Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  The memory of that encounter called her back, especially on the cold nights, laden with offerings and ready to make wild promises, anything to be free of the fear she felt beyond the cemetery walls. Allie knew she would be allowed to stay, one day, when she had laid enough before the iron bound doors. Yellow ivory, white bone, things both new and long dead; things made clean by worms, kept hidden from the sun until ripe.

  Her betrothed craved sacrifice, but what lover didn’t?

  Her worn boots began to squelch in the deepening mud and a few drops of icy water flew up to soak through threadbare skirts.

  A shiver ran through her so reminiscent of the touch she yearned for. A moment dimly remembered, pain and fear, a weight against her. Was it wrong to promise yourself to a stranger in the dark? Allie didn’t have an answer, all she knew was that she would keep making offerings until her love returned. Right and wrong, smart or stupid didn’t matter, it wasn’t like she’d been given a choice. The wind was rising, chasing away the low mist and whipping her dark hair into streaming chaos. She ground her teeth and mashed her hands deep into her pockets.

  Allie had spent so long getting herself to look just so, it wasn’t fair. Her beloved never saw her as she wanted to be seen. The wind seemed to push against her, as if to drive her back from the brooding mausoleums ahead of her.

  I will not be denied.

  She reached out and took support from the crooked angel that stood over the sunken and forgotten grave of Thomas Rilley, nineteen thirteen to nineteen sixty-three.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to the angel. The cracked stone stayed expressionless but she knew that she had done the right thing to speak. Angels could be vengeful—standing alone for so long bred spite.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Tom,” she added as an afterthought.

  An owl hooted its approval of her manners, winking at her from the velvet night with lambent eyes that missed nothing. Before too long the wind blew itself out, the owl returned to the hunt and she could move forward once more. She felt a growing warmth, an eagerness to her stride as she stepped into the shadows of the taller monuments that snaked over the older, moister parts of the graveyard.

  Here a century had spilt its favoured children, holding them close in clinging clay. The shadows were long and stubborn here. Great horses rose above old generals and cherubs squatted like vultures over the tombs of babes. Each chisel stroke upon the weathered stone spoke of agony, ground into marble and granite with grim resolve; so that those who stole new years from their betters might remember. Lost brothers, wives and mothers, scattered in the darkness, hidden from the sun.

  None knew all the secret names now. Allie only knew a few.

  No one risked the cold or dared to walk between the frozen watchers for long. The statues set to guard old secrets, all better left buried.

  The ground rose, becoming drier and now her damp feet sounded on bared paving stones, scoured by the sulking wind that made the grave dust dance in tiny, ever decreasing circles. She smoothed her hair, her fingers catching in the knots that unseen fingers had tied as she walked the path. The dead would have their little jokes.

  The ossuary stood on the top of the hill. Her heart was pounding—a rhythm to prick up the ears of all but the most sated of night time wanderers.

  A row of trees had once adorned the last sweep up towards the low building that squatted at the top of the hill but, like teeth in an old man’s mouth. Many had fallen leaving the avenue ragged.

  The bleached bodies of the trees had never been removed, just shifted to the side of the path where their splintered bodies lay half buried, holding back the coiled brambles and darting thistles that had long harboured designs on the pale stones that lead to the house of bones.

  Before she knew it, Allie stood before the great doors. The saint and his demons stared at her with hollow, deep carved eyes. They watched as she reached into her pocket and began to lay out her gifts before the door.

  A bird’s skull, small and light. The feet of the cat that had killed it.

  Last of all, she laid out the teeth, still alive with the aching cold. Gold glinted from one of the molars as she set it in a fan-like pattern over the pale bones that she had spent so long picking clean; that was a special prize, gold for her love as precious as the moments they would share soon when she was heard, when the door groaned open and she was taken below.

  Allie was so lost in making everything just so that she almost didn’t hear the approach of the night watchman. At the last moment she noticed the scrape of boots and the muted glow of his approaching light.

  She panicked and scurried on all fours into the shelter of a carved tome that had cracked and toppled from the stone pedestal that marked a long dead scholar’s grave. She squeezed herself into the narrow space between the plinth and the stone pages, all the while whispering apologies to the one who slept beneath.

  The watchman came closer and she had to stifle her prayers.

  Her entreaties were silent now.

  Please make him go away.

  Let him not see.

  Make him blind. Make him scared. Make him pass quickly.

  The unwelcome torch came on regardless, robbing the shadows of their mystery and freezing the unquiet statues into position.

  The watchman, himself little more than a tramp, was drunk, walking unevenly. Allie knew that the old man only took the job in exchange for a meal and somewhere warm to sleep. He was as lost in the world of the living as she was. He was probably the only one closer to the dead than Allie, though she hated to admit it. The watchman, like all of the living, was too hot, dirty and loud. The one time they had encountered each other before had not been pleasant. He’d made all sorts of threats and terrible, burning promises about what would happen if he found her again.

  Allie forced herself further back into the shadows, wincing at the touch of the stone through her thin jacket.

