....cold as the stones of a well.
At First Sight (1973)
Do Val and Jane share an apartment on the floor below an empty flat? Val has doubts, especially after tentative nights out with male coworkers, or waking up in the dark to find Jane gone.
Giallo notes are struck: fast cars at night, stylish older men, black leather gloves; the creeping menace of being alone on the top deck of a bus heading home.
Jamesian notes are also struck, particularly about the "empty" flat.
....she looked up at the next house: one floor above, a man's silhouette moved in a bright frame. He might be reflected from the flat upstairs—but no, impossible, that flat was empty; he was beyond a door in the building opposite. Val intended to explore upstairs some day in daylight.
....She reached for the doorknob. As she did so she thought: suppose when she grasped the knob it was turned from inside?
Once in that apartment, of course at night:
....her eyes found the boards beneath the window. Dust hung about her feet like ground-mist, but where she looked a rectangle of board was defined. It must have been a trunk; whoever had lived here last had taken it with him. He'd left only a crumpled grey blanket spread on newspapers, and two wine-glasses. Val felt disappointed; the room had been drained of danger. Then she saw that the glasses held dregs. She stooped to examine the crimson globule in each, and on the floor between them and the blanket saw the imprint of hand. No, it couldn't be; to lie like that it must have been boneless. Someone had dropped a glove....
* * *
....even the graffiti looked like improvements.
The Hands (1986)
A forced liminal odyssey by a pedestrian in an unknown town uncovers nightmares that echo judgments of the protagonist about his own past.
....a derailment somewhere had landed him in a town he'd never heard of and couldn't locate on the map, with only his briefcase full of book jackets for company. Were those the Kentish hills in the distance, smudged by the threat of a storm? He might have asked the ticket collector, except that he'd had to lose his temper before the man would let him out for a walk.
But then a tone of inevitability begins thickening:
....By the time he found a pub, embedded in a concrete wall with only an extinguished plastic sign to show what it was, it was closing time. Soon he was lost, for here were the clones again, a pink face and an orange and even a black-and-white, or was this another shop? Did they all leave their televisions running? He was wondering whether to go back to the pub to ask for directions, and had just realised irritably that no doubt it would have closed by now, when he saw the church.
At least, the notice-board said that was what it was. It stood in a circle of flagstones within a ring of lawn. Perhaps the concrete flying buttresses were meant to symbolise wings, but the building was all too reminiscent of a long thin iced bun flanked by two wedges of cake, served up on a cracked plate. Still, the church had the first open door he'd seen in the town, and it was starting to rain. He would rather shelter in the church than among the deserted shops....
As he stepped into the porch, a nun came out of the church. The porch was dark, and fluttery with notices and pamphlets, so that he hardly glanced at her. Perhaps that was why he had the impression that she was chewing. The Munching Nun, he thought, and couldn't help giggling out loud. He hushed at once, for he'd seen the great luminous figure at the far end of the church.
....He'd thought churches meant nothing to him anymore, but no church should feel as cold and empty as this.
....He'd thought churches meant nothing to him anymore, but no church should feel as cold and empty as this. Certainly he had never been in a church before which smelled of dust.
The fluttering in the porch grew louder, loud as a cave full of bats—come to think of it, hadn't some of the notices looked torn?—and then the outer door slammed. He was near to panic, though he couldn't have said why, when he saw the faint vertical line beyond the darkness to his left. There was a side door.
Leaving the church, trying to find his way back to the train station, Campbell's man Trent steps down several further levels in horror. He agrees to take a survey for a woman at what he assumes is a religious bookstore. But once inside, the building seems to have no light and no exit.
By God, they couldn't frighten him, not any longer. Certainly his hands were shaking—he could hear the covers rustling in his briefcase—but with rage, not fear. The people in the room must be waiting for him to go away so that they could continue their hymn, waiting for him to trudge into the outer darkness, the unbeliever, gnashing his teeth. They couldn't get rid of him so easily. Maybe by their standards he was wasting his life, drinking it away—but by God, he was doing less harm than many religious people he'd heard of. He was satisfied with his life, that was the important thing. He'd wanted to write books, but even if he'd found he couldn't, he'd proved to himself that not everything in books was true. At least selling books had given him a disrespect for them, and perhaps that was just what he'd needed.....
It took him a long time to step forward, for he was afraid he'd awakened the figures that were huddled in the furthest corner of the room. When his eyes adjusted to the meagre light that filtered down from a grubby skylight, he saw that the shapes were too tangled and flat to be people. Of course, the huddle was just a heap of old clothes—but then why was it stirring? As he stepped forward involuntarily, a rat darted out, dragging a long brownish object that seemed to be trailing strings. Before the rat vanished under the floorboards Trent was back outside the door and shutting it as quickly as he could....
He could distinguish the doors only by touch, and he turned the handles timidly, even though it slowed him down. He was by no means ready when one of the doors gave an inch. The way his hand flinched, he wondered if he would be able to open the door at all. Of course he had to, and at last he did, as stealthily as possible. He wasn't stealthy enough, for as he peered around the door the figures at the table turned towards him. Perhaps they were standing up to eat because the room was so dim, and it must be the dimness that made the large piece of meat on the table appear to struggle, but why were they eating in such meagre light at all? Before his vision had a chance to adjust they left the table all at once and came at him....
If it had been darker, he might have been able to turn away before he saw what was squealing. As he peered down, desperate to close the door but compelled to try to distinguish the source of the thin irregular sound, he made out the dim shapes of four figures, standing wide apart on the cellar floor. They were moving further apart now, without letting go of what they were holding—the elongated figure of a man, which they were pulling in four directions by its limbs. It must be inflatable, it must be a leak that was squealing. But the figure wasn't only squealing, it was sobbing. Trent fled, for the place was not a cellar at all. It was a vast darkness in whose distance he'd begun to glimpse worse things. He wished he could believe he was dreaming, the way they comforted themselves in books—but not only did he know he wasn't dreaming, he was afraid to think that he was. He'd had nightmares like this when he was young, when he was scared that he'd lost his one chance. He'd rejected the truth, and so now there was only hell to look forward to. Even if he didn't believe, hell would get him, perhaps for not believing. It had taken him a while to convince himself that because he didn't believe in it, hell couldn't touch him. Perhaps he had never really convinced himself at all....
So many Campbell stories, with their alienating rhetorical strategies and strange-making of the everyday, seem like sublime versions of an Amicus portmanteau film: characters skidding hard into alienation and misanthropy, unable to accept the fact that they are dead already, no matter which tarot card Peter Cushing deals them.
* * *
Across the cranium of the landscape....
Welcomeland (1988)
Slade returns to the village where he grew up, and at Ramsey Campbell's hands "learns better" - that he cannot go home again.
The town is now the site of a bankrupt amusement park, though the attractions and their staff seem to carry on with half-functioning clockwork imprecision. Was home always a chamber of horrors, or did the austere there-is-no-alternative 1980s turn Slade's native ground into a horror attraction?
....He'd been left alone in the house just once when he was a child. He'd awakened and blundered through the empty rooms, every one of which seemed to be concealing some terror that was about to show itself. He remembered how that had felt: exactly as the house felt now. He'd retraced the memory without realising. Then a neighbour who'd been meant to keep an eye on him had looked in to reassure him, but he prayed that wouldn't happen now, that nobody would come to keep him company.
* * *
Jay
17 January 2022
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