Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

“Wait another day? Those kids are barely alive!” Paul was incredulous. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I say kill the lot of them, they’re like fish in a fucking barrel down there.”

  “We’re not assassins, Paul,” said Harrison, his own voice rising a notch. “And as much as I don’t know what we’re dealing with—neither do you. What if shooting them doesn’t work?”

  “I don’t think…” I began to say, but Paul got there first.

  “They aren’t fucking vampires, for God’s sake! We don’t need a silver bullet or a stake or whatever. They’ll go down just like anything else.”

  “I can’t allow it,” Harrison’s voice was lower now and I could see that an internal conflict was battling within him. “Just because what they have done is abominable it doesn’t give you the right to execute them.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “If you kill them I can’t allow you to stay in town. You’ll be cast out as a murderer.”

  “That’s not your decision to make. Why not see what everyone else thinks?”

  “And march a mob up here with flaming torches? This isn’t the dark ages. These people are sick.”

  “Yeah, in the fucking head.”

  “Head, body, both. It’s an illness, Paul. They are just trying to survive, however wrong their way of going about that may be. They need to be punished, but maybe they could also be helped.”

  “You think illness is an excuse? A reason to defend these bastards? For fuck’s sake, Harrison. Why don’t they just ask for a transfusion? They’re a bunch of psychos, simple as that.”

  “Listen to yourself. A transfusion? Who knows how to do one of those these days? Think about it, man. If they’d asked you to bleed in a jar for them would you have done it? Or driven the poor unclean bastards out of town?”

  I’d heard enough, and could see both sides of the coin. It was an argument far older than this evening. The degree to which people should be punished for their sins. The circumstances which could be called upon to in some way explain, even if not to justify, such sin. Can sickness ever be an excuse for inhumanity towards your fellow man? For cruelty to others? Cruelty to children? It was an argument for which I had neither the time, the inclination, nor the right answer.

  Paul was of the old ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ persuasion, Harrison of a more liberal bent. Me? Nothing could justify what they had done; I had to agree with Paul on that score. The fact it was children made it worse. Hell, if it had been adults it would still have been wrong, but I just wanted the kids safe. Retribution was a more troublesome topic. We couldn’t arrest them. We couldn’t lock them up. But if we sent them on their way how many others would suffer? My thoughts were tying themselves into knots of Gordian proportions. I slipped the swing out from under my backside. “I’m going back. Who’s coming?”

  * * *

  I’d started walking as soon as the words were out of my mouth and Paul followed immediately, Harrison only seconds after that. They were like chalk and cheese but I was glad to have them both with me. Them and Holyfield who’d sat licking his paw throughout our recent debate.

  “So what’s the plan?” said Paul. It was four words which suddenly made me the leader of our little trio. The problem was, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a fucking clue.

  “I don’t know, but we can’t go home to our beds and sleep on it. We don’t go in and start killing people, but we don’t leave those kids a moment longer than we have to. First things first; the stranger.”

  After a quick detour to a few sheds, we eventually found some bolt cutters, and headed back to the house. The stranger was still sprawled out on his recliner, and the patio door was unlocked. We slipped inside and looked at him, his eyes open yet unseeing, the glass of what was now congealed blood sitting half drank by his side.

  “What do we do now?” hissed Harrison.

  I was making it up as I went along, and was about to suggest that we bound and gagged the man to take him out of the equation. I don’t think Paul had thought ahead either, but while I took a second to think, he acted. He dropped his gun to the floor, grabbed the heavy bolt croppers out of Harrison’s hands and cracked them against the side of the strangers head.

  To this day, I believe that the intent had been to do no more than incapacitate him. The blow was not delivered with as much force as Paul was capable of, but the impact shattered the stranger’s skull like the shell of a boiled egg. I can only think that the infection had caused his bones to weaken, as the way his cranium collapsed was more akin to some third rate special effects in an eighties horror movie than anything you’d expect in real life. The whole side of the stranger’s face caved in as though it was nothing more than a poorly inflated football.

