The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  This silenced her, though visibly unhappily, while I rinsed the last dish. As I grabbed my coat from the hook in the hall and buttoned myself up she came to the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. “I wish we all had telephones,” she said, “then you could tell them you’re staying in.”

  I’d opened the front door when my father left off competing with the Brain of Britain contestants long enough to ask where I was going. “Mum knows,” I called and shut them in.

  From the gate I saw the mist was turning into fog. As the trees in the street grew more distant they faded and turned vague, while those closest to the main road looked like paralysed columns of smoke. Beyond them a shoal of rectangular lights crawled by, smearing the murk with their glow—the windows of a bus. Away from the main road the night was as silent as the fog that loitered on the far side of the railway arch. I no longer felt so eager to make my way to the Noble house, and even thought of using my mother’s concern as an excuse to postpone the adventure. Surely the fog would help me spy on the house unobserved, and was I really going to prove unworthy of the mission just because I was on my own? I shut the cold wet gate behind me and strode to the railway bridge.

  A moist chill wind met me, and so did a surge of fog. It wavered on the far side of the road beyond the arch, where pallid haloes swelled around the streetlights. I was past the bridge when the fog faltered backwards, and a pale mass glimmered at the downstairs window of the Norris house. As it shrank into the dimness I told myself that it had been the reflection of a streetlamp fattened by the fog. All the same, I wasn’t slow in making for the nearest exit from the road.

  I hadn’t previously noticed the figures carved above the massive iron gates. A shield was flanked by a knight with a porous mossy face and a man whose lower half was a serpentine tail. Perhaps I should have known he was meant to be Neptune, but the pair of figures and the stone bird glistening with moisture on the shield seemed to conceal a meaning, however unintentional. What would Mr Noble have found in them? The bird might have put him in mind of the Holy Ghost, and perhaps the knight could have symbolised the son of God, leaving the half-human presence to play the creator, all of this just another inadvertent echo of an infinitely older truth. I could easily have fancied I was entering Mr Noble’s territory as I ventured under the arch.

  The side entrance for pedestrians led onto a pavement bordering the road that stretched past half a dozen broad stone columns beneath the deep archway. As I hurried past each column in the dripping murk, the fog dragged itself back from the next ahead, and I had the unwelcome impression that something more substantial than a shadow had withdrawn out of sight to wait for me. I was less than halfway through the arch when it found a voice, a thunderous open-mouthed roar that grew louder and found echoes to make it more overwhelming still, so loud that I thought the columns quivered. When I dashed out of the far side of the arch I heard a skeletal clicking recede into the night until the train was out of earshot down the line.

  The road and the twin pavements merged into a path that disappeared into the murk, where trees and headstones looked decomposed by fog. I turned away across a sodden lawn, which was as grey as the unstable walls that closed around me, lowering the sky. For a time that felt slowed down by my wary footsteps the murk was my only companion. Its chill gathered underfoot as the wet grass turned my shoes blacker. At last I saw pale silhouettes ahead, and the corroded figures set about reclaiming their shapes from the fog as it started to absorb light beyond them. By the time I reached the memorials I could see the source of the glow—the blurred lamps on Walton Lane, where the Nobles lived.

  I tramped across the grass to the hedge and sidled along until I was opposite the house. A car crept past with a protracted hiss of tyres on tarmac, and then the road was as still as the drops of condensation dangling from spikes of the hedge. A pair of murky side streets framed the block of houses across the road, and a streetlamp lent them the look of a theatrical set ready for a performance. I watched my breaths drift through the hedge to grow indistinguishable from the fog and waited for the play to begin.

  I waited long enough that I began to shiver. Though it was only the chill of the night, it felt absurdly like nervousness. All three front windows of the Noble house were curtained, and a thin unsteady veil of fog added to its secretive appearance, so that I risked jogging on the spot and thumping my chest with my arms. However surreptitious they were, the noises I made might have prevented me from hearing some activity in the house. I was wondering if the fog would let me venture closer, though I didn’t know whether I could trust it not to retreat, when I heard Tina’s mother.

