Dark Companions (34 page)

Conversion

You’re in sight of home when you know something’s wrong. Moonlight shivers gently on the stream beyond the cottage, and trees stand around you like intricate spikes of the darkness mounting within the forest. The cottage is dark, but it isn’t that. You emerge into the glade, trying to sense what’s troubling you.

You know you shouldn’t have stayed out so late, talking to your friend. Your wife must have been worried, perhaps frightened by the night as well. You’ve never left her alone at night before. But his talk was so engrossing: you feel that in less than a night you’ve changed from being wary of him to understanding him completely. And his wine was so good, and his open-throated brightly streaming fire so warming, that you can now remember little except a timeless sense of comfortable companionship, of communion that no longer needed words. But you shouldn’t have left your wife alone in the forest at night, even behind a barred door. The woodcutter’s cottage is nearby; at least you could have had his wife stay with yours. You feel disloyal.

Perhaps that’s what has been disturbing you. Always before when you’ve returned home, light has been pouring from the windows, mellowing the surrounding trunks and including them like a wall around your cottage. Now the cottage reminds you of winter nights long ago in your childhood, when you lay listening to a wolf’s cry like the slow plummeting of ice into a gorge, and felt the mountains and forests huge around you, raked by the wind. The cottage feels like that: cold and hollow and unwelcoming. For a moment you wonder if you’re simply anticipating your wife’s blame, but you’re sure it’s more than that.

In any case you’ll have to knock and awaken her. First you go to the window and look in. She’s lying in bed, her face open as if to the sky. Moonlight eases darkness from her face, but leaves her throat and the rest of her in shadow. Tears have gathered in her eyes, sparkling. No doubt she has been crying in memory of her sister, a sketch of whom gazes across the bed from beside a glass of water. As you look in you’re reminded of your childhood fancy that angels watched over you at night, not at the end of the bed but outside the window; for a second you feel like your wife’s angel. But as you gaze in, discomfort grows in your throat and stomach. You remember how your fancy somehow turned into a terror of glimpsing a white face peering in. You draw back quickly in case you should frighten her.

But you have to knock. You don’t understand why you’ve been delaying. You stride to the door and your fist halts in mid-air, as if impaled by lightning. Suddenly the vague threats and unease you’ve been feeling seem to rush together and gather on the other side of the door. You know that beyond the door something is waiting for you, ready to pounce.

You feel as if terror has pinned you through your stomach, helpless. You’re almost ready to flee into the woods, to free yourself from the skewer of your panic. Sweat pricks you like red-hot ash scattered on your skin. But you can’t leave your wife in there with it, whatever nightmare it is, rising out of the tales you’ve heard told of the forest. You force yourself to be still if not calm, and listen for some hint of what it might be.

All you can hear is the slow sleepy breathing of the wind in the trees. Your panic rises, for you can feel it beyond the door, perfectly poised and waiting easily for you to betray yourself. You hurry back to the window, but it’s impossible for you to squeeze yourself in far enough to make out anything within the door. This time a stench rises from the room to meet you, trickling into your nostrils. It’s so thickly unpleasant that you refuse to think what it might resemble. You edge back, terrified now of awakening your wife, for it can only be her immobility that’s protecting her from whatever’s in the room.

But you can’t coax yourself back to the door. You’ve allowed your panic to spread out from it, warding you farther from the cottage. Your mind fills with your wife, lying unaware of her plight. Furious with yourself, you compel your body forward against the gale of your panic. You reach the door and struggle to touch it. If you can’t do that, you tell yourself, you’re a coward, a soft scrabbling thing afraid of the light. Your hand presses against the door as if proving itself against a live coal, and the door swings inwards.

You should have realised that your foe might have entered the cottage through the doorway. You flinch back instinctively, but as the swift fear fades the panic seeps back. You can feel it hanging like a spider just inside the doorway, waiting for you to pass beneath: a huge heavy black spider, ready to plump on your face. You try to shake your panic out of you with the knowledge that it’s probably nothing like that, that you’re giving in to fancy. But whatever it is, it’s oozing a stench that claws its way into your throat and begins to squeeze out your stomach. You fall back, weakened and baffled.

