabbling to get in. Of course the water was cooling, but several times she emerged from a doze with an unpleasant start at how suddenly chill it felt. Each time she unplugged some of it and replaced it with hot water, a process which had grown not so much automatic as obsessive when her father rapped on the door again. ‘Are you still in there, Amy? Are you likely to be much longer?’

  It was a familiar enough enquiry, but there was a new cold sharpness to his voice. ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Because it’s nigh on time for church.’

  That so many hours had passed without her noticing came as a shock, but surely it was to some extent welcome. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here.’

  ‘I should like to come in there myself if that’s not too inconvenient.’

  Presumably it was his attempt at sarcasm which made him sound as though he was reading an old script, playing at being himself. Amy climbed out of the bath, slopping water on the chubby linoleum, and wrapped herself in a towel from the rail before sliding the bolt back.

  If her father had been standing any closer his fixed face would have been against the door. He stood back barely far enough for her to sidle by; indeed, she felt the towel begin to slip as it brushed against him, so that for a moment she thought he had seized it. She was fleeing into her room when she noticed that he hadn’t followed but was staring into the bathroom. ‘Have you done wallowing?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know. Why?’

  ‘I suggest the water is let out. I doubt you would relish a cold bath.’

  She couldn’t help shivering at that. She heard the plughole utter a choking sound, eventually followed by a cackling which took rather too long to fade. By that point he’d emerged from the bathroom, and soon he knocked on her door. ‘You will be staying in, then, since you aren’t fit,’ he said.

  ‘If you say so.’

  He muttered a few words and moved away, continuing to talk to whomever he was addressing. The door into the corridor opened and closed, and she found she was still listening. When there was no further sound she leaned out of her room to gaze along the hall, which was empty but for eyes. Having returned the towel to the bathroom she pulled on a clean T-shirt, then she removed the phone from its niche and carried it to the main room, dialling on the way. ‘Directory Enquiries,’ a woman said almost at once. ‘What name, please?’

  Amy told her, and a likely initial, and the town. Shortly an announcement composed of samples of a female voice gave her the number. She keyed it and heard it ringing out there in the dark. It sounded far more distant than the other side of Partington—as though she was hearing it along a passage so lengthy and narrow she rubbed her forehead hard to rid herself of the idea. She was trying instead to think how best to convey her message when a man said rapidly ‘I will in a minute. Let me answer this first. Hello.’

  ‘Mr Roscommon?’

  ‘One of them, but sorry, if you’re selling anything it’s not convenient right now.’

  ‘I’m not. I—’

  ‘Bear with me,’ he said, and withdrew to answer a mumbling. ‘That’s what I’m about to find out if you’ll allow me, father. Hello? Who are you, then?’

  ‘It’s Amy. Amy Priestley. I used to be on the top floor from you. I mean, I still am.’

  ‘I remember. We met you at the photo. What can I do for you?’

  ‘How’s Mr Roscommon?’

  ‘It’s kind of you to ask, Amy, very thoughtful. The girl who used to live upstairs on the hill, father. The daughter of the chap who brought us all together, yes, you unfortunately excluded, I was about to say if you’d given me the chance. He isn’t as well as he might be, Amy, but as you can hear, he’s still able to talk.’

  ‘Could I speak to him?’

  There was a pause during which she felt her heart thump. ‘That rather depends,’ George Roscommon said. ‘Bear with me a minute, father. What about?’

  ‘Something both of us saw.’

  A longer pause ensued before he said ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s important. I’ve nobody else to ask.’

  This time there was no reply, so that she thought her desperation had driven him away until she heard his father’s mumble in the background. ‘She’s after you, father,’ he said. ‘You heard her on the radio. It’ll be about that kind of thing.’

  Mumbling ensued—the same phrase more than once. ‘Pardon? You—’ said George Roscommon, and brought his mouth to the phone. ‘He’ll speak to you. It’s against my advice, but I’m just the son.’

  A silence which Amy took to express more of his reluctance was followed by an outburst of creaking. He must be bearing the phone to his father. A sharper creak apparently indicated the old man’s grasp on the receiver, because in a few moments she heard what he had of a voice. It sounded as though he was forcing it out of one side of his mouth. ‘Who,’ he said.

  Since it was also very slow, she waited for more of the question, only to have him repeat it in a fury at his state or at her lack of response. ‘Who.’

  ‘Amy. Amy Priestley. Like Mr Roscommon said, y
our son, I live—’

  ‘Help you.’

  That might have been a promise, except that it had been preceded by a mangled syllable which Amy suspected was ‘God’. She’d fallen silent when he began to heave more words out. ‘Know you. Saw you outside. Should’ve stayed there.’

  ‘Because of what’s in here, you mean. Nobody but me believes there’s anything.’

  ‘Heard you on the wireless. Would’ve rung except I wasn’t talking to that, that…’

  His voice was grinding slower; perhaps his thoughts were too. ‘What would you have said?’ she prompted.

  ‘Get everyone out and burn it down. It’s crawling.’

  ‘Father,’ his son protested.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Amy said.

  ‘Then just get out.’

  ‘My dad won’t. He can’t see what we can.’

  ‘Get out yourself.’

  ‘I’ve seen more since I was on the radio,’ Amy said, and then his advice caught up with her. It wasn’t at all the sort of advice she would have expected a parent to give her. ‘Why just me?’

  The old man drew a breath which she heard rattling in his throat.

  ‘If you can see these things,’ he said, slower than ever, ‘they can see you.’

  ‘Father,’ the son repeated, closer now. Amy was afraid the younger man might take the phone away, though that was by no means all she was afraid of. The old man’s answer had made her feel both watched and overheard. She stared about, first at the window with the night adhering to it, then through the doorway at the largely unseen hall. She was about to speak, with nothing much to say but yearning to have another person hear her, when the old man demanded ‘What’s that? What’s she saying?’

  ‘Shall I take it, father?’

  ‘Crossed line. Some crazy woman saying—that’s never a prayer. Tell her to get off. Giving me another stroke. Feel it in my face.’