Death Trance

Eleven

I was released late in the afternoon on $75,000 bail, put up by an Essex County real-estate corporation of which Mrs Constance Bedford was a major stockholder. Outside, it was bright, dry and windy, and I was picked up by Tom Watkins, one of Walter Bedford's clerks, and driven back to Quaker Lane Cottage.

Tom Watkins was young and flush-faced, with a fluffy little mustache. He had never been involved with a homicide case before, and I think I quite scared him.

'I read the police report on Mrs Edgar Simons' death,' he told me, as he drove. 'That was some way to die.'

I nodded. It was impossible to explain to anybody what I felt about the gruesome events of the previous evening. I was still suffering from residual shock, and a kind of persistent nausea. I could actually imagine what that chandelier chain must have felt like, passing right through Mrs Simons' insides, cold and uncompromising and beyond any human capability to remove. Worst of all, though, I still felt dread. If Mrs Simons' dearly beloved Edgar had been powerful and cruel enough in his spirit state to impale his widow like that, what would Neil try to do to Charlie Manzi, or Jane try to do to me? And from what Walter Bedford had told me, Charlie and Mrs Edgar Simons and I weren't the only people in Granitehead who had been visited by flickering visions of their dead relatives.

For some unknown reason, it seemed as if this year the influence of these manifestations was stronger than usual, although I hadn't really been living in Granitehead long enough to know what 'usual' might be. Mrs Simons had said something about the manifestations being seasonal, more frequent and more obvious in the summer months than they were in the winter. Only God knew why that could be: maybe there was more static electricity in the air in the summer, feeding the apparitions with natural power.

Tom Watkins said, 'Mr Bedford will get you off of this rap. You just wait and see. He talked to the district attorney already, and tomorrow he's going to have a meeting with the chief of police. Actually, the police don't really think you did it, either. They don't know how the hell Mrs Edgar Simons got herself up on that chandelier chain, but they don't really believe that it was you who put her there. They had to arrest you as a matter of procedure; and to satisfy the newspapers.'

'It's in the newspapers? I haven't seen one.'

Tom Watkins nodded towards the back seat. 'There's a couple of the locals there. Help yourself.'

I reached over and picked up the Granitehead Messenger. The main headline read, WIDOW IMPALED IN GRISLY GRANITEHEAD KILLING, local antique dealer held. Underneath there was a morgue photograph of Mrs Edgar Simons taken when she was ten years younger, and a picture of me that had been taken outside Trenton Marine Antiques when it first opened.

'That'll be good for business,' I said, folding up the newspaper and tossing it back on to the seat.

Tom Watkins drove up Quaker Lane, turned around in a circle outside my cottage, and parked. 'Mr Bedford said that he'd call you later this evening. Something about making an appointment to drop over.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Is there anything else you need? Mr Bedford said I was to go get anything you wanted.'

'No, I don't think so, thank you. I want a drink more than anything else.'

'You're sure you're going to be okay?'

'I'm sure. Thanks for the ride. And tell Mr Bedford thanks, too.'

Tom Watkins drove off, and once again I was standing alone outside Quaker Lane Cottage, my hands in my pockets, unsure of what lay waiting for me inside, what strange disturbances from a time and a place that I could only guess at. Was it heaven? Or hell? Or a shifting, displaced limbo; a half-seen world of distorted psychic energy, where the spirits of the dead faded and flickered like those garbled radio messages which you can pick up during the hours of darkness?

The house watched me with its neutral, shuttered eyes. I walked up the garden path, took out my keys, and opened the front door.

Everything was exactly as I had left it yesterday evening. At least I had had the presence of mind to turn off the oven before I ran out, leaving a half-cooked lasagna dinner on the middle shelf. I went into the living-room and the fire was dead, ashes blowing across the rug from the draught which blew down the chimney. My books were laid out on the floor, and propped up against the side of a chair, the painting of the David Dark.

I crossed the room and looked out through the diamond-leaded windows into the garden. I could just see the back of the swing seat, and the right-hand side of the orchard. In the distance, silvery-gray rain clouds were building up over Salem Sound. Seagulls turned and fluttered around the Neck like wind-blown newspapers. I pressed my forehead against the cold window-pane, and for the first time in my life felt unutterably defeated.

