Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  “I’ll come with you,” Joyce said, and strode upstairs as if she were daring anything to be there. Molly couldn’t help holding her breath until Joyce came down, buttoning her coat. “Can I come too?” Helen said in a small voice.

  “Yes, you’d better.” Certainly she would need the doctor. Molly took one of Freda’s arms, Joyce the other, and Helen trailed behind as they supported Freda along the hall. As soon as they reached the front door, Molly opened it at once.

  The street was there. Freda’s sigh of relief was so profound it made Molly tremble too. “Let’s step out,” Joyce said, and Molly thought she was impatient with herself, with her own unnecessary secret fear.

  They helped Freda past the locked gates and onto Caledonian Road. The deserted streets made Molly wonder how late it was; it looked as though they would have to get the doctor out of bed. Beneath the streetlamps the shops looked unreal, their windows blank with glaring light. She wished it weren’t so silent—just the sound of a car would have helped.

  Tenements massed along a side street, and not a window was lit. Nothing moved, not a breeze, not a scrap of litter in sight. They were crossing the bridge now, over the canal that was still as ice. The open sky at the bridge showed only unbroken blackness.

  They must be nearly at the doctor’s, nearly at Kings Cross. The bridge sank behind them, and Molly strained her ears for cars, trains, taxis. Why did the streets appear to continue into the distance, walls and blank windows and never a main road? Freda was slowing now, dragging them to a halt, glancing up at the cloudless black sky and then around at the streets. It’s all right, Molly tried to tell her by squeezing her arm, we’ll be all right, please don’t say it, please don’t ask—

  “Where are we?” Freda said.

  66

  “WE must have taken a wrong turning,” Helen said.

  “Of course we have,” Joyce agreed fiercely, as if that would make it so. “We’ll go back.” She was turning Freda, who seemed all at once drained of strength, and Molly had to follow. She held Freda’s arm—that was real—and tried not to grasp too hard. They must go back to Doreen’s and start again, she told herself as they turned toward the shops.

  But there were no shops. There were only identical terraces of identical dilapidated Victorian houses dwindling into the distance until the street vanished into its perspective. Identical streets crossed it at regular intervals. In the light of the few streetlamps, doors and windows gleamed like knives. The lightless sky pressed close above the worn roofs.

  Freda’s fingers dug into Molly’s wrist, but Molly was beyond noticing the pain. Freda must be realizing what Molly had realized: they hadn’t come out of Doreen’s into the street after all, but into a dream of the street. They had stepped into the dream and made it more real. “It’s happening,” Freda said in a dull despairing voice.

  “I don’t know what you mean. We can’t be very lost, we haven’t come that far.” Joyce urged them forward, glancing back sharply to make sure Helen was still following, urged them so fast that she left Freda no breath to protest. She was glaring about, challenging the familiar streets not to reappear, until Molly wondered if she was actually not seeing the identical seedy houses. Perhaps Joyce had no time to see, but Molly was seeing too much: glimpses of unlit rooms beyond the uncurtained windows, glimpses of shapes that might have been furniture or figures but which moved like neither. She didn’t know if she was more afraid that all the houses were empty or that a face might look out of a window, perhaps out of all of them. Most of all she was afraid that one of the doors might open as she passed.

  Their footsteps rang flatly beneath the featureless sky. Molly had lost count of the number of roads they had crossed. “I know what I’m looking for,” Joyce said angrily as if someone had suggested she did not, and at the next intersection she pointed. “There we are.”

  It was a telephone box at the far end of the terrace, on the corner of an intersection exactly like the one where they were standing. It looked heartbreakingly real, the bright red box with its beckoning light and waiting phone and even a directory on the shelf beneath. Joyce was already making for the phone box, supporting Freda when she stumbled, but there was at least one question that needed to be asked. “Who do you mean to call?” Molly demanded.

  Joyce stared at her as if she were being facetious. “The police, of course.”