  She was somewhere in the house. Her voice was shriller than I’d ever heard it, but I couldn’t make out any words. I leaned so close to the hedge that my breath set a beaded cobweb quivering, and the spider darted out of its thorny lair in search of prey. As I strained my ears, aggravating the ache the chilly night had laid on them, Mrs Noble’s voice grew louder, but I heard no words until she threw the front door open. “You get on with playing your horrible games,” she cried. “I’m off to see my friends. I’ve still got some, whatever you tell them.”

  She sounded distressed—not least, I’ve come to think, by her own behaviour—and helplessly desperate. Beyond her I saw her husband standing hand in hand with Tina, and it disturbed me to wonder which of them she was haranguing, if not both. She turned her back on them and slammed the door, its thud rendered duller by the fog. She marched away in the direction of the park, vanishing into the fog before her rapid footsteps did.

  She’d made one point obvious to me: that if something happened in the house, I had no chance of hearing it from where I was. I hurried alongside the hedge fast enough to splash my trouser cuffs and emerged from the cemetery opposite the gateway to the park. I wouldn’t be able to hear if I stayed by the graveyard, and so I dashed across the road. The fog flapped ahead of me, urged by a bitter breeze, to reveal block after block of houses flanked by side streets. When it unveiled the Noble house I was still on the corner of the street at the far end of the block—not close enough to hear. I took a breath that tasted like soot and catarrh, and then I sprinted as quietly as I could along the block to dodge around the windowless side of the Noble house. I barely managed not to falter in front of the building, because I could hear Mr Noble and his daughter.

  Their words weren’t so clear where I was now, and I edged my face around the corner of the house. I could only hope that if any neighbours saw me they would think I was playing some kind of hide and seek, ignominiously childish as that would seem. I’d closed my fingers around the edge of the house as if this might concentrate my senses, though it mostly made me aware of the cold rough bricks under my fingertips, when I began to understand what I could hear. “Remember the first words I spoke to you,” Mr Noble was urging.

  He was in the room above the front door—the room where I’d seen movement at the window when Tina had been brought home. His voice sounded deliberate, close to a chant or at any rate some kind of ritual. “Remember the first time you held me in your arms,” Tina said.

  Was she answering him? Her voice seemed ritualistic too, and very little like a two-year-old’s despite its childish pitch. “Remember how I told you truths you never knew,” her father said, “and you didn’t think I should.”

  “Remember how I used to when you took me for a walk.”

  Could those even be a two-year-old’s words? Why did she and her father want to share these memories in that room? I couldn’t help wishing someone else were there to hear, and as I peered at the sluggish clumsy dance of the fog in the wind I might have been hoping it would produce them. Then Mr Noble said “Remember the field where you found my father.”

  I was appalled to think he’d taken her to the French site, and then the truth caught up with me. Mr Noble and his infant child weren’t talking to each other at all. I’d been right to think that their deliberate almost hypnotic speech was a ritual, but they were trying to use
the memories to entice the person they belonged to—Tina’s grandfather. All at once I didn’t want to have my thoughts confirmed, but they were, by a third voice in the upstairs room. It was excessively large and yet feeble, not to say unrecognisably shapeless, more like an uneven gust of wind than any sound produced by a mouth I’d call human. Nevertheless it managed to pronounce words, however loosely. “Leave me dead.”

  “You are,” Mr Noble said. “You always will be. All you can do now is help us.”

  I thought and very much hoped I’d heard the worst, and certainly enough that I wasn’t tempted to linger. I deeply regretted failing to wait until Bobby and Jim were free to help me watch the house. I was shoving myself away from it when I heard worse still: Tina’s giggles. They sounded a little hysterical, and she had to be reaching to whatever had joined her and her father in the room. This shocked me so badly that I hadn’t managed to move when I heard something blunder against the upstairs window.