  If I push too hard and the old book shifts…

  She closed her eyes for a second and forced herself to breath regularly.

  When she opened her eyes Allie was greeted by a terrible sight.

  Her prayers had been answered, at least in part, the drunkard had not seen her gifts. At least that is what she assumed because he was pissing right on them. A night’s worth of drink dribbled out in steaming drops. The old despoiler even had the gall to up end his bottle into his maw, while he was shaking himself dry over her hard won gifts.

  It was too much. She rushed him, a wordless howl spilling from her lips.

  It didn’t take much to tip him over, the watchman had never been steady on his feet.

  Allie hadn’t really had much of a plan, she just wanted to make him pay, she’d imagined him falling into the door, flopping in his own piss., She’d hoped to give him a good scare and a kick before he could pull himself together, but she never got the chance.

  The door. Her door.

  The one that had always been locked, swung wide as the watchman fell against it. He teetered for the merest instant then tumbled down into the darkness. He landed with a wet thunk.

  Alley cast about for the fallen man’s torch, her hand recoiling from the fresh, warm, mud. At last she grasped the rubber handle and sent a thin beam into the cavernous blackness in front of her. That moist darkness—something that she longed for and at the same time something she had hoped never to see. The torch beam stabbed down, as noticeable as a pure soul in hell, and illuminated the pool spreading out from the watchman’s bald head.

  She was trapped. Part of her filled with longing to slink into the hollow stillness of that tomb and another part of her queasy with the realisation of what she had done. This was no cat, no bird—that was a man cooling on the stones below her.

  As much as she wanted to respond to the clear invitation of the open door, there was the terrible miasma of the fresh kill stopping her from crossing the threshold into the sanctuary she had dreamed of for so long.

  Piles of pale bones lined the walls, their
yellowed exteriors made purest white by the torch’s stabbing beam.

  “Go,” A thin voice echoed from the neatly arrayed piles of decay. The densely packed skulls and long femurs caught the splash of the torch’s light, but there was no one living to be seen.

  Allie stood her ground for a second, fighting the fearful urgings of her pounding heart. Her skin prickled. They were so close, so full of expectation. Her legs felt like they might not hold her as she turned and ran back into the night. Ghosts followed her all the way home.

  * * *

  She had to wait for the moon to dim again before she felt their call. The weeks had not been easy. The world of the living was sharp and jarring enough; her stepmother’s shrill calls, her father’s rough touch. Allie had been a ghost among them for so long, now she felt displaced from the only world that made any sense to her.

  The birds and the cups, the cards and bones, all agreed that it should have been her lying at the bottom of those stairs. The watchman had stolen her place. Left her to deal with the mess he left behind.

  The dead had only anger for her now. She felt their contempt even beyond the cemetery. In the guttering of candles and the crackling hiss of flickering bulbs. There was rage at the edge of light; resentment in the darkness from those she had betrayed, polluted.

  At first she feared that the watchman would be missed. She watched the bone house for days hidden in the long grass at the top of the hill. None of the other visitors to the cemetery noticed her. She felt like everyone must know what had happened. How could they not hear the dead railing against her?

  She need not have worried. The ossuary held its secrets well. No one went close to the ossuary and no one looked up at the dark girl standing on the hill. Mourners had eyes only for their own dead anyway.

  The loss of the watchman had no outward effect on the cemetery, except that they padlocked the gate at night. The living, ever deaf, didn’t mourn with the dead.

  Allie had long ago found ways to breach the crumbling walls.

  What with guilt and worry, there had been less time to find proper gifts than she would have liked. She felt empty handed when she returned. A child’s doll with a missing leg, some blood-stained glass from outside a pub and feathers, bound with spider’s web, were all she had to offer. She had considered some part of her own body, but she knew that there was already enough blood. The graveyard was alive with it.

  There were scratching sounds emanating from every grave she passed. The dead had known the watchman well and they could smell him on her, scent her guilt.

  Allie didn’t know if she feared or hoped for the chill touch of some ghoul on the lonely trek up to the ossuary. Would it be him or some other, angrier phantom? Did it really matter? Would he even want her anymore? She had never been at peace with the living, the way they hurt you, judged you. It had always been the dead that she had turned to for comfort.

  They’d buried her real mom far away, but one headstone was much the same as another. Allie had recognised the fellowship of death from the start. When she was a girl she’d pictured bony fingers stretching from one coffin to the next like roots; everyone holding hands in the dark. No matter where her father moved them or how hard things got she could always find a trace of the life she had lost in death.

  A child’s dream, she saw deeper now, but there was still cool solace in the cemetery’s shadows and the hissing of its leaves, elusive whispers in the night.

  The voices had never been hostile before. Some were angry or confused but she had never heard them direct that rage at her. Now it was like crossing a room after her father had been drinking, the slightest noise might set them off and there was no knowing what they might do to her. Her haven had turned sour.

  It was a slow walk; Allie had to make so many apologies. She knew they were only just accepted. Rilley’s angel bared long fangs at her when she passed and the cherubs puffed out fat cheeks in disapproval. With the watchman lost the path was becoming overrun with new growth. Allie had never realised how much a part of the place the old ogre was.

