Incarnate

“It doesn’t seem enough to say that Campbell is a master of the horror genre.”

—Publishers Weekly

“At the core of this horror story is the stuff that dreams are made of … five people with widely different backgrounds and varying degrees of psychic ability are gathered together for an experiment on prophetic dreaming. The story (begins) 11 years later, when the former subjects … find that all their nightmares start to come true … MASTERFUL.”

—Booklist

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

INCARNATE

Copyright © 1983 by Ramsey Campbell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Reprinted by arrangement with Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 8-10 West 36 Street, New York, N.Y. 10018

Cover art by Jill Bauman

First TOR printing: September 1984

ISBN: 0-812-51650-8 CAN. ED.: 0-812-51651-6

Printed in the United States of America

For
MATTHEW:

someday, son, all this

will be yours

—with my love

Among the people I could not have done without are my wife Jenny, for continuity George Walsh, for improving the structure John Owen, for allowing himself to be taken to a Spiritualist meeting.

Carol Smith, for insights into television Norman Shorrock, for philatelic pointers Christine Ruth, for London locations Dave Drake, for reminding me of Chapel Hill Jim Walker, for cinema backgrounds John Williams, for legal advice John Thompson, for help in post-production.

… dreams you might have dreamed yourself …”

—ROBERT ROBINSON,
on classic horror fiction

“I have walked a city’s street where no man else had trod.”

—ROBERT E. HOWARD,
Recompense

I ask you to think on the hours when one sleeps. Do you know what happens then? The body may lie still in bed, but what happens to the thoughts—the spirit? With what ancient demons does it spend its time? And in what deeds?”

—ARDEL WRAY AND JOSEPH MISCHEL,
Isle of the Dead

“I am forever dreaming of strange barren landscapes, cliffs, stretches of ocean, and deserted cities with towers and domes… . All this dreaming comes without the stimulus of
Cannabis indica.
Should I take that drug, who can say what worlds of unreality I might explore? … I have travelled to strange places which are not upon the earth or any known planet. I have been a rider of comets, and a brother to the nebulae… . Surely the strange excrescences of the human fancy are as real—in the sense of real phaenomena—as the commonplace passions, thoughts, and instincts of everday life.”

—H P. LOVECRAFT
, in letters

(27 September 1919, 21 May 1920)

Incarnate

1

W
HEN
they let her out of the room at last, she’d forgotten what she had to say. The sky outside the window told her it was evening, the sunset descending a smoldering ladder of clouds above the Oxfordshire hills, and she could hear voices in the corridor. But apart from those details, her mind was blank. Above the clouds the August sky was a deep calm blue, calm as the sleep her whole body ached for. Maybe the voices weren’t in the corridor after all but in the pincushion that her wired head felt like. She had just realized that her speculations had driven what she had to say out of her head when the door opened and Stuart Hay came in.

Whatever it had been, she didn’t think she would have been able to say it to his round, young, constantly flushed face that always looked incredulous. “Still here then, are you?” he said, scratching his mat of cropped red hair. “Having a lie in?”

“There isn’t much else I can do, is there?”

“There is now.” He pulled back the cuffs of the redundant lab coat that he wore like a skeptic’s uniform and began to peel the taped wires off her forehead. “You can meet the others.”

So she would meet them at last, but just now that was only another distraction, something else to make her forget what she had to remember. “Is it over?” she said.

“Disappointed?” He had removed the last of the contacts; the patches of her skin where they had been felt moist and cool, as if his fingertips were lingering. “What were you expecting?” he said with a grin that seemed patronizing.

“What were you? It was your idea.”

“Dr. Kent’s, not mine.” He was smiling, pleased that she’d been sharp with him. “But no, we haven’t done yet,” he said, bringing her her dressing gown from the hook on the door. “She thought it was time for you all to meet one another.”

She swung her disused legs out of the sheets that felt untidy and clammy, and wondered if she could stand up. “How long now, do you think?”

“You’ve only been here five days, you know.”

“It feels more like twice that,” she said, matching his sharpness. She’d listened to at least that many playbacks of her voice that sometimes sounded as if she had been muttering drunkenly in her sleep. “I can’t even read now, I can’t concentrate with waking up so much.”

