Death Trance

Twelve

Edward Wardwell drove us down to the West Shore Fishery in his dented blue Jeep, and I bought him a dinner of oyster stew and entrecote steak. For the first time in two days I discovered that I was really hungry, and I ate two portions of Irish barmbrack with my stew, and a heap of salad with my steak.

The Fishery was decorated in that nets-and-lobsters style ubiquitous in restaurants all along the New England shoreline; but it was dim and relaxing and very normal in there, and the clams and flounder were better than most. All I wanted was good food and normality, especially after last night.

Edward told me that he had started sub-aqua diving in San Diego, when he was 15 years old. 'I'm not especially good at it,' he said, buttering another piece of tea-bread, 'but it did whet my appetite for underwater archaeology.'

Contrary to the popular notion that the Pacific and the Caribbean were littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure-ships, Edward said that the best-preserved vessels were almost always in northern waters. 'In the Mediterranean, for example, a timber ship will last about five years under the water. In the Pacific, you'll be lucky if it lasts just over a year. Ironwork, in warm water, will last only 30 or 40 years.'

He drew circles on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger. 'What you grow to understand when you get involved with underwater archaeology is that there is no such thing as "The Ocean". The conditions under the ocean vary as much from one location to another as they do on land. Take the Wasa, which sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628 and was raised almost intact in 1961. She was in amazing condition, simply because the water was too cold for teredo mollusks to survive there, and attack her woodwork. And in the Solent, which is the entry to Southampton and Portsmouth harbours in England, the Royal George was still pretty solid after 53 years on the bottom, and the Edgar was still an obstruction to shipping after 133 years. The classic example, of course, was the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545. That was nearly 150 years before the David Dark went down, and yet half of her hull, the half that had been buried in the mud, had survived.'

'It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring up the Wasa and the Mary Rose,' I reminded him. 'How are you going to bring up the David Dark when you can't even afford a thousand dollars for a picture?'

'The first step is to locate her, to prove that she's there. Once I've done that, I'll be able to approach the Peabody and the Essex Institute and City Hall, and see what I can do about raising finance.'

'You're pretty confident.'

'I think I have to be. There are two compelling reasons for bringing up that wreck. One is its straightforward historical importance. The other is that it's having this weird effect on the people of Granitehead.'

'Well, I'll go along with that,' I said. I beckoned to the waiter to bring me another whisky.

'I have a terrific idea,' said Edward. 'Why don't you come diving with me over the weekend? If the weather's reasonable, we plan to go down on Saturday morning, and maybe Sunday, too.'

'Are you kidding? I never dived in my life. I'm from St Louis, remember?'

‘I’ll teach you. It's as easy as breathing. It's pretty murky down there, not like diving off Bermuda or anything like that. But you'll love it, once you get used to it.'

'Well, I don't know,' I said, reluctantly.

'Just come try it,' urged Edward. 'Listen, you want to find out what happened to Mrs Edgar Simons, don't you? You want to find out why all these ghosts have been walking in Granitehead?'

'Sure.'

‘I’ll give you a call then, Saturday morning, if the weather clears. All you need to bring is a warm sweater, a windbreaker, and a pair of swimming shorts. I'll supply the wet suit, and all the sub-aqua gear.'

I drained the last of my drink. 'I hope I haven't let myself in for anything terrifying.'

'I told you, you'll love it. Oh — just remember not to have anything too rich for breakfast. If you vomit underwater, it can be really dangerous, sometimes lethal.'

I gave him a slanted smile. 'Thanks for the warning. Is a bowl of Wheaties overdoing it?'

'Wheaties are fine,' said Edward, quite seriously. Then he checked his waterproof diver's watch, and said, 'I'd better be going. My sister's coming up from New York tonight, and I don't want to leave her on the doorstep.'

Edward drove me back up to Quaker Lane Cottage. 'Do you know something interesting?' he asked me, as he drew the Jeep to a jerking halt. 'I once checked back on the origin of the name "Quaker Lane" because it always struck me as incongruous that a lane should have been named for the Quakers when there were never any around here. I mean, most of them, as you know, were centered around Pennsylvania; and as far as I could discover there were no records of any Friends in Granitehead, not until the middle of the 19th century.'

