The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  “Dominic.” The voice was growing higher. “Look at me.”

  “Won’t.” I was straining to pronounce the childish word when I realised that my eyes were shut. Just a single dog was barking, but why couldn’t it chase away the figure that was tottering across the graveyard as though its legs were about to collapse into fragments? “Make him go away,” I mumbled by no means as loud as I meant to.

  “Dominic, there’s nobody. There’s just me.”

  As I tried to find some reassurance in this I saw the figure leave more than its feet behind, only to land on the unequal stumps of its legs and sway wildly from side to side as it hobbled with appalling determination towards me. No part of me except my mouth would move, and so I concentrated on producing another enervated scream. “Dominic, wake up,” the voice urged. “We’re both here now. Here’s your father.”

  My eyes took quite a time to open while the barking somewhere near the graveyard faltered into silence. My mother was kneeling by my bed, and my father was silhouetted against the light above the stairs. “Are you awake now, son?” my mother pleaded. “Talk to us.”

  “Mall rye.” With an extra effort I succeeded in pronouncing “Own lead ream.”

  “Who was leading something, son? I can’t understand you. Wake up properly, there’s a good boy.”

  The echo of Mr Norris’s old phrase jerked at my consciousness and seemed to bring my body into focus. “I said I knew it was a dream, mum.”

  “Are you sure? You didn’t sound as if you did.”

  She might almost have been asking if it had been real. I was certain that it hadn’t now, but I wished I didn’t know the reason. “I do now,” I said.

  “Well, don’t go having it again.” I saw her realise this sounded unreasonable and turn her anxiousness on my father. “I said we should have taken him to the doctor,” she complained.

  “Don’t make him worse, Mary.” As she gave him a look that foretold an argument my father said “Do you want us to stay till you’re asleep, son?”

  I imagined struggling to lose awareness while they watched or pretending to sleep so that they wouldn’t keep me awake. “I’ll be all right knowing you’re in your room,” I said.

  “You keep telling yourself that,” my mother said. “And tomorrow we’ll see about the doctor.”

  She plainly thought I’d been traumatised—upset, she would have said, or shaken up—by the old man’s death, though I’d let my parents think I had seen no details. I didn’t understand how a doctor could cure me of dreaming, since the dream was just a substitute for worse. I knew it was a dream because I feared the old man would return not in that form but as something like the presence I’d encountered in the cinema. I was afraid he might visit me because I’d caused his death by trying to elude him. In that case, wouldn’t he come back to Jim and Bobby too? The thought failed to comfort me once my parents left me with it in the dark.

  I must have slept again, since I woke up. When I stumbled down to breakfast, almost missing at least one stair, I saw that my parents were waiting to speak. My mother was sprinkling a second layer of sugar on a bowl of cornflakes while my father poured a glass of chilled milk. “You look as if you’ve hardly slept, son,” my mother said. “Would you like to stay off school?”

  “No, I’ll go.” Mr Askew was our form master this year, and I’d lent him my latest tale when he’d asked what I was writing now. “I need to,” I said.

  “Don’t put him off school, Mary. We don’t want him falling behind.”

  “I wasn’t trying to,” my mother said and turned to me. “What about your friends? Will they have been to the doctor?”

  “I don’t know, mum. They didn’t see any more than me.”

  “I’ll be finding out. Eat up or you’ll be late for school.”

  I wanted to foil her plan, but I couldn’t think how or even precisely why. At least I should warn Jim and Bobby, and I downed my breakfast so enthusiastically that I was told not to gobble and not to make myself sick. The instant I’d finished I hurried to stuff myself into my coat and grab my satchel.

  Autumn was heaped around the trees, where people had brushed leaves from the pavement in front of their houses. A few rusting leaves clung to the flagstones, and I skidded on some as I made for Jim’s house. I couldn’t see or hear him anywhere, and was wondering if I should knock when he and Bobby appeared on the corner of the main road. They had their backs to me, but Jim lifted a cupped hand in my direction, and then Bobby threw her arms wide in an outspread shrug. A pang in my guts sent me forward, but I wasn’t close enough to hear my friends by the time they noticed me. “What were you talking about?” I demanded.

