Death Trance

Eighteen

During the afternoon, the wind got up again, and the weather steadily worsened, until at three o'clock, with heavy showers spattering against the wheelhouse windows, and the waves beginning to dance, Dan Bass called Edward and Jimmy up from the bottom, and told them to call it a day.

They had searched the area beneath us intensively and systematically, but found nothing, not even a scour-pit which might have told them that a wreck was lying beneath the mud. Dan had told me that any obstruction to the normal tidal stream causes the water to speed up as it flows around it, since water is almost completely incompressible; and, that the whirls and eddies which this speeding-up creates leaves a natural excavation in the ocean floor. Because of this tidal scouring even a wreck which has been completely buried by mud leaves an unmistakable trace of its presence: a ghostly image in the ooze.

But today, there was nothing. Only the sloping mud-bank which gradually and smoothly descended into the deeper roads of Salem Harbour. Only fishing-tackle, and nets, and rusted automobiles, and dinghies that had fallen apart into firewood.

Edward came up on deck and peeled off his wetsuit. His lips were blue against his beard, and he was shivering with cold.

'No luck?' I asked him.

He shook his head. 'Not a thing. But we can come out again tomorrow. We still have all of this eastern vector to cover.'

Forrest, who had given up diving about an hour before, and now sat in the wheelhouse in a polo-neck sweater and jeans, said, 'I don't think we're making any progress at all, Edward. I think it's time we did some echo-soundings.'

'Echo-soundings aren't going to tell us anything unless we have a rough idea where the wreck is located,' said Edward. 'Apart from the fact that we can barely afford to rent the equipment, especially if it takes us six or seven months to get any results.'

'I could help financially,' I told him. 'A couple of hundred dollars, if that's any use to you.'

'Well, it's a generous thought,' said Edward. 'But the problem is one of time, more than anything else. We can only dive at weekends, and at this rate it could take us forever to find the David Dark. We've been at it for over a year already.'

'Is there no record at all of where she might have gone down?'

'You know what happened. Esau Hasket made sure that every single mention of the David Dark was cut out of the record books.'

'How about the Evelith library? Do you think there might be something in there?'

'The Evelith library? You have to be joking. Are you joking?'

'Of course I'm not joking.'

'Well, let me tell you something about old man Duglass Evelith. He must be about 80 years old now, I've only seen him once, and these days he never comes out of that house of his. What's more, he won't let anybody else in. He lives with a Narragansett Indian servant, and a girl who may or may not be his grand-daughter. They have all their groceries delivered, and left at the lodge at the end of the driveway. It drives me crazy, to think of all the incredible historical material that one old man is sitting on, but what can I do about it?'

'You sound like you've tried to get in there,' I said.

'Have I tried! I've written, telephoned, and called up there five or six times. Each time: a polite refusal. Mr. Evelith regrets his library is private, and not open to inspection.'

The Alexis was puttering back towards Salem Harbour now, her diving-flag struck and packed away, her stern rising and falling as the tide surged in. Dan was singing a sea-song about Sally Free and Easy, who 'took a sailor's loving… for a nursery game.'

I said to Edward, 'Maybe you've been approaching Evelith the wrong way. Maybe you should offer him something, instead of asking for something.'

'What could I possibly offer a man like Evelith?'

'He's a collector, isn't he? Perhaps you could offer him an antique. I've got a portable writing-case in the shop that was supposed to have belonged to one of the members of the witchcraft trials jury, Henry Herrick. It's engraved with the initials HH, anyway.'

'I think you may have a good point there,' put in Jimmy. 'It's worth a try, anyway. People like Evelith hide themselves away because they think that everybody wants to lay their hands on their stuff. Look at the way he sells his pictures… anonymously, in case anybody finds out where they came from.'

Edward seemed a little put out that he hadn't thought of tempting old man Evelith with a bribe. But he said, as graciously as he could manage, 'Let's go up there this afternoon, shall we? It's only a half-hour's drive. Maybe it is a good idea.'

'I'm too tired to make it today,' I told him. 'Besides, I have my parents-in-law coming over to the cottage. How about tomorrow morning, about ten?'

