The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  Not just the unkempt shaggy hair but the loose skin and eyes looked virtually drained of colour, while the head was propped up on a fleshy concertina that might have been producing the unmusical wheeze I heard. I’d hardly clutched at the edge of the bathroom sink, bruising my slow skinny fingers in a bid to support myself, when I discovered I was lying on a bed. A mirror that a nurse was holding showed me how dim my eyes were, not to mention pinched between drooping eyelids and lumps of shrivelled flesh. My face looked ready to expose its bones, a thought I wished at once I hadn’t had, leading to another view of the face. Although its eyes were closed, I was gazing down at it, and I saw its regained colour was cosmetic. Experts had rendered it and the rest of the body presentable, dressing it up in a suit I’d never seen before, so that it would stay genteel for visitors until the lid was screwed down on its box.

  I didn’t know who was having these thoughts or even how many of us were. I was appalled to think that the spectacle of my own corpse was some kind of revenge the Nobles had taken, unless Toby had on their behalf. If I was dead, how could I return to myself? My disorientation felt as though the blackness that the icon seemed to represent had closed around me, trapping me in the eternal void. The sight of my lifeless made-up face had fastened on my consciousness, imprisoning me in the moment, but surely the corpse was separate from me, since I could still think. I could remember as well: how I’d grown too weak to hold a mirror as I lay in bed, and the ache spreading through my hands as I gripped the sink, and then the sight of my reflection—of today’s face. The dilapidated object had never felt remotely as welcome, and it embraced my consciousness as though desperate to have me back. “Still here,” I gasped or at any rate tried to pronounce. “Not gone.”

  As my mind regained its grasp of my surroundings I saw Toby stoop to take the icon. I supposed he was removing its influence, though I could have fancied he was protecting the icon more than me. In a bid to bring my thoughts under control—they felt like a swarming mass of panic—I blurted “Who saw that? Was it you?”

  “I wasn’t there, dad.” In a tone I imagined a counsellor might use he said “Tell me what you saw.”

  “Me.” With more of an effort I managed to say “Dead.”

  “We all see that. Ourselves, I mean, not you. It’s the other gate from being born. Now you’ve found it you wouldn’t need to see it again.”

  I tried to find his attitude comforting rather than additionally unsettling, but had to ask “Have you ever seen me like that?”

  “Not yet. Not till it happens.”

  I thought he was expressing resignation rather than indifference, and what else could I expect from such a question? “If you weren’t seeing,” I persisted, “who was?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. It’s your future that’s remembering.”

  “Mustn’t that involve you?” A surge of panic made me demand “Was it Macy who saw?”

  “Not her either, and nobody who comes after her. It’s all within you.”

  “I’m understanding less and less of this.”

  “It’s the start of your future. As Christian says, words don’t help much. They just get in the way. You need to go through it for yourself.”

  “If you have, I can.” However much bravado this involved, I crouched forward to reach for the icon that lay like a sleeping pet on the floor between us. “Let’s see where I end up next,” I said.

  “I have to be back at the church now. I’ll guide you again soon.” Toby leaned forward twice as fast as I had and retrieved the icon. “Shall I put this back where it was?” he said.

  “If you have to go,” I said too much like a reproachful parent, “just leave it on your chair.”

  “I’ll help you again, I promise. Maybe when you come to ours on Sunday.”

  The notion of rendering the ritual so domestic and mundane came nowhere near appealing to me. As I limped after Toby to the front door I felt compelled to say “So will you be reporting back to anyone?”

  “I’ll be hoping Christian isn’t thinking about you, Dad. And I don’t know what he could ask me that he won’t already know.” Toby turned as he stepped on the path, and I saw a warning in his eyes before he spoke. “Try not to provoke him any further,” he said.

  “Is that all the advice my son has for his old dad?”

  “Almost.” My feeble bid for jauntiness had only made him grave. “Wait for us to guide you,” he said. “Don’t risk going too far by yourself.”

