The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  He saw me at once and strode over. He looked as resolute as his firm handshake; even his broad grin did. “Quite like old times,” he said.

  I wanted to share his enthusiasm. “Which, Jim?”

  “Don’t you remember? We met here once.” As though taking pity on me he said “It was a long time ago.”

  “Of course I do. Can you recall why we were here?”

  “Hey, I’m not forgetful either, and don’t let my family tell you any different.” Having established what I was drinking, he came back from the bar with a glass for himself as well. “We’d never have foreseen it,” he said.

  I wished I didn’t find this ominous. “Foreseen what?”

  “Us sitting here with wine instead of pints.” As I tried to hitch up a rueful smile he said “And we were here to figure out how to get your lad away from Christian Noble and his daughter.”

  I couldn’t help wondering if Jim had needed to take time to recollect this. “You’ll remember what came of it,” I prompted him.

  “We went to that dive near Ormskirk.”

  “How much of it has stayed in your mind?”

  “They’d cleared out and taken nearly everything. They left the copy of the book you’d done, that your lad’s put online now. And we saw where they made Bobby sleep,” he said and paused. “She’s not here yet, then.”

  “She called before. Her train’s delayed.”

  “She’s pinched your excuse.”

  The reminiscence of the night we’d all met in the Chinese restaurant failed to calm my nervousness for her, although surely nothing dreadful could be holding up the train. “What else do you remember about Safe To Sleep?” I said.

  “That’s right, that’s what he called it. The name just slipped my mind.” Jim paused again as if to fix the memory. “We went down underneath,” he said, “and somebody had dug the cellar far too big. No wonder the whole place collapsed.”

  “There was more to it than that, Jim.”

  “I know you said so at the time, but I’ll be honest, I never thought there was. I think you were letting the Nobles get to you a bit too much.”

  I was trying to decide how crucial disagreement might be when Jim said “Anyway, we aren’t here to talk about that. Don’t let all this online stuff bother you too much either. It looks as if it’s stopped.”

  “Perhaps, but have you seen why?”

  “Because they’re all leaving it to the Nobles to take their own revenge. Which is superstitious crap, but maybe the rubbish the Nobles used to spout has done some good for once if it shuts that mob up. Mind you, I’m sure most of them would never have done worse than shoot their mouths off.”

  “Why only most, Jim?”

  He grimaced as though he was trying to hold in his words. “I don’t suppose it’s anything at all.”

  “Tell me anyway. You know I won’t make fun.”

  “Maybe I’d rather you did. I’ve just kept feeling there’s someone round the house.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  “No, of course not,” Jim said with more force than I thought the denial required. “And the lads are there if they’re needed, but they’re sure it’s just me going a bit antique. They don’t see how anyone can have been getting in, and I’m not pretending I do either.”

  With some care I said “Is there any evidence they are?”

  “None I could show the lads.”

  “No, but you could tell me about it, and Bobby too.”

  “I’ll be talking to her if she shows up.”

  His comment roused my apprehension. “Let me find out where she is,” I said.

  My phone displayed her message—On train but I’ll be late—and I called that number. When the bell began to ring it sounded odd: not merely hollow but multiplied, as though echoing in some unnatural space. It kept ringing long enough to aggravate my unease, and then Bobby said “All right, I’m here. I’m here now.”

  Not just her words seemed somehow wrong. Like the bell, her voice sounded as though it was proliferating across a void. “Where?” I pleaded.

  “Here, Dom. Here.” As Jim blinked at the drinkers around us while I peered nervously about, she said “I’m just trying to see I’m not followed. I don’t expect it’ll do any good. I’ll let you see me now.”

  I’d begun to panic, having no idea what she could mean, when the door made way for a glare of sunlight and a silhouette pocketing a phone. Bobby and her voice had been outside the window. Jim and I stood up to receive one-armed hugs, and then Bobby nodded at our glasses. “I’ll get a bottle,” she said.

  Her cheerfulness felt at least as determined as Jim’s. He stayed on his feet, peering out of the window while Bobby headed for the bar. When she returned with a bottle and another glass he murmured “Was someone following you, then? Did you see them?”

  “I don’t have to,” Bobby said, raising her chin to fend off any argument. “I feel them behind me.”

  Jim gazed past her in stubborn disbelief. “You can’t be now.”

  “Not now, but I wasn’t thinking when I tried to lose them. They can find us whenever they like.”

  I was afraid she was expecting Jim to accept too much too soon. “You were going to tell Bobby what you saw at home,” I said.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “You said there wasn’t enough to show your sons,” I protested, “not nothing.”