  One eye hung loosely from its socket; blood and yellow pus streamed from the fissures which had been rent open and poured from his nose and mouth. A guttural gurgle emerged from the stranger’s blood-filled throat. Unbelievably, he tried to stand. I stumbled backwards into Harrison who was busy vomiting on the tiled floor. Paul looked at me, his eyes betraying the fear of what he had done irrespective of his earlier ‘kill ‘em all’ stance. The stranger’s head hung to one side, and he spat blood and what could have been curses while his left hand groped around for something, anything, to defend himself. When his hand happened upon the blood-filled glass by his side I realised two things with instant clarity: he was going to thrust it into Pauls face, and he was a blood-drinking monster that needed to be destroyed.

  “Fucking hit him again!” I screamed.

  The order snapped Paul back to the matter at hand. He lashed out at the stranger—no, the creature—once more, and with an awful ripping sound its head was almost torn from its shoulders. The thing staggered, and reached for Paul who had backed away and was lining up another swing. It was Harrison who shouted this time demanding that Paul kill it, his earlier sensibilities torn away by the horror now being played out before his eyes. Paul swung again, a blow which tore the monster’s head from its shoulders, leaving the body to crumple to the floor. It didn’t get up. Nor did the head continue to chatter its teeth, or snarl at us. We weren’t in a zombie movie. We’d just killed someone.

  When someone is beheaded right in front of your eyes it isn’t an easy thing to deal with. The three of us were so fixated on what we had done that none of us noticed that the occupants of the shelter had silently scurried out like rats from a nest. Realisation only came when the first of them launched themselves against the patio doors with a thud and a crack. By the time we had turned, the next pair had thrown themselves against the glass. This time it failed to hold.

  I can recall how the moonlight glinted off their steel fangs. The chaos as they charged us on all fours, like animals. And the blood, I can remember the blood. The coppery tang of it on the air. The way it sprayed from wounds and decorated the room in a crimson overcoat.

  Paul managed to grab his gun and let off both barrels, the pellets shredding the bodies of the two he hit, but he had no time to reload. I can recall how he used the gun as a club, how each blow crumpled flesh and crunched bone. The creatures were both strong, unfeeling of pain, and weak, their bodies clearly rotting from within as the infection caused decay in place of death. But there were too many of them, and one eventually clamped its jaws upon his face, tearing off his nose and shredding his cheeks. Holyfield took out a few more, but as he concentrated on one fallen victim two more pounced onto his back, tearing through his hair and into the back of his neck with fangs and clawed nails. I shot one, blowing an arm clean out of its socket and across the floor. The anaesthetic effect of the infection numbed the pain but provided no respite when I fired my remaining shot directly into the bastard’s face. Reloading was out of the question so I grabbed the hot barrel in my hands and swung the stock in a whirlwind of blue steel and walnut.

  For all the details I do remember, right down to the Ralph Lauren logo on one of those monster’s shirts, there are large gaps in my memory.
From the point at which I resorted to using my weapon to bludgeon those around me to the point at which I finally realised that I was merely beating unmoving corpses into an ever bloodier pulp, I remember little. Everyone bar me was dead. Only I survived.

  I didn’t see, or don’t recall, exactly what happened to Harrison. Sometimes I wake at night after reliving those moments in my dreams, hearing him screaming my name, “Mitch! Mitch!”, as he battled against them. The memory of those screams are enough without any visual accompaniment. I know they killed him; I found his body behind the sofa as I wearily stumbled out of my own, murderous, frenzy. I know he fought; as there was blood on his fists and boots, on his knees and his forehead. He must have scrapped like a kid in a playground brawl, but it hadn’t stopped the creatures tearing a hole in his chest and spilling his intestines across the floor. I remember seeing that. I wish I didn’t.

