The Searching Dead

by Ramsey Campbell

  It was Brighton Rock, which I’d found on the second-hand bookstall in St John’s Market downtown. Usually I bought science fiction books, but I’d remembered Mr Askew’s recommendation. Before I’d finished the first chapter I was excited and flattered that he’d told me to read so relentlessly adult an author. Besides the seedy truthfulness that I hadn’t realised books were able to convey, the vivid details—observations of behaviour, impressions of the seaside resort and the darker aspects it couldn’t contain—felt as lifelike as memories, even if they weren’t mine. I was so eager to show Mr Askew I’d taken his advice that I took the novel into school despise having several chapters still to read.

  Mr Askew was talking to Brother Treanor at the gates, but as Jim and I left the bus he headed for the school. Unusually for him, the headmaster was on gate duty, no doubt to emphasise his warning that everyone represented the school wherever we wore the Holy Ghost uniform. “Good morning, sir,” Jim and I said, raising our caps just as much in unison, none of which we meant as the joke we were immediately aware of. We were hurrying away to keep any mirth at a distance from him, and I was removing the book from my satchel, when Brother Treanor called “Sheldrake.”

  I didn’t know why I should be singled out, and Jim turned around as well. “Sir,” I had to say.

  “What book have you brought here now?”

  “It’s Graham Greene, sir.”

  “It should not be.” As I wondered what he was trying to deny, Brother Treanor said “Bring it here to me at once.”

  I thought the paperback looked respectable enough—the cover bore no picture, just the title and the author’s name politely lettered in a white rectangle stacked between two orange ones, the lower one declaring that the book was complete and unabridged, a phrase that used a penguin for an ampersand—but he glowered at the book. “He has no place at Holy Ghost,” he said loud enough to blot out the good mornings of the boys who’d just come through the gates. “Especially not that shilling shocker.”

  “But sir, Mr—”

  “Give it here immediately.” His voice was growing higher and more strangled, and I could have fancied that his mottled face was ballooning out of the constricted collar. “Sensational filth,” he cried. “Heresy as well, I shouldn’t wonder. Do your parents know you read such stuff?”

  I was afraid he meant to rip the book apart or, worse, make me do so on the stage. “Sir,” I protested, “Mr Askew said I ought to read it.”

  Brother Treanor’s face quivered with rage, and I thought the convulsion was about to spread to his grip on the book he was leafing through when Mr Askew said behind me “Did I hear my name?”

  Brother Treanor shut the book and brandished it at him. “Here’s what this boy from your class has brought into the school.”

  “Sir, it’s one of the ones you told me to read.”

  “Is it one I lent you?” Before I could risk answering on the assumption that I’d understood, Mr Askew said “Very well, Sheldrake, leave it to me. I am indeed the proud owner of that book, headmaster.”

  “You feel it’s an occasion for pride,” Brother Treanor said as if he was accusing Mr Askew of the sin.

  “I think fine writing is, and I’ll make that claim for Mr Greene. And if you’ll permit my saying so, I believe Sheldrake has the intelligence to read the book as it should be read.”

  “The boy has a mind all right,” Brother Treanor said, though not too favourably. “May I ask how you’re saying he should read?”

  “Critically, headmaster. That should always be the way. It’ll stand him in good stead when we’ve qualified him for university, and he’s more than ready to learn.”

  Brother Treanor gazed at him before handing him the book. “This is yours,” he said, not entirely unlike a question. “You might take care how much trust you put in your pupils, Mr Askew.”

  Jim was waiting for me on the drive, but Mr Askew waved him away with his stick. “Walk with me, Sheldrake,” he said and no more until he’d limped halfway to the school. “You’ll find this in your desk. Please keep it there until it’s time to go home, and don’t fall into the habit of fibbing.”

  I thought this was unfair: he’d told the lie or at any rate implied one, while I’d simply been his mute accomplice. “As the headmaster said,” he murmured, “I’m trusting your intelligence. Please don’t let me down.”