“You could go stir crazy in here, at that,” he admitted, with a glance around the pale green room that was almost clinically bare, but his tone seemed to say that not only had she volunteered, she was being paid as well. She tidied her hair in front of the mirror and gazed at her wide mouth, her bright green eyes, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders. He took her arm as she limped on her prickling legs toward the door, and that contact let her ask, “Have you found out anything about me?”

“Too soon to say.” He halted, gripping the doorknob. “Just one thing before you meet the others—please don’t talk about any of your dreams. I don’t need to tell you why.”

The smell of paint in the corridor caught at her throat, the indirect lighting that trailed down the green walls made her feel half-asleep. She could hear several voices now, in the lounging area at the far end. Though Stuart was leading her slowly toward them while she got used to her legs again, she felt she was going too fast to think. Had she had a dream that she’d forgotten to confide to the microphone over her bed, or was that her exhausted imagination? Had Stuart been in it, or was that her imagination too? The more she tried to grasp it, the less real it seemed, and in any case it was too late now, for they were at the end of the corridor. As she stepped off the linoleum onto the island of green carpet, everyone turned to look.

She didn’t take in their faces at first. She had let go of Stuart too readily. The carpet seemed to give way under her feet, and she sat quickly on the nearest chair, almost missing. She had a confused impression of a crowd of seated people and large-boned Dr. Kent alone on her feet, the empty socket where a television should have been plugged in, tables bare of newspapers and magazines, smoke streaming jerkily up from an ashtray. But there were only a few people, one of whom came over and sat next to her. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Molly. I’m Joyce.”

She was a small woman in her forties, gray eyes bright as steel in her square face behind her pale blue spectacles, whose case was clipped into the breast pocket of her candy-striped summer dress. She snatched off the spectacles as if that would help her get closer to Molly. “I’ll introduce you. Freda, Helen, Danny. Stuart and Guilda you know, of course.”

Guilda must be Dr. Kent, whose long face, with its pale, almost invisible eyebrows, looked amused by the way Joyce had taken over. She came round the circle of low chairs to Molly, her large hand fingering the row of pens in the pocket of her lab coat, and Joyce rounded on her. “Now we’re all here, what can you tell us?”

“Not a great deal. I thought I made that clear. Nothing that might influence your dreams.”

Joyce looked furious at being put in her place by a woman several years younger than herself. ”Will you give us your word that you’ll tell us everything if we agree to continue?”

“Eventually, when we’ve analyzed the results.”

“Very well. We put our trust in you.” She was taking her role of spokeswoman rather for granted, Molly thought in the midst of her frustration at trying to remember. “Just so long as you make sure,” Joyce was saying to Dr. Kent, “that people know what we’ve seen before it’s too late.”

“Famous.” That was Danny, a bullnecked man in his twenties, whose head looked too small for his neck. Perhaps it was the multitude of pimples that stood out against his pasty complexion which made him avoid looking directly at anyone and keep his voice so low that they had heard only the last word. “We’ll be famous,” he said now that everyone was listening.

“I don’t care if we’re famous or not.” Joyce put on her spectacles to stare at him, her gray eyes glinting in her square face. “We could be useful if only the world would acknowledge it, that’s what matters. That’s what I expect Guilda to achieve.”

“They must think we’re important,” Danny mumbled, “or they wouldn’t be paying us so much.”

He couldn’t earn much if he was impressed by the nominal fee they were receiving. He broke the embarrassed silence himself. “It’s funny,” he said, forcing a laugh to prove it, “I used to dream I’d be famous. That shows it works, doesn’t it? That’ll show them. Once I dreamed—”

Dr. Kent was behind his chair so fast that he shrank away. “Please remember what I said,” she murmured.

Freda took pity on him. She was a lanky woman in her forties who sat stooped forward as if to hide her tallness. Above her full lips and long nose, her eyes looked wistful. “I know how you feel,” she told him. “Sometimes I wish I could have seen the future. I don’t usually dream ahead, I dream—” She smiled quickly and covered her mouth.