  It sounded like a moth, if far larger and yet less substantial. It made me stumble around the front of the house to look. There was something in the curtains, not so much entangled as struggling to borrow more of a shape from them. Apart from the ill-defined appendages that were fumbling at them, I could see a gibbous mass identifiable as a face only because it consisted largely of a mouth, gaping in a cry that it seemed unable to utter. Then a version of a pair of eyes swelled above it, both of them uncertain of their size and shape. They pressed against the window so hard that they spread distressingly wide, and then the presence let the curtains sag and was gone. When it spoke again it sounded more pleading than ever. “Out there,” it said like a child finding someone else to blame.

  “Out where?” Mr Noble said, and his voice grew sharper. “Outside?”

  The sound of footsteps crossing the room released me from my paralysis, but I barely had time to retreat around the side of the house before I heard the sash of the window thrown high. “Hello?” Mr Noble called. “No point in lying low. We know you’re there.”

  As I fought not to breathe I saw a wisp of breath escape me. I clamped my hands over my nose and mouth until I heard the sash clump down. I thought I’d managed to escape notice until I realised Mr Noble didn’t need to locate me. “Find them, then,” he said, and Tina giggled. “Find something even you won’t be afraid of.”

  For a desperate moment I was able to pretend I’d misunderstood, and then I fled. I dashed across the road, even though this brought me closer to the graveyard. Glancing back, I saw that the fog was swelling towards me, but only from in front of the Noble house. Was there a faint restless outline on the fog, like a pallid shadow cast by nothing I could see? I wasn’t anxious to know, and I turned and ran.

  I couldn’t help praying to meet people on the road, but the fog had driven everyone indoors; there wasn’t even any traffic. The only sound was the panicky clatter of my footsteps on the flagstones. I wanted to be reassured by the lack of any noise behind me, but I’d sprinted just a few yards when the silence made me look back. My gasp filled my mouth with fog. The mass of murk that was following me along the road was no longer featureless. In its midst a blurred figure was floundering after me. While its swollen unequal limbs were squirming in a parody of pursuit, as if it wasn’t certain how to move, it was coming as fast as the fog—as fast as I could run.

  I fled past the corner of the graveyard, into the side street that led to the railway bridge. Along here the streetlamps were fewer and dimmer, and the fog looked close to dousing them. If I’d seen someone in any of the houses opposite the cemetery I might have sought refuge, but all the houses were curtained or dark if not both. I’d added panting to the exhausted clatter of my footsteps, and fog rasped my nostrils with every breath. From the second streetlamp I glanced over my shoulder, and almost stumbled against the wall that hid the railway alongside the graveyard. The pursuer was already at the first lamp, which showed me far too much—showed the figure blundering out of the glow of the lamp, waving all its malformed pallid limbs in the air as if miming the capture it anticipated. It appeared to be incapable of keeping its size or its shape, which it was borrowing from the fog, but the features on the misshapen bloated head were dismayingly clear. While I couldn’t judge whether the greyish blobs of eyes were blind, one of them was almost as large as the wavering lopsided mouth.

  I sucked in a breath that came near to choking me with fog, and dashed past the next lamp. When I risked looking back I saw that the pursuer was no closer than it had been. I was able to think that the fog wouldn’t let it reach me, since the fog to which it owed its substance could never come so close, and I succeeded in turning my back on the shape that was wallowing after me through the dimness. Then a sooty breath reminded me how close the fog was, even if it wasn’t visible, and I put on a desperate burst of speed. I was within a few strides of the railway bridge when the fog seemed to condense on the nape of my neck, and I felt how solid it had grown—solid enough for a version of fingers, however boneless.

  I cried out and flinched away, staggering across the road. Too late I realised that I’d veered away from the bridge. I was lurching towards it when I glimpsed movement in the dark beneath the arch, and the figure bulged towards me, all its limbs outstretched like a spider’s, its eyes and mouth fluctuating with eagerness. I stumbled backwards, almost sprawling on the road, until my shoulders thumped the window of a corner shop as dark as all the houses. “Go away,” I begged like someone nowhere near my age.