'Did you find out why it was named "Quaker Lane"?' I asked him.

'Eventually, almost by accident. In the flyleaf of an old book that was sent in to the Peabody by old Mrs Seymour, she's always sending us stuff, most of it trash out of her attic. But in this one, someone had written, "Craquer Lane, Granitehead." '

' «Craquer»? That sounds French.'

'It is. It means to crack, or break.'

'So why should anyone have called this Craquer Lane?'

'Don't ask me. I'm only a maritime historian. Maybe the surface of the lane was notoriously broken-up. This was the way they used to carry the coffins up to Waterside Cemetery, remember, so maybe they called it Craquer Lane because they were always dropping the coffins and breaking them. Who knows?'

'That's what I like about historians,' I told him. 'They always bring up more questions than they answer.'

I climbed down from the Jeep and closed the door. Edward reached over and put down the window. 'Thanks for the dinner,' he said. 'And, you know, good luck with the cops.'

He drove off downhill, the wheels of the Jeep splashing and jolting in the puddles. I went back into the cottage and poured myself another drink, and started to tidy up a little. Mrs Herron from Breadboard Cottages sent her maid Ethel up to 'do' for me twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, change the bed, Hoover the rugs, clean the windows; but I liked to have the cottage reasonably clean and tidy in any case, and I always liked fresh flowers around. They reminded me of the happy days here with Jane; the best days of my whole damn life.

That evening, I sat in front of the fire and read as much as I could find about sunken ships, and sub-aqua diving, and the old days in Salem and Granitehead. By the time the Tompion clock in the hallway struck midnight, the wind had dropped and the rain had eased off, and I probably knew as much about raising wrecks as anybody, apart from the real experts. I poked the last crumbling log in the dying fire, and stretched myself, and wondered whether I deserved a last drink or not. It was a peculiar thing about drinking on my own: I never quite managed to get drunk. I got the hangovers, though. It was the punishment without the pleasure.

I locked up the cottage and took a last measure of Chivas upstairs with me. I ran a deep, hot, tubful of water, and slowly undressed. I hadn't slept properly for two nights now, and I felt exhausted.

Once in the bath, I lay back and closed my eyes and tried to let the tension slowly soak out of me. All I could hear was the steady dripping of the hot faucet, which had never turned off properly, and the crackling of Badedas bubbles.

Now that the weather had quietened down, and the wind had stopped sucking and breathing its way around the house, I felt strangely less afraid. Maybe it was the wind that had brought the spirits, the way that it had brought Mary Poppins; and when it changed or dropped, the spirits left us in peace. I prayed to God that they would. But I also added a codicil that the weather should work itself into a frenzy on Saturday morning, just for a few hours, so that I wouldn't have to go diving.

I was still lying in the tub when I heard a faint whispering. I opened my eyes at once, and listened. There was no mistaking it. It was that same whispering I had heard downstairs in the library, a soft torrent of scarcely audible blasphemy. My shoulders felt chilled, and all of a sudden the bathwater felt uncomfortable and scummy.

There was no question about it. Quaker Lane Cottage was possessed. I could feel the coldness of whatever spirits were passing through it as if all the downstairs doors had silently been opened, and wintry draughts were blowing everywhere. I sat up in the bath and the splashing of the water sounded awkward and flat, like a cheap sound-effect.

It was then that I looked up at the mirror over the wash-basin. It had been misted over by the steam rising up from the bathtub, but now the mist seemed to be patchily condensing, forming itself into the pattern of a hollow-eyed face. Dribbles of condensation ran from the darkened eye-sockets like tears, and from the line of the lips like blood; and even though it was probably nothing more than the gradually-cooling vapour, it looked as if the face were alive and moving, as if somehow there was a captive spirit within the silvered surface of the mirror, trying desperately to show itself, trying desperately to speak to the outside world.

