Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell

Author:Ramsey Campbell [Campbell, Ramsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780099673408
Publisher: Legend
Published: 1990-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The tower seemed not to be shrinking as quickly as it should. "Freud knows why," she scoffed at herself, but it made her feel as if the car wasn't moving as fast as the speedometer claimed. She mustn't let her fears tempt her to drive faster, or she might go off the road as Giles Spence had. At last the yellow distance between her and the bridge telescoped, the canal gleamed like teeth in a thin mouth. She sprayed her windscreen with almost the last of the washer fluid, and the wipers scraped an arc relatively clear of mud as she braked at the narrow bridge and accelerated down into the copse.

Trees leaned over her, nodding their dense heads of leaves. A greenish tinge crept into the mud that coated the windscreen beyond the sweep of the wipers, as if moss had grown there, unnoticed until now. Trees linked branches above her as the road began to curve. She didn't remember the copse as being so extensive or so dim, but on her way into Redfield she'd had no reason to notice. At least she was past Toonderfield, she thought, and immediately wondered if she was. If Giles Spence had run his car into a tree, it had to be down here. Toonderfield must end on the far side of the copse.

The road zigzagged, and she braked reluctantly. She was about to see the sky beyond the copse, she promised herself. What did it matter to her if Spence had died here all that time ago--just fifty years ago? At least she was out of ------------------------------------226

sight of the tower. There had been nothing about the tower in the graveyard, she thought: only about the land--the land that "shall be soaked with blood." She couldn't help peering through the dimness and the mud that edged her windscreen at the trees, to see if she could identify which one had been marked by Spence's crash. But it wasn't the sight of any tree that made her foot jerk on the accelerator, nearly stalling the car.

It was only a scarecrow. Someone must have dumped it among the trees rather than cart it away when it ceased to be of use. It must have been abandoned quite some time ago for its head to have grown into such a mess, though admittedly more than one of the scarecrows she'd glanced at as she passed the fields hadn't had much of a face. A wind scuttled through the undergrowth, and the scarecrow swayed out from the tree in whose shadow it was propped. The looming of the fattened greenish blob that might be more like a face than she cared to see made her press the accelerator hard, slewing the car across the curve. The road turned sharply back on itself, and she saw the sky a few hundred yards ahead, at the end of the next straight run. She was so dazzled by the daylight, and by the relief it made her feel, that she almost didn't notice the scarecrow.

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