  “So I did,” With imperfectly suppressed resentment Jim said “I heard whispering, that’s all.”

  Having topped our glasses up, Bobby filled her own. “What did it say, Jim?”

  “Not that kind of whisper. I thought it was the pipes at first, but there aren’t any where it was.” Jim looked frustrated, as if language had begun to desert him. “Like someone creeping round the place,” he said. “I don’t know how to put it better.”

  “Like a kind of crawling you can almost feel inside you.”

  Jim gave a violent shrug that might have been designed to rid him of the idea, though it looked reminiscent of a shudder. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

  I did. It threatened to revive experiences I’d done my best to put out of my mind, and I should have preferred Bobby not to ask “What have you seen, Dom?”

  “Mostly shadows,” I risked saying, only to imagine I saw a dark pendulous shape scuttle overhead.

  “I don’t think they’ve bothered to be solid yet. Maybe they’re waiting till we’re more afraid.”

  Jim expressed a breath fierce enough for a word. “Am I meant to know what you’re talking about?”

  “They’d mean you to. The people who’ve been attacking us online, they’ve got what I expect they prayed for.”

  “You’re saying they’d mean me to know what you mean.”

  “No,” I said, trying to believe that only the irregularities of the ceiling had lent the shadow limbs. “What they’ve brought back would.”

  “Which is what exactly?”

  “The founders of the church.” Although the name felt too close to an invocation, I seemed unable not to say “The Nobles.”

  Jim stared at the glass he’d just drunk from and then at each of us in turn. “Shall we talk about something else while we finish this?”

  “Why, what do you think that will put off?”

  “I’m saying there’s no need to talk where people can hear,” Jim said and lowered his voice further. “Let’s save it till we’re back at Dom’s or mine if you’d both rather.”

  “We don’t want to invite them home,” Bobby cautioned. “We don’t want them to get in more than they have.”

  “You shouldn’t put your family at risk, Jim, and Bobby’s trying to protect Carole by coming all this way.”

  Jim took another eloquent breath while he scrutinised us both. “I don’t think I know why we’re supposed to be here.

  “We need to agree what we can do.”

  “I could try and get the identities of some of the people who’ve been threatening us online.
My lads should be able to do it, and there’s certainly some hate speech.”

  “It’s gone far beyond that,” Bobby objected. “Weren’t you listening to me?

  “I’ve listened to you both, and do you want to hear what I think?”

  “I hope we will.”

  “I think you both spent too much time with the Nobles. You’ve let yourselves be influenced too much.”

  “I was. I said so when I wrote about them online, but I’m not any more.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you only think you’re free of them.” Before I could point out that neither of us believed this—quite the reverse—Jim said “You mentioned they gave you, what did you say, occult visions. That’ll be like hypnotism, won’t it? The suggestion can hang around even if whoever’s responsible has gone.

  “It was never only hypnotism,” I said. “We’d like to believe that, but we’ve seen too much.”

  “Dom, maybe you can’t let go of the Nobles when you’ve had them on your mind so long. And some of the people who’ve put these ideas in your head aren’t even gone.”

  “If you mean Toby and his wife they’ve cast me out. I let them know I was concerned in case they turned into a family like the one the Nobles had.”

  “Good God,” Jim said, though his outrage might have been aimed at me. “I pray that couldn’t happen. They didn’t strike me as capable of anything like that.”

  “They couldn’t really, Dom, could they? For a start, your son already has a wife.”

  I felt as if Jim and Bobby were reminding me how obsessed I was, so preoccupied with the Nobles that they’d distorted my view of my own family. “All I’m saying,” I insisted, “Is they can’t influence me any more. Jim, you saw they gave me an icon like the one you meant to bring away from Safe To Sleep, but I threw it in the river.”

  “That’s a pity. It could have been evidence.” Jim shook his head, dismissing my mistake. “The fact remains you got involved with their church,” he said. “It could still be affecting your mind more than you realise.”

  “Jim,” Bobby said and waited until she had all his attention. “Tell me you didn’t see anything wrong at Safe To Sleep.”

  “I saw plenty I’d call wrong. I saw how you had to hang on to your bed because they’d worked on your nerves so much.”

  “Not that kind of wrong. Didn’t you see what had grown underneath the house?”

  “I don’t know about grown. The way they’d dug the cellar out certainly wasn’t safe.”

  “Weren’t you there when it dragged the whole place underground?”

  “I told Dom at the time, that was subsidence.

  “I think you’re as affected as you want to believe we are, only the effect it’s had on you is making you determined not to see.” As Jim opened his mouth with a wordless but vigorous sound Bobby said “I didn’t come just to keep all this away from Carole. I wanted to help you see what’s happening so you’ll be ready for it.”