  It wasn’t clear how much sense of the situation she had. Perhaps the dream had got inside her, perhaps she was beginning to behave as people did in dreams, or could her proposal be the answer, however grotesquely out of touch it seemed ? Surely the dream could reach only so far— perhaps the phone could reach further. Molly had a sudden inkling that she could limit the dream, if she could think how.

  Joyce pulled open the door of the phone box and beckoned Helen to take Freda’s arm. The creak of the door in the midst of the empty streets was shockingly loud. She left the door open as she lifted the receiver. The sound of the bell echoed through the streets. Before she could dial, a voice spoke on the phone. “Joyce, it’s Geoffrey. Come home.”

  “No,” Joyce cried and dropped the receiver as if it were crawling with insects. She stared at it as it lay in its cradle and then, though she was shaking, she picked it up again. “Please, Joyce, I’m all alone,” the voice said at once. “Leave the others, they won’t let me come to you, they’ll try and tell you I’m not who I am. Just start walking and I’ll come to you.”

  “No!” It was almost a scream. Joyce backed out of the phone box, still clinging to the receiver, and wrenched the cord out of the body of the phone. She stared at the receiver in her hand, then she flung it clattering along the deserted street. She stared furiously after it. Molly was searching for something to say when Freda murmured, “Look up there at the lights. That’s where we should go.”

  She was pointing feebly along the street at right angles to the one they had just taken. On the horizon, beyond the multitude of roofs, lights were shining—lit windows. They must be beyond the reach of the dream.

  Again Molly felt as if she had it in her to limit that reach. Molly helped Freda away from the phone box, and Helen had to follow. This time it was Joyce who lagged behind, glaring about at the cloned streets as if she had only just realized what was wrong with them. When Molly called to her, she came hurrying.

  The houses progressed slowly past them, every door a threat. There were fewer streetlamps now. It occurred to Molly that the streets were in some sense their fear, hers and Freda’s and Helen’s and Joyce’s. “You must fear nothing now,” Sage had said. She could change the streets, she realized, but then she saw the trap: if she made the streets familiar they would change behind her back, just as they had when she’d left Doreen’s house, and in any case by changing them she would be giving more power to the dream. There was no way out through her own mind.

  The street was heading uphill. Her legs and her feet were aching. The distant lights were a little closer, only a little. She wondered if it was possible to die in the dream, and knew all at once that they never would. Nor would they ever sleep, for there was no longer any need.

  Helen was suddenly urging them faster. At first Molly couldn’t see what had changed. The identical houses crowded the pavements, which were deserted except for the street-lamps. Only when she saw the first lamp go out did she realize how much the dark had already closed in.

  She matched Helen’s pace on the sloping pavement, and avoided her eyes. It seemed they had all agreed tacitly not to discuss what was happening, as if that might help. They were virtually carrying Freda now, and Molly was tempted to slow down for her sake when she heard sounds above the hollow clatter of their footsteps. Doors were opening beyond the lit streetlamps, footsteps were converging on the women from the dark.

  Joyce was turning furiously to see what could be there, and Molly urged her to keep up. Inside her head she could hear how insane and pitiful she would sound if she began whistling, as some trapped part of her mind wanted her to do.
The hill was .growing steeper. The lights ahead had come closer unnoticed, but more of the lamps behind and around the women were being extinguished, more doors were opening in the dark. The noises of pursuit sounded less like a marching crowd than one huge sluggish deliberate mass.

  “Up there,” Freda was pleading, nodding her head at the top of the hill. They were nearly at the summit, on which stood a church. The church was dark. Nevertheless Freda’s instinct seemed to be right, for as they labored up the hill and came abreast of the churchyard gates the sounds of pursuit stayed down below. What was more, they could see the lights.

  The lights of London began at the foot of the hill and reached to the horizon across the Thames. A ship full of lights was sailing past the luminous Houses of Parliament, and Molly could even make out the face of Big Ben: it was almost four in the morning. The lights of a plane blinked across a sky where she felt there might be stars, the lit windows of tower blocks south of the river reached their broken lines into the sky. She stood on the summit and drank in their randomness, the randomness of all the lights. It was life, the opposite of the dream.

