Read Online The Influence by Ramsey Campbell - Free Book Online Page B

boxed in by overhanging Tudor storeys. Strolling was no use: he couldn’t recall what he’d realised at the funeral.
    His memory often let him down since he’d come out of the hospital. Sometimes he wondered how much of himself was lost, though it seemed not to matter. But he was sure this did, for he’d told himself so. Something that he’d seen or overheard at Queenie’s funeral had lit up like a flashbulb in his mind. He dawdled home beside the river, but the sight of lamps kindling on the bridge while their reflections trawled the water didn’t help. When he reached home at last, his father was waiting for him.
    As soon as Lance let himself into the small flat that almost overlooked the river, his father levered himself to his feet, his arthritic hands gripping the arms of his chair that was turned to the window from which he’d been watching for Lance. He bumped the chair around toward the room and lowered himself carefully onto the seat, then he scrutinised Lance, his compact face expressionless but for the hint of a frown among the lines on his forehead. “You can get yourself some dinner if you haven’t eaten,” he said eventually. “I don’t feel like eating.”
    He was making Lance feel as if he’d done something wrong and forgotten what it was. Lance found himself an apple in the fruit bowl next to the historeys of Chester between the Roman soldiers on the sideboard, and crunched it while his father wrote a letter to the museum he’d retired from. His father stared at his pen as the nib rested on a gathering blot, and then his head jerked up, flinging back his grey hair. “Well, how were my brother and his wife? What were they saying about me?”
    Lance was expecting to be blamed for the torments of anxiety his father suffered whenever Lance was out of his sight. By the time he framed an answer his father was staring at him as if he were making it up. “Keith said he was sorry you weren’t there,” Lance told him doggedly, “and Edith was hoping the family could get together now.”
    “Did you remember to say I was ill?”
    Lance’s hand closed over his mouth, squeezing his beard. “Oh no, I forgot.”
    “Hurrah, something else for them to lay at my door. My brother even denounced me for leaving home until he realised he could follow. I don’t know why you went at all. You couldn’t have believed any of them would be glad to see you.”
    Lance could tell he was attacking himself under the guise of attacking Lance. “I wanted to see Auntie Queenie laid to rest,” he said.
    “I can imagine how she must have bothered you. If we’d seen more of her you mightn’t have turned out the way you did.”
    “Dad, can’t we just talk? I had something to ask you.”
    His father let the writing pad slip to the floor and stared blankly at him. “Don’t you think I wish we could talk as we used to? I thought we’d have more time to share our lives when I retired. I was looking forward to strolling with you by the river on evenings like this. Perhaps you don’t appreciate how finding that filth in your room turned everything you’d said to me into lies. Thank God your mother was dead by then and never knew what you’d been hiding.”
    Lance had sometimes thought his mother suspected more about him than she admitted—that she had been watchful on his behalf. A memory gleamed in his father’s eyes until he blinked it away and said “No, this is wrong. We shouldn’t spend our last years together like this. You never would have ended up this way if we’d cared for you as we should have. Ask whatever you have to ask.”
    By now Lance had forgotten, but his father was liable to act as if he were forgetting on purpose, especially recent memories. He managed to think of something else that had been troubling him. “Did granddad really lose his mind before he died?”
    “You aren’t losing your mind. If there are gaps that’s the price you have to pay, and you should realise it could have been