  Jim grimaced at the subject or at me. “What do you think?”

  “It isn’t like a story any more, Dom,” Bobby said.

  “Not a story we ought to be in, anyway,” Jim said.

  “We are though, aren’t we?” More like my fictitious character than the irrationally jealous adolescent I’d just been, I said “We don’t want Mr Noble’s dad to have died for nothing.”

  “I don’t know why he had to die like that at all,” Bobby said, rubbing the shadows under her eyes with a finger.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Jim protested. “He shouldn’t have kept coming after us.”

  “You remember why he did, though,” I said. “If we fix that we’ll be helping him.”

  “We’d have to pray to help him now,” Jim said, though not to Bobby. “He’s gone wherever he’s gone.”

  Bobby looked as embarrassed as this kind of talk had begun to make me. “Fix what, Dom?”

  “See our parents do what he wanted them to do. That way he won’t have died in vain.”

  I thought my friends didn’t care for my writerly choice of words until Jim admitted “I didn’t tell mine what he said. I just told them he got run over.”

  “I didn’t even tell mine what we saw,” Bobby said. “My dad’s got enough to bother him at work. He thinks they want to fire him for getting people to join the union.”

  I felt unnecessarily confessional for saying “I think my mum’s going to talk to yours and Jim’s.”

  “What about?” Bobby said more fiercely than I understood.

  “About what we saw. I had a bad dream in the night and woke them up.”

  “I didn’t,” Bobby said with defiance if not pride.

  “Me neither,” Jim said.

  Bobby stared at me as if she thought I’d let the team down. “I’ve got to go to school,” she said and stalked across the road.

  Jim raised his eyebrows and wriggled them like a comedian. “Girls,” he declared.

  “Bobby’s Bobby,” I objected. “She’s not girls.”

  “She’s one, or haven’t you been noticing? I’ve noticed quite a bit lately, me.”

  I felt uncomfortable with him as I never previously had. “We shouldn’t talk like that when she isn’t even here.”

  “If she was we’d get a punch,” Jim said and watched her step onto the platform of a bus, baring a glimpse of leg. “Or maybe we wouldn’t,” he said more to himself than to me. “Maybe she wouldn’t mind.”

  “I want to keep her as a friend.”

  “She can still be that, can’t she? Maybe she’ll be more of one.”

  Since we’d gone this far I had to learn “Are you going to ask her out, then?”

  At once Jim looked as awkward as his size sometimes made him. “Bit soon for that,” he muttered.

  I wasn’t sure if he meant our and Bobby’s age or his relationship with her. At least he seemed to have no intentions that I needed to be jealous of, not that I was entitled to be or would have had a reason I could bear admitting to myself. I think Jim was as relieved as I was that he could end the discussion by saying “Here’s the bus.”

  Brother Treanor had some words on health for the school that day—how sins would rot our souls just as too many sweets would rot our teeth. I found myself wondering if there was a spiritual equivalent of chew
ing gum, which advertisements assured us would clean the sugar off our teeth. Perhaps prayers were meant to be the gum, not least since both ended up in your mouth. Until recently I wouldn’t have dared to indulge in such thoughts, but now I was tempted to write them. Since they would feel out of place in a tale of the Tremendous Three, perhaps it was time I wrote something else.

  Just the same, I was eager to learn what Mr Askew thought of my new story, where Don and Jack and Tommy destroyed Professor More-Carter’s occult powers by burning all his books. I suspect that as well as Mr Noble’s journal I had Ray Bradbury’s new book in mind. Mr Askew took our class for the second lesson of the day, and when he limped over to my desk I did my best not to be reminded of Mr Noble’s father and his dogged uneven pursuit. “Sheldrake, I haven’t had time to give your work the perusal it deserves,” he said. “I promise you it is on top of my heap to read.

