The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  Some or all of this might have been addressed to Amy, but she was unable to respond. She could hear no other voice, and knew it wasn’t a crossed line. She was forcing her mouth open to tell him, though that rendered being overheard more of a threat than ever, when his son took over the phone. ‘My father can’t talk to you any more.’

  His tone made it obvious that he blamed her for the old man’s aggravated state—perhaps assumed that the voice responsible had been hers. Before she could argue, the connection was broken, so abruptly she wasn’t sure he’d done it. The receiver hummed smugly to itself until she silenced it. Holding it like a small fragile club, she made herself look out of the room.

  The hall was deserted, but she felt no less observed. She glared at the kitchen before she remembered there was no longer a tree for anything to climb. The flattened eyes along the walls led her gaze to the dead eye of the outer door, beyond which she was almost sure she glimpsed movement. ‘Can’t get in,’ she said as loudly as she dared, and tried to feel encouraged. Squeezing the receiver in her fist, she was able to take the first step. She trudged along the hall and hugging herself with both arms, leaned her face towards the spyhole.

  At first she thought all the lights in the corridor had failed. Then the object which was pressed against the door retreated far enough for her to see a hole in it which might have been a puckered mouth to which shreds of the lips still adhered. As it withdrew another few inches, a similar hollow in the shrivelled brownish surface became apparent next to it, and below them the stringy gap where the nose had been. The head reared back further, and the gaping jaw came into view. Perhaps it was so wide with a scream at the contents of the mouth, which were swarming over the cracked fleshless chin. Amy stumbled away from the door, the phone in her hand scraping a panel of the wall, and the image shrank, but not soon enough for her to avoid seeing the shape outside the door raise on either side of the remains of its head the handless sticks of its arms.

  She retreated until the movement in the lens was no larger than an insect wriggling in a spider’s web. ‘Can’t get in,’ she heard herself repeating, almost as often as ‘Can’t touch me.’ The eyes on the walls watched her like spectators at an asylum. Eventually the writhing vanished from the bulbous glass, but it took her a considerable time to venture close enough to determine that as much of the corridor as she was able to spy out was empty. That only meant the figure she had seen was somewhere else, and her repetition of the things it couldn’t do no longer seemed so powerful. She flung open all the inner doors and switched on all the lights, then she grabbed the remote control of the television, having abandoned the phone on a chair, and searched the channels. Three sitcoms and a congregation swaying and singing and clapping in church, a spectacle she left playing on the basis that television might be modern enough to help fend off the past, one of the few thoughts her headache hadn’t pinched out of her skull. On that basis she played a tape of Resurrection Merchants as well, and then there seemed to be nothing to do except sit at a kitchen bench with the phone on the table in front of her and stare along the shaky hall, willing the door to stay shut and impregnable. The spyhole was too distant to betray any movement beyond it, but she kept imagining a handless stump poking about the outside of the door in search of the bellpush.

  The tape was at its loudest when she thought she heard a scrabbling at the door. She seized the phone before she realised there were better weapons in the kitchen drawers. She was shoving herself away from the table, the bench digging into the backs of her knees, as the door swung open.

  It was only her father, but at once that was bad enough. He covered his ears for a moment as though fitting his mask of grim resolution to his face, then shouldered the door closed and thrust his keys into his coat pocket. ‘So this is how you conduct yourself when you should be praying,’ he said, and frowned at the scraped panel. ‘Good God, what have you been doing to this wall?’ He strode towards her, turning off the room lights as he advanced, and stalked into the main room. ‘Dear Lord preserve us,’ he muttered, and more that she couldn’t distinguish as he killed the stereo and television. As he lurched into view his blank gaze swung at her, gleaming as it came. ‘We shall put an end to your devilry,’ he said.

  19 - Kept in the family

  Oswald was observing how the arched roof of the church resembled saintly bones pressed together and upraised, and so he didn’t notice that the Pickles family was following him until they caught up with him in the small stone porch. ‘All on your own today?’ Jack Pickles said.