I stood up, showering water everywhere, and reached for the washcloth on the side of the basin. With three violent strokes, I wiped the steam off the mirror until it was clear again; and all I could see was my own harassed face. Then I stepped out of the bath, and took down my towel.

It was no use, I told myself, as I went through to the bedroom. If I was going to be visited by whisperers and apparitions every night, then I was going to have to move out. I had read in Architectural Digest about an Italian who happily shared his huge palazzo with a noisy poltergeist, but I was neither brave enough nor calm enough to handle the disturbances at Quaker Lane Cottage. There was a terrible lewdness about the whispering; and a terrible suppressed agony about all the visions I had seen. I felt that I was glimpsing and hearing things from Purgatory, the dreary and painful ante-chamber to hell. The worst part about it was that Jane was there, too, the woman I had loved, and married, and still loved.

I toweled myself dry, brushed my teeth, and went to bed with one of the sleeping capsules that Dr Rosen had given me, and a book about the building of the Panama Canal. It was well past one o'clock now, and the house was silent, all except for the steady ticking of the long-case clock in the hallway, and the occasional chime to mark the quarter-hours.

I don't know when I fell asleep, but I was awakened by the sudden dimming of my bedside lamp, as if the neighbourhood were suffering a brown-out. It dimmed and dimmed, until I could see the element in the light-bulb glowing orange and subdued like an expiring firefly.

Then came the coldness. An abrupt fall in temperature, just the same as the chill I had experienced in the library the night before. My breath began to vaporize, and I wrapped the comforter more tightly around me to keep myself warm.

I heard laughing, whispering. There were people in the cottage! There had to be. I heard shuffling on the stairs, as if four or five people were hurrying up to see me. But the noise died away in a flurry, and the door remained closed, and there was nobody there at all.

I stayed exactly where I was, wound up in that comforter. My elbow ached from supporting my body in the same position, but I was too scared to move a muscle. Yesterday morning, when I had thought back over the way in which I had broken into Mrs Edgar Simons' house, I had congratulated myself on how courageous I must have been to do it. But now, in the middle of the night, with all these rustlings and murmurings at my bedroom door, I remembered just how blatantly terrified I had actually been.

'John,' whispered a voice. I glanced around, my teeth clenched rigid with alarm.

'John,' the voice repeated. There was no mistaking whose voice it was.

Croakily, I answered, 'Jane? Is that you?'

She gradually began to appear, standing at the foot of the bed. Not so dazzlingly bright as before, but still flickering like a distant heliograph message. Thin, and sunken-eyed, her hair waving around her in some unfelt, unseen wind, her hands raised as if she were displaying the fact that she was dead but bore no stigmata. What frightened me most of all, though, was how tall she was. In those dim white robes, she stood nearly seven feet, her hair almost touching the ceiling, and she looked down at me with a serious and elongated face that sent dread soaking through me like the cold North Atlantic rain.

'John?' she whispered again, although her mouth didn't move. And she began to drift sideways around the end of the bed. My vision of her came and went, as if I were seeing her through a tattered gauze curtain. But the nearer she approached, the colder the temperature became, and the more distinctly I could hear the static crackling of her upraised hair.

'Jane,' I said, in a constricted voice, 'you're not real. Jane, you're dead! You can't be here, you're dead!'

'John… ' she sighed, and her voice sounded like four or five voices speaking at once. 'John… make love to me.'

For a moment, my courage and my confidence collapsed inside of me into that gravitational Black Hole called panic. I buried my face under the comforter, and squeezed my eyes tight shut, and shouted under the bedclothes, 'I'm dreaming this! It's a nightmare! For Christ's sake, tell me I'm dreaming!'

I waited under the comforter with my eyes shut until I could hardly breathe any more. Then I opened my eyes again and stared at the darkness of the quilting, right in front of my nose. The trouble with hiding is that at some point you have to come out of it again, and face up to what it was that made you hide in the first place. I said a silent prayer to myself that Jane would be gone, that the whispering would have stopped, that the cottage would have warmed and restored itself. I whipped down the comforter, away from my face, and looked up. What I saw just above me made me yell out loud. It was Jane's face, only four or five inches away from me, looking directly down at me. She seemed to melt and shift and change constantly; sometimes looking childish and young, at other times looking ravaged and old. Her eyes were impenetrable: there seemed to be no life there at all. And her expression never changed from that dreamless serenity which I had seen on her face as she lay in her casket, before burial.

