The House On Nazareth Hill

  The House On Nazareth Hill

  Ramsey Campbell

  Originally published in 1996.

  This ePub edition is version 1.1, published in January 2013.

  for John and Ann

  —eminently lunchable!

  Rooms nobody sees

  Years later Amy would remember the day she saw inside the spider house. She knew as soon as the family came out of the church that they wouldn’t be going for a drive. Half an hour ago she’d seen the rusted moor over the yellowish cottages of Partington, but now the late October sky had fallen on it, or rather a fog had. Above the marketplace surrounded by dark grey roofs pinched steep, and beneath the hem of the fog attached to the sky, the hulk of a building riddled with black windows squatted in its park. Her parents were lingering in the church porch while the priest remarked on how tall she was growing, which only made her feel smaller, unless it was the sight of the building too big for the town which did. Then the priest said ‘Watch out for witches’ and took his bright scrubbed face into the church, which released a faint scent of incense to mix with the moist autumnal smell.

  ‘Funny thing for a priest to say,’ Amy’s father remarked.

  ‘He means the day, Oswald,’ said her mother.

  ‘I know it, but just the same, a priest. So long as he doesn’t think too much that’s of yore is a joke.’

  ‘Don’t be digging up your antique words, you sound more ancient than me.’

  ‘She isn’t ancient, is she, Amy?’

  ‘Only like you.’

  ‘That’s you put in your place,’ Amy’s mother told him, and pulled at her polo-neck to cover more of the little ruff of flesh under her chin before zipping up her padded jacket a last inch. ‘Well, are we bound for home?’

  Amy’s father unzipped the top of his an inch to compensate, letting his broad throat slump. ‘Looks like the day for a spooky stroll.’

  ‘Careful you don’t give her nightmares. I’d be happy to stay by the fire.’

  ‘We haven’t heard from my younger lady yet. What’s your idea of a Sunday well spent, Amy?’

  All the business with jackets was making Amy’s arms feel restricted by hers, and eager to swing. ‘I don’t mind a walk.’

  ‘That’s right, you keep us fit,’ her father said, and raised his bushy eyebrows at his wife as he lowered his mouth at both ends and in the middle. ‘We’re too fond of hopping in one car or the other at the least excuse.’

  ‘Some of us don’t have the option if we want to go to work.’

  ‘So long as the books can do without you when the elements are like this.’ He closed the gate of the small steep churchyard after the family. ‘How’s this for pleasing everyone, Heather? We’ll sit by the fire with my roast and my pumpkin pie when we’re back from a healthy trot over the top.’

  ‘A little trot.’

  ‘Over the hill and back again,’ he said, which might have sounded like a nursery rhyme to Amy if she hadn’t known which hill. She was eight years old, halfway to nine, and more reassuringly, with her parents. She grabbed their hands through two bunches of padding as the family turned along the main road.

  They couldn’t walk abreast for long. At the first sharp bend the forty-foot-high wall which held back the earth beneath a terrace of cottages leaned out so assertively that the Priestleys were crowded off the token pavement. An iron cross as big as Amy and as mossy as the gritstone bricks secured the wall, but she always expected to see the invisible belt buckled by the cross give way, spilling a chunk of Partington across the tarmac. Instead she heard the faint rumble, made monotonous by distance, of the motorway. Below the bend were the first shops—Hair Today, Twist the Chemist’s, the post office which was also a wine shop, as could be deduced from the breath of the red-faced postmaster. For the moment the house in the park was out of sight, but most of the side streets to the west of the main road meandered towards it as though, Amy imagined, it had taken hold of them. Hers didn’t, and as she and her parents turned the corner of the Scales & Bible, beyond whose frosted windows she heard the bony click of dominoes, she found she was glad that home was on the other side of the main road.

