The Way Of The Worm

by Ramsey Campbell

  The worn steps were even more precarious than they looked. I heard water or some other fluid substance slop against them, and seemed to feel a ripple pass through the step I was trapped on. “Don’t stop,” I couldn’t help telling my friends, “go up.” Of course they were already climbing, and no doubt only panic made me think time was slowing down, gathering about us like amber. They stumped quickly upwards, and I followed almost close enough to nudge Jim’s spine with my forehead. Whenever my feet slipped, which was distressingly often, I gripped the rail so hard that flakes of paint or rust came off in my hand. I was struggling to concentrate on our ascent, to put out of my mind the cause of our flight. I saw Bobby use the top of the rail to swing herself onto the promenade, and then Jim did. Both of them stared towards the ramp, and their expressions left me terrified to look. I managed not to do so until I was on the top step.

  The shape on the beach had split into three. The section that bore Tina’s face was swimming past the steps, propelling itself with a boneless motion of its elongated limbs. The others had climbed the ramp, and the lanky mass that Christian Noble had become loitered at the top while the object that was Toph scuttled out of sight towards the main road. The creature below us writhed out of the water to stretch its limbs wide and clamber spider-like up the sea wall to rise taller than any of us on the promenade, its thin tongue outlining Tina’s smile of triumph. I heard the river smash against the wall and the steps, and knew the Nobles meant to cut us off in every other direction. I sensed inhuman playfulness, if it wasn’t a remnant of their version of humanity—a malevolent game intended to render us meaningless, an interlude of self-indulgence before they moved on to their next unimaginable development. The oppressive notion, and the abnormally black sky that surrounded us with a premature dusk, seemed capable of paralysing me until Jim spoke. “Up there, quick.”

  He was pointing at the nearest side street, and I had an awful premonition that the route would prove to be a trap. While it led to the main road, it was so precipitous that the pavements were furnished with handrails. The apparition with Tina Noble’s face was prancing back and forth across the promenade, and her father’s distorted remains were performing a similarly ghastly dance at the top of the ramp, but where was Toph? Staying put wouldn’t save us, and I tried not to feel fatally ensnared as I dashed uphill after Bobby and Jim.

  Patches of the cobbled roadway exposed older stone beneath, and more than one upright of the handrail was unsteady in its socket. Just a few paces slowed us to a desperate trudge. Before we’d climbed halfway we had to drag ourselves upwards by the rail like senile mountaineers on a rope. Every house we passed was full of the black sky, and I suspected that even if anyone was inside they were somehow blinded to our plight. I glanced downhill to see that the invader of the promenade had extended all its limbs to fence off the junction. At least the slope grew gentler where the handrails ended, beside the street that contained the ruined house. We stumbled past the rail, and I saw the cross street was deserted. At least it was until the shape with Christian Noble’s face sprang along it faster than a spider.

  “Keep going,” Bobby cried as if this might save us, and I could only comply, however hopeless it seemed. We struggled up the higher stretch, and my heartbeat grew painfully fierce. Though it was close to deafening, I heard my friends’ effortful breaths. The pounding of my head appeared to shake the black sky, unless the sky was growing impatiently wakeful. We staggered onto the main road and leaned against the nearest building, a silent pub. The road wasn’t quite empty, even if unnaturally so. While it was devoid of traffic and pedestrians, Toph came sauntering towards us on a cluster of skeletal many-jointed legs, nodding his joyful deformed parody of a head.

  The monstrous version of his father darted past us to help both the offspring hem us in. When they began to approach in an intricate many-legged dance, I thought we were the victims of a ritual. I was afraid the hypnotic patterns their movements described might be able to reduce us to a single psychic entity, a mocking imitation of the Nobles’ own state—a slave they could use for play or worse. I might have closed my eyes to shut out their magical antics, but I was still more afraid not to see. Bobby clutched my arm, and then Jim stepped forward, ignoring or at least feigning to ignore the Nobles’ approach. “This isn’t right,” he said in the strongest voice I thought he could find, and stared both ways along the empty road. “I don’t believe in this. It can’t be so.”