  ‘As you say.’

  ‘Where’s the daughter?’ Hattie asked from beneath an outbreak of headgear reminiscent of a rockery.

  ‘I’m of a mind to send her away for the good of her health.’

  Oswald had lit upon this notion in the midst of his prayers, but Jack appeared to think it betrayed some weakness. As they emerged from the porch into a wind as cold as the stones in the churchyard he passed a hand over his freckled scalp imperfectly crossed by failed hair and peered up at Oswald through his square tortoiseshell spectacles. ‘We hear you had a bit of a to-do yesterday.’

  ‘Just some behaviour that should never have been seen in public.’

  Hattie pushed her son forward in order to refer to him. ‘Might have been worse if one of our tribe hadn’t been there to lend a hand, would you say?’

  ‘I was glad of him.’

  ‘What was it all in aid of, anyway?’ Jack asked. ‘Something to do with a Bible, weren’t you telling us, son?’

  ‘She’d been writing things she oughtn’t in it.’

  ‘No need to draw us a picture,’ Hattie said at once.

  ‘Mam, I wasn’t going to,’ Shaun protested while his cheeks developed a few additional patches of red.

  ‘She was scaring people in the street, wasn’t that it too?’ said his father.

  ‘And the old biddies in Tea For You,’ his mother said. ‘One of them was telling me just now before church.’

  ‘You’ll take this how it’s intended, Mr Priestley, but your girl’s getting a reputation. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘I didn’t think at first old Miss Clay could be talking about her,’ Hattie said and glanced around before lowering her voice, though there were only gravestones near. ‘What’s making her behave like that? Is it drugs?’

  A thought lanced Oswald’s shame. ‘Let me undertake before you that no poisons will ever be allowed near her again.’

  ‘It’s a pity there isn’t a school here in town so you could keep more of an eye on her. The bigger the place, the worse the influences. Stands to reason.’

  ‘I shall be taking that in hand too.’ Oswald followed her through the gate, which Shaun closed behind his father. ‘I am grateful to all three of you,’ Oswald said.

  Only Shaun looked as though he felt entitled to be thanked, and Oswald had to resist a compulsion to explain. They’d helped him clarify the course of action he must pursue, but there was no need to publicise his methods. He watched them turn downhill with their son towering between them. They’d kept Shaun under their control, and now it was time for Oswald to do more than they had, before it was too late. He crossed himself while he gazed across Heather’s grave at the church, then he drove to Nazarill.

  Had she really been too ill even to be driven to church, or could she have been wary lest her behaviour there might betray her? He remembered the last time she had entered the churchyard, remembered her muttering at the grave as if to resurrect her mother. Thank God her mother wasn’t here to see how their daughter had gone wrong, nor to hold him back.

  No gates, he thought as the Austin passed between the gateposts, nor any need for such so long as there was a keeper. As the light saluted him, Nazarill appeared to expand the better to embrace him. When he admitted himself to the building, the quiet and the subdued light put him in mind of a church. Though he saw nobody on the stairs or in the corridors, he felt welcomed home. He paced along the silent passage to his door a
nd let himself in.

  Amy was rising to her feet from behind the kitchen table. She subsided at the sight of him and dropped the phone she was holding. Though he saw it strike the table, he couldn’t hear the impact for the uproar in the apartment. As he covered his ears, the keys in his hand stung his cheek. He rammed his shoulders against the door and shoved the keys into his pocket while he breasted the sound, which immediately began to retreat. ‘So this is how you conduct yourself when you should be praying,’ he said, and saw as his senses recovered from the onslaught that out of vandalism or worse she had scratched a panel by the door. ‘Good God, what have you been doing to this wall?’

