Free The Influence by Ramsey Campbell

worse.”
    “Yes, but did he?”
    “Who says he did? What have they been saying?”
    “Alison’s husband was saying he must have gone mad.”
    “What the devil does he know about it? He wasn’t there, he isn’t even family. My father didn’t lose his mind, he lost his wife, and that’s like having part of yourself torn off. Maybe when your cousin’s husband loses someone he won’t be so eager to denigrate people’s grief.”
    “I miss mother too,” Lance said awkwardly.
    His father clasped his hands together and stared at his whitening knuckles. “I suppose you do. I apologise for saying what I said before. I’m sure that if she were here she’d intercede between us.”
    Their talk had foundered in embarrassment. Lance retreated to his room, a windowless box in which furniture white as the walls crowded round the bed. Since he’d come out of hospital he often found that memories surfaced when he was close to sleep, but the memory of his grandfather wouldn’t give way to any other. Whatever Lance’s father said, Lance was convinced the old man hadn’t just been mourning. Throughout his last months he’d accused Queenie of not letting him go to his wife, of keeping him alive because she couldn’t bear to be without him. Richard and Keith had told him soothingly that he’d see his wife when it was time, but Lance thought that even they had been taken aback when their father had lingered for weeks on what the doctor told them was his deathbed.
    One night Lance had heard him cry out so loudly he’d been sure it was the end, and had raced up to the room to find the old man lying twisted on the bed, shrivelled limbs huddled together, eyes wide and blank. Then the withered body had jerked like a puppet or someone lurching out of a dream. “Let me go, let me go,” the old man had begun to moan, a complaint he’d kept up for days until he died.
    Queenie hadn’t let him rest even then. The family and the undertakers had managed to sneak the corpse away from her for embalming, but when she’d realised that the coffin was about to be closed for burial she’d rushed to the front of the church, arms outstretched, crying “He moved.” And he had: the mouth had fallen open as if in a last silent protest at being prevented from resting. Her footsteps must have shaken it open, Lance told himself, but he wished he could forget the episode, not only because it might be blocking what he wanted to remember.
    That weekend he went walking by the river, first with his father, who grew impatient with him for not chatting, and then by himself. On Saturday a brass band gave a concert on the riverbank, on Sunday canoeists were braving the weir, but all this only distracted him. Whatever he was trying to remember, hadn’t it to do with Alison? If he could help her, perhaps that would make up for the way he used to think about her; perhaps she might even realise that she needn’t be wary of him. When he returned home he could tell that his father was suspicious of him for wanting to go out by himself.
    On Monday he was able to be more alone, at work. He had been a clerical officer before his breakdown, but he’d come back as a filing clerk. Few of the married women would talk to him, and most of the men were shy of him, as if his slowness and forgetfulness might be infectious. Now he had the task of putting all the dormant files in order, tens of thousands of them in the long basement where shelves stretched almost from wall to wall and rose to the low dim ceiling. Bare bulbs dangled into dusty aisles so narrow that two people couldn’t even squeeze past each other, not that there was often anyone besides Lance. He was glad not to be upstairs, where he might be expected to answer the phone; since his spell in the hospital he had lost the confidence. But then how could he phone Alison?
    He still couldn’t think why he should. Being unable to grasp the memory made his head feel stiff and cramped. Was it about Alison