  9 - A Desperate Gesture

  For most of that week I did as I'd been told, although my doubts were growing. Could Toby’s advice have been a means of controlling me—of ensuring I didn’t discover too much by myself? However daunting the vision of my death had been, I was tempted to see more of the future, before that event and perhaps after it as well. If my son and Claudine were capable of coping with the future memories our bodies somehow contained or engaged with—if even Macy was able to cope—what business did I have taking flight? If I waited until Sunday so as to be guided, Macy might well be involved in the ritual. By Saturday I’d begun to feel like the solitary coward in the family, so weak that I was liable to put Macy more at risk, and I resolved to take a mental journey by myself.

  Lying on the bed was sure to draw me back into my past with Lesley, and sitting in the workroom would. I chose the front room as my base, opening the curtains wider to let in all the light I could. The mid-afternoon suburb was providing a soundtrack: birds in the trees, distant shouts on a sports field, the ruminations of a lawnmower. In case all this wasn’t enough to restore my awareness when I needed to return, I looked for a suitably rowdy show on television and found a transmission of the second Die Hard film.

  I left the wormy icon in the workroom and hoped the mantra was enough to send me onwards. I sat facing the window and the thin outspread television, where Bonnie Bedelia was trapped on a hovering airliner while Bruce Willis battled hordes of villains down below, reflecting that he’d experienced much the same situation in the past. The airliner reminded me how Lesley had looked forward to a trip with Toby’s family once she was able to travel. She’d reminisced about our trip to Disney World, and now I remembered it too. This wasn’t the direction I wanted to take, and I began to repeat the formula Toby had used to send me forward.

  I kept my voice so low that I wasn’t even sure of pronouncing the syllables out loud. I had an absurd sense of trying not to disturb the neighbours or make them wonder what the old man next door was up to on his own. I did my best to fix the situation in my mind—the film that had grown suspensefully hushed, the sunlit room, the faintly creaky armchair—so that it would bring me back the instant I wanted to return. The chair recalled another one, or the flight in the film did, or both. I was tightly strapped into a seat next to a small window crystalline with ice. Below the window an unbroken field of white cloud was racing by so fast that the sight snatched away my breath. At first I thought the further ride to which this led my mind was travelling much slower, and then I noticed that the clouds were streaming vertically past the craft. Before I could adjust to the disorientation, they were left behind as the passenger flight rose towards the dark. Intricate miniature patterns of ice blossomed on the outside of the glass, only to shrink and vanish when the craft passed beyond the atmosphere. I tried to fight vertigo, which felt as if the inside of my skull had grown weightless and unstable, while I gazed down at the dwindling world.

  I’d scarcely begun to share the experience when I was drawn elsewhere in space and time. I was contemplating the earth again, but from such a distance that I would never have identified it had I not known. I seemed hungry to be there, and yet some instinct warned me to stay clear by any means I could find. Was the premonition bound up with the vision that had intermittently troubled me ever since my adolescence, of a monstrous hunt across a devastated world? I was sailing towards the planet almost too swiftly to think, but I had a sense of heading for an encounter far worse than my adolescent nightmare—too drea
dful even to anticipate. The impression left me feeling like a tiny child at the mercy of the boundless dark, and I was unable to think myself back to my chair, because I wasn’t riding in one; I was being carried by the dark “No,” I pleaded, apparently without a mouth, “I’m sitting there, I am,” and felt the airless blackness close around me like a trap, all the more inescapable because insubstantial. My mind found room for just one thought: those weren’t the words I needed to use. The mantra, yes, the reiterated syllables and their inversion—and just in time, if time had any meaning where I was, I realised that I had to turn the formula around. Then I was battling nausea on the craft above the atmosphere, and watching clouds stream like a milky flood below a window, and with a shudder that felt like a break in an electronic transmission I was back in my own front room.