  This felt like a hole in my day, even though I could look forward to his comments. It left space in my mind for thoughts of my mother and Bobby’s and Jim’s. As Jim and I made for home in a twilight that smelled like a ghost of smoke I was hoping that the situation might be resolved without involving us too much. The Three had had their latest adventure, after all. But as we crossed the carriageway while the policeman mimed our safety I saw Bobby and her mother heading for our road.

  Mrs Parkin looked readier than Bobby to wait for us. I blamed my talk with Jim for making me wonder if Bobby’s breasts would grow to match her mother’s, which were so generously prominent inside her tautly buttoned overcoat that they seemed capable of unbalancing her small wiry frame. I felt my face turn red, but Mrs Parkin ignored whatever guilt it might have been betraying. “That’s handy,” she said. “We’ll just pick up your mother, Jim, and go along to Dominic’s. We’ve been having a word and now we want another.”

  “What about?” I had to ask.

  “Roberta’s already asked me that. We’ll talk about it when we’re all together.”

  As she bustled along the street she kept glancing back to urge us onwards if not to make sure we weren’t having a surreptitious discussion. We waited beneath a tree tattered by October while she rapped on Jim’s front door, which Mrs Bailey opened so nearly instantly that she might have been waiting for the signal. As she saw Jim her placid padded face snatched at a frown. “You’re there,” she said as if he’d strayed. “Hurry up and come along.”

  She followed us while Mrs Parkin led the way, and I suspect I wasn’t alone in feeling like an escorted prisoner. I wanted to run ahead of Bobby’s mother so that I could at least let everyone into my house, but she was first at the door. She had to knock twice before my mother opened it, “Here you all are,” my mother said, not entirely like a greeting. “Well, come in.”

  She showed everyone into the front room, which I saw she’d tidied for the occasion. As Jim’s and Bobby’s mothers left a space between them on the couch she said “Would anyone like something to drink?”

  “I’ve had enough tea for one afternoon,” Mrs Parkin said. “And Roberta doesn’t need anything.”

  Perhaps Bobby had already had a drink at home, but it sounded punitive. Out of loyalty I said “I don’t either.”

  “Nor me,” said Jim.

  “You three can sit down at least,” my mother said, perching on the edge of the chair by the radiogram.

  Mrs Parkin slapped the space in the middle of the couch to summon Bobby, where she looked like a prisoner flanked by warders. Once I’d sat on the remaining armchair and Jim took the arm Mrs Parkin said “So what haven’t you told me, Roberta?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you or dad. He said he isn’t sleeping.”

  “Never mind him just now. He’s not here. What should you be telling your mother?”

  As Bobby sucked her lower lip in and gripped it with the upper one, Mrs Bailey said “Shall we go a bit gently? We don’t want anybody more upset than they have to be.”

  “It won’t help to keep it in,” Bobby’s mother said. “Talking, that’ll help.”

  Bobby released her lip with a small empty sound. “We saw their teacher’s dad get run over.”

  “We didn’t really see,” Jim said. “We didn’t want you seeing.”

  “I could take it just as much as you, Jim Bailey.”

  “Nobody’s saying you’re not strong,” Bobby’s mother told her. That’s how we’ve brought you up, so get on with the truth.”

  “I just did.”

  Mrs Bailey’s face stiffened into composure. “We’ve heard that wasn’t everything that happened.”

  I don’t know how accused my friends felt, but I was loath to speak. “It was, though,” Bobby said.

  As Mrs Parkin let out a breath ferocious enough to shake a lock of Bobby’s hair, my mother said “Miss Mottram saw you from her shop. She says the gentleman was chasing all of you.”

  Bobby gazed at Jim and then at me, and I saw they both felt it was my responsibility to answer. Why had Miss Mottram needed to be in her shop on Sunday when you weren’t meant to work on the Sabbath, even hang out washing? “Assertive,” I mumbled.