Edward shrugged. 'Okay by me. How about you, Gilly? You want to come?' He wouldn't normally have asked her, but I sensed that he was trying to find out just what it was between Gilly and me, if anything. Gilly looked across at me with a direct expression on her face, and said, 'No thanks. I have to work in the shop, tomorrow. It's all go for us independent business ladies, you know. Can't relax for a minute.'

'Suit yourself,' said Edward.

We reached the harbour and tied up. As we stowed the diving gear away in the back of Dan Bass' station wagon, Forrest came over and clapped a friendly hand on my shoulder. 'You did well, this morning, for a first dive. If you want to put in some training, come on up to the Sub-Aqua Club Monday evening. When we find that son-of-a-bitch, you'll want to be down there to see it.'

'We'd better go tell the police and the coastguard about Mrs Goult,' I reminded him.

'Dan will do that. They know him over at police headquarters. The diving club is always coming up with suicidal mothers and drowned babies and unwanted dogs in sacks full of rocks.'

'Seems like the sea conceals a multitude of sins,' I remarked.

'You betcha,' said Forrest, and he was serious.

Gilly came over to my car as I was about to leave. She leaned in at the open window, her hair blown about by the breeze, and said, 'You're really going back to the cottage tonight?'

'I have to.'

She looked at me without saying anything, then raised her face against the wind. T wish you wouldn't,' she said.

'I wish I didn't have to. But there's no point in running away from it. I have to face up to what's going on, and I have to find some way of sorting it out. I'm not going through another night like last night. Sooner or later, one or other of us, or both of us, are going to get hurt. I haven't forgotten what happened to poor old Mrs Edgar Simons. I don't want anything like that happening to you. Or to me, for that matter.'

'Well,' she said, with a sad and philosophical smile, 'that was a whirlwind romance that whirled itself in and whirled itself out again.'

'I hope you don't think that it's over,' I told her.

'It isn't, not as far as I'm concerned. Not unless you want it to be.'

I held out my hand, and Gilly took it, and squeezed it.

'Can I call you later?' I asked her.

She nodded, and said, 'I'd like that,' and made a kiss with her eyes.

As I drove off, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw her standing there on the dock, her hands in the pockets of her Parka. She hadn't made me forget Jane. I don't think any girl could have done that. But for the first time since Jane had died, I felt alive again, and that the world might be worth living in, after all. I thought how strange it was that human optimism is rarely invested in hoped-for events, or the fateful course of future history; but rather in other people, each of them as uncertain and confused as we are. There is no stronger courage than the courage of knowing that someone loves you, and that you are not alone.

I drove back to Quaker Lane. At the bottom of the hill, fixing his fence, I saw George Markham, and I pulled the Toronado to a halt and climbed out.

'How are you doing, George?' I asked him.

He stood up, wiping his creosote-stained hands on his Oshkosh overalls. 'I heard they dropped the charges against you,' he said. He was trying to be blunt, but I could tell that he was embarrassed.

'Insufficient evidence,' I told him. 'Besides which, I didn't do it.'

'Well, nobody said you did,' said George, hastily.

'Nobody said that I didn't. But somebody said that I was rambling that evening, and not myself.'

'You wasn't yourself. You have to be fair about that.'

I thrust my hands into my pants, pockets and looked at him with a grin. 'You're right, George. I wasn't myself. But then who would have been, if they'd seen what I'd seen.'

George looked at me narrowly, one eye half-closed, as if he were trying to weigh me up. 'You really did see Jane, swinging on the swing?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And I've seen her again since.' He was silent for a long time, thinking. It was cold out there, in the front garden, and he wiped his nose with his hand. I stayed where I was, hands in my pockets, watching him.

At last he said, 'Keith Reed didn't believe you. But then Keith don't like to believe anybody too much when it comes to hauntings.'

'Do you believe me?'

George, ashamed, nodded.

'You've seen a ghost for yourself, haven't you?' I asked him. I wasn't sure that he had, not at all, but there was something about the way he was looking at me, something scared and uncertain and deeply impressionable, something that told me: this man has seen an apparition with his own eyes.