  The women gazed at the lightscape. Nobody spoke, but now their silence wasn’t caused by a fear of speaking. Molly was listening to the murmur of the city, the murmur that proved beyond any doubt that the city never slept, when a light went out between the hill and the river.

  Molly took a deeper breath. Of course lights were going out here and there, it would be unnatural if they did not, and soon lights would come on as people woke. She had almost calmed herself when the next few lights went out, and then a line of them. Some of them were windows, all of them were at the foot of the hill. Darkness was spreading like a stain from the hill on which she was standing.

  Freda had seen it too. “Let’s go in here,” she pleaded, pointing at the church. “I want to rest now.” Molly knew that she was thinking they could never outdistance the dream or escape the night. The dream would simply engulf the world ahead of them.

  She gave the lights one last yearning look, then turned quickly away. Perhaps watching was spreading the dream. She pushed open the gates, which scraped over the concrete path as if they had never been opened before. “Help me,” she said urgently to the others as she led Freda toward the church.

  Helen took Freda’s arm, but Joyce was lagging again, gazing wistfully toward the lights. “Come on, Joyce,” Molly called, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Let’s not split up. Freda can’t walk any further just now. She’d begun to suspect something else: perhaps each unlit window meant someone dreaming the dream, perhaps she and the others had spread the infection of it as they wandered, changing the streets of London into the streets they’d seen.

  The doors opened when she turned the knob, and showed her a dim unlit porch. By the glow that hovered on the clouds over London, she made out that the porch was quite bare. It didn’t matter, the church was a refuge, and even if she didn’t like the coldness of the place, Freda was stumbling determinedly into the porch. Freda opened the doors into the body of the church just as Molly found the light switch beside them.

  The other women hurried to support Freda as the lights came on. Molly thought she heard one of them groan with dismay. But there was nothing to fear in the church: there was nothing at all—no altar, no pews, no furniture of any kind. A few bare light bulbs dangled from the unadorned ceiling and glared on the cold white naked walls and gray flagstones.

  Freda slumped into a sitting position on a flagstone, which tipped up an inch or so with a scraping of mortar, and there was nothing for Molly to do but close the doors. She squatted beside Freda and tried to understand what she was capable of doing.

  Nobody spoke or looked at anyone else. The church felt like a cave far smaller than it was. It wasn’t the refuge that a church was supposed to be, and that was why Molly shrank into herself as she heard the sounds outside. The pursuit had come up the hill.

  She heard the gates scrape over the concrete and the outer doors open. Soft sounds crossed the porch, and then the inner doors squeaked inward. But Helen’s cry was so violent that Molly twisted round. Susan was in the doorway.

  Or rather, something that was pretending to be Susan. Whatever was behind it, in the porch and beyond, was very large and dim, but Helen saw only the child. “Oh, Susan, thank God,” she cried. “I thought you’d—! don’t know. Thank God you’re all right.”

  Molly realized Helen had never been able to accept she’d been tricked. “It isn’t Susan,” she said and, irrationally, felt cruel. “Look at her eyes.”

  Then both women faltered, for Susan ignored Helen and walked up to Molly. “Yes, look at them,” she said. “You look.”

  “Get out of here and leave us alone,” Joyce shouted. “You can’t frighten us.”

  Molly stared at Sage’s eyes in the child’s face. “You can’t hypnotize me,” she muttered. “There’s nothing you can do to us now.”

  “We never did,” Susan said.

  “What do you mean, we?” Molly demanded. “There’s only one of you.”

  “Yes, only one.” It was Sage’s voice now. “But you must see who it is.” The child reached into a handbag she was carrying. Her hand emerged, and something flashed toward Molly’s face. The flash was so bright that she recoiled, squeezing her eyes shut in case they were in danger. She opened them, expecting to see a knife. “Look at the eyes,” the child said in Sage’s calm voice.

  It was a mirror. She looked into it, looked away quickly and glared at the sight of the child with Sage’s eyes, glanced reluctantly back at the mirror, at herself with— “It’s a trick,” she said flatly.