  All the same, she liked the streets near the marketplace—their bulging bricks yellow as sand, the lintels of darker stone which gave each window a permanent frown as if the cottages were intent on remembering something they never quite could, the sights of small compact rooms beyond those windows that weren’t veiled with white net, which Amy realised was meant to look demure but which put her in mind of underwear. On Moor View, which presumably had one from its upstairs rooms, a hand appeared beyond a window white with soap and rubbed an oval of glass clear to display a woman’s preoccupied face. Along Gorse Cottages, the first cross street, two little girls in witches’ masks and pointed hats were waving premature sparklers pale with daylight, wands whose magic they were trying to invoke. At the junction of Moor View with Market Lane, where the outer corners of the houses were rounded rather than square, a man on a ladder was handing up slates to a man on a roof. Beyond the lane of houses squashed together twice as tall as they were broad the shops crowded along Market Approach, Cards & Bards and The Cosy Cafe and Furry Friends, the pet shop, and Hiking & Biking and Knitty Knatty Knora and Hat A Head and The Cakery and The Chopping Block, as the butcher’s son had renamed the shop as if to prove himself as witty as his neighbours. Passing his shop brought the Priestleys into the market square, and now there was very little between Amy and the spider house.

  The market stalls had been cleared away as usual late on Saturday afternoon, amid an hour’s worth of clangs and clanks that had resounded through the town, and the square was deserted, watched only by a black cat in the window of one of the farm produce shops which boxed in the square. A few scraps of sodden litter moved feebly in a breeze which felt to Amy as though something large and very cold had expelled a breath. The car park beside the marketplace was the quickest way home, but her parents’ fattened hands were leading her into Little Hope Way, past The Sweet Tooth and All Your News. In a moment she could see only the building beyond the rusted-open gates of the park on the hill.

  Its double doors alone were as broad as most of the houses of Partington. Three narrow windows were set in a great deal of wall to either side of the doors, and two more sets of six gaped above, the smallest beneath the roof. Where the front of the building wasn’t black with slime, it was scaly with moss. Four chimney stacks so big they looked misshapen occupied the skeletal roof, through one of the many holes in which Amy thought she glimpsed movement, as if the house was only pretending to be dead. She was at the end of the brief street by now, and being led across Nazareth Row. ‘All right, Amy?’ her mother said.

  The ruin was pretending to retreat, but held its ground and rose above them, and as it did so it grew. Amy tried to grasp her parents’ hands more firmly, because they felt as though she had hold of little more than padding. ‘Yes,’ she said, and tried to believe herself.

  ‘If anything ever is wrong you’ll be sure to tell us, won’t you? Don’t ever let things stick inside your noddle and get to the point where you can’t talk about them.’

  ‘She said there was nothing, love. Leave her be before she gets like—leave her if she wants leaving.’

  ‘Really there’s nothing,’ Amy said in an attempt to head off whatever subject had made her mother’s fingers stir uneasily. ‘I just wish we didn’t have to go by the spider house.’

  Her father stared down at her without breaking his stride. ‘Why are you calling it that? You know it’s got a name.’

  ‘No need to shout at her, Oswald.’

  ‘I wasn’t, was I, Amy? We wouldn’t call that shouting. But you know the name, that�
��s what we’re seeking to establish.’

  ‘Yes, dad.’

  ‘There’s my lady. Sing it out, then.’

  Amy would have preferred not to say it aloud while the house was growing so fast, revealing that it was as deep as it was broad. Now she was through the pitted wrought-iron gates in the variously askew railings, and the gravel path was making so much noise underfoot that she considered using it as an excuse not to speak. Her father’s gaze wasn’t about to relent, however, and so she murmured ‘Nazarill.’

  ‘Turn up the volume a notch or two. You’ll be getting no marks if you answer your teachers like that in school.’

  ‘She isn’t—’ Amy’s mother started to protest, but Amy interrupted louder. ‘Nazarill.’

  ‘And why is it called that?’

  ‘Because this used to be Nazareth Hill, you said.’

  ‘That’s it. Nazareth Hill. Nazarill. That’s been its name ever since I can remember, so why do you insist on calling it the other silly thing?’