Perhaps I ought to leave Granitehead for good. Sell up the business, and go back to St Louis. There was even a chance that I might be able to get my old job back, at MidWestern Chemical Bonding. I would probably forfeit a few years of promotion, but what was that compared with the extraordinary terror of what was happening here in Granitehead? I was particularly disturbed by the excitement which Walter Bedford had shown when I had told him about the apparition of Jane. There was something grotesquely unhealthy about it, as well as dangerous. The trouble was, I was beholden to the Bedfords not only for bailing me out of jail, but for two-thirds of the finance which had opened up Trenton Marine Antiques and so it was going to be very hard for me to refuse their request to come over to Quaker Lane Cottage and see Jane's apparition for themselves.

I was just about to pour myself a drink when there was a ring at the front doorbell. George Markham, maybe? Or Keith Reed? It had better not be Keith Reed, I'd give him a flea in his ear for telling the police that I had been 'rambling, and deranged.' I called, 'All right, I'm coming,' and went to answer it.

Standing outside in the evening wind was Edward Wardwell, in a plaid lumberjack coat and a peaked denim cap. He said: 'I'm sorry to call on you personally. But I heard what had happened, and I just had to come over from Salem to talk to you.'

As a matter of fact, I was oddly relieved to see him. It was better to have some company in that unsettled house than none at all. And I did want to talk to him about the painting of the David Dark.

'Come on in,' I told him. 'I haven't lit the fire yet. I've only just been sprung, if that's the word.'

'Do you think your attorney can get you off?' Edward Wardwell asked, taking off his cap and stepping into the hallway.

'I hope so. He's my father-in-law. Well, he was my father-in-law, before my wife died. Walter Bedford, of Bedford & Bibber. He's pretty well-connected. Plays golf with the district attorney and gin-rummy with the judge.'

'I've met him,' said Edward Wardwell. 'You forget that I knew your wife. She and I went on a seminar together, to study maritime history. That was, what, three or four years ago now, up at Rockport. She was a very pretty girl, your wife. All the guys there kept trying to date her. She was clever, too. I was sorry to hear that she died.'

'Well, thank you for that much,' I told him. 'Can I get you a drink?'

‘I’m a beer man myself.'

'There's Heineken in the icebox.'

Edward Wardwell followed me into the kitchen and I opened a bottle of beer for him. He watched me closely as I poured it out.

'You didn't kill that old woman, did you?' he asked me.

I looked up at him; then shook my head. 'How did you know?' I queried.

'I have a pretty good idea of what's been going on around here. I don't work for the Peabody for nothing, you know. I know more about the maritime history of Salem and Granitehead than almost anyone, except maybe the Evelith family. But then I don't have their books.'

'You know what's been going on?'

'Sure,' he said, taking the beer-glass out of my hand. He sipped a little, leaving foam clinging to his mustache. 'Granitehead has always had a reputation for ghosts, just like Salem has always had a reputation for witches. Although the town fathers have done everything they can to play it down, there isn't any doubt at all in my mind that Granitehead is a nexus between the spirit world, if I can dare to call it that, and the physical world. More than anyplace else in the whole United States. Perhaps anyplace else on the entire globe.'

'So what happened to Mrs Edgar Simons — you don't think that I was responsible?'

'It's possible that you were responsible, but in my opinion not likely. What you obviously don't know is that there have been six or seven deaths of bereaved people in Granitehead over the past ten years, and all of them have been characterized by the extraordinary and inexplicable ways in which they have occurred. One man was found with his head trapped inside a water-pipe, drowned. The newspapers said that he had put his head down through an access hole to discover what had been blocking the pipe up, but the police report reads different. The access hole was tight around his neck, so that it would have been impossible for him to have put his head through it. The doctors had to cut off his head to get him out, and then flush his head out of the pipe with a strong jet of water.'

I made a face, and Edward Wardwell shrugged. 'Mrs Edgar Simons' death was no different,' he said. 'A physical impossibility. I mean, let me ask you, if you had wanted to kill her that way, how you would have done it?'

'I couldn't. It was like some grisly kind of conjuring trick.'

'Exactly, and the police know that, too. They have to prove in court that you killed Mrs Edgar Simons, and if you can show beyond any question that it was impossible for any human being to have impaled her on the chandelier like that, you're home free.'

