The Influence by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

from pile to staggering pile, hoping that he wouldn’t have to pull out books from low down on the stacks that were all taller than he was. His shadow drifted over them as if the coaly furniture were leaking. He found the children’s books heaped by the bed.
    You didn’t see books like these in the shops, thick spines embossed with gilded letters and sometimes with pictures. He put one hand on top of the pile and the other halfway down, and lifted the books. He was turning towards the door when the pages squeezed out of the books at either end of the armful, flew out of the bindings like pulp out of rotten fruit, and the pile of books sprawled across the bed.
    He picked up one book gingerly, a book with a saint on the cover. When he tried to part the wadded pages, they tore like wet bread. All the books were like that, the children’s books and those in the other piles he examined, books about faith and will. She’d often talked about that couple, and the first time he’d heard her he’d thought they were friends of hers. There were books in French and German too, and languages he didn’t even recognise. “Look at the state of these,” he said when Alison came up. “She must have been something special if she could read them.”
    “They aren’t all like that.” She opened the top book on a pile near the bed, and then she stared at it. “I don’t understand. She was reading this the night she died.”
    The print was seeping unreadably through the pages, fragments of which stuck like mould to the opposite wad. “Maybe it was a different book,” Derek said, raising his voice to jar her out of her dismay. “They don’t look worth keeping, anyway. Let’s get the tea chests.”
    They’d kept the chests when they moved from Liverpool. At first Alison examined each book, but after a dozen or so had proved to be rotten she began to throw them in by the handful. “I’ll see to chucking them if you like while you sort out her clothes,” Derek said.
    She wrinkled her nose as she pulled out the first drawer, which was full of underclothes, yellowed and cobwebbed as if they hadn’t been touched for years. Two more drawers contained clothes sown with spiders’ eggs; the rest were stuffed with books, the pages mashed together. “It’s as though the soul’s gone out of the room,” Alison murmured as she upended a drawer. She opened a black wardrobe so determinedly that it lurched forward. A long white dress billowed at her, and Derek saw it come apart, torn pieces swarming toward her face. They were moths, which fluttered out of the window into the dusk. “I’ll leave this until daylight, I think,” she said.
    When they’d loaded all the books into the chests the darker patches revealed on the walls looked like stains, spreading as dusk deepened. The sense of so much still to be done depressed him. “What this place needs is bloody gutting,” he muttered.
    “I know what it needs.” Alison took his hand and ran her thumb lingeringly over his palm, and led him downstairs to their bedroom. They sat on the bed and undressed each other, traced each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths. Alison closed her long soft warm legs about his hips as he slipped snugly into her. The waves of her sucked him deeper, until he swelled and then erupted, so powerfully that they were left gasping. As he came he felt Queenie’s floor hovering over them, a huge dark blotch.
    After dinner he pored over his accounts. At least Ken, the builder for whom he’d rewired a block of houses that were being turned into flats, had paid him almost three thousand pounds, though the cheque was dated next week. He was still making entries in the ledgers after midnight, writing small to stay between the lines. He felt dwarfed by debts and all the empty rooms.
    In the morning Tony from the estate agent’s called round unexpectedly to price the house. “And they’re talking of rewiring your kiddie’s school, so you should let them