The Influence (32 page)
She wouldn’t be sorry to leave here after all. None of the children played much with her, because of the way she must have seemed to them before Christmas. Miss Frith was disappointed in her and felt she wasn’t trying, since she had been spelling perfectly last term. Mummy knew why, and daddy felt it was part of what she’d been through: he said he’d rather have her like herself even if she had to learn all over again to spell. They knew she was trying. Only her mother knew that she’d thrown away last year’s diary, with the entries that looked as if an impatient teacher had been showing her how to spell but in Rowan’s own handwriting. Rowan had no longer been sure whose diary it was.
Mummy knew what had happened. Perhaps that was why they never talked about it, or perhaps she was waiting for Rowan to be old enough to want to; perhaps she was even embarrassed that Rowan had had to lie on her behalf, though Rowan thought that doing so on behalf of someone else might be part of growing up. It made her feel protective of her parents. Just now she was glad she was still a child and able to rely on their protection, though the years during which she would be a child seemed like almost no time at all.
The van was loaded. Her father had been helping the men, and now he was sharing coffee from their vacuum flask. “Mummy’s checking the house if you want a last look,” he told her, “and then wagons roll.”
Her mother was coming downstairs as Rowan trotted along the leafy hall. “Ready for the adventure?” she said with a smile that wavered as she reached out gingerly, almost automatically, to touch Rowan’s throat. She hadn’t forgiven herself for that, though it had never hurt much: Rowan had only been bothered in case her father might have noticed that at first she’d found it hard to speak. She took her mother’s hand and moved it up from her throat to her cheek. “Please may I say goodbye to my room?”
“Of course you may.” As they passed on the stairs she added “Just don’t be long, or I’ll come to find you.”
Rowan ran to the middle floor and glanced into her bedroom. It was bare and unfamiliar, and looked much dustier now that there was no furniture for dust to hide behind. Only the view of the bay remained, and she shed a tear for that before she tiptoed quickly up to the top floor.
She wasn’t sure why she needed to go there. As she stepped into the central passage she felt almost as frightened as she had in the weeks after Christmas, when falling asleep had felt like falling out of her body into the waiting dark. She’d taken refuge in her parents’ bed for weeks before she’d felt safe enough to sleep by herself. Surely she was safe now: her mother was downstairs and within hearing. She ventured along the stale corridor where sunlight never reached, and pushed open Queenie’s door.
There seemed to be nothing to make her afraid, nothing to explain why her whole body seemed to shrink around the sudden pounding of her heart. The room was bare, and nothing moved except a tanker and the seagulls in its wake beyond the window. Yet she could feel how short-lived all this was, how if she gazed for long into the room it would turn into the mouth of a tunnel that led to the dark. She closed her eyes and, groping for the handle, shut the door tight.
She’d come up here as if that would tell her what had happened last time she had, but she was as uncertain as ever. Had her mother been able to drive Queenie out because the old woman had turned herself back into a child, or had Queenie relented at the end and let Rowan return? If she had gone to look for her father again, mightn’t she find him this time or at least believe she had, since she deserved to? All Rowan knew was that when her mother had let go of her throat she hadn’t known where she was: she had been falling out of the sight of her own body in her mother’s arms into darkness, falling as if she would never stop, except that the fall had ended inside her body, a life-size weight she’d had to learn to move, to see out of and to make speak. In the instant of returning she’d sensed Queenie soaring away into the dark, Queenie’s dark—and it had taken her months to realise that if that bare scoured dark was Queenie’s, the place Rowan had passed through in her efforts to come home must have been her own.
Things could change, she told herself. The house would soon be a nursing home, where people like Queenie would be cared for, made to feel less lonely, she hoped. She was beginning to think she might like to do that kind of work herself. Whatever was waiting at the end of her life, surely it needn’t be what she had already gone through, unless she gave in to the fear that it would. She opened her eyes and ran downstairs, and breathed easier once her surroundings felt less flat, more real.
As her mother’s car turned in the shadow of Queenie’s house, the shadow seemed to gape like a long pit in the road. Then they were in the sunlight and following the van, and the sight of Jo and her children waving goodbye dwindled. As soon as Rowan finished waving she clasped her hands together to make herself feel she was still holding onto her mother and father. The last thing she heard in the road was the sound of the waves beyond the house, so distant that she might have been hearing them in a shell, the thin blue shell of the sky. The car turned out of Queenie’s road towards the future, and she whispered “I’ll never come back.”