'John,' she said, somewhere inside my head.

I couldn't speak. I was too frightened. For not only was Jane staring at me so closely, she was actually lying, or rather floating, on top of me, toe to toe, five or six inches above the bed. The coldness poured down from her like the vapour from dry ice, and I felt as if frost crystals were forming on my hair and on my eyelashes, but Jane kept floating above me, ethereal and freezing, suspended in some existence where gravity and substance seemed to have no meaning.

'Make love to me… ' she whispered. Her voice echoed, as if she were speaking in a long empty corridor. 'John… make love to me… '

The comforter slipped away from the bed as if it had a life of its own. Now I was lying naked, with this flickering manifestation of Jane hovering horizontally over me, whispering to me, chilling me, and yet begging me for love.

She didn't move her arm, and yet I felt a sensation like a cold hand drawing itself across my forehead, and touching my cheeks, and then my lips. The coldness crept down my bare sides, tingling my nipples, outlining the muscles of my chest, touching the sides of my hips. Then it touched my testicles, making them harden and shrink; but arousing a curious tingling in my penis which in spite of my fear and in spite of my discomfort, made it rise.

'Make love to me, John… ' she whispered, voice upon voice, echo upon echo. And the coldness massaged me, up and down, until feelings began to stir inside me that I hadn't felt for over a month now.

'John… ' she said again.

'This is a dream,' I told her. 'This cannot be happening. You cannot be real. You're dead, Jane, I've seen you dead and you're dead.'

The cold massage continued, on and on, until I began to feel that I was close to a climax. It was like having sex and yet totally unlike having sex: I could feel slipperiness and softness and the wiry stimulation of pubic hair. Yet it was utterly freezing. My penis felt white with cold, and my body was covered with goosebumps.

'Jane,' I told her, 'this isn't true.' And as my body tightened into a climax, I knew it wasn't true, I knew that it was completely impossible, I knew that I couldn't be having sex with my month-dead wife; and as the semen spattered over my bare stomach there was a hideously loud screech and Jane seemed to come hurtling towards me with her face exploding in a welter of blood and shattered glass and for one instant of total terror her skull seemed to collide face-to-face with mine, the cheeks torn raw from the cheekbones, the eyes gouged out, the lips spread in a smash of strawberries to bare beneath them the grinning bloodstained teeth.

I rolled out of bed and across the floor so fast that I collided with the bureau and knocked over a clinking assembly of after-shave bottles, photograph-frames, and ornaments. A vase of porcelain flowers dropped to the floor and shattered.

I stared at the rumpled-up bed, shivering. There was nothing there at all, no blood, no body, nothing. I felt the stickiness of semen sliding down my stomach and I put my hand down there and touched it. A nightmare, it must have been. An erotic nightmare. A mixture of sexual frustration and fear, all tangled up with images of Jane.

I didn't really want to get back into bed, and I was frightened to fall asleep, but it was two o'clock in the morning now, and I was so tired that I couldn't think of anything but crawling under the comforter and closing my eyes. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead and tried to calm myself down.

As I did so, gradually, I began to see brownish marks appearing on the bedsheet, like scorch marks. Some of them even smouldered slightly, as if they were being burned from beneath the sheet by someone with a red-hot poker, or a cigarette-end. I watched them in fearful fascination, as they formed themselves into curves and curls and straights.

They were blurry, difficult to read, but they were definitely letters; SA.V.GE.

SAVE ME? SAVAGE?

And then it occurred to me. It may only have been because I had been talking to Edward Wardwell this evening about that very thing. But it seemed to fit in so well that I could scarcely believe that the letters meant anything else. Not SAVE ME, not SAVAGE, but SALVAGE.

Through the spirit of my dead wife, whatever lay in the hold of the David Dark was pleading to be rescued.