  Amy didn’t know. Perhaps its ominous stillness reminded her of a spider crouching in its web; perhaps because, since she’d glimpsed his fear of spiders despite his efforts to conceal it from her, that somehow stood for fears of her own which she would rather not deny. She hadn’t the words to express that idea. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tried saying, and thought she had placated him enough that he wouldn’t mind her steering him and her mother off the path, placing the solitary oak tree between the family and the ruin.

  Acorns crunched beneath her feet, and the undergrowth wet with fog insinuated a chill through her soles as she passed into the shelter of the gnarled ancient branches. The cracked trunk as wide as the whole family cut off her view of Nazarill—and then her father grabbed her waist with both hands. ‘Let go a moment,’ he told her mother, and swung Amy onto his shoulders. ‘I’ll show you there’s nothing to be frightened of.’

  Amy found herself sailing up towards a twisted branch thicker than his arm. The remains of a rope swing dangled from it, and as the rope, which looked and felt drowned, brushed her face she thought the branch was about to thump her head. Her father ducked before she did, and only a few drops of water tapped her on the scalp while he bore her out from beneath the oak, encompassing her hands in his. As his footfalls on the soaked grass turned shrill with the grinding of gravel, the house reared up against the overgrown summit of the hill beneath the rubbed-out sky and came for her.

  She thought her father meant to fit his hand around the dripping greenish brass knob and open the massive mouldering doors. Until this moment she hadn’t known how much she didn’t want to see them opened. But he veered towards the nearest hole where a window had once been, and jogged her with his shoulders to tell her this was just a game. The movement sent a drop of icy water from her scalp to crawl down the nape of her neck. ‘Now then, look here,’ he said in a half-joking tone which the ruin threw back flattened and chilled. ‘Tell us what you see.’

  The long secretive windows were too high for her parents to see in, Amy realised. Only she could, and before she had a chance to resist, she did. She saw a smaller room than she was expecting. Its floorboards were littered with greyish plaster that had fallen from the walls and ceiling, where it had been replaced by various colours and textures of fungus. The room was so dim that she could barely distinguish the far wall, from which an unhinged door leaned into an oblong of blackness. Nothing was about to loom out of that blackness, Amy told herself—not if she spoke up soon enough. ‘It’s just a room,’ she said with all the voice she could find.

  ‘That’s all. Just a room in an old mansion nobody cares for.’ He was addressing her mother as well, who’d begun to chafe her upper arms as if that could have some effect through the padded jacket. Though he’d said that was all, he hitched Amy up and tramped to the adjacent window. ‘Same in here, I’ll hazard.’

  It was—too much so for her liking. Even if she ignored the oozing greenish fur of the walls and the bony fragments scattered across the bare floorboards, the doorway of this room was open too. It was black as a strip of film on which something was preparing to appear. She shivered, not only because the trickle of water had found her spine. ‘Can’t see anything bad,’ she told her parents and the room.

  ‘Any spiders visible?’

  ‘No, dad. I said.’

  ‘Then that must mean there aren’t any, mustn’t it? There’s no earthly reason for making any kind of a fuss.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  She ought to have agreed with more enthusiasm, even if his idea made no sense. Dissatisfied with her response, he strode to the next window. ‘I can’t imagine you’ll see anything in here either. Let us know when you’ve had enough.’

  ‘I think she has already, Oswald. You’ve made your point, I think.’

  As he turned towards her mother Amy disengaged one hand, intending to use her collar to catch another drop of water before it ran down her back. She was facing away from the window when she heard a faint movement behind her: a muffled shifting of metal—the kind of noise abandoned cans might make if a stray animal was among them. She twisted not just her head but her whole upper body around to see into the room while she dabbed at her neck. Then the drop of water escaped down her spine as she was overwhelmed by a shudder so violent that it wrenched her other hand out of her father’s grasp—that she overbalanced into the room.

  It was smaller than the others, a cramped cell whose bare walls streamed with moisture, and it smelled as though its contents had been kept locked away for many years. Perhaps whatever was imprisoned had died there, because she could see it crouched in the farthest corner, its withered limbs clenched like a dead spider’s legs around its ragged scrawny torso, its blackened twigs of fingers digging into its cheekbones as though it had torn all the flesh off them. Nevertheless those fingers moved to greet her fall.