'Come through to the living-room,' I said. 'I'd like to get the fire going before the temperature starts falling.'

We went through to the living-room, where I got down on my knees in front of the hearth and began clearing out the fire. Fortunately, there were plenty of logs and kindling stacked beside the grate, so I didn't have to go out to the woodpile. Edward Wardwell put down his beer, and picked up the watercolour of Granitehead beach. He examined it minutely, and when I turned around from the fire to find some rolled-up copies of Newsweek to stuff under the logs, I saw that he was paying particular attention to the ship.

He said, 'Out of those six or seven other deaths, only two people were ever charged with homicide, and both of those were released before their cases got to trial. In each case the district attorney said that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. The same will happen to you.'

'How come you've made such a study of it?' I asked him, as I struck the first match, and lit the corner of the rolled-up magazines.

'Because the maritime history of Granitehead and the spiritual history of Granitehead are inextricably intertwined. This is a magical place, Mr Trenton, as you've discovered for yourself, and what's more the magic is real, and violent. It's not like the Haunted House at Disneyland.'

The fire began to burn up, and I stood up and brushed my trousers. 'I'm beginning to realize that, Mr Orwell.'

'Wardwell. But why don't you call me Edward?'

'All right. I'm John.' And for the first time, we shook hands.

I nodded towards the watercolour. 'I know now why you were so anxious to lay your hands on that picture. I did a little detective work last night, and I found out what ship that is, in the background.'

'Ship?' asked Edward.

'Come on, Edward, don't act so innocent. That ship is the David Dark; and this picture must be one of the only surviving illustrations of it. No wonder it's worth more than 50 bucks. I wouldn't take less than a thousand.'

Edward tugged at his beard, curling the hair of it around his fingers. He regarded me from behind his circular spectacles with watery eyes; and then let out a long, resigned puff of breath. Cough-candy, again; liquorice and aniseed.

'I was hoping you wouldn't find out,' he said. 'I'm afraid I made an idiot of myself yesterday, running after you like that. I should have played it cool.'

'You did arouse my interest. Now you've raised my financial expectations too.'

'I can't pay more than 300.'

'Why not?'

'I simply don't have more than 300, that's why.'

'But you said the Peabody was buying this,' I told him. 'Don't tell me the Peabody only has 300.'

Edward sat down, still holding the picture. 'The truth is,' he said, 'the Peabody don't know about this picture. In fact, the Peabody don't know about any of the investigations I've been doing into the history of the David Dark. In Salem, and especially at the Peabody, the David Dark is something that people just don't talk about. You say "David Dark", and they say "Never heard of it," and they make it pretty damn clear that they don't want to hear about it, either.'

I poured myself a whisky, and sat down opposite him. 'But why?' I wanted to know. 'David Dark himself was supposed to have had conversations with the devil or something, wasn't he? But I haven't read anything which explains why they cut the ship's name out of all of the records, or why people won't talk about it.'

'Well, I'm not sure, either,' said Edward. He finished his beer, and put down the glass. 'But I first came across the name David Dark the year that I joined the Peabody from college. They gave me a small exhibition to prepare, a special showcase depicting the history of the rescue and salvage operations that had gone on around Salem and Granitehead during the past three hundred years. It was pretty tedious stuff, to tell you the truth, apart from one or two spectacular wrecks on Winter Island, and a couple of whalers being overturned by humpbacks. But I was interested in one of the earliest documents I found, which was the log of the salvage vessel Mimosa, out of Granite-head. Apparently the captain of the Mimosa was a real 18th-century hotshot when it came to bringing up wrecks, and he successfully salvaged one of Elias Derby's Chinamen when it was blown by a storm into the mouth of the Danvers River and sunk in six fathoms of water off Tuck's Point. His name was Pearson Turner, and he kept a really meticulous log for five years, from 1701 to 1706.'

'Go on,' I said. I poked the fire to keep it crackling.

