Death Trance

One

I opened my eyes, abruptly; unsure if I had been asleep or not. Was I still asleep now, and dreaming? It was so dark that I could hardly tell if my eyes had actually opened. Gradually I was able to make out the luminous hands of my old-fashioned bedside clock; two dim green glows, like the eyes of an ailing but malevolent goblin. Ten after two, on a cold March night on the Massachusetts coast. But nothing at all to suggest what might have woken me.

I lay tensely where I was, snuggled up alone in that big old colonial bed, holding my breath, listening. There was the wind, of course, rattling and chattering at the window, but out here on the Granitehead peninsula, where your bedroom is separated from the shores of Nova Scotia by nothing but hundreds of miles of dark and ruminative sea, the wind is a fact of life. Persistent, fretful, and fussy, even in spring.

I listened with the acuteness of someone who was still desperately unused to being left alone at night; with the same hypersensitive ears as a wife left at home while her husband goes away on a business trip. And when the wind suddenly rose, and worried around the house, and then just as suddenly died away again, my heartbeats rose and pounded and died away with it.

The window rattled, fell silent, rattled.

Then I heard it, and even though it was almost inaudible, even though I probably perceived it more through my teeth and more through my nerve-endings than I did through my ears, I recognized it at once as the sound that had woken'me up, and my senses prickled like static electricity. Plaintive and monotonous, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, the chains of my garden swing.

I stared into the darkness, eyes wide. The luminous goblin-eyes of my clock stared back at me, and the more I stared the more they looked like goblin-eyes and the less they looked like my bedroom clock. I defied them to move, defied them to wink at me. But outside in the garden, on and on, there was that creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik. And the eyes refused to wink.

It's only the wind, I thought to myself. It's the wind, right? It must be. The same wind that's been rattling my window all night. The same wind that's been having such breathy conversations with itself down my bedroom chimney. But I had to admit to myself that I had never known the wind blow my swing before; not even on a gusty night like this, when I could clearly hear the seething, disturbed sleep of the North Atlantic Ocean as it eddied a mile-and-a-half away around the rocks of Granitehead Neck; and the garden gates of Granitehead Village banged as they always did in intermittent applause. The swing was too heavy, a high-backed chair carved out of solid American Hop Hornbeam, suspended by iron chains. The only way that it could possibly creak was if somebody were to swing in it, steady and high.

Creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, over and over; sometimes muffled by the wind, and the background roar of the sea, but continuing without a single break in rhythm while the clock hands moved through five whole minutes and the goblin appeared to incline his head.

This is madness, I told myself. There's nobody out there, at twenty after two in the morning, swinging. It's a kind of madness, anyway. More like a depressive neurosis, like Dr Rosen was trying to tell me about; a change in perception, a shift in mental balance. It happens to almost everybody when they lose somebody close to them. Dr Rosen said that I would probably experience it quite often: the unnerving sensation that Jane was still with me; that she was still alive after all. He had gone through similar delusions himself, after his own wife died. He had glimpsed her in supermarkets, just turning around the end of an aisle, and out of sight. He had heard her mixing pastry in the kitchen, and hurried to open the kitchen door, only to find that the room was quite empty, that the bowls and the spoons remained spotless and unused. This must be the same, this creaking I thought I was hearing. Real enough, in its way, but actually a sympathetic hallucination caused by the emotional aftereffects of sudden bereavement.

And yet: creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, on and on, and somehow the longer it went on the harder it became to believe that it was nothing more than my mind deceiving my ears.

You're a rational adult man, I told myself. Why the hell should you climb out of a warm comfortable bed on a night like this, just to go to the window and watch your own garden-swing blowing backwards and forwards in a March gale?

Yet — what if there is somebody out there? What if there is somebody swinging, the way Jane used to, hands held high to clasp the chains, head leaning back against the seat, eyes closed? Well, what if there is? That's nothing to be afraid of.

You really think there's somebody out there? You really believe that somebody took the trouble to climb over your backyard palings and stumble their way through eighty feet of unkempt orchard, just to sit on your rusty old garden-swing? On a black windy night, cold as a witch's nipple, with the thermometer down to zero?

It's possible. Admit it, it's possible. Somebody may have been walking back up Quaker Lane from the village, drunk maybe, or even just playful, or maybe pensive, or depressed? And maybe they just caught sight of the swing and maybe they just decided it would be fun to try it, and hang the wind, and the cold, and the chance of getting caught.

The trouble was, I thought to myself, who could that somebody be? There was only one more house on Quaker Lane before it narrowed and dwindled into a grassy horse-track, and then zigzagged downhill to the Salem Harbour shoreline. The track was stony and broken and almost impossible to follow in the daytime, let alone at night. And what was more, that last house was almost empty in the winter, or so we'd been told.

It could have been Thomas Essex, the old hermit in the wide-brimmed caballero hat who lived in that run-down sea-cottage close to Waterside Cemetery. Sometimes he passed this way, singing and hopping; and once he had confided in Jane that he could catch sea-bass just by whistling to them. Lillibulero, he said, that's what they liked. He could juggle, too, with clasp knives.

But then I thought: he's eccentric, sure. But he's old, too. Sixty-eight if he's a day. And what's a 68-year-old man doing on my swing, at well past two o'clock in the morning, on a night like this?

