The House On Nazareth Hill

by Ramsey Campbell

  It was the brutality of the gesture as much as its force that sent her sprawling. The heel felt rough as a brick, and she caught a whiff of decaying vegetation. As her elbows struck the floor she clenched her teeth so that he wouldn’t see her wince. For an instant too brief for her to be certain she’d glimpsed anything he appeared dismayed by her fall and by his own action, then his eyes renewed their blankness. They looked as if they were forgetting how to blink. ‘Don’t require worse of me,’ he said. ‘Do as you were bid and clear—’

  His voice rose to a shout. Amy had used her aching arms to heave herself upright and was retreating along the hall. She flung her bag through her doorway onto her bed, to have both hands free, and dashed across the main room to the window.

  Beneath a sky like ice on a lake George Roscommon was scrutinising a flower-bed near the railings. Amy wrenched at the catch of the sash, bruising her fingertips. It wouldn’t budge. Even when she succeeded in digging the side of her left hand behind that end of the semicircle of metal while she rammed the heel of her right against the other dull point, nearly breaking her skin, the catch didn’t stir its groove. She heard her father tramping towards the room, and each of his footsteps felt like the threat of another bruise to her forehead. She freed her hands from the catch and began to thump the window with her fists. ‘Help,’ she cried. ‘My father’s hurting me. I don’t know what he’ll do.’

  The pane vibrated with her blows, and it seemed the view beyond it did, a phenomenon which rendered the presence of the gardener even more distant and unconvincing. He had paused to scribble on his clipboard, but despite all the noise she was making, close to deafening herself, he didn’t so much as glance up. She should have kept hold of her bag—she might have been able to smash the glass with the rock. She swung around, desperate for something else she could use, and found herself staring instead at her father.

  He was watching her from the hall, his hands clasped in front of him. At first she couldn’t understand why his remaining there should frighten her, and then she saw that he knew he needn’t approach—knew she wouldn’t be able to open the window or make herself heard outside Nazarill. Her forehead was throbbing as if her earlier headaches had been a premonition of her injury, but she hung onto her thoughts and swallowed a sour taste, and spoke. ‘What told you he couldn’t hear me through the window?’ she said, and fastened her stinging gaze on her father.

  She wouldn’t have believed his expression could grow blanker, but it did. It was no answer, she thought—it was a pretence, even if he didn’t know it was—and so she held his stare with hers. Soon he began to jerk his head from side to side as though to dislodge the idea she’d planted there. When her gaze didn’t leave him he unclasped his hands and clawed at his cheeks, and she had a sudden terrible impression that she was about to see him drag his face into the shape of someone else’s. Before that could quite happen he let go of it and stalked into the room. Rather than argue with her question or even consider what it implied, he meant to turn his confused rage on her.

  He was halfway across the room when she darted for the hall. She had to dodge around the table to stay out of his reach, but she hadn’t realised how much time that would give him to head her off. He took just three deliberate steps to match her effort and was between her and the door, his hands stretched out negligently on either side of him. His face seemed to have abandoned all interest in wearing an expression until she seized a chair by its back and overturned it in his path. As he saved himself from toppling over it, his teeth bared and his blank eyes bulging, she fled into the hall.

  Her first, thoughtless, instinct was to run to the corridor. That made no sense until she found her keys, if she ever had a chance to find them. She was sprinting to her room and thinking how to barricade her door when another course of action suggested itself—the only one that might work. She snatched the telephone out of its plaque and dashed into the bathroom, hurling her weight against the door as her father leapt over the chair and flew across the hall. She was jamming the bolt into its socket with her left hand, which seemed to possess by no means enough strength, when he crashed into the door.

  The inch or so of bolt which had penetrated the socket almost sprang out again, and she thought she saw it start to bend. She tried to dig her heels into the linoleum, and felt them slither out from under her as she failed to wedge the door with herself. Then its pressure against her slackened, and she was able to ram the bolt home as the door shook with a blow from his fist. ‘Return that instantly,’ he shouted.