About the Author
The
Oxford Companion to English Literature
describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are
The Face That Must Die
,
Incarnate
,
Midnight Sun
,
The Count of Eleven
,
Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight
,
Secret Story
,
The Grin of the Dark
,
Thieving Fear
,
Creatures of the Pool
,
The Seven Days of Cain
,
Ghosts Know
and
The Kind Folk.
Forthcoming is
Bad Thoughts
.
His collections include
Waking Nightmares
,
Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things
,
Told by the Dead
and
Just Behind You
, and his non-fiction is collected as
Ramsey Campbell, Probably
. His novels
The Nameless
and
Pact of the Fathers
have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in
Prism
,
Dead Reckonings
and
Video Watchdog
. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.
Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at
www.ramseycampbell.com
.
Look for these titles by Ramsey Campbell
Now Available:
Dark Companions
The Seven Days of Cain
Ancient Images
Obsession
The Hungry Moon
Coming Soon:
The Nameless
A lost horror film holds the key to terrifying secrets.
Ancient Images
© 1989 by Ramsey Campbell
The legends have persisted for decades of a lost horror film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi that was never released. Rumor has it that, for reasons long forgotten, powerful forces suppressed the film and burned all known prints. Nobody now living has seen the finished film. But that might no longer be true…
Film researcher Sandy Allan is invited to a screening of a newly-discovered sole-surviving print, but then the film disappears and the real horror begins.
Sandy’s search for the film leads her to Redfield, a rural community known its rich soil, fertilized by blood from an ancient massacre. But Redfield guards its secrets closely, with good reason. During every step of her search, Sandy is watched, shadowed by strange figures. Is it paranoia, or is someone—or something—determined to keep the lost film and the secrets it reveals buried forever?
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Ancient Images:
At last the pain became unbearable, but not for long. Through the haze that wavered about her she thought she saw the fields and the spectators dancing in celebration of her pain. She was surrounded by folk she’d known all her life, oldsters who had bounced her on their knees when she was little and people of her own age she had played with then, but now their faces were as evilly gleeful as the gargoyles on the chapel beyond them. They were jeering at her and holding their children up to see, sitting children on their shoulders so that they were set almost as high as she was. Her streaming eyes blinked at the faces bunched below her. As she tried to see her husband she was praying that he would come and cut her down before the pain grew worse.
She couldn’t see him, and she couldn’t cry out to him. Someone had driven a gag into her mouth, so deep that the rusty taste of it was choking her. She couldn’t even pray aloud to God to numb her awareness of her bruised tongue that was swollen between her back teeth. Then her senses that were struggling to flee what had been done to her returned, and she remembered that there was no gag, remembered why it couldn’t be her tongue that felt like a mouthful of coals whose fire was eating its way through her skull.
For an instant her mind shrank beyond the reach of her plight, and she remembered everything. Her husband wouldn’t save her, even if she were able to call out his name instead of emitting the bovine moan that sounded nothing like her voice. He was dead, and she had seen the devil that had killed him. Everyone below her, relishing her fate, believed that she was being put to death for murdering him, but one man knew better—knew enough to have her tongue torn out while making it
appear that he was simply applying the law.
The haze rippled around her, the gloating faces seemed to swim up towards her through the thickening murk, and again she realised what her mind was desperate to flee. It wasn’t just a haze of pain, it was the heat of the flames that were climbing her body. She made the sound again, louder, and flung herself wildly about. The crowd roared to drown her cries or to encourage her to put on more of a show. Then, as if God had answered the prayer she couldn’t voice, her struggles or the fire snapped her bonds, and she was toppling forwards. Her hair burst into flames. As she crawled writhing out of the fire, she thought she felt her blood start to boil.
She didn’t get far. Hands seized her and dragged her back to the stake. She felt her life draining out of her charred legs into the earth. Hands bound her more securely and lifted her to cast her into the heart of the fire. In the moment before her brain burned, she saw the man who had judged her, gazing down impassively from his tower. The face of the devil that had killed her husband had been a ghastly caricature of the face of the man on the tower.
The Influence
Ramsey Campbell
Sometimes evil refuses to die.
Rowan’s great-aunt Queenie is dead. After all the misery she caused her family while she was alive, most of them are secretly relieved. But Queenie did not want to die, and she will do anything to live again…including possessing young Rowan. She haunts the child’s nightmares, taking her over bit by chilling bit. As her soul is drawn inexorably into a cold darkness, can Rowan hope to reclaim her life from the evil dead?
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
The Influence
Copyright © 1988 by Ramsey Campbell
ISBN: 978-1-61921-299-2
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: May 2013