  They unstuck themselves from either side of the yawning grimace revealed by the shrivelled flesh, and reached blindly for her.

  Her legs slid off her father’s shoulders. She might have grabbed the edges of the hole that had once been a window, she could have closed her ankles around his neck, but her thoughts were too slow. Hands seized her waist and dragged her off her perch. She kicked wildly and felt her left foot strike her father’s back, and then she was standing on the chill wet grass, where her mother had set her down. ‘Keep your feet to yourself if you don’t mind,’ her father protested. ‘That hurt.’

  ‘Don’t blame her, Oswald. You nearly let her fall. She’s had enough now. Are you fit, Amy? You’re fit, aren’t you, sweet?’

  Amy felt as if she was swaying although, as far as she could judge, she was standing quite still. Her mother crouched to peer into her eyes. ‘You didn’t see anything nasty, did you?’

  Amy’s knees started to knock—she thought she heard them drumming like a substitute for speech. ‘Are you cold?’ her father suggested, and audibly wanting this to be the case: ‘Is she coming down with a cold, do you think?’

  Perhaps that was all; perhaps the glimpse of the cell and its occupant was the beginning of a fever, the kind that gave you nightmares even when you were sure you were awake. Amy drew a breath which tasted of fog and sent a shiver through her while she tried to brace herself to ask someone to lift her up so that she could see she’d been mistaken. Then her mother said ‘Let’s get you home in the warm.’

  At once that seemed a decidedly preferable alternative, but the scrutiny wasn’t over. “That’s all that’s wrong, isn’t it?’ her mother said. ‘That and nearly toppling in.’

  Amy was prepared to swear to it if doing so took her away from the ruin, except that she was suddenly afraid her denials might be overheard—might bring an object which had ceased to be a face into view over the windowsill, to prove it was real. ‘I think so, mummy’ was as much as she dared say.

  ‘Of course it is. Just look at you.’ She stroked Amy’s hair back and pushed it under the padded hood before steering her towards the gates. The gr
avel bit dully into Amy’s feet through her shoes, slowing her down. It seemed to be delaying her father too, and when she was past the oak she risked a glance over her shoulder. She might have thought the ruin was creeping up behind him, the fog having sneaked down to encourage it, to give the impression that within the grounds only the building and the bedraggled tree were solid. All the windows were dark as holes beneath a rock. ‘Hold my hand too, daddy,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Here I come,’ he said, but hardly did. ‘So long as you weren’t shivering because of me. Neither of us would harm you for the world, I hope you know.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Amy said, stretching her free hand out to him as far as her arm would reach. He plodded towards it and at last was close enough to take it loosely in his padded grasp, to which she clung in order to hurry him along with her mother through the gates standing in patches of rust on the gravel. Then the pavement of Nazareth Row was soothing her feet, not threatening to trip her up like the approach to Nazarill. She urged her parents along Little Hope Way to the marketplace where, as they turned towards the car park, she allowed herself another backward glance disguised as a smile at her father.

  The ruin was dissolving into the mist, the edge of which drifted like a series of visible breaths in and out of the lockjawed gates—the advancing breaths of Nazarill. She tried not to rush her parents across the square in case they noticed her panic, but the shops with metal pulled down over their faces looked as though they were hiding from the sight she was struggling to believe she hadn’t really seen inside Nazarill. The car park, its desertion emphasised by the hundreds of rectangular white outlines on the glistening tarmac, was no more reassuring. At least the main road was beyond the dormant barrier, the shops and inseparable houses winding homeward and, better still, intervening between her and Nazarill. The fog was waiting at the first bend, panting silently, but that needn’t matter—except that her father halted short of the bend and slapped his forehead as though to crush an insect. ‘I should look in on the Prices. I was saying to you, Heather, with all that hi-fi equipment I saw being delivered they need their insurance topping up.’