Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

door. After the soup she felt a little hot, lightheaded. She moved to the window and admired the court set back from the bare street; above the roofs the sky was diluted lime and lemon beneath clouds like wads of stuffing. “ ‘Napier Court’—I see the point, but don’t you think that naming houses is a bit pretentious?” Alma slid her feet through the cold sheets, recoiling from the frigid bottle. She’d fill it later; now she needed rest. She set aside Victimes de Devoir and lay back on the pillow.
    Alma awoke. Someone was outside on the landing. At once she knew: Peter had borrowed Maureen’s key. He came into the room, and as he did so her mother appeared from behind the door and drove the music stand into his face. Alma awoke. She was swaddled in blankets, breathing through them. For a moment she lay inert; one hand was limp between her legs, her ear pressed on the pillow; these two parts of her felt miles distant, and something vast throbbed silently against her eardrums. She catalogued herself: slight delirium, a yearning for the toilet. She drifted with the bed; she disliked to emerge, to be oriented by the cold.
    Nonsense, don’t indulge your weakness, she told herself, and poked her head out. Surely she’d left the light on? Darkness blindfolded her, warm as the blankets. She reached for the cord, and the blue window blackened as the room appeared. The furniture felt padded by delirium. Alma burned. She struggled into her dressing-gown and saw the clock: 12:05. Past midnight and Maureen hadn’t come? Then she realised: the clock had stopped—it must have been around the time of Maureen’s departure. Of course Maureen wouldn’t return; she’d been repelled by disapproval. Which meant that Alma would have no transistor, no means of discovering the time. She felt as if she floated, bodiless, disoriented, robbed of sensation, and went to the window for some indication; the street was deserted, as it might be at any hour soon after dark.
    Turning from the pane she pivoted in the mirror; behind her the bed stood at her left. That wasn’t right; right was where it stood. Or did it reverse in the reflection? She turned to look but froze; if she faced round she’d meet a figure waiting, hands outstretched, one side of its face incomplete, like those photographs from Vietnam Peter had insisted she confront— The thought released her; she turned to an empty room. So much for her delirium. Deliberately she switched out the light and padded down the landing.
    On her way back she passed her mother’s room; she felt compelled to enter. Between the twin beds, shelves displayed the Betjemans, the books on Greece, histories of the Severn Valley. On the beds the sheets were stretched taut as one finds them on first entering a hotel room. When Peter had stayed for weekends her father had moved back into this room. Her father—out every night to the pub with his friends; he hadn’t been vindictive to her mother, just unfeeling and unable to adjust to her domestic rhythm. When her mother had accused Alma of marrying beneath her she’d spoken of herself. Deceptively freed by their absence, Alma began to understand her mother’s hostility to Peter. “You’re a handsome bugger,” her mother had once told him; Alma had pinpointed that as the genesis of her hostility—it had preyed on her mother’s mind, this lowering herself to say what she thought he’d like only to realise that the potential of this vulgarity lurked within herself. Now Alma saw the truth; once more sleeping in the same room as her husband, she’d had the failure of her marriage forced upon her; she’d projected it on Alma’s love for Peter. Alma felt released; she had understood them, perhaps she could even come once more to love them, just as eventually she’d understood that buying Napier Court had fulfilled her father’s ambition to own a house in Brichester—her father, trying to talk to Peter who never communicated to him (he might