  Amy took hold of the receiver with both hands to quell its trembling. She thumbed the talk button and waited, but there was dead silence in the earpiece. She’d begun to think Nazarill had cut her off from phoning when the receiver established contact with a line, just as her father dealt the door a series of thumps which made her forehead throb. ‘Unbolt this now,’ came his voice like a sharp blade through the wood.

  His noise was driving out of her head every number she might call. For an unbearable few seconds the only person she could bring to mind was old Mr Roscommon, but she couldn’t remember his number, and what use would he be in his state? It occurred to her to consult her watch for some sense of who might be at home now. Her watch had stopped for the first time ever—stopped close to, or perhaps exactly on, her emergence from the flat. The period since then felt as though it reached deep into the night, but her last view from the window implied some stage of the afternoon, surely late enough for people to be home. Her father battered the door again, so hard she saw it quiver in its frame, and as he shouted ‘This is not your door. Open it at once’ she keyed the only number he’d left in her head.

  The phone rang five times as if to discourage her from waiting before it greeted her with a wholly impersonal hired message. ‘Hello. Nobody’s here at the moment. Please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’ In its modernity it struck her as the sound of a future from which she was being excluded. ‘Rob?’ she pleaded. ‘Are you there? Be there.’

  The receiver emitted a shrill beep and then fell silent. If she didn’t speak the tape would switch itself off. ‘It’s me,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I—’

  It wasn’t only the memory of how she had dismissed him in Tea For You that made her hesitate. She had a sense of being overheard—by Nazarill, or by her father, or both? She mustn’t let either silence her. ‘I’m sorry I told you to fuck off,’ she said as another blow rattled the door in its frame. ‘I felt like everyone was against me. You aren’t really on my dad’s side, you can’t be, he isn’t my dad any longer. Come here and you’ll see. Please don’t just call.’

  Was there a faint sound along the line—a hint that someone at the other end was listening? If her father spoke someone else might hear his changed voice, but he was busy throwing his weight at the door, which looked as though it wouldn’t last much longer. She pressed the receiver against her face so hard the earpiece amplified a creak either of plastic or of bone. ‘Come and fetch me,’ she said unsteadily. ‘He won’t let me out. I tried to get out while he was at work, but—I couldn’t. He came back before he would have normally. I think it called him back, this place did.’

  She’d restrained herself from mentioning why she had been unable to leave, but perhaps she had still said too much. ‘I mean…’ she continued, to retain her presence on the tape while she searched for an explanation that wouldn’t demand too much faith of Rob. ‘It’s like…’ she added, and had conceived nothing further to say when a woman’s voice revealed itself in her ear. ‘Amy, I think that’s enough.’

  She sounded even less welcoming than when she had refused to admit Amy to her house, but Amy couldn’t let herself be put off now. ‘Is Rob there, Mrs Hayward?’

  ‘He is not. He’s at school, where I’d have expected you to be.’

  ‘When is he home, do you know?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Don’t you really know?’ Amy pleaded, and when the only
answer was a silence which she had no doubt was offended, said not much less desperately ‘You’ll let him hear what I said when he comes home though, won’t you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I won’t be doing that, no. I’ll be wiping the tape.’

  Amy felt as though her forehead had received another blow, and sat down hurriedly on the edge of the bath. ‘Why?’ she heard herself protest.

  ‘For a start, I won’t have language like the word you used in my house, and I hope Robin never uses it anywhere else either.’

  In that case, Amy thought, she didn’t know her son as well as she was implying, but the perception was no help. ‘I was saying I was sorry I did,’ she said with all the contrition she could muster.

  ‘I’m glad of that at least.’

  ‘So will you—’ Amy closed her eyes tight and vowed she was going to sound reasonable. ‘Will you say to him I need to see him as soon as he can come over, no later than tonight, so I can tell him to his face?’