  She’d done more; she had left all the lights on. What had she been about in his room? As the tape held its breath, trying to take him unawares with its next outburst, he marched along the hall, clawing at the switches in the rooms. He had to flail at the air in front of his face as he dodged first into his bedroom, where nothing appeared to have been touched, and then into Amy’s; he thought he’d felt a tickling on his skin. Before he could identify the cause, the stereo recommenced its pandemonium, in the midst of which he was just able to distinguish a voice yelling ‘Let’s dance while we die.’ He stalked into the main room to do away with it, and saw that Amy was using it to drown out the sound of a hymn on television.

  ‘Dear Lord preserve us, are you afraid of a hymn? Thank God your mother—’ He pressed his lips together as he switched off the cacophony and then, to allow himself to think, the television. He thought he felt the tickling again, as if his nerves were about to escape his control. He wouldn’t allow her to do that to him. He dragged a hand over his face, pinching his eyes with finger and thumb on the way, and stepped into the hall. ‘We shall put an end to your devilry,’ he said, and strode at her.

  She might at least have had the grace to flinch, he thought. When he turned from replacing the phone in its nest, he found her watching him as if he was the one who’d changed, not her. ‘I’m what you made me,’ she said.

  ‘Never dare suggest that, even to me. What you have become is none of my doing, nor any of your—’ The reference to her mother caught in his throat as he lowered himself onto the bench between Amy and the hall. ‘Perhaps it isn’t entirely your fault either. I want to know whom you have been talking to.’

  ‘Myself.’

  ‘Don’t say that, even as a joke.’

  ‘It’s what you think, isn’t it? You think I made up all that stuff that’s written in the Bible.’

  ‘As it happens I think nothing of the kind. Perhaps now you’ll have the goodness to tell me where you learned it.’

  ‘Learned what?’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent, child. You forget your friend gave me an account of it while you were entertaining all the ladies in the tea room. How did you know there was an asylum here, and a fire?’

  Her stare fastened on him. He wouldn’t look away from his own child, but he couldn’t help rubbing a hand over his face. She appeared to have more than one question to ask, and the one which emerged was ‘How did you?’

  ‘I made it my business to find out in case it could cure you of your fancies.’

  Her attention strayed past him. That might have been a relief, except that she gave the impression of seeing or expecting to see more than the empty hall. He felt the crawling on his skin again, and clenched his fists rather than touch his face. ‘No chance of that,’ she said, and brought her gaze to bear on him. ‘You’re saying it’s true. That’s what this place was and that’s what happened.’

  ‘Amy, please don’t try and make me sound as though I’ve fed your maggot. You know it’s true, and I insist on being told who took it upon themselves to give such information to an impressionable girl of your age.’

  ‘Can you hear yourself? What do you think you sound like?’

  ‘Your father. Whether you like it or not,’ he said while his face mouthed outside the kitchen window as though it was prompting him, ‘that is who I remain. You’re playing games, but you shall not be the victor. You’re the subject of this discussion, not I.’

  ‘So discuss me.’

  ‘I believe you have been using this tale of an asylum to behave as if you…’ He couldn’t quite say it—having to think it was bad enough—but other words crowded out of his mouth. ‘Telling wicked stories on the radio for the world to hear, uttering foul language in the marketplace, going for people in the street as well, I understand. And defacing the Bible, God forgive you, and now damaging our home. Do you realise the whole of Partington knows about you? In the past they would have had you locked up, and perhaps…’

  ‘Go on. That’s what it wants.’

  ‘I have no idea what you mean, nor any wish to know. Is it not possible for you to attempt to listen for once instead of saying the first thing that strays into your head? I’m attempting to confront you with the truth we need to see.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Staring so won’t silence me, and I suggest you give it up. Answer me this, a straight answer if you have any within you. Some remedy has to be found for the way you’ve grown. What do you think it should be?’

  He saw her thinking rather than blurt out an answer, and thought she was taking him seriously at last. Then she said ‘When do you think I started?’

  ‘Becoming as you are? Pretty well since we moved here. I think you decided at the outset to dislike it. I know you were sorry to leave our old home, I appreciate that it had memories for you, but you must see it was too big for just the two of us. We would have moved sooner if I could have found somewhere smaller that was suitable.’