  The film on television had yet to reach the end of the scene I’d last watched. This disconcerted me so much that I wasn’t immediately aware of tracing the icon in my hands. No, they were empty, but they’d felt as if they were shaping its outline—as if the syllables I’d been repeating invoked or symbolised its form. I could easily have fancied that it had crept into my hands and then departed while I was elsewhere. As soon as I felt safe to walk without staggering too badly, I made for the workroom. The icon was on Lesley’s desk, but had it moved? Even if Toby hadn’t replaced it quite where I’d left it, I wasn’t slow to lock the smiling object in my desk.

  I was acutely aware of its presence in the house. That night in bed, whenever I began to drift towards sleep I felt as though my hands were poised to shape the icon. Recalling the rhythm of tracing its endless ambiguous outline brought the mantra into my head. I couldn’t tell which way that might lead me, and I had a fearful notion that it didn’t matter—that the same appalling confrontation lay in wait for me in either case. I tried only to know I was alone in bed, but this brought back memories of Lesley. At least they were mine and helped to fix me within myself. The pillow was wet against my cheek before I fell asleep and whenever I awoke.

  I might have been keener to visit my son and his family if I hadn’t realised there would be several of the icons in their house. Every time I drove to our Sunday get-together I felt I was going home. They lived midway between my old house and the Nobles’ first one, though at least out of sight of the graveyard. Toby maintained that he’d immediately liked the area—the suburban discreetness between the main roads, the trees along the streets, the defiantly independent neighbourhood shops—when I’d brought him home, having rescued him from Safe To Sleep. Their house was more than twice the size of my childhood dwelling, and modernised throughout by the previous owner. If this satisfied them I could hardly object, but it troubled me that they’d imposed no personality of their own. I couldn’t help remembering the room in the house near Ormskirk, where I’d first met Toph—the room that had made me think the Nobles’ minds must be elsewhere, given how anonymous it was.

  As I parked between Toby’s and Claudine’s cars on the concrete flags that had flattened the front garden, Macy looked down from her bedroom window. At least I knew that room contained favourite toys, not least a dolls’ house that lit up at night, and games, mostly on a computer. There were books as well, and I’d tried not to feel perturbed by learning her favourite was Peter Pan, no doubt revived by Toby from his childhood. By the time I finished clambering forth she had opened the front door. “Grandad,” she cried, and then her eagerness wavered. “Where’s your worm?”

  I had to fend off any similarity to the secret conversation I’d recorded. “At home, Macy,” I said.

  Inspiration brightened her eyes. “Is it looking after your house?” I couldn’t see how to avoid asking “Does it look after yours?”

  “Our three look after me and mum and dad when we’re asleep. Never mind, grandad,” she said in case I felt excluded. “You can borrow mine.”

  “Why, do you think I need looking after? You mustn’t worry about me.”

  “You’ll be safe in our house,” she said with a gravity I tried to find no more than childlike. “You can have mine to help you migrate.”

  Even if she’d learned the word from her parents, I was daunted by her use of it. “I won’t be doing that today,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, dad.” Toby came out of the clinical kitchen past the bare blond staircase. “As Macy says, you’ll be absolutely safe with us.”

  I didn’t speak until I’d shut the door behind me. “I know you think you’re doing your best for me, but I’ve had enough.”

  I heard discreet metallic sounds as Claudine planted utensils on the dining-table, and then she looked into the hall. “You really shouldn’t stop yet, Dominic. Toby says you’ve hardly started.”

  “I’ve seen as much as I’d like to see, thanks.”

  “You’ve only seen the body, haven’t you? You mustn’t let that put you off. It’s just a way of setting you free to go further.”

  Dismay prompted me to blurt “Has everyone seen theirs?”

  “I have,” Macy said with pride. “It was like being a grandma.”

  “There now, Dominic,” Claudine said. “You’ve no reason to be nervous when she isn’t.”