  “No.” Sage’s voice was almost sad. “At last you are seeing the truth.”

  How could a mirror in a dream tell the truth? How could it be? She stared at the sight of herself with Sage’s eyes, and then she saw the truth, remembered it. The dream couldn’t have changed her memory. The reflection was not a trick. At last she saw that Sage’s eyes, and the eyes of the others from the dream, had always been her own.

  “Yes.” Sage’s voice, and the eyes in the child’s face, were gentle now, encouraging. “You made us. You are us. You must not deny all this any longer.” The child’s hands gestured gracefully at the church and implied everything that was outside the walls. “You are only harming your friends,” the child said in Susan’s voice.

  “You leave us out of this,” Joyce shouted. “Just get out, whatever you are. Nobody here wants you.”

  But Helen was sidling toward the child. She looked bewildered and hurt by being ignored. “Don’t try to use Helen,” Molly whispered furiously. “Haven’t you harmed her enough?”

  “Haven’t you?” Momentarily the child’s voice was sharp. “You will not be able to bear this forever,” she said more gently, glancing at the walls of the church as if she could see through them. “There will come the moment when you cannot stop yourself.”

  “You wait and see,” Molly cried, but her words sounded as empty as the church. She didn’t need the child with her eyes to tell her that sooner or later she would have to give in, for the sake of the others if not for herself; she couldn’t condemn them to eternity in the dead place on the hill, with only the interminable dilapidated streets and whatever lived there to go out to. If she even wished they could change, they would. That would feed the dream, but she knew she couldn’t stop herself wishing, not for long, not for ever. Why couldn’t she have suppressed the power in herself once and for all years ago, while she still had the chance? That was one wish she couldn’t grant herself, to go back all those years to a point where she could have been stopped.

  Then she had a thought that sent a shudder through her from her feet to her head. At last she saw how she could limit the dream. It must be true, for the child’s eyes flickered. The thing that looked like Susan was suddenly afraid. If any change that Molly imagined would come to pass, couldn’t she imagine herself incapable of ever changing anything again?

  Again the child’s e
yes, her eyes, flickered. The thing with Susan’s face knew she could do it. What would happen then? Would Susan and the restlessness beyond the doors vanish, or would the women be trapped here forever, since it would never change? Molly didn’t care; the secret fear in the eyes was giving her strength. She closed her eyes, she reached deep into her mind and pushed the power away from her.

  She opened her eyes, and Susan was smiling. It couldn’t be done that way, there was something undermining Molly’s wish. Molly thought of the real world, of how much she and the others might already have infected as they wandered, how many people might be in danger of waking and finding themselves still in the dream. She thought of what she’d done to Martin, and cast off the power violently, glaring into the eyes in Susan’s face. Saving the world must give her the strength.

  Susan smiled more widely, sympathetically. “You cannot do it. You know what would happen. Nobody has that strength.”

  Molly did know, deep in herself. Before she was conscious of what she feared it had saved her from her wish. If she gave up her power, she and the others would be trapped in the dead place forever. She would never see Martin again, or her parents, or any human being except Joyce and Helen and Freda. She had to do it, if she didn’t condemn herself and the others she would be condemning the world, but the fear of eternity had paralyzed her will. They would never die, but one by one they would certainly go mad.

  How could she condemn the others to that. without consulting them first ? But how could she consult the world? Her choice was clear again, clear and so simple that she grew absolutely calm. She glimpsed the flicker of fear in Susan’s eyes, her own eyes in Susan’s face. Her own fear was there outside her, unable to daunt her. The next moment she had made her choice, let go of the dream and her power over it, and her choice could never be taken back.

  The child stared at her, a terrified accusation, then fled out of the church. She dodged whatever was outside, but Molly heard it start after her, a huge purposeful movement that left the concrete path and rushed down the hill. Molly stood there like a cardboard figure, listening helplessly to the receding sounds, until she was hurled to the stone floor. Helen had knocked her down, and gave her a look of pure hatred as she ran out, crying “Susan!”