  In a moment Bobby seemed to catch his purpose. “I don’t either. This can’t have happened yet.”

  I feared all this was a pitifully feeble defence, but I couldn’t see a better one. “You’re right,” I said and cleared my clogged throat. “This isn’t our world. We don’t belong here.”

  I had a sense that we hadn’t found the correct words and mightn’t ever, but Bobby clasped my hand and Jim’s as if she was seized by inspiration. Before I knew what she was planning, she urged us into the road. “Not so,” she cried. “It’s just a trick. I won’t have it. No.”

  “No,” Jim shouted, and I tried to summon up all my conviction as I echoed him. I heard a scurrying of many limbs behind us, and then faces reared over us, though only one head. I heard a screech and saw a gout of red. I was wondering dismally which of my friends had been injured if not killed when I realised brakes had made the sound. We were halfway across the road, and the red belonged to a traffic signal that was forbidding us to cross. A car had almost run us down, and its driver had a monologue for us about old idiots, involving rather stronger words. Pedestrians were staring at us in disbelief or contempt, but we ignored them as we made arm in arm for the opposite pavement, our gait wavering between a stagger and a swagger. When we turned there was no sign of the Nobles, and the sky had begun to clear without delivering a storm. Bobby let out a gasping breath that did duty as a bid to laugh. “I don’t know what we did,” she said, “but it worked.”

  “I’ve no idea what happened,” Jim declared, “and I’d rather not have. It’s done with now. It’s gone.”

  Despite his resolve, he was shaking—we all were—but I couldn’t insist he admit any more than he’d said. “Let’s hope so,” I murmured, and did my best to think we could.

  21 - On Their Own

  “Back together again.”

  “The three of us, just like old times.”

  My voice was the loudest. “We’ll always look out for one another.” We were ready for anything now, I told myself. We’d achieved our greatest triumph, to which our entire lives might have led. I could almost have thought we’d been born for the purpose. I felt as if we had restored the world to its everyday self. The streets through which the bus was bearing us looked as they had on our way to the burned-out house, but time wasn’t running in reverse; it was back to normal. Slim clouds were scrawled on a sky rendered pale blue by the sun, and the glinting needle of an airliner passed a thread through a frayed white cushion. As the road wound back and forth towards the tunnel the sunlight showed us occupants of rooms above blocks of shops: a woman sitting at a computer, a girl playing a video game, a man resting his feet on a table strewn with plates while he read an electronic reduction of a book. When the tunnel entrance came in sight I saw Starview Tower beyond it, across the river. If we still faced any kind of threat, I believed we could deal with it together. Perhaps the mature exploits of the Tremendous Three had just begun.

  As a queue for the left-hand toll lane halted the bus, the tower slipped out of sight. Just a lorry was ahead of us when I glimpsed movement on the gantry that displayed signs above the toll booths. A hunched lanky shape had run across the metal bar to vanish overhead. The bus advanced to the barrier, and I heard a large object fall on the roof.

  Jim stared at me and grimaced. “Not again,” he said, though it sounded less like a complaint than a challenge.

  “If it is we’re equal to it,” Bobby said with equal fierceness.

  I felt bound to measure up to them. “More than equal,” I contributed. “We’r
e the Three.”

  The bus gathered speed towards the tunnel, and I wondered if the arch might dislodge the unauthorised passenger from the roof. As we entered the tunnel I glanced back. All the seats behind us were unoccupied, and the rear window showed only the receding booths. I was staring at it in the hope of seeing the intruder belatedly swept off the roof, having retreated along it as far as it could, when Bobby said “Dom.”

  I turned to find neither her nor Jim looking at me. They were gazing at the window directly in front of us, outside which three variously misshapen heads dangled upside down. Despite their inversion, their gleeful smiles were unmistakable. “Go away,” Jim said loud enough to be heard throughout the bus. “We got rid of you once.”

  “And we’ll do it again,” Bobby vowed.