  He was offering her an excuse for herself, but her concentration seemed to be lingering on his last word. His face began to itch even before she responded. ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ she said.

  ‘I know to the letter.’

  ‘You said I started when we moved here, but I didn’t know it was an asylum then.’

  ‘Which simply means that once you were told about it you used that as a pretext to worsen your behaviour.’

  ‘I wasn’t told. I read it in the Bible.’

  ‘Amy, if you persist—’

  ‘I didn’t write it. I wasn’t even sure it was true till you said it was.’

  ‘Enough. Finis. You won’t muddle me. You can stay in your room until you are ready to talk sense, and that means until you tell me who supplied you with all this harmful information I committed myself to keeping from you.’

  Amy stood up at once, blotting out his night face. ‘You’ll have a long wait.’

  ‘Take all the time you can bear. You shall find me waiting.’

  She stepped around the table, and his face glowed out of the night. It gave him the impression of being her guardian angel until he noticed her keeping as far away from him as there was space. ‘Cease trying to make me into a monster,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should appreciate I am restraining myself. As soon as you decide to behave rationally—’ He was watching her faint shape opening a fainter door, which slammed so hard it would have shaken the wall which contained it had that been less firm. Feeling as though at least some of his speech had been a pretence he’d had to maintain in order to convey her to her place, he turned out the kitchen light and headed for his room.

  As he came abreast of her door he felt the tickling on his cheeks. He went swiftly into his bedroom and threw himself to his knees, bruising them, but he wasn’t swift enough. Even when he dug his fingernails into the knuckles of his clasped hands, he couldn’t pray—couldn’t rid his mind of the thought of Amy’s room full of crawling things, swarming away from her head and over her quilt and into the mess that covered the floor. He dragged his knuckles over his cheeks to drive away the tickling—the sensation of cobwebs in the air—but couldn’t drive away his thoughts. In the past the heads of the unhealthy had been shorn when they became infested, and perhaps that had been Amy’s secret reason for having hers cropped. As he shuddered at the threat of the sensation which had i
nvaded the air of his home, it seemed clear to him that she hadn’t succeeded in disinfesting herself.

  If that hadn’t proved successful, what would? This was a question with which he didn’t feel able to cope by himself. He was clasping his hands again, bruising his knuckles with his fingertips in an attempt to distract himself from the anticipatory itching of his face, when the phone summoned him.

  In one movement he was up from his knees and through the gap he made with the door and snatching the receiver from its perch before it had completed its second pair of rings. A voice he recognised said ‘Hello?’ He let it repeat itself twice while he closed his bedroom door behind him and sat on the end of the bed, at which point he said ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I speak to Amy, please?’

  ‘I fear not.’ A sense of calm, of having had at least part of his so far unspoken prayer answered, let him use the caller’s name. ‘Robin.’

  ‘Doesn’t she want to talk to me?’

  ‘I imagine that to be the case. She has given me no contrary impression. Besides, that isn’t quite the issue,’ Oswald said, and permitted himself a smile at the whiteness of his imminent lie. ‘She isn’t here.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Gone away.’

  ‘Where?’

  Though the boy’s voice was beginning to cause him to itch with annoyance, it was at least encouraging him to work out details to tell anyone else who might ask. ‘To an aunt’s.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had one.’

  ‘You scarcely knew she had a father, did you? Little wonder that she failed to mention her Aunt Alice,’ Oswald went on smoothly as the name presented itself in his head. ‘I trust you recognise that a retreat is what she needs. She may have told you how upset she was that she couldn’t go away with the school.’

  ‘How long’s she going to be away?’

  ‘As long as need be. I shall be clearing it with the school.’

  ‘Have you got her address?’

  For an instant that seemed wily of her ill-chosen friend; then Oswald was more in control than ever. ‘Not even I shall be in contact with her until she improves.’