Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

have been unable, but this was no longer important), finally walking away from Peter whistling “Release Me” which he’d reprised the day after the separation, somewhat unfeelingly she thought. Even this she could understand. To seal her understanding, she turned out the light and closed the door.  
    Immediately a figure rose before her mother’s mirror, combing long fingers through its hair. Alma managed not to shudder; she strode to her own door, opened it on blackness, and crossed to her bed. She reached out to it and fell on her knees; it was not there.
    As she knelt trembling, the house rearranged itself round her; the dark corridors and rooms, perhaps not empty as she prayed, watched pitilessly, came to bear upon her. She staggered to her feet and clutched the cord, almost touching a gaping face, which was not there when the light came on. Her bed was inches from her knees, where it had been when she left it, she insisted. Yet this failed to calm her. There was more than darkness in the house; she was no longer comfortingly alone in her warm and welcoming home. Had Peter borrowed Maureen’s key? All at once she hoped he had; then she’d be in his arms, admitting that her promise to her mother had been desperate; she yearned for his protection—strengthened by it she believed she might confront horrors if he demanded them.
    She watched for Peter from the window. One night while he was staying Peter had come to her room— She focused on the court; it seemed cut off from the world, imprisoning. Eclipsed by the gatepost, a pedestrian crossing’s beacons exchanged signals without meaning; she thought of others flashing far into the night on cold lonely country roads, and shivered. He had come into her room; they’d caressed furtively and whispered so as not to wake her parents, though now she suspected that her mother had lain awake, listening through her father’s snores. “Take me,” she’d pleaded—but in the end she couldn’t; the wall was too attentive. Now she squirmed at her remembered endearments: “my nice Peter”—“my handsome Peter”—“my lovely Peter”—and at last her halting praise of his body, the painful search for new phrases. She no longer cared to recall; she sloughed off the memories with an epileptic shudder.
    Suddenly a man appeared in the gateway of the court. Alma stiffened. The figure passed; she relaxed, but only for a moment; had there not been something strange about its long loping strides, its trailing shadow? This was childish, she rebuked herself; she’d no more need to become obsessed with someone hastening to a date than with Peter, who was no longer in a position to protect her. She turned from the window before the figure should form behind her, and picked up her flute. Half an hour of exercises, then sleep. She opened the case. It was empty.
    It was as if her mother had returned and taken back the flute; she felt the house again rise up round her. She grasped an explanation; last time she’d fingered her flute—when had that been? Time had slipped away—she hadn’t replaced it in its case. She threw the sheets back from the bed; only the dead bottle was exposed. She knelt again and peered beneath the bed. Something bent above her, waiting, grinning. No, the flute hadn’t rolled. She stood up and the figure moved behind her. “Don’t!” she whimpered. At that moment she saw that the dressing-table drawer was open. She took one step towards it, to her ring, but could not look into it, knowing what was there—a face peering up at her from the drawer, its eyes opening, infinitely slowly, the lashes parting stickily— Delirium again? It didn’t matter. Alma’s lips trembled. She could still escape. She went to the wardrobe—but nothing could have made her open it; instead she caught up her clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed and dressed clumsily, dragging her skirt round to reach the zip. The room was silent; her music had fled, but any