  Even though I lived, a part of me had died, for I had become a killer. Harrison was right, we weren’t murderers, but that was what I became that night. Dehumanised as they had been, in deed and in my own perceptions, they were still people. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, human beings just like me, but sick. Sick with an illness that was of no fault of their own, and which may have also been responsible for the depths of madness to which they had plunged. I legitimately call it self-defence, and attempt to reconcile it as retribution for what these—these vampires—had done, but at the end of the day I put them down like rabid dogs, and in doing so, I was changed. To the town I was a hero; the children had been saved. Their physical scars had healed, and their mental scars seemed only superficial as the blessed fog of amnesia clouded all but the vaguest notions of what had happened to them. To me, my heroism was tainted by a homicidal villainy, a destructive darkness that would stain my character, and plague my thoughts for the rest of my life.

  It’s been hard to adapt, and impossible to forget. I’d always been a quiet one, but following that I withdrew even further. My accountant’s fingers were now killer’s hands, appendages which no longer belonged in the town I had always called home. I was as altered by my actions as the outbreak had altered the world, and the infection had altered those whom I had brutally dispatched. It wasn’t long before we heard stories of a vampire clan which had been roaming the countryside, taking children, and draining their blood. To start with, we thought it may have been those that had come here, and that we—that I—had rid the world of this new evil… but the stories continued.

  One day a man came. He said he was passing through, but he had come with a purpose. He sought me out, introduced himself as Harry Atherton, and told me he was hunting them. He explained how he’d found a number of nests, and taken them out by placing explosive charges on their chests as they slept. The timed detonations killed them all at once, and he told me that this was the best way to do it, as waking one wakes them all. It was this which had been our big mistake.

  We talked long into the night. About how these groups could have come into being; if they had evolved independently, or if they were part of a whole.

  We talked. We drank.

  In the morning Harry offered that I could travel with him, work with him. And I have accepted.

  Digging Deep

  Ramsey Campbell

  It must have been quite a nightmare. It was apparently enough to make Coe drag the quilt around him, since he feels more than a sheeted mattress beneath him, and to leave a sense of suffocating helplessness, of being worse than alone in the dark. He isn’t helpless. Even if his fit of rage blotted out his senses, it must have persuaded the family. They’ve brought him home. There wasn’t a quilt on his hospital bed.

  Who’s in the house with him? Perhaps they all are, to impress on him how much they care about him, but he knows how recently they started. There was barely space for all of them around his bed in the private room. Whenever they thought he was asleep some of them would begin whispering. He’s sure he overheard plans for his funeral. Now they appear to have left him by himself, and yet he feels hemmed in. Is the dark oppressing him? He has never seen it so dark.

  It doesn’t feel like his bedroom. He has always been able to distinguish the familiar surroundings when any of his fears jerked him awake. He could think that someone—his daughter Simone or son Daniel, most likely—has denied him light to pay him back for having spent too much of their legacy on the private room. However much he widens his eyes, they remain coated with blackness. He parts his dry lips to call someone to open the curtains, and then his tongue retreats behind his teeth. He should deal with the bedclothes first. Nobody ought to see him laid out as if he’s awaiting examination. In the throes of the nightmare he has pulled the entire quilt under him.

  He grasps a handful and plants his other hand against the padded headboard to lift his body while he snatches the quilt from beneath him. That’s the plan, but he’s unable to take hold of the material. It’s more slippery than it ought to be, and doesn’t budge. Did his last bout of rage leave him so enfeebled, or is his weight pinning down the quilt? He stretches out his arms to find the edges, and his knuckles bump into cushions on both sides of him. But they aren’t cushions, they’re walls.

  He’s in some kind of outsize cot. The walls must be cutting off the light. Presumably the idea is to prevent him from rolling out of bed. He’s furious at being treated like this, especially when he wasn’t consulted. He flings up his hands to grab the tops of the walls and heave himself up to shout for whoever’s in the house, and his fingertips collide with a padded surface.