Then you see the rake. It’s resting against the corner of the cottage, where you left it after trying to clear a space for a garden. You carry it to the door, thinking. It could be more than a weapon, even though you don’t know what you’re fighting
.
If your wife doesn’t awaken and draw its attention to her, if your foe isn’t intelligent enough to see what you’re planning, if your absolute conviction of where it’s lurking above the door isn’t false— You almost throw away the rake, but you can’t bear the sense of your wife’s peril any longer. You inch the door open. You’re sure you have only one chance.

You reach stealthily into the space above the door with the teeth of the rake, then you grind them into your prey and drag it out into the open. It’s a dark tangled mass, but you hurl it away into the forest without looking closer, for some of it has fallen into the doorway and lies dimly there, its stench welling up. You pin it with the teeth and fling it into the trees.

Then you realise there’s more, hanging and skulking around the side of the door frame. You grab it with the rake and hurl it against a trunk. Then you let your breath roar out. You’re weak and dizzy, but you stagger through the doorway. There are smears of the thing around the frame and you sway back, retching. You close your mouth and nostrils and you’re past, safe.

You lean on the rake and gaze down at your wife. There’s a faint stench clinging to the rake and you push it away from you, against the wall. She’s still asleep, no doubt because you were mourning her sister all last night. Your memory’s blurring; you must be exhausted too, because you can remember hardly anything before the battle you’ve just fought. You’re simply grateful that no harm has befallen her. If she’d come with you to visit your friend none of this would have happened. You hope you can recapture the sense of communion you had with him, to pass on to your wife. Through your blurring consciousness you feel an enormous yearning for her.

Then you jerk alert, for there’s still something in the room. You glance about wildly and see beneath the window more of what you destroyed, lying like a tattered snake. You manage to scoop it up in one piece this time, and you throw the rake out with it. Then you turn back to your wife. You’ve disturbed her; she has moved in her sleep. And fear advances on you from the bed like a spreading stain pumped out by a heart, because now you can see what’s nestling at her throat.

You don’t know what it is; your terror blurs it and crowds out your memories until it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It rests in the hollow of her throat like a dormant bat, and indeed it seems to have stubby protruding wings. Its shape expands within your head until it is a slow explosion of pure hostility, growing and erasing you. You turn away, blinded.

It’s far worse than what you threw into the forest. Even then, if you hadn’t been fighting for your wife you would have been paralysed by superstition. Now you can hardly turn your head back to look. The stain of the thing is crawling over your wife, blotting out her face and all your sense of her. But you open your eyes an agonised slit and see it couched in her throat as if it lives there. Your rage floods up, and you start forward.

But even with your eyes closed you can’t gain on it, because a great cold inhuman power closes about you, crushing you like a moth in a fist. You mustn’t cry out, because if your wife awakens it may turn on her. But the struggle crushes a wordless roar from you, and you hear her awake.

Your seared eyes make out her face, dimmed by the force of the thing at her neck. Perhaps her gathered tears are dislodged, or perhaps these are new, wrung out by the terror in her eyes. Your head is a shell full of fire, your eyes feel as though turning to ash, but you battle forward. Then you realise she’s shrinking back. She isn’t terrified of the thing at her throat at all, she’s terrified of you. She’s completely in its power.

You’re still straining against the force, wondering whether it must divert some of its power from you in order to control her, when she grabs the glass from beside the bed. For a moment you can’t imagine what she wants with a glass of water. But it isn’t water. It’s vitriol, and she throws it in your face.

Your face bursts into pain. Howling, you rush to the mirror.

You’re still searching for yourself in the mirror when the woodcutter appears in the doorway, grim-faced. At once, like an eye in the whirlwind of your confusion and pain, you remember that you asked his wife to stay with yours, yesterday afternoon when he wasn’t home to dissuade you from what you had to do. And you know why you can’t see yourself, only the room and the doorway through which you threw the garlic, your sobbing wife clutching the cross at her throat, the glass empty now of the holy water you brought home before setting out to avenge her sister’s death at Castle Dracula.