I made up my mind to ignore the creaking and go back to sleep. I bundled the soft hand-stitched comforter around my ears, burrowed down into the bed, closed my eyes, and breathed with exaggerated deepness. If Jane had still been here, she probably would have teased me into going to take a look out of the window. But I was tired. You're tired, right, you need your sleep. I hadn't been able to get more than four or five hours a night since the accident, often less, and tomorrow I had to be up early for a breakfast-time meeting with Jane's father; and then I had to go to Holyoke Square to Endicott's, where they were putting up a collection of maritime prints and paintings, rare ones, worth bidding for.

I managed to keep my eyes closed for something like an entire minute. Then I opened them again and the goblin-eyes were still watching me. And from the garden, no matter how forcefully I muffled my ears, that continual creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik.

And then… God, I could swear it, someone singing. Faintly, in a high-pitched voice, blown by the wind; so indistinct that it could have been nothing more than the draught blowing across the top of the chimney-stacks. But singing, all the same. A woman's voice, clear and particularly mournful.

I scrambled out of bed so quickly that I barked my knee on the mahogany bedside table, and sent the goblin-clock tumbling and ringing across the floor. I was too scared to get up slowly: it had to be a kamikaze charge or nothing at all. I dragged the comforter along with me, wrapping it around my waist, and stumbled to the window breathless and blind.

It was so damned dark out there that I could hardly see anything at all. The very faintest distinction in tone between hills and sky. The shadowy thrashing of the trees as the wind relentlessly bowed them down, and bowed them down again. I stared and listened, listened and stared, feeling ridiculous and heroic at the same time. I pressed the palm of my hand against the window-pane, to stop it from rattling. But the creaking of the garden-swing seemed to have died away, and there was nobody singing, nobody that I could hear.

And yet that tune seemed to echo in my head, that peculiar mournful tune. It reminded me of the sea-chanty that old Thomas Essex had been singing the very first time we came across him, as he walked up Quaker Lane.

'O the men they sailed from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores. But the fish they caught were naught but bones With hearts crush'd in their jaws.'

I had later found it written down in Sea Songs of Old Salem, by George Blyth; but unlike almost all the other chanties in the book, there was no explanation of what it meant, or whether it had any foundation in genuine local history. It was simply subtitled 'A Curiositie.' And yet who had been singing 'a curiositie' outside my cottage, so late at night; and why? There couldn't have been more than a dozen people in Granitehead who knew that song by heart, or its air.

Jane had always said the song sounded 'deliciously sad.'

I waited by the window until my shoulders began to feel cold. My eyes became slowly accustomed to the darkness, and I could indistinctly make out the black rocky reaches of Granitehead Neck, limned by the Atlantic surf. I took my hand away from the window-pane, and it was chilled and clammy. My handprint stayed on the glass for a moment, a ghostly greeting, and then faded away.

Groping my way back across the bedroom, I found the lightswitch and turned on the light. The room was the same as always. The big wooden early-American bed, with its puffy duck-down pillows; the carved double-fronted wardrobe; the wooden wedding-chest. On top of the bureau on the other side of the room was a small oval mirror in which I could just see the pale blur of my own face.

I wondered if it would be an admission that I was going to pieces if I went downstairs and poured myself a drink. I picked up the royal blue bathrobe I had dropped on the floor when I went to bed last night, and tugged it on.

The house had been so silent since Jane had gone. I had never realized how much noise, how much aura, a living person actually gives off; even when they're asleep. When Jane had been alive, she had filled the house with her warmth and her character and her actual breathing. Now, no matter which room I looked into, there was nothing but oldness and silence. Rocking-chairs which never rocked. Drapes which were never drawn unless I drew them myself. An oven which was never lit unless I went into the kitchen and lit it myself for one of my own solitary meals.

Nobody to talk to: nobody even to smile at when I didn't feel like talking. And the enormous incomprehensible thought that I would never see her again, ever.

It had been a month. A month and two days, and a handful of hours. I was over the self-pity. I think I was over the self-pity. I was certainly over the crying, although you can't lose someone like Jane without being susceptible for the rest of your life to unexpected tears. Dr Rosen had warned me that it would happen from time to time,

and it did: I would be sitting at an auction, ready to bid for some special piece of marine memorabilia which I particularly wanted to acquire for the shop; and I would suddenly find that tears were sliding down my cheeks, and I would have to excuse myself and retreat to the men's room and blow my nose a lot.

'Damn spring colds,' I would say to the attendant.

And he would look at me and know exactly what was wrong because there is an unadmitted kinship between all the closely-bereaved, a feeling which they can never share with anybody else because it would sound too much as if they were being morbidly sorry for themselves. And yet, damn it, I was.

I went into the low-beamed living-room, opened up the sideboard, and took stock of what liquor I had left. Half a mouthful of Chivas Regal; a teacupful of gin. A bottle of sweet sherry to which Jane had taken a fancy when she was first pregnant. I decided on tea instead. I almost always drank tea when I woke up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Bohea, without milk or sugar. A taste I had acquired from the people of Salem.

I was turning the key in the sideboard when I heard the kitchen door close. Not slam, as if it had been blown by the wind, but close, on its old-fashioned latch. I froze where I was, breath caught, heart banging, and listened. There was no other sound, only the wind blowing; but I was sure that I could sense a presence, a feeling that