  “Every time you show up,” I said, “so don’t bother.”

  Tongues slithered out of the inverted mouths, shaping wider smiles, and objects too varied to be called hands closed over the windows on both sides of us. They might have been preparing to crush us or, I thought, seep into us. “That won’t convince us,” Jim declared. “We didn’t believe last time and we don’t now.”

  “Listen to Jim,” Bobby said.

  I wasn’t sure if she was addressing the faces or me. “That’s the truth, you need belief,” I said. “You feed on it, but you’ll get none from us.”

  More attempts at hands pressed against the side windows, and I heard the glass creak. The trinity of faces grew flat against the pane in front of us, putting me in mind of the undersides of snails, and Jim leaned forward to deal the glass a thump with the side of his fist. “And I’ll tell you what,” he said, “God doesn’t believe in you either.”

  The inverted pairs of lips stirred, forming identical sneers, which enraged Jim. “Laugh at this if you can,” he said through his teeth.

  Before he’d finished speaking he had taken out his phone. He brought up an image of a luminous cross, which he thrust at the faces. I thought I saw them shift uneasily before the pallid lumps that bore them huddled together to merge. “Bobby, Dom,” he urged. “You can do it if you want to.”

  I pulled out my phone as Bobby rummaged in her bag. While the ruse reminded me of my adolescent tale in which students overcame their occultist tutor, did this matter so long as it worked? I’d seen the phrase Jim had used to find the image—shining cross—and entered it in the search box. Moments later I had a picture similar to his, and held it close to the faces, which had begun to swarm over one another. As Bobby added her phone to the defence Jim cried “No belief for you. This is the only one we’ll ever have.”

  I supposed that in a sense this might be true, at least as a form of words. The faces were crawling over one another in a growing confusion of features, of misplaced eyes and dislocated mouths. Jim began to follow them with his phone, sliding the lit cross back and forth over the pane, and we copied him. “God doesn’t see you,” he called. “Nobody does.”

  At the very least his words or the nearness of the phones seemed to offend our persecutor. Any number of digits slithered over the windows as the composite head reared up, just in front of a hanging sign that warned drivers to stay in lane. We heard a large soft thud that produced an inhuman cry, and an object scraped backwards along the roof. All of us looked back in time to see a partially demolished shape sprawl off the far end of the roof and plummet helplessly to the floor of the tunnel. Now we were on the uphill slope, which let us see a lorry crushing the shape beneath its wheels in an agonised flurry of limbs. The lorry sped after us without slowing, and I wondered how odd the driver of the bus might find our outburst of cheers and applause.

  Why couldn’t it have ended like that, or at any rate along those lines? Even if that hadn’t been the end, we would have demonstrated once again that we weren’t to be cowed. We did indeed take the bus to Liverpool, and our route—traffic on the roads, pedestrians on pavements, people glimpsed in shops and flats above them—reinstated the mundane. While I was sure that we oughtn’t to take it for granted, I couldn’t tell whether my friends thought so too. We hadn’t spoken since making for the bus stop, where we would have been overheard by a queue, and we weren’t the only passengers upstairs on the bus. Did Jim and Bobby detect anything as we passed beneath the river? Bobby glanced towards the roof and then stared at the floor, while Jim crouched over his clasped hands, quite possibly in silent prayer. I was afraid I sensed a dormant presence at least as wide as the river, and was dismayed to think how much the Nobles and their practices might have left in the world.

  The bus brought us to the foot of the road that sloped up to the main railway station in Liverpool. When Jim and I made to escort Bobby to her train she planted her hands on our chests. “I’ll be all right by myself, boys. There’ll be plenty of people.”

  The contradiction left me uneasy about leaving her. “You’ve just missed a train. The next one isn’t for nearly an hour.”

  “I expect I’ll find something to read.”

  Jim cleared his throat as though to rouse himself, and I had the impression that he was determined to fend off the experience we’d gone through. “We could have a farewell drink in the Crown.”

  “I’ve never liked farewells, Jim, and anyway this isn’t going to be one. Let’s just say till next time and head for home. I should think you might want to be with your family.”