'I, uh… heard my brother Wilf,' he said, in a throat-dry voice.

'Did you see him, as well as hear him?'

George lowered his head and looked down at the ground. Then he raised his head again, and said, 'Come on inside. Let me show you something.'

I followed him into the house. As I closed the door behind me, the first collision of thunder sounded in the distance, out to sea, and the wind suddenly rose, and banged George's garden gate. George led me into the living-room, and went across to a dark-oak bureau next to the fireplace, which he opened up and rummaged around inside. At last he produced a framed photograph, quite a large one, which he solemnly handed to me, as if he were presenting me with an honorary degree.

I examined the photograph carefully, even turning the frame around and looking at the back of it. It was a black-and-white picture of a highway, somewhere local by the look of it, with trees in the background, and a parked car a little way off by the side of the road. That was all. One of the dullest photographs I think I had ever seen.

'Well?' I asked George. 'I don't quite know what I'm supposed to be looking for.'

George took off his spectacles and folded them. 'You're supposed to be looking for my brother,' he said, pointing to the picture.

I peered more closely. 'I don't see him. I don't see anyone.'

'That's the point,' said George. 'This used to be a photograph of my brother, standing right in the front. Then, two or three weeks ago, I saw that he'd moved back a ways, no more than six or eight feet, but back. I didn't credit it at first, thought I was making a mistake, but the next week he moved even further back, and last week he disappeared back down the highway altogether. That's why I took the picture down from the shelf. My brother's gone from that picture, and that's all there is to it. I don't know how, or why, but he's gone.'

I handed the photograph back. 'The same thing's been happening to my pictures of Jane,' I told him. They've been moving, and changing. Nearly the same, but not quite.'

'What do you think it is?' asked George. He grasped my arm anxiously, and looked at me right in the face. 'Do you think it's witchcraft?'

'Of a kind,' I said. 'It's very hard to tell. But some of the people from the Peabody Museum are looking into it. They may find a way of putting your brother to rest. Jane, too. And all the other spirits that have been haunting Granitehead. At least, well, I hope they will.'

George put his spectacles back on again. 'I heard Wilf crying,' he said, staring sadly at the empty highway in the photograph. 'Night after night, in the spare room upstairs, I heard him crying. There was nobody there, nobody that I could see, anyway. But this sobbing and weeping that went on and on, like a man in terrible despair. I can't tell you how much that affected me, John.'

I gripped his shoulder as reassuringly as I could. 'Try not to let it worry you, George. It may sound like Wilf's unhappy, but maybe he's not. Maybe you're only hearing the most stressful side of what he feels like, now that he's dead. It's possible that people's personalities divide up, when they die, and that somewhere there's a happy Wilf, as well as a sad one.'

George shrugged. 'I don't really believe that, John. Thanks for the thought.'

'I don't know what else to tell you,' I said. 'I don't know anything about it myself, except that these people from the Peabody think that they may have guessed the cause of all these hauntings.'

'What is it? Radiation, something like that?'

'Not exactly. But listen, when I know some more, I'll come down and let you know. I promise. Especially if you give me that game of stud you promised.'

We shook hands, although I wasn't quite sure why. Then I left George to fix up his fence, got back in my car, and drove up the uneven roadway to Quaker Lane Cottage.

I had been dreading coming back to the cottage ever since I drove away from the dock at Salem. I had dawdled along West Shore Drive at less than 20 miles an hour, much to the annoyance of a truck driver behind me. But there it was at last, at the top of the hill, looking gray and old and peculiarly squalid under the threatening sky. I made up my mind as I turned around and parked in front of it that this was going to be the last night I was going to sleep here. The cottage seemed so cold and hostile that there wasn't any reason for me to stay.

I climbed out of the car and approached the cottage with a terrible sense of foreboding. A stray shutter clapped at an upstairs window: the hook had been pulled free from the outside wall during the high winds of the past few days, and unless I wanted it to bang all night, I was going to have go up on a ladder and fix it. I opened the front door, and went into the house, and it was just the same as when I had left it. Chilly, stale-smelling, without warmth or atmosphere or any sense of contentment.