The Chimney

Maybe most of it was only fear. But not the last thing, not that. To blame my fear for that would be worst of all.

I was twelve years old and beginning to conquer my fears. I even went upstairs to do my homework, and managed to ignore the chimney. I had to be brave, because of my parents—because of my mother.

She had always been afraid for me. The very first day I had gone to school I’d seen her watching. Her expression had reminded me of the face of a girl I’d glimpsed on television, watching men lock her husband behind bars; I was frightened all that first day. And when children had hysterics or began to bully me, or the teacher lost her temper, these things only confirmed my fears—and my mother’s, when I told her what had happened each day.

Now I was at grammar school. I had been there for much of a year. I’d felt awkward in my new uniform and old shoes; the building seemed enormous, crowded with too many strange children and teachers. I’d felt I was an outsider; friendly approaches made me nervous and sullen, when people laughed and I didn’t know why I was sure they were laughing at me. After a while the other boys treated me as I seemed to want to be treated: the lads from the poorer districts mocked my suburban accent, the suburban boys sneered at my old shoes.

Often I’d sat praying that the teacher wouldn’t ask me a question I couldn’t answer, sat paralysed by my dread of having to stand up in the waiting watchful silence. If a teacher shouted at someone my heart jumped painfully; once I’d felt the stain of my shock creeping insidiously down my thigh. Yet I did well in the end-of-term examinations, because I was terrified of failing; for nights afterwards they were another reason why I couldn’t sleep.

My mother read the signs of all this on my face. More and more, once I’d told her what was wrong, I had to persuade her there was nothing worse that I’d kept back. Some mornings as I lay in bed, trying to hold back half-past seven, I’d be sick; I would grope miserably downstairs, white-faced, and my mother would keep me home. Once or twice, when my fear wasn’t quite enough, I made myself sick. “Look at him. You can’t expect him to go like that”—but my father would only shake his head and grunt, dismissing us both.

I knew my father found me embarrassing. This year he’d had less time for me than usual; his shop—The Anything Shop, nearby in the suburbanised village—was failing to compete with the new supermarket. But before that trouble I’d often seen him staring up at my mother and me: both of us taller than him, his eyes said, yet both scared of our own shadows. At those times I glimpsed his despair.

So my parents weren’t reassuring. Yet at night I tried to stay with them as long as I could—for my worst fears were upstairs, in my room.

It was a large room, two rooms knocked into one by the previous owner. It overlooked the small back gardens. The smaller of the fireplaces had been bricked up; in winter, the larger held a fire, which my mother always feared would set fire to the room—but she let it alone, for I’d screamed when I thought she was going to take that light away: even though the firelight only added to the terrors of the room.

The shadows moved things. The mesh of the fireguard fluttered enlarged on the wall; sometimes, at the edge of sleep, it became a swaying web, and its spinner came sidling down from a corner of the ceiling. Everything was unstable; walls shifted, my clothes crawled on the back of the chair. Once, when I’d left my jacket slumped over the chair, the collar’s dark upturned lack of a face began to nod forward stealthily; the holes at the ends of the sleeves worked like mouths, and I didn’t dare get up to hang the jacket properly. The room grew in the dark: sounds outside, footsteps and laughter, dogs encouraging each other to bark, only emphasised the size of my trap of darkness, how distant everything else was. And there was a dimmer room in the mirror of the wardrobe beyond the foot of the bed. There was a bed in that room, and beside it a dim nightlight in a plastic lantern. Once I’d awakened to see a face staring dimly at me from the mirror; a figure had sat up when I had, and I’d almost cried out. Often I’d stared at the dim staring face, until I’d had to hide beneath the sheets.

Of course this couldn’t go on for the rest of my life. On my twelfth birthday I set about the conquest of my room.

I was happy amid my presents. I had a jigsaw, a box of coloured pencils, a book of space stories. They had come from my father’s shop, but they were mine now. Because I was relaxed, no doubt because she wished I could always be so, my mother said “Would you be happier if you went to another school?”