Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

minute something else would take its place.
    Since she had to face the darkened house, she did so. She trembled only once. The Victorian valentines hung immobile; the mirrors extended the darkness, strengthened its power. The house waited. Alma fell into the court; from the cobblestones, the erect gateposts, the street beyond, she drew courage. Two years and she’d be far from here, a complete person. Freed from fear, she left the front door open. But she shivered; the night air knifed through the dangerous warmth of her cold. She must go—where? To Maureen’s, she decided; that was not too far, and she knew Maureen to be kind. She’d forget her disapproval if she saw Alma like this. Alma strode towards the orange fan which flared from the beacon behind the gatepost, and stopped.
    Resting against the beacon was a white bag, half as high as Alma. She’d seen such bags before, full of laundry. Yet she could not force herself to pull back the gates and pass. Suddenly the gates were her protection against the shapeless mass, for deep within herself she suppressed a horror that the bag might move towards her, flapping. It couldn’t be what it appeared, who would have left it there at this time of night? A car hissed past on the glittering tarmac. Alma choked a scream for help. Screaming in the middle of the street—what would her mother have thought? Musicians didn’t do that sort of thing. Besides, why shouldn’t someone have left a bag of washing at the crossing while she went for help to heft it to the laundry? Alma touched the gates and withdrew, chilled; here she was, risking pneumonia in the night, and for what? The panic of delirium. As a child she’d screamed hoarsely through her cold that a man was bending over her; she was too old for that. Back to bed—no, to find her flute, and then to bed, to purge herself of these horrid visions. Ironically she thought: Peter would be proud of her if he knew. Her flute—must the two years any longer be meaningful? Still touched by understanding, she couldn’t think that her parents would hold to their threat, made after all before she’d written to Peter. What must have been a night breeze moved the bag. Forcing her footsteps not to drag, Alma left the orange radiance and closed the door behind her; her last test.
    In the hall the thing she had thought was Maureen’s coat shifted wakefully. Alma ignored it, but her flesh crept hot and cold. At the far end of the hall mirror, a figure approached, arms extended as if blindly. Alma smiled; it was too like a childish fear to frighten her: “enjoyably creepy”—she tried to recapture her mood of the morning, but every organ of her body felt hot and pounding. She broke and ran to her room; the light, oddly, was still on.
    In the rooms below, her father’s desk creaked; the flower arrangements writhed. Did it matter? Alma argued desperately. There was no lock on her door, but she refused to barricade it; there was nothing solid abroad in the house, nothing to harm her but the lure of her own fears. Her flute—she wouldn’t play it once she found it; she’d go to bed with its protection. She moved round the bed and saw the flute, overlaid by Victimes de Devoir. The flute was bent in half.
    One tear pressed from Alma’s eyes before she realised the full horror. As she whirled, completely disoriented, a mirror crashed below. Something shrieked towards her through the corridors. She sank onto the bed, defenceless, wishing all were over. Music blasted from the record player, the Nocturne ; Alma leapt up and screamed. “In roaring he shall rise,” the voice bawled, “and on the surface—” A music stand was hurled to the floor. “— die !”The needle scraped across the record and clicked off. The walls seemed on the point of tearing, bulging inwards. Alma no longer cared. She’d screamed once; she could do no more. Now she waited.
    When the figure formed deep in the mirror she knew that all was over. She faced it,