  I was appalled by Claudine’s nonchalance and saw that Toby shared it. Rather than respond to it—I might have lost all control—I said “I’ve been further. That’s what I’m saying was enough.”

  “Dad,” Toby protested, “I asked you to wait till we could make sure you came back.”

  “As you see, I managed all by myself.”

  I had a grotesque sense of reducing the situation to decrepit peevishness. “Where did you go, grandad?” Macy said with renewed enthusiasm.

  “Perhaps I’ll tell you when you’re older.” I couldn’t bear to think she might know from her own experience, or even know more and worse. “I was only trying to see my future,” I told her parents.

  “It doesn’t work that way, dad. Once you’ve seen your end you see beyond yourself.”

  “The future’s remembering us,” Macy said as if she were teaching a younger child.

  “But the line isn’t the same for anybody else, Dominic. Not even for you and Toby, for instance.”

  No doubt I looked bemused, and Toby said “Don’t wear yourself out trying to understand. I’ve told you Christian says there aren’t words.”

  “He’s got plenty for some things.”

  Claudine nodded hard to indicate Macy. “We won’t discuss that now if you don’t mind.”

  I thought she was rebuking more than my indiscretion. “If you don’t feel comfortable having me here…”

  “You’ve done what you’ve done, Dominic. Toby’s your family and you should be able to rely on our support. The truth will have to be sorted out now. I only hope all this won’t harm the church. Now I’ve already said this isn’t the time or the place for a discussion.”

  As though to make up for her extended reproof Toby said “If you can’t trust Christopher and his family, dad, you know you can always trust us.”

  “Over anything in particular?”

  “Guiding you further. Not necessarily today if you haven’t come prepared, but soon.”

  “Can anybody tell me what the point is?”

  “Getting ready for the future we’re all going to see,” Macy said.

  I hadn’t meant the question for her. I wanted to believe she’d borrowed the idea, but I had to say “That isn’t what your mum and dad just said.”

  “Some futures are stronger than others, Dominic. The strongest one draws everyone together.”

  Macy was eager to assure me “It won’t be like anything we’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s what you’re trying to prepare for, is it?” This was addressed to her parents, and when they nodded in unison I said “It can’t be that soon.”

  “Sooner than you know, dad.”

  “Not in anybody’s lifetime here.” I was recalling the passenger flights I’d foreseen. “There are people who come after us,” I said.
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br />   “The future could be stronger than they are, Dominic We don’t know how far it may reach back.”

  As I was almost reminded of something one of the Nobles had said, Toby insisted “That’s why we oughtn’t to lose time. Even the Bible recognises that.”

  “I’m still not grasping the necessity. Do you think Christian or one of, one of his could make it clearer?”

  “If you hadn’t gone for him again,” Claudine said, “you could have asked him.”

  “You aren’t suggesting I should have kept quiet about them.”

  “Go and fetch your drink for dinner, Macy. Just stay in the kitchen till we call you. Close the door.” Claudine watched it shut and turned to me, lowering her voice. “Why do you keep attacking Christian and his family?”

  “You don’t think what I found out matters.”

  “All the trouble you’re making could hinder their work.”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you?” I protested, to Toby as well.

  “Not like the church does,” Toby said. “Nowhere near.”

  “If it was a choice Christian and Tina made as adults,” Claudine said, “quite a few of us don’t see why it’s anybody else’s business. It certainly doesn’t seem to have harmed Christopher.”

  “I should just have let them keep it in the family, you mean.” When Claudine grimaced, perhaps at my tasteless turn of phrase, I said “I must be showing my age. Some things still need to be against the law.”

  “Dad, in time you’ll come to see how irrelevant that is.”

  When I stayed quiet, more from despair than acquiescence, Claudine said “Will it be safe to let Macy join us now?”

  “She’ll always be safe from me,” I retorted and was appalled by my own clumsy language. “With me, I don’t need to tell you I mean.”