  The novel was indeed hidden under several books in my desk when I reached the classroom. Throughout the English lesson I felt as if Mr Askew’s behaviour was disclaiming its presence and our conversation. When home time came I transferred the book between two others into my satchel. Jim and I were on the drive when I saw Brother Treanor standing guard. If he asked about the book, what could I say? Mr Askew wasn’t there to help, and would I be able to play with the truth as deftly as he had? I felt my face turn red, and my mouth grew parched of words as we made for the gates, where the headmaster stared at me. “So then, Sheldrake,” he said.

  I managed to say a word I hoped was neutral. “Sir?”

  “No doubt you imagine you’ve had a lucky escape.” As I searched for a response I could risk giving, he said “Too much of a burden?”

  I felt trapped and childish for having to repeat “Sir?”

  “Your schoolbag. Is it weighing on you for some reason?”

  I’d shrugged it higher on my shoulder while he was musing about my escape. “Just homework, sir,” I mumbled.

  “You must expect that if you’ve set your sights on a university.” He paused long enough to make me wonder if he’d asked a question, and then he said “Best hurry home and make a start on it, then.”

  I never knew how much he suspected. Perhaps at some stage of the confrontation he decided against learning whether Mr Askew had given me the book. I resented the panic he’d caused me to suffer, particularly since it had proved to be needless, and I vowed I wouldn’t panic over anything connected with Mr Noble or his church. “Let’s meet as early as we can tomorrow,” I urged Jim and Bobby as we parted at the corner of her road.

  On Saturday morning I was there before ten. I’d called at Jim’s, only to find he’d been sent on an errand. Bobby was next to arrive, and we rediscovered how awkward we’d grown with each other. Whenever she grinned mutely at me, which was often, I grinned back. We’d spent some minutes working on this routine by the time Jim showed up, and I couldn’t help saying the first words that came into my head. “Are we ready for everything?”

  It used to be the rallying cry of the Tremendous Three, and Bobby made the first response. “Ready for anything.”

  “Ready,” Jim gave in to saying, though even in my latest tale his character declared “Ready as can be.”

  Our route took us through the railway bridge and past the Norris house. I kept my eye on it in case there was something I could point out to my friends, but although the air in the front room looked dim with dust even from across the road, it didn’t adopt any shape. The bus we caught on the main road passed the Noble residence, but the curtained window over the front door showed no signs of life, and I couldn’t see any activity in the house. I hoped Tina and her parents were all together somewhere, which I didn’t think would be at the church.

  When the bus left us on Everton Brow we turned away from the view across the city—buildings that grew paler and flatter with mist as they receded towards a skein of fog the length of the visible river—and headed along Kensington to the Grafton ballroom. Jim and I knew boys met girls there and danced with them, not to mention more than dancing, and I was surprised Brother Treanor hadn’t warned the school against this famous occasion of sin by now. As we followed the road that forked away from Kensington behind the ballroom I heard a faint waltz from within, presumably a rehearsal. The music faded and was gone as the road led us into a wasteland.

  Though the Liverpool blitz had ended before I was born, all the bombed streets on this side of Kensington lay in ruins. Every roadway was strewn with fragments of houses, and the smell of stal
e fire caught in my throat. Apart from the infrequent shrill clink of bricks as our footsteps disturbed a stray dog or cat in the rubble, ours were the only sounds for miles of devastation. Here and there a street or at least a block of houses appeared to have survived intact, until you saw how empty the windows were, bereft of glass and the rooms they’d belonged to. Some solitary houses were framed by the remains of their neighbours, where jagged bricks sprouted weeds. Crutches of fallen timber propped up crumbling frontages, and everywhere we saw remnants of bedrooms, their floors bitten off in mid-air. We’d been picking our way through the streets for some time when Jim said “So where’s this church?”

  “It’s in Joseph Street, isn’t it, Dom?”

  “I know that,” Jim complained. “Where’s that supposed to be?”

