Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell Page B

with shock.
    Perhaps the streetlamp had failed, robbing her of the silhouetted tree. For a moment, alcohol hindered her thoughts sufficiently for her to think so. But how could that explain the dark vague bulk, so close that it must be in her garden? What was this silence that clung to her as though she were in the grip of a trance?
    As she stared, unable to look away, a pale patch grew clearer within the bulk. It was a window, at about the same level as hers. Within it dim light moved slowly as the glow of embers. By its size, the window must belong to a back bedroom. She was gazing at the back of a house, where no house could be.
    She forced herself to turn away, to recapture some sense of her bedroom, her house, light, familiarity. A figure was lying in the bed. She hadn’t heard him enter. “Oh God,” she cried inadvertently, starting.
    He jerked nervously. “What? What’s wrong?”
    “That is. That! Can’t you see?”
    Now she was frightened in a new way, for she realised he could not. “What?” he demanded, staring straight at the dim unsteady rectangle. “What are you talking about?”
    The threat of a night’s insomnia edged his voice. Was she going to add to his worries? She swallowed; her fear sank into her guts. “Nothing. It’s gone now,” she lied.
    “Come to bed then, for heaven’s sake.”
    She closed her eyes before dragging the curtains shut. “I think I’ll just have a nightcap first.”
    In fact she downed two more drinks before she felt able to peer out of the living-room. The tree stood beyond the hedge; the branches sprinkled with buds and the privet leaves were lurid with sodium light. The longer she stared, trying to fix the view in her mind, the less familiar and more unreal it seemed.
    Paul lay on his back, his lips trembling with snores. She slipped in beside him. At last, when she’d stared at the sodium glow through the curtains for minutes, she took off her glasses. Her stomach felt calmer. Alcohol was melting the icy lump of fear.
    She lay teeming with thoughts. Had Paul’s tension infected her? Was it making her imagine things? She preferred the alternative: that she’d seen a house that was no longer there. Why should she feel menaced? Good Lord, what could a house that no longer existed do? Her eyes grew heavy, but still she reopened them, to check that the light wasn’t flickering. Around her, unsharpened by her glasses, the room was very vague.
     
     
    She stared at the place where the bricks were hidden. Rocks gleamed, polished by the sea. It seemed impossible that there was no trace of what she’d seen—but she was stubbornly convinced that she’d seen it: there could be nothing wrong with her mind. Perhaps more rocks would help bury what was there, if there was anything. Besides, a walk to the beach would take her away from the house. Her gladness dismayed her.
    Today the sea was calm. The sun made a shoal of glittering fish that swam in all the rock pools. Over the beach crept the incessant mouthless whispering of waves. She selected rocks, and wished she felt closer to the stillness.
    She set down the rocks. The growth of the cairn was satisfying, but would it be enough? Would the pile act as a gravestone, or something of the kind? Though she knew she had dug it herself, the earth looked as it would have if it had been upheaved from beneath.
    She was being stupid. All right, she had seen the house that used to stand here. Was that so terrible? The length of the garden separated the previous house from hers. Surely that was reassuring. After all, houses couldn’t move.
    If only she could tell Paul! Well, in time she would be able to. At least that hope was heartening. Perhaps, she thought as he opened the gate, she could tell him soon, for he looked somehow relieved.
    “I’ve got to go away,” he said at once.
    She felt her hope being squeezed to death in her stomach. “When?” Her voice sounded dwindled, as she felt.
    “Tomorrow.” He was staring at