  I suspected she was just as anxious to rejoin Carole. Perhaps she realised that my family wasn’t so available to me, because she embraced me even more tightly than she hugged Jim. “That’s it for now,” she said, turning swiftly away. “Look after yourselves, and next time let’s just meet because we’re friends.”

  “We’ll look after one another,” I called after her, and she lifted a hand without glancing back.

  Jim and I watched her trot resolutely uphill, outdistanced by a succession of buses, and then he gave me an apologetic look. “If you don’t mind, Dom, I will get back to the lads. Dominic’s meant to be making us all dinner.”

  “You head off, Jim. Bobby’s right, they’re what you need.”

  “Do you fancy coming back with me? He always makes too much for us.”

  “It’s your family evening. Don’t worry, I’m off home.”

  Jim hesitated but spoke anyway. “What’s the chance of you getting back together with your lad?”

  Was Jim determined to forget not just the Nobles but the Church of the Eternal Three? I could only say “I’m hoping. Best to give it time.”

  I would have felt like an intruder in his house, and I feared this might be true of Toby’s and Claudine’s. We trudged up the road Bobby had climbed, and shook hands at length when we reached Jim’s stop. His bus came before mine, and as it moved off he gazed down from the top deck, shaking a fist twice in our childhood gesture—the code of the Tremendous Three. Despite odd looks from my companions at the bus stop, I flourished a fist in response.

  At first I had company on the bus I caught, but soon I was the solitary passenger, upstairs at any rate. I sat sideways on the end of a front seat to keep an eye on everything behind, but saw no unwelcome activity and sensed none. I let myself fancy the Nobles had gone at last, having lost the little interest in us that they’d had. I know I wasn’t wishing them away just from myself.

  As I walked home through the suburb the trees stayed as still as the cloudless sky, all of which felt like a hint of peace. If I was going to be alone, at least perhaps this meant I wouldn’t encounter any uninvited visitors. I might be assailed by memories of the confrontation at the river, not to mention recollections of other such experiences, and I was trying to think how to fend them off—surely by reminding myself that I’d survived—as I reached home. I was opening the gate when my heart jerked as though my body had realised something before my mind did. No, the phone in my breast pocket had just received a message.

  I did my best to hope there was no reason to be apprehensive until I read it. Bobby had sent it to me and Jim. It’s on the train, it said. It�
��s worse.

  I felt so guilty that I was left almost unable to think. What had I caused by taking us all to the ruined house? I was about to call Bobby, having been distracted by the shamefully irrelevant thought that even under duress she was determined to punctuate correctly—no doubt her phone was doing that—when a second message arrived. Don’t phone, it told us. Can’t talk while nobody else can see it. Can’t stand feeling trapped. Getting off next stop.

  I didn’t know what her plan could achieve, but I hadn’t responded by the time Jim did. Which?

  In seconds we had our answer—Crewe—and Jim replied at once. See you there. Dom?

  I was already running to my car, and sent the response my phone suggested. On my way, I promised.

  Driving out of Liverpool as fast as I could risk left me little chance to think. I did wonder how much Jim believed now or even let himself recall of his experience. If we were resolved to protect Bobby, not to say ourselves, that had to be enough. Any other speculation threatened me with panic, and I concentrated on the road.

  Driving to Crewe took most of an hour. Towns gave way to villages, and then intermittent groups of houses flanked the road, settlements apparently too small to bear a name. I’d left my phone on the seat beside me, but it showed no further messages, which I tried to find encouraging. Though the road had grown devious, I was making good time when I began to hear distant howls or wails or shrieks. They might have been voicing my suppressed apprehensiveness, since they were sirens. They belonged to ambulances and police cars, and perhaps they weren’t so distant after all; they seemed to be converging somewhere ahead from all over the countryside. When a police car flashed its lights and raced past me I swerved onto the verge, scraping one wing on the thorns of a hedge. As I reached for the phone I almost fumbled it onto the floor, because my hand had begun to shake.