  I’ve hurt them all, stolen the one who looked after them.

  It was hard to know what to feel. She would not have harmed her sleeping family for anything, but he’d been so loud and disrespectful.

  He’d forced her to do something.

  She’d only wanted to teach him a lesson after all.

  If… It was no good making excuses. She knew what it was like to have someone who hurt you tell you that they never meant to do it. How many times had she wanted to scream back, ‘You’re not sorry, you’re never sorry’? What people did mattered and there was no point trying to tell yourself that there were excuses.

  Allie balled her fists and swallowed back tears. Her failure was hers to accept; if the dead made anything clear it was that at some point you have to stop running.

  Another tree had fallen and she was forced to step over it. Jagged branches snatched at her skirts and despite her best efforts, wooden claws scored her calves. More blood in the graveyard—she could feel the air thicken with the scent. Allie made the best she could of it, mopping at the thin trails on her legs with the bundled feathers. Feathers, spider webs and blood; blood on glass and childhood lost.

  Will it be enough?

  The door had not been relocked. She had no torch this time but her eyes drunk in the starlight, picking out details that should have been hidden to mortal eyes. Each step of the shadowed stair was clearly defined, even down to the spider-web cracks that permeated the worn stone. Further down, a monochrome world spread before her, its boundaries defined by the neatly stacked bones that lined the chamber’s rough stone walls. The white bones radiated pale light, an eldritch gleam that only her eyes could see.

  The first step down was slippery and the railing next to it was jagged, corroded. The next step had crumbled slightly when the watchman hit—she could feel the indent with her foot. The third was smooth with use.

  Four

  Allie didn’t know why she was counting; it wasn’t much farther to the bottom.

  Five

  The numbers kept the other voices out, she realised. It had been subtle at first but as she neared the bottom of the stairs the sounds bloomed in her head like she was in a crowed auditorium. Snatches of old conversations and flashes of regret, forgotten grudges and secret joys threatened to overwhelm her.

  Six

  It was too much; she was being torn in too many directions.

  Eight? Or was it nine? There couldn’t be many more than that could there?

  Allie had once imagined that only one person spoke to her from the dark but now she knew that there were many. A voice for every skull; every skull speaking as one; each whispering a greeting or demand.

  The watchman was not where he had fallen. Dried blood told her that his body had been dragged across to the wall. That’s where she found him, thinner than he had been; the skin already drawn tight, his teeth bared in greeting… just like all the rest.

  “He must be cleaned.” The voices whispered.

  “Prepared.”

  “Made one of us.”

  “Flesh does not belong here.”

  “I can’t,” Allie protested. Her voice echoed through the hollow chamber and something shifted deep in the brittle piles.

  I’m going to be sick. Please don’t make me.

  “You brought him here, it is your job.” There was no room for argument.

  “You put him among us.”

  “You must clean him, hold things together.”

  The breath hissed between Allie’s teeth.

  You can’t ask me to do this… I won’t!

  She flinched, expecting more anger—ready for the inevitable pain, but there was only silence.

  “You did this.” The skulls said, “You placed him amongst us. Do you deny it?”

  If they had shouted, threatened, she would have known how to handle that. It was a lesson long learned. It was the simple expectation that disarmed her.


  Allie’s stomach heaved and she turned as if to go… but at last she nodded. She lay the blood soaked feathers and the doll in the centre of the room, but she kept the heavy piece of glass.

  Pretend you are not here—it’s someone else doing this. If they want it done so badly let them…

  But they need you, you did this. You killed a man, you have to make it right.

  First, she peeled off the man’s uniform. It was hard to work the buttons because her fingers had gone icy and numb. The greasy cloth crackled as dried blood flaked away. Next, she reluctantly disrobed herself. The work would be messy.

  But you don’t have to notice.

  The image of one of the few holidays they had taken when her brother was still alive flitted through her mind. Her brother grinned at her, and laughed at her embarrassment about being seen in a swimming costume. She wished she was free like he was now.

  “Don’t look,” she said, blushing at the thought of them seeing her. It was as much apprehension as cold that studded her pale skin with goosebumps. She laid the watchman flat and straddled him, raising her improvised blade. Her first cut was tentative and the jagged glass barely broke the skin.

  God help me I can’t do it again.

  “Harder.” The dry voice from beyond the bones ordered.

  Allie gulped and thrust the glass hard into the watchman’s distended belly.

  A cloying stench rose up, curling over her naked flesh like the long fingers of some lascivious wraith.

  “Again!”

  Her hand obeyed without thought. Allie winced as the blackened glass nicked her finger, but that didn’t stop her from stabbing again and again.

  At last the yellow fat was rolled back and the stubborn tendons had been individually severed.

  She was only vaguely aware of it; she was lost in memory, watching her brother play with his red beach ball, he was still so small.

  Allie retched as she became aware of her surroundings again for a moment. She didn’t look down, her hands worked automatically, so clever in the dark, even without eyes to guide them.

  “It has to go.”