There isn't very much to tell,' said Edward, 'but one summer there was an unusually low tide in Salem Bay, and even the smaller ships were stranded on the mud. This was 1704,1 think, or 1705. The low tide is mentioned in several other diaries and records as well, so it's soundly authenticated. It was during this low tide that a friend of Pearson Turner's spotted in the mud banks to the west of Granitehead Neck a protrusion from the mud which he took to be part of the bow castle of a sunken and half-buried ship. Pearson walked out to the wreck himself, in wading boots, although he was unable to get as close as he might have liked because the ooze was so soft. He did manage, however, to bring back to the shore a fragment of decorative moulding, and Esau Hasket, who owned the David Dark, tentatively identified it as part of his lost ship.'

'Lost? The David Dark was lost?'

'Oh, yes. She sailed out of Salem Harbour on the last day of October, 1692, and the only reason I know that is because it happens to be mentioned in the diaries kept by one of the early Salem wharfingers. He says something like, "A tempestuous north-westerly gale had been blowing for three days and showed no sign of letting up, but in spite of the perilous weather the David Dark set sail, the only vessel to do so during that whole wild week. She vanished into the storm and was never again seen in Salem." That's the gist of it, anyway. I can show you the diary itself, if you like.'

'But what's the connection with apparitions in Granite-head?' I asked. There must be scores of wrecks around these shores.'

As the fire blazed up, Edward unbuttoned his jacket. 'Let me get you another beer first,' I told him.

I went outside to the kitchen. At the foot of the staircase, I paused for a second or two, listening. I hadn't been upstairs yet, not since I had seen the flickering light in there last night. I hoped to God there wasn't anything up there which I didn't want to see. I hoped to God that Jane wouldn't appear again, not for her father, not for her mother, and especially not for me. She was dead but I wanted her to stay dead, for her own sake, and for the sake of our child who never was.

When I came back with the beer, Edward was leafing through Great Men of Salem. 'Thanks,' he said, then, 'you're not having trouble yourself, are you?'

Trouble?'

'You haven't seen anything which might suggest that Jane's trying to get in touch with you? Or maybe heard something? A lot of the Granitehead hauntings have been aural, rather than visual.'

I sat down, realized my glass was empty, and stood up again. 'I, er, I — no. No, nothing like that. I guess it only happens to old Graniteheaders. Not to us strangers.'

Edward nodded, as if he accepted what I was saying, but didn't completely believe me.

'You were telling me about the connection between the David Dark and the hauntings,' I reminded him.

'Well,' he said, 'it's only fair to warn you that in strictly scientific terms, it's a pretty tendentious connection. It wouldn't win a history award. But I don't know what sort of a world we're dealing with here: I don't know why these spirits are manifesting themselves, or what for, or how. It may just be an unpleasant freak of nature, something to do with weather conditions, or maybe it's something to do with geographical location. Granitehead may be like Easter Island, a spot on the map that for completely incomprehensible reasons happens to be conducive to spiritual apparitions.'

'But you think it's the ship.'

'I'm inclined to think it's the ship. And the reason why I'm inclined to think it's the ship is because I've discovered two accounts of the David Dark being prepared for her last voyage — one written before she sailed and the other written nearly eighty years later. I found the contemporary account in the most boring old book you could think of, a late 17th century treatise on maritime shipfitting and metalwork. It was written by a shipbuilder from Boston called Neames, and let me tell you that man was tedious. But right near the very end of the book he mentions the Salem coppersmiths of Perly and Fisk, and says what a magnificent job they were making of a "huge copper vessel" to be fitted inside the David Dark for the purpose of "containing that Great Foulness which has so plagued Salem, that we may look forward to its final removal." '

'You know this stuff by heart,' I remarked, not altogether admiringly.

'I've studied it often enough,' said Edward. 'But Jane was the one for learning history by heart. She could reel off dates and names like a memory bank.'

'Yes,' I said, remembering the way Jane could memorize telephone numbers and birthdays. I didn't really want to discuss Jane with Edward Wardwell; it was too sensitive a subject, and besides, I felt absurdly but strongly jealous that Edward had known her before me.

'What was the other account?' I asked him.