  ‘No, Amy. Forgive me, but no.’

  ‘Why not?’ Amy cried, and her thin shrill voice in the earpiece seemed to penetrate her brain.

  ‘Because it isn’t Robin you need to see, and I hope your father’s taking care of that.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear how he’s trying to take care of me?’ Amy almost screamed, and realised she could no longer hear him—couldn’t judge when she had ceased to do so or where he was now. ‘What do you mean he should do?’

  ‘Oh, Amy, if you’re going to force me to say this I will. Just from what I heard when you didn’t know I was listening it’s clear you need medical help, you poor child.’

  ‘You should talk to my father,’ Amy said bitterly, ‘you’d get on with—’ and clapped her free hand over her mouth. She’d told herself how to distract her father, perhaps even how to persuade him to take her out of Nazarill. She let her hand drop, uncovering her resolutely artless face in the mirror, and said ‘I mean it, you should talk to him. He needs someone to tell him I ought to have help. Wait and I’ll—’

  At first it was the noise outside the room which cut her off—a wrenching that resounded through the wall. She thought her father was attempting to dig out some of the bricks which were keeping him away from her. Then the wrenching gave way to a splintering crash, and the phone went terminally dead.

  It took her a good few seconds of jabbing buttons and trying to be certain she hadn’t somehow switched off the receiver before she could believe that he’d ripped the housing of the phone off the wall. She hugged the useless receiver to her midriff and stared, her eyes feeling shrivelled with lack of sleep, at the door. She was bracing herself to see it quiver, but her father only spoke. ‘What more will you have me do?’

  The chill of his voice seized her whole body. The aerial of the receiver tapped against the mirror, then scraped it, and she reached to push the metal rod into itself. The back of her hand touched the back of a hand cold as glass, and she saw herself holding a weapon. She firmed her grip on it without interfering with the aerial and did her best to hold herself as steady, along with her speech. ‘If you go away from the door I’ll come out,’ she called.

  She’d taken two deep breaths which tasted not quite pleasantly of soap before she heard a response—a crunch of plastic. He’d trodden on a fragment of the housing, not many yards along the hall. ‘I have moved,’ the wall said in his voice.

  ‘No, where I can see you. Go in the big room. Go right across and keep talking.’

  ‘Let my words enter your soul.’ As he spoke she heard another snap of trodden plastic, and his heavy steps returned along the hall. She thought he was loitering outside the bathroom door until she heard him commence praying in the main room. ‘Our Father…’

  Amy ventured almost to the door, but only so as to understand what was happening: he no longer sounded as though he was in the room she knew. Even when she grasped that he was speaking louder with each pace he put between them, she had to convince herself that she would see nothing unfamiliar if she opened the door—nothing except the man who was shouting his prayer as if to falter might rob him of the ability to pray. He was more than halfway through a second repetition of the prayer by the time she finished sneaking the bolt out of its socket and edged the door open a crack.

  He was standing at the window, his shoulders against the pane. Beyond the glass the shadow of Nazarill was encouraging the night, a darkness which Amy thought she saw solidifying around his face, like a liquid capable of eating away its outline. ‘Deliver us from evil,’ he roared as she inched the door towards her. Their eyes met, and he gasped himself silent.

  He’d run out of breath at last, Amy thought, but it was immediately apparent that he didn’t think so—that he blamed her for his faltering. He scratched at his face on either side of his mouth, which he had clamped shut so hard its lips virtually disappeared, and stepped forward as his dwindling image sank into the night. Amy stood her ground and brandished the receiver, wagging the aerial at him. ‘Better not touch me again,’ she said.

  He held out his upturned hands, then let them drop as though the spectacle they were indicating was too much for them. ‘What kind of creature have you become that you offer violence to your own father?’

  Despite everything, that affected her—forced her to imagine how it would have made her mother feel. ‘It’s no worse than you did to me,’ she cried.