  “What was that, Dominic?” Mrs Parkin said. “We didn’t hear.”

  “He was sort of,” I said again, though with more consonants. “After us, I mean.”

  “Why,” Mrs Bailey said, “what had you been doing?”

  “He wanted somebody to hear about Mr Noble’s church. Mrs Norris said about it, mum, remember.”

  My mother wasn’t letting this placate her. “Why would he want any of you?”

  Jim shifted uncomfortably on the arm of the chair, cramping my space. “He knew Dom and me from when he gave a talk at school.”

  “Mrs Sheldrake’s asking why he’d think you three could help,” Mrs Bailey said.

  “He didn’t,” I said before anybody else could speak. “He thought all of you and our dads could.”

  “Then why were you running away from him?” Mrs Parkin said.

  My face was growing hot with my efforts to manufacture an answer when Bobby found one. “Like I said, we didn’t want him bothering my dad. He was trying to follow us home because we wouldn’t tell him where we lived.”

  Mrs Parkin stared at her and then shut her eyes for the duration of a weary nod. “Fair play, Roberta, we believe you. Don’t we, ladies?”

  “It looked worse than it was,” Mrs Bailey said and hastened to explain “Not the poor man’s passing. Your side of it, the three of you.”

  “It was tragic but it was an accident,” my mother said. “Try and forget about it now, all of you. It wasn’t any of your doing.”

  This seemed to end the discussion, which I thought had achieved nothing at all. As Jim’s and Bobby’s mothers set about standing up I said in desperation “He told us where the church is.”

  Mrs Bailey frowned at Jim. “Why would he want to tell you?”

  “Because he wanted everyone to know, mum.”

  She and Mrs Parkin were on their feet, and I did my best to delay them by saying “It’s in Joseph Street off Kensington. It’s the Trinity Church of the Spirit, like Mrs Norris said.”

  “Well, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it,” Mrs Parkin said.

  “You saw how Mrs Norris was at the coronation party. She’s got worse, hasn’t she, mum, and Mr Noble’s father was like that as well.”

  “You’re saying he wasn’t quite right in the head,” Mrs Bailey decided. “All the more reason why we shouldn’t get involved.”

  “We don’t want anyone like that telling us what to do,” Bobby’s mother told Jim’s and mine.

  “Mum,” I protested, “Mr Noble made them like that, didn’t he? Maybe he’s doing it to other people too. Don’t you think somebody should stop him?”

  “They saw how he was at the other church and sent him packing. I expect they will at this one if he’s still up to his tricks.”

  “How can they? It’s his church.”

  “Come along, Roberta,” Mrs Parkin said and turn
ed towards the hall.

  Bobby didn’t stand up until she’d asked “Are you going to tell dad?”

  “I’ll tell him what you should have told us. I don’t fancy he’ll be too concerned about this church.”

  “That’s us as well,” Mrs Bailey said and waited for Jim to follow her. “We may not agree with what someone believes, but if it’s not against the law it isn’t up to us to interfere. There are too many people wanting to tell others what to think.”

  I felt left behind with my useless thoughts, and not just by my friends. Bobby sent me a wave as she went out of the gate, but the gesture looked too feeble to be meaningful. “See you tomorrow,” Jim called from the street, but I didn’t feel this promised much either. As my mother shut the front door I said “Will you say to dad?”

  “I’ll tell him what we had to find out, yes.”

  “I mean will you say what Mr Noble’s dad wanted?” When she opened her mouth to show me her silence I said “He wanted it so much he got run over.”

  “Don’t you try to force me, Dominic. Just you remember you’re the child here. You don’t tell your parents what to do.” As I wondered how much of her anger was embarrassment left over from the mothers’ meeting she said “Now make yourself scarce. Go and write one of your stories,” and I trudged upstairs past “Thou God See All”, feeling more alone and misunderstood than ever.

  21 - At the Window

  “Your mother’s right,” my father said. “It’s up to them at the church to sort him out.”