'The later one — 82 years later, as a matter of fact — was contained in the memoirs of the Reverend George Nourse, who had lived and worked in Granitehead for most of his life. He said that one day in 1752 he attended the deathbed of an old-time Salem bo'sun, and the bo'sun asked him particularly to commend his soul to heaven, since when he was younger he had spied on the secret loading of the David Dark’s last cargo, even though he had been warned that all who set eyes on it would be condemned to walk the earth forever, neither alive nor dead. When the Rev. Nourse asked the bo'sun what the cargo might have been, the bo'sun went into convulsions and started screaming about "Mick the Cutler". The Rev. Nourse was greatly disturbed by this, and went to speak to all the cutlers in the Salem district to see if he could throw some light on what the bo'sun had said, but without success. But he later said himself that he was sure that he had seen the bo'sun after his death, just turning the corner by Village Street.'

I sat back in my chair and considered what Edward Wardwell had been suggesting. Under normal circumstances, I would have dismissed it immediately as a fairy-story. But I knew now that fairies and goblins and all kinds of other manifestations might actually exist, and if a young man as serious as Edward Wardwell were convinced that the wreck of the David Dark was somehow influencing the community of Granitehead, then I was not too far away from taking him seriously.

And what had that old witch-woman said to me on Salem Common? 'It's the place you die, not the time, that makes the difference. There are spheres of influence; and sometimes you can die within them, and sometimes you can die without them. The influence came, and then the influence fled; but there are days when I believe that it didn't flee for good and all.'

'Well,' I said at last, 'I suppose you want this picture because it might give you some clues about what the David Dark might have been carrying?'

'More than that,' said Edward, T want to know what she looked like, as exactly as possible. I do have one sketch which is supposed to be the David Dark, but it isn't even half as graphic as this.'

He looked at me, and took off his spectacles. I knew that he wanted me to say that he could have the picture, that I would drop my thousand-dollar price to $300; but I wasn't going to. There was always the remote possibility that he was a glib and creative confidence trickster, and that he had simply invented all these stories about Pearson Turner and the Rev. Nourse and 'Mick the Cutler'. I didn't really believe that he had, but I still wasn't going to let my picture go.

'The detail in this painting is vitally important,' he said. 'Although it isn't very artistic, it looks reasonably accurate, and that means I can more or less estimate the size of the David Dark, and how many frames her hull was likely to have, and how her superstructure was fashioned. And that means that when I do find her, I can be sure I've located the right ship.'

'When you what?' I asked him. 'When you find her?'

Edward replaced his spectacles and gave me a small smile of modest pride. 'I've been diving off Granitehead Neck for seven months now, trying to locate her. I haven't been able to do too much diving during the winter, but now that spring's here, I intend to start again in earnest.'

'What the hell do you want to find her for?' I asked him. 'Surely, if she's having this kind of influence on Granitehead, she's better off under the water.'

'Under the mud, you mean,' said Edward. 'She'll be pretty deeply buried by now. We'll be lucky if there's even a few frame-tops showing.'

'We'll be lucky?'

'There's a couple of other guys from the museum helping me, and Dan Bass from the Granitehead Aqualung Club. And Gilly McCormick's been my unofficial lookout and log-keeper.'

'You really believe you can find this wreck?'

'I think so. It's not too deep around that side of the Neck, because of the way the mud builds up. There are dozens of wrecks down there, but almost all of them are yachts and small dinghies, all comparatively recent. We did come across the remains of a fabulous 1920s Dodge motorboat, but that couldn't have sunk more than six months ago. When the summer comes, we intend to scan the seabed with EG & G sub-mud sonar, and see if we can pinpoint the David Dark precisely.'

'Surely she would have decayed by now. There won't be anything left to pinpoint.'

'I think there will,' Edward disagreed. 'The mud there is so soft that you can plunge your arm into it right up to the elbow without any trouble at all. Once, I almost sank down to my waist. The David Dark, if she sank around there, would have been buried almost up to her original waterline pretty well straight away, and over the next few weeks she would have sunk deeper. All the timber under the mud would have been preserved intact, and as it happens a particularly cold current runs into Salem Bay around Granitehead Neck, and that would have had the effect of inhibiting decay in the timbers that remained exposed. Fungi and bacilli don't like cold water, any more than gribble or nototeredo norvavica — that's a woodboring mollusk, to you.'

'Thanks for the marine biology lesson. But what are you hoping to do if you eventually locate the David Dark?’

Edward spread his hands in surprise. 'Bring her up, of course,' he said, as if it had been obvious, all along. 'Bring her up and find out what it is she's carrying in her hold.'