Death Trance

Sixteen

We drove up to Gilly's apartment on Witch Hill Road, overlooking Gallows Hill Park. The apartment was small but scrupulously neat, with framed fashion designs on white-painted walls, and yuccas in tasteful white Portuguese planters. I was still smarting from all those glass-cuts, but all of them had been clean, and only one of them, on my shoulder, was actually bleeding.

'Would you like some wine?' asked Gilly.

I sat down stiffly on the beige corduroy sofa. ‘I’ll have a large Scotch if you've got it.'

'Sorry,' she said, coming in from the kitchen with a large frosted bottle of Pinot Chardonnay. 'Everybody I know is a wine-drinker.'

'Don't tell me they're vegetarians, too.'

'Some of them,' she smiled. She set two tall-stemmed glasses down on the table, and sat down beside me. I took the bottle and poured us both brimful measures. At that moment I felt that if I had to drink wine, I might just as well drink a lot of it.

'How much do you think the Hawthorne will charge you?' Gilly asked.

'Couple of thousand, at least. Those plate-glass windows must cost a fortune.'

'I still don't really understand what was going on.'

I raised my glass in a silent toast and swallowed half of it almost straight away. 'Jealous wife,' I told her.

She stared at me uncertainly. 'You told me your wife was — '

'She is,' I said, assertively. Then, more quietly, 'She is.'

'Then you mean to say that what happened tonight — that was her! Your wife? She did that?'

'I don't know. It's a possibility. It could have been nothing more than a freak gust of wind. You remember that high-rise in Boston, with the windows that kept falling out? Maybe the same thing happened at the Hawthorne.'

Gilly frowned at me in complete non-comprehension. 'But if your wife is dead, how could it have been even a possibility that it was her? You're telling me that she's a ghost, too? Your dead wife is a ghost?'

‘I’ve seen her, yes,' I admitted.

'You've seen her,' said Gilly. 'My God, I can't believe it.'

'You don't have to. But it's the truth. I've seen her two or three times now, and tonight, when we were making love, I saw her again. I looked at your face and instead it was her face.'

Gilly took a drink of wine and then looked at me levelly. 'This is getting very hard to play along with, you know that?'

'It isn't any easier for me.'

'Do you know how often I've been to bed with a man, almost the moment I've met him, the way I did with you?'

'I wish you'd stop trying to justify yourself,' I told her. 'I went to bed with you just as quickly as you went to bed with me. Just because you're the woman and I'm the man, does that make any difference?'

'It's not supposed to,' said Gilly, a little defensively.

'In that case, don't let it.'

'But now you've put me in a weird position.'

'Weird?' I asked her, picking up my wine again.

'Well, weird, yes — because the first man I've ever picked to pounce on — the very first man ever — and he turns out to have some obsession with his dead wife. And the windows of his goddamned hotel room fall in.'

I stood up, and walked across to the patio doors which overlooked Gilly's narrow third-storey balcony. Outside, geraniums trembled in the vibrant night wind. Beyond, I could see the smattering of lights that was Witchcraft Heights. It was past two o'clock in the morning now, and I was tired and shaken beyond argument, beyond reproaches. My ghostly reflection in the dark glass lifted his wine, and drank.

'I wish I could say that I'm obsessed with my wife,' I said quietly. 'I wish I could say that I'm suffering from hysteria; that I've never seen her or heard her anywhere else except inside of my mind. But she's real, Gilly. She's haunting me. Not just the cottage where we used to live, but me, as a person. That's another reason why I'm going to go diving tomorrow, even though I don't want to. I want my wife to be put at rest.'

Gilly said nothing. I came back from the window and sat opposite her, although she wouldn't look at me.

'If you want to forget we ever met, that's all right by me,' I told her. 'Well — it's not exactly all right. It'll upset me. But I can understand how you feel. Anybody else would feel the same. Even my doctor thinks it's nothing but post-bereavement shock.'

I hesitated, and then I said, 'You're a very attractive person, Gilly. You do exciting things to me. And I still stand by what I said earlier on — how amazing it is that two people can work up a storm together only minutes after they've met. We could both have a good time; you know that. But I have to tell you that Jane's spirit is still around me, and that there may be danger, the way there was tonight.'

Gilly looked at me, and her eyes were glistening. 'It's not the danger,' she said, with a catch in her voice.

'I know. It's the image of the ex-wife.'

'I had that before. I had an affair with a married man when I was seventeen. A bank executive. His wife wasn't dead, of course, but she was always there. Either on the telephone, or in the back of his mind.'

'And you definitely don't want to go through it again.'

She held out her hand to me, 'John,' she said, 'it's nothing against you. It's just that I'm feeling threatened. And there's one thing that I've always promised myself, ever since I started working on my own. Never let anyone threaten you, no matter how.'

I didn't know what to say to that. She was right, of course. She may have thrown herself at me like a sexually-deprived tigress, and I may have thrown myself back at her like an equally sexually-deprived tiger. But she was under no obligation to accept me as a lover with all of the problems I was carrying with me. All the phantoms, and the fears, and the might-have-beens. Not to mention the unhealed wound of my recently-lost wife and our unborn baby.

'All right,' I told her. I let go of her hand. 'I don't like what you're saying, but I can understand why you're saying it.'

'I'm sorry,' she told me. 'I don't think you have any idea how much you attract me. You're just my type.'

'Nobody with a ghost on their back can possibly be your type. They can't be anybody's type. Not until they've been exorcized.'

Gilly sat and looked at me for a while in silence, and then got up and went into the kitchen. I followed her, and stood in the doorway, while she took out eggs and muffins and coffee.

'You don't have to cook me anything,' I said.

'Breakfast, that's all,' she smiled. She broke the eggs into a basin and began to whip them up.

'Have you thought about exorcism?' she asked me. 'Getting a priest around to lay your wife to rest?'

I shook my head. 'I don't think it would work. I don't know, maybe it might. But I think the only way that any of these apparitions in Granitehead are going to get any peace is if we find out why they're so restless, what it is that makes them appear.'

'You mean like raising the David Dark?’

'Maybe. Edward seems to think that's the answer.'

'And what do you think?' asked Gilly, taking out a pan and cutting a little sunflower shortening into it.

I rubbed my eyes. 'I'm trying to keep an open mind. I don't know. I'm just trying to keep sane.'

She looked at me kindly. 'You're very sane,' she said. 'You're also a beautiful lover. I hope to God you can give your wife some peace.'

There was no need to answer that remark. I watched her scramble eggs and toast muffins and perk coffee, and thought about nothing but sleep, and tomorrow's dive. The cold waters of Granitehead Neck were out there now, restless as the spirits of Granitehead itself, waiting for the dawn.