  None of us knew. Quite a few of the streets we’d passed had lost their signs, either buried under rubble or carried off as souvenirs, but I assumed none of them had been Joseph Street, since we hadn’t seen a church. Despite the gaps everywhere, the wasteland seldom let us see very far, and was proving to be more of a maze than it had looked. By now I would have welcomed someone we could ask for directions, but it was plain that nobody lived here, and the streets seemed even more lifeless because of the utter absence of shops. The shattered roadway we were following ended at a high wall fanged with broken glass, alongside which we had to make our way around chunks of exploded houses before we came to a collapsed section of the wall, where the opening gave us a view across the devastated land. “Is that going to be it?” Bobby said.

  Beyond several streets we could see a church. “It doesn’t look like much,” Jim said.

  I had an odd sense that it was trying to look less than itself. It was the only church in sight, a long low red-brick building with a blunt spire at one end. Even at that distance I could see it had been rebuilt, new bricks filling gaps in the original frontage beneath a new slate roof. As we made our way through the rubbly streets I saw the spire was incomplete, lacking the point it must once have had, which had been replaced with a cap of incongruously bright red bricks. A couple of stained-glass windows were intact, undistinguished images of angels gazing up at Mary with her baby in her arms and of the disciples with a radiant bird above their heads. The rest of the windows were new, with perfunctory arches that looked secretive with frosted glass. We were nearly at the entrance to the church at the far end from the crippled spire before we were able to read the noticeboard that stood on two poles to the left of the shallow porch. The poles and the board had been painted black as if to disguise the newness of the wood. Cheap plastic capitals spelled out TRINITY CHURCH OF THE SPIRIT—SERVICES BY APPOINTMENT, and I wondered if the sign was meant to look uninviting so as not to attract the uninitiated. We’d taken care to make no noise as we approached the church, and now we gazed at each other while we listened for noises within. At last Bobby whispered “Aren’t we going in?”

  “You bet we are,” Jim said by no means as low, “I don’t think it’s even a church any more,” and strode into the porch to twist the brass ring of the latch.

  In those days you could expect a church to be open to the public even when nobody was there to keep an eye on them, but I wondered if Mr Noble mightn’t like the ordinary person to see inside. Apparently he didn’t care, since the thick door rumbled inwards readily enough. Jim was first into the building, and as I followed Bobby in he halted, slapping his hips in a mime of disgust. “Did this use to be a Catholic church?”

  At first I couldn’t see why he would think so, even if the surviving stained-glass images were Christian. Beneath the peaked rafters, most of which were new, some of the old pews had been retained, while the rest of the space on either side of the nave was occupied by folding seats that would have looked more at home in a school hall. At the far end of the church an altar or at any rate a lengthy table was bare except for the white cloth it was draped in. Pale sunlight through the pair of pointed whitish windows beyond the altar helped it look emptier still. I was about to ask Jim what had made him raise the question when I saw a solitary confessional booth by the left-hand wall near the altar. “Maybe it was,” I said.

  “Then he’s got a damned cheek,” Jim said loud enough for his final syllable to drop on us from beneath the roof. “What else do you think he’s done?”

  “We’re here to find out, aren’t we?” Bobby said like herself in my tales, and made for the altar.

  I peered about as Jim and I went after her. All I could see were bare pews and seats—no hymnbooks or missals, which suggested Mr Noble mightn’t want anyone unconnected with his church to read what they believed. We climbed the token steps up to the altar—Jim stalked up as if to demonstrate how stripped of holiness he thought the place was—and I saw that the cloth it bore wasn’t as white as it had looked. It was faintly stained in places, and sprinkled with black soil. “What’s he been doing here?” Jim demanded.

  “Was it a harvest festival?” Bobby said, and I was agreeing with the idea when we heard voices near the church.

  We knew they would be coming in, because we recognised them. “Here we are,” Tina was saying, and her father said “She knows our place.” My friends and I exchanged panicky glances, and Bobby spun around. “Quick,” she said, “in there.”

  She was pointing at the confessional, and made for it at once. “I don’t like that,” Jim said. “It’s disrespectful.”

  “It’s stopped being what it used to be. Where else are we going to hide?”