  ‘That was my unhappy obligation. I am your father.’

  ‘Then act like one. If I’m supposed to be ill, take me to a doctor.’

  ‘I heard you.’

  She thought she’d managed to fasten on his words at last until he said ‘I need no outsider to tell me my duty. It is plain to me the shame of it is best kept within these walls.’

  He’d overheard her talking to Rob’s mother. Amy felt as though his responses were walling her up, compelling her to pace an area bounded by the same few cramped ideas over and over again. She’d let the receiver droop in her grasp, but now she raised it as a warning. ‘You won’t,’ she blurted, and dodged along the hall.

  The pressed eyes appeared to be gawping at the mess she and her father had left on the floor. Glancing back to ensure that he wasn’t in sight, she darted into his room. She was barely over the threshold when she halted, too confused even to think of closing the door.

  The neatness of the room was daunting enough: the disciplined ranks of items on the dressing-table, their symmetry doubled by the mirror; three pairs of shoes supporting one another, toes upturned, on the floor at the foot of the bed; the pillow innocent of the slightest trace of a head, the pale quilt smoothed flat as a slab. The room felt lifeless, no longer inhabited by anyone she knew, and cold enough to make her shiver all the way to her teeth. Her keys must be somewhere in it if they weren’t on him. She was glaring about, feeling as though the indefinable unfamiliarity of the room was helping hide the keys, when she heard footsteps enter the hall. She ran to the wardrobe and flung open the panelled doors.

  To the left his shirts, a flattened mass of white, were dangling their many arms; to the right his suits had drawn their legs up. All the contents of the wardrobe seemed to represent her father’s absence. As she leaned into the stifled dimness a faint musty odour snagged her throat. She hadn’t time to search the pockets individually, but she gave the suits a fierce slap that would have rattled any keys. She’d heard only a jangle of hooks on the rail when her father stalked into the room. ‘What cursed thing have you planted in there?’ he shouted.

  As Amy swung away from the wardrobe, her forehead pounding with the threat his appearance constituted, the aerial of the receiver in her left hand whipped the air not far short of his face. ‘I’ve put nothing,’ she said, snatching the aerial out of his reach. ‘I’m looking for my keys you stole.’

  ‘If I were a wronghead that is where I might have left them for you to find,’ he said, and fished the keys out of a pocket of his trousers to display them.

  Couldn’t it be an old dialect word he’d picked up fr
om his grandparents? For as long as it took the keys to catch the light twice they seemed less important than the question, and then only retrieving them mattered, however she achieved it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, holding out her empty hand, though not far.

  ‘This is my room and I want you out of it.’

  At least he hadn’t pocketed the keys. As he stepped backwards through the doorway with a jingle of them, she followed. The flattened eyes looked astonished by her behaviour, unless they were mocking it; she couldn’t interpret the gleam in his. ‘Close the door,’ he said as soon as she was through it, and once she had: ‘Right away from my room.’

  He was backing towards the kitchen and holding up her keys, which kept emitting a hypnotic glint. He meant to lure her to her room. As he retreated past it she saw he was intent on closing the kitchen door, perhaps to deny her access to all the knives beyond it. He groped behind him for the handle, and at the moment when his—attention flickered, Amy lunged at him. The door slammed, a plastic fragment which she’d failed to avoid cracked beneath her heel, and he lifted the keys like a flame above his head. ‘These are no longer yours. Go to your place.’

  ‘I’m not going in my room till you give me my keys.’

  ‘I think you are,’ he said, and came at her with a swiftness that made clear her weapon no longer deterred him.

  Amy fled into the main room. At the end of the drive the gateposts were stained red. She dashed to the window in time to see George Roscommon’s truck hesitating at the road. She stared wildly around her in search of an object she could use to break the pane. A dining-chair might do, and she made herself drop the receiver in order to seize one. At that moment the gateposts turned grey as a doused fire, and the truck drove away along Nazareth Row.