Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell

thread you never had occasion to use. You relax to prepare for your last concerted effort, and remember.
    You recall the day you perfected the solution. As soon as you’d quaffed it you felt your brain achieve a piercing alertness, become precisely and continually aware of the messages of each nerve and preside over them, making minute adjustments at the first hint of danger. You knew this was what you’d worked for, but you couldn’t prove it to yourself until the day you felt the stirrings of cancer. Then your brain seemed to condense into a keen strand of energy that stretched down and seared the cancer out. That was proof. You were immortal.
    Not that some of the research you’d had to carry out wasn’t unpleasant. It had taken you a great deal of furtive expenditure at the mortuaries to discover that some of the extracts you needed for the solution had to be taken from the living brain. The villagers thought the children had drowned, for their clothes were found on the riverbank. Medical progress, you told yourself, has always involved suffering.
    Perhaps your wife suspected something of this stage of your work, or perhaps she and the butcher had simply decided to rid themselves of you. In any case, you were working at your bench, trying to synthesise your discovery, when you heard him enter. He must have rushed at you, for before you could turn you felt a blazing slash gape in the back of your neck. Then you awoke on the cellar floor.
    You edge yourself forward across the laboratory. Your greatest exertion is past, but this is the most exacting part. When you’re nearly touching your prone body you have to turn round. You move yourself with your jaws and steer with your tongue. It’s difficult, but less so than tonguing yourself upright on your neck to rest on the stairs. Then you fit yourself to your shoulders, groping with your mind to feel the nerves linking again.
    Now you’ll have to hold yourself unflinching or you’ll roll apart. With your mind you can do it. Gingerly, so as not to part yourself, you stretch out your arm for the surgical needle and thread.

The Proxy
     
    When her spade struck the obstacle she thought it was another stone. Among the sunlit lumps of earth that bristled with uprooted grass, soil trickled down her balked spade. She tried to dig around the object, to dislodge it. It and her spade ground as if they were subterranean teeth. It was longer than she’d thought: inches—no, feet. She scraped away its covering of earth. It was composed not of stone but of bricks.
    The remains of a wall? She glanced at the neighbouring houses. Within their small front gardens they stood close to the pavement, in pairs. Only hers hung back within its larger garden, as though the others had stepped forward to meet the rank of trees along the avenue. Hers was newer; it didn’t know the drill.
    The disinterred bricks looked charred, as had some of the earth she’d turned. She was still pondering when she saw Paul’s car. He had to halt abruptly as another driver, impatient with the lethargic traffic lights, swung across his path, into the side road. As Paul drove by to lock up their car he waved to her. His wave looked feeble, preoccupied.
    When he returned she said “How was your day?”
    “Oh,” he groaned. “Not bad,” he added quickly, smiling—but the groan had been the truth. He wouldn’t be able to tell her more: she didn’t even know the exact nature of his job—something to do with the Ministry of Defence.
    He mixed drinks and brought them outside. They sat sipping on the bench he’d made, and gazed at the upheaved earth. The shadow of an adjacent house boxed in the garden. Eclipsed by roofs, the sunlight still flooded the sky with lemon.
    When they had been silent for a while she said “Did you see what I unearthed?”
    “A bit of wall.”
    “Don’t you think it could be an old foundation? See—if there were a house just there, it would be in line with all the