  The sides of the cot must bend inwards at the top, that’s all. His trembling hands have flinched and bruised his sunken cheeks, but he lifts them. His elbows are still pressed against the bottom of the container when his hands blunder against an obstruction above his face. It’s plump and slippery, and scrabbling at it only loosens his nails from the quick. His knees rear up, knocking together before they bump into the obstacle, and then his feet deal it a few shaky kicks. Far too soon his fury is exhausted, and he lies inert as though the blackness is earth that’s weighing on him. It isn’t far removed. His family cared about him even less than he suspected. They’ve consigned him to his last and worst fear.

  Can’t this be another nightmare? How can it make sense? However prematurely eager Simone’s husband may have been to sign the death certificate, Daniel would have had to be less than professional too. Could he have saved on the embalming and had the funeral at once? At least he has dressed his father in a suit, but the pockets feel empty as death.

  Coe can’t be sure until he tries them all. His quivering fists are clenched next to his face, but he forces them open and gropes over his ribs. His inside breast pocket is flat as a card, and so are the others in the jacket. When he fumbles at his trousers pockets he’s dismayed to find how thin he is—so scrawny that he’s afraid the protrusion on his right hip is a broken bone. But it’s in the pocket, and in his haste to carry it to his face he almost shies it out of reach. Somebody cared after all. He pokes at the keypad, and before his heart has time to beat, the mobile phone lights up.

  He could almost wish the glow it sheds were dimmer. It shows him how closely he’s boxed in by the quilted surface. It’s less than a hand’s breadth from his shoulders, and when he tilts his face up to judge the extent of his prison the pudgy lid bumps his forehead. Around the phone the silky padding glimmers green, while farther down the box it’s whitish like another species of mould, and beyond his feet it’s black as soil. He lets his head sink onto the pillow that’s the entire floor and does his desperate best to be aware of nothing but the mobile. It’s his lifeline, and he needn’t panic because he can’t remember a single number. The phone will remember for him.

  His knuckles dig into the underside of the lid as he holds the mobile away from his face. It’s still too close; the digits merge into a watery blur. He only has to locate the key for the stored numbers, and he jabs it hard enough to bruise his fingertip. The symbol that appears in the illuminated windo
w looks shapeless as a blob of mud, but he knows it represents an address book. He pokes the topmost left-hand key of the numeric pad, although he has begun to regret making Daniel number one, and holds the mobile against his ear.

  There’s silence except for a hiss of static that sounds too much like a trickle of earth. Though his prison seems oppressively hot, he shivers at the possibility that he may be too far underground for the phone to work. He wriggles onto his side to bring the mobile a few inches closer to the surface, but before his shoulder is anything like vertical it thumps the lid. As he strives to maintain his position, the distant phone starts to ring.

  It continues when he risks sinking back, but that’s all. He’s close to pleading, although he doesn’t know with whom, by the time the shrill insistent pulse is interrupted. The voice isn’t Daniel’s. It’s entirely anonymous, and informs Coe that the person he’s calling isn’t available. It confirms Daniel’s number in a different voice that sounds less than human, an assemblage of digits pronounced by a computer, and invites him to leave a message.

  “It’s your father. That’s right, I’m alive. You’ve buried me alive. Are you there? Can you hear me? Answer the phone, you… Just answer. Tell me that you’re coming. Ring when you get this. Come and let me out. Come now.”

  Was it his breath that made the glow flicker? He’s desperately tempted to keep talking until this chivvies out a response, but he mustn’t waste the battery. He ends the call and thumbs the key next to Daniel’s. It’s supposed to contact Simone, but it triggers the same recorded voice.

  He could almost imagine that it’s a cruel joke, even when the voice composed of fragments reads out her number. At first he doesn’t speak when the message concludes with a beep, and then he’s afraid of losing the connection. “It’s me,” he babbles. “Yes, your father. Someone was a bit too happy to see me off. Aren’t you there either, or are you scared to speak up? Are you all out celebrating? Don’t let me spoil the party. Just send someone who can dig me up.”