  I couldn’t pretend I shared Jim’s scruples any longer. I’d grown impatient with the trivia you were meant to confess to the priest, and the prayers he gave you as penance felt like lines you had to write in detention, surely not how praying ought to feel. “You go in that side,” I urged Bobby. “We’ll go in the other.”

  She opened the left-hand door at once and dodged into the booth. Jim hesitated until we heard scattered bricks rattling close to the church, and then he shrugged unhappily and snatched the other door open. A penitential kneeler of bare wood was the only item in this half of the booth. Jim sidled past it and stood with his back to the wall of the church, and I faced him, having shut the door. Although we were close enough to feel each other’s breath, I could barely make out his dim face, and beyond the mesh that separated sinners from their confessor I could only just distinguish Bobby seated in the priest’s half. Jim shifted his feet, rapping the kneeler against the wooden floor of the booth, and I was jerking a finger to my lips when we heard the door open in the porch.

  It let in a faint squeak of wheels—the noise of a pushchair—and then small footsteps trotted towards the altar. “She looks as if she wants to give a sermon,” a woman said with a determined laugh.

  Until then I hadn’t realised that a pulpit was among the items missing from the church. “Perhaps it’s in her future, Mrs Richards,” Mr Noble said.

  It was a man who asked “Does she attend your services?”

  “Of course, Mr Wharton,” Mr Noble said as if the question was unnecessary. “She’s of the faith.”

  “I see she is,” the man said, and I wondered how Tina was behaving near the altar. “It was good of you to let me come along with you. When I saw you all I thought you must be on your way here.”

  “There’s nowhere else round here to go, is there?” the woman said.

  “So what do you think of our church?”

  “I’ll admit it isn’t quite what I expected.”

  “It hardly looks like one inside, does it? That’s what I thought at first, but it’s how they used to be.”

  I didn’t need Jim’s grimace in the dimness to make me think she was reproducing Mr Noble’s thoughts. “Not just the building either,” she said. “Everything it stands for.”

  “You mean how Mr Noble says—” The man stopped his words with a cough that sounded flattened by a knuckle. “Pardon me,” he said, “should I be calling you Father Noble?”

  A giggle that I knew too well echoed through the church
. “I will,” Tina called.

  “You know that’s not appropriate.” As I wondered how the man and woman felt about his speaking like this to a toddler, Mr Noble said “We’ve no need of titles here, Mr Wharton. Words that restrict have no place in our faith. They’ve always been designed to obscure the truth.”

  “And you say it’s true that you can bring my father’s mother back to us.”

  “I believe I told you so. You asked what kind of church this was.” Lightly enough for slyness Mr Noble said “Can I do it, Mrs Richards?”

  “He brought my Tom back. I can speak to him whenever Mr Noble brings him. I have twice.”

  I looked away from Jim, not least because he couldn’t be sharing my fear that the woman might soon find her husband dreadfully transformed. “So what would I have to do?” the man said. “Are donations involved?”

  “Just a tribute,” the woman said.

  “A tribute, then. How much might that be?”

  “Not money. Mr Noble never asks for that,” the woman said with another resolute laugh. “One like this.”

  They were nearly abreast of the confessional, and I had to resist an impulse to retreat from the door, crowding Jim. He looked close to pondering aloud what the woman meant, but then the man helped us guess. “Any special kind of flower?” he said.

  “One that’s grown on your loved one’s grave,” the woman told him. “Mr Noble says it’s an old tradition.”

  “It’s why flowers are still placed on graves,” Mr Noble said. “It’s like so much about religion, an old truth that’s been changed to suit the new beliefs. In more enlightened times the living never left flowers for the dead. Flowers were messages the dead sent.”

  He and his companions were past the confessional by now. Footsteps ascended the steps, and a dull thud let me deduce that the woman had placed a flowerpot on the altar. The idea seemed banal enough, not too remote from Bobby’s notion of a harvest festival, but I felt as though the action had darkened the box in which I was trapped with my friends. I could have fancied it had summoned a chill from under the floor of the booth, and I wasn’t wholly comfortable with hearing the man ask “What else do you believe?”