  The figure emerged from its lair as if it had grasped how to control the fog, and I had a dreadful notion that it was about to grow taller than the bridge. Then it faltered as though the fog had, thrusting its approximation of a face at me. I was struggling to retreat further when I saw that the spasmodic eyes were intent not on me but on the reflection in the window. “Not me,” it pleaded, and in a moment it was gone like fog dispersed by a wind.

  I was daring to breathe again, despite how foggy this tasted—I was wondering how I’d heard the distorted shaky voice, more in my head than anywhere else—when I became aware of rapid footsteps under the bridge. In a moment Bobby appeared and hurried to me. “Dom, where have you been?” she demanded. “I was just coming home. I thought I’d go to yours to see what you were doing.”

  “I’ve been watching Mr Noble’s house.” I stared about at the fog, which was as featureless as fog should be. “Did you see?” I hoped aloud. “Did you hear?”

  “I didn’t hear anything, but—” She shivered before saying “What was it, Dom?”

  “You’ve got to believe me now. It was Tina’s grandfather,” I said, and saw how to win Bobby over at last. “Mr Noble makes her call him.”

  23 - The Whispering Church

  “Jim, he’s making their little girl think she can call back the dead.”

  “He is,” I insisted in case Bobby didn’t sound forceful enough. “I heard him.”

  “So what’s her mother doing about it?”

  “She’s given up, Dom says,” Bobby told him in disgust. “She just goes out and leaves them.”

  “Maybe she knows it isn’t that serious. She must know it doesn’t work.”

  “That doesn’t matter, does it?” I said, because I was afraid Bobby might try to make Jim accept more than he would. “He’ll still be affecting her mind. Look what happened to his dad.”

  “And suppose they’re doing it to other children at his church?” Bobby said.

  “We don’t know if they are,” Jim said. “Anyway, I thought you thought Tina couldn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth, Jim Bailey.” As I wondered how much Bobby still believed what I’d told her she’d seen at the railway bridge, she said “She’s already got more to her than her mother.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it if they both do what Nobbly says.”

  “So do you want to let that happen? Want her to grow up doing just what men tell her to do?”

  I had a nervous sense that Jim mightn’t find the
prospect disagreeable enough for Bobby’s taste. I was about to assure her how little I would welcome the development when Jim let the argument lapse. “Dom, have you told your parents about her?”

  “They wouldn’t want to know. They’re glad she’s back with him.”

  “Well, if she’s a genius like Bobs says, shouldn’t it be her choice?”

  “Don’t keep saying I said things I never.” Though Bobby looked ready to follow this up with a punch, she restrained herself to saying “We aren’t talking about getting her away from him, are we, Dom? We want to find out what’s happening first and then we can tell our parents.”

  I saw Miss Mottram watching us from behind the counter in her shop. No doubt she thought we were having a typical teenage conversation, however she envisioned one of those. Now I wonder how safe she felt in her soft lair full of knitting patterns and balls of wool, or how threatened by the future we might have seemed to represent. “Find out how?” Jim said.

  “Let’s try seeing what’s at his church,” I said. “We can on Saturday before we go to the flicks.”

  I thought Jim was about to raise yet another objection until he gave a grimace like a facial shrug. “Don’t know what good that’s going to do, but fair enough, I wouldn’t mind seeing.”

  It felt as if we were the Tremendous Three again, or the best we could counterfeit at our advanced age. I left Bobby at the corner and Jim outside his house, and strode home through the distantly befogged October dusk, feeling almost sufficiently heartened not to look for an apparition taking shape in the remote murk. However awful the thought was in more ways than I cared to define, I suspected that Mr Noble had other uses for the presence he’d brought back than to send it after me a second time. I only hoped he hadn’t learned who had been spying on his house.

  Wouldn’t spying on the church increase that risk? Just the same, I was eager to see it now that the three of us would. The rest of the week felt as if it was holding back the future, which I was still young enough to yearn for without knowing what it might be. I couldn’t even predict the outcome of taking a book into school.