The first task was to light the living-room fire. When that was licking up, I poured myself a drink, and walked into the kitchen, still wearing my raincoat, to see what I could make myself for supper. There was Salisbury steak; or chicken-in-gravy; or hot tamales in a can. I didn't feel like any of those. What I really had a hankering for was one of Jane's chilli-con-carnes, fiery with pepper and thick with beans. I felt very sad for her then, and sad for myself. The flickering apparition of her which had been haunting me these past three nights had half-distorted my real loving memory of her, and when I thought of her now I couldn't help picturing that horrified electrical face.

'Jane,' I whispered to myself; maybe a little bit to her, too. Dante had written 'nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria' — there isn't any greater sorrow than to remember a time of happiness when you're in misery. My old boss at MidWestern Chemical Bonding had taught me that one.

'John,' a voice whispered back.

She was there, in the cottage. I knew she was there. In the wind that sighed down the chimneys, in the beams and the woodwork and the lath-and-plaster walls. There was no way of exorcizing her, because she had become the cottage, and in an extraordinary way she had become me, too. I knew intuitively that however far I travelled, even if I went back to St Louis, or across to the West Coast, Jane would always be there, whispering, cajoling me to make love to her, drawing me deeper and deeper into the half-world of electrical purgatory, and making it impossible for me to continue to lead my life. I had loved her when she died, but if she kept on haunting me I knew that I would end up hating her. Perhaps that was what had happened to Mrs Edgar Simons. She had refused to submit to her dead husband's demands, and he had killed her. How long would it take before that happened to me?

It seemed to me that the dead were jealously possessing the living. Charlie Manzi's marriage had been ruined by the ghostly appearance of his dead son. George Markham was growing increasingly anxious about his brother. My relationship with Gilly was in suspense until I could lay Jane's spirit to rest. And God knows how many other bereaved people in Granitehead and Salem were finding that the overwhelming demands of their dead loved ones were making it impossible for them to give affection and attention to the living.

The other night I had wondered whether I would meet Jane again if I were to die. What had she whispered to me, as I struggled under the water this morning? 'Don't leave me,' as if she wanted me to die, too, so that we could be together again. I wondered if the same thing had happened to Mrs Goult. Had she been called by her recently-dead mother? Had she felt that the only way in which she possibly be happy was to commit suicide, and join her mother in that flickering, restless world of ghosts?

Perhaps I was being too inspirational, like Edward. But I began to believe that all of these hauntings had the same purpose: to alienate the people whom the dead had loved from the real and physical world, to encourage them to believe that death would be their only chance of contentment and happiness. It was as if the dead were trying to exorcize the living, instead of the other way around. And whether it had anything to do with the David Dark or not, I believed then that Edward was right, and that some powerful and malevolent influence was at work.

I finished my drink and walked back into the living-room to pour myself another. The long-case clock in the hallway whirred, and then struck six. It was later than I had thought: time seemed to have jumped, the way it sometimes does after four p.m. The fire was crackling, and popping, and I stacked on another couple of logs.

It was then that I glanced across at the painting of the David Dark, which Edward had left propped up against the side of my armchair. It was different, somehow; although I couldn't understand why. I picked it up, and examined it under the lamplight. It appeared to be gloomier, in a way, as if the sun had gone in. And I was sure that when I had first looked at it, there hadn't been such a menacing build-up of clouds on the right-hand side of the picture.

Perhaps this painting was like spiritual litmus. When dangerous events were in the air, it darkened, and grew more threatening. Even the painted waves seemed to be rougher, and the painted trees were bending in an unseen wind.

I put the picture down again. I was beginning to think that tonight was going to prove to be something of a showdown: a frightening confrontation between me and the Bedfords and the ghosts of Granitehead. A squall of rain lashed against the leaded window, as if in temper, and I stood where I was, chilled in spite of the fire, and wished to God that I knew how to bring this grotesque and terrifying dream to an end.