  Jim closed his mouth and stayed quiet long enough for me to take a generous drink. I was searching for arguments to add to Bobby’s when Jim said “All right, show me and I’ll do my best to see. It won’t alter my beliefs, but I’ll try if it’s going to help.”

  “Remember what we used to say,” Bobby said, grasping his hand and mine. “We’d always look out for one another.”

  “That’s what it’s like,” Jim said as if she’d inspired him. “One of those stories Dom used to write about us.”

  Bobby let go of our hands before I had time to clasp Jim’s. “What do you think we should do, Dom?” she said. “You’ve seen the most of any of us.”

  Given her days and nights at Safe To Sleep I wondered how true this could be. Was she trying not to recall her experiences? “We ought to go where the Nobles died,” I said.

  “And let them do their worst. We’re still three and we’re together.”

  I hoped this lent us as much power as she assumed. She poured the last of the wine into the glasses and raised hers. “Drink up and let’s be on our way,” she said. “Here’s to friendship that won’t die.”

  “Friendship,” Jim and I said together, though I wondered if he shared my feeling that her final phrase was too extreme a claim. We drained our glasses, having clinked them forcefully enough to attract rather more than a glance from the barman, and marched in a moderately steady line out of the pub.

  Bobby halted outside, so abruptly that Jim almost collided with her. I thought she’d detected an intruder in the crowd until I saw she was gazing at the abandoned cinema. “That’s where we were the day you went under the church, Dom.”

  “I wish we’d gone with him instead.”

  “Forget what you were up to,” I said. “We weren’t really ourselves yet, were we? We were still finding out who we were.”

  Jim and Bobby stared at me. “What do you think we were up to?” Bobby said.

  My hesitation was more eloquent than I could help. “What do boys and girls generally get up to in the dark?”

  “Not a lot,” Jim said, “at the age we were.”

  “Just a snog and I wasn’t too good at it,” Bobby said.

  “Don’t say you’re obsessed with sex as well, Dom.”

  Presumably he meant besides the Nobles. I saw his and Bobby’s faces move apart in the light from the screen, not as guiltily as they would have if they’d known who was watching, and the mutations I’d chopped into writhing bits in the crypt of the Trinity Church of the Spirit. Jim’s comment had revived the fury I’d felt then, so that I might have revealed how I’d caught him with Bobby if she hadn’t intervened. “He won’t be, Jim,” she said. “That’s all long past, and as Dom says, we’re other people now. Let’s focus on the past that won’t stay dead.”

  20 - A United Family

  Once we were on the bus we began to reminisce about trips across the river. “Seems as if we were always running for the ferry,” Jim said.

  “Remember when they almost wouldn’t sell us tickets,” Bobby said, “because we were too puffed to say please.”

  “And the day the crewman wouldn’t let us up the stairs,” I said, “because we were too lively for him.”

  “We always made it to New Brighton, though,” Bobby declared. “Nobody stops us.”

  “Nobody stopped you on the dodgems,” Jim remembered. “I came away with bruises every time.”

  “Well, you nearly sprained my back that time you came after me down the helter-skelter.”

  “And we always saved the ghost train for the last ride,” I contributed.

  “And then it was fish and chips on the prom. Remember when the wind blew half of yours away.”

  “That was when Dom wanted us to hurry so we wouldn’t miss any of a film. Films were your life even then, Dom.”

  Perhaps riding on the top deck of the bus, as we used to do with scholars’ half fare tickets, had reminded us of our adolescence, but I suspected we were trying not to anticipate what lay ahead—perhaps even Jim was. I recalled the ferry dipping gently as a cradle or rearing up from the waves, the wheel vibrating in my grasp as Bobby’s dodgem dealt my car yet another hearty thump, the mat prickling against the backs of my legs all the way down the spiral ramp, the mechanical howls and doggedly illuminated goblins that lay in wait for the faltering carriages of the ghost train, the smell of fish and chips an unexpected gale served me before wrenching half the newspaper and its culinary contents out of my hands… This brought back memories of newspaper reports of Eric Wharton’s death. I felt adrift in time, unable to judge whether this preceded the memory that had revived it or came after. I tried to fasten on another—the Court in New Brighton, a cinema whose screen had remained practically square, defiantly celebrating the old shape of films. Would speaking help to fix me in my mind? “Not my whole life by any means,” I said, only for Jim to blink at me as if I’d answered so belatedly that he had to remind himself of his own remark. I had indeed been elsewhere longer than I’d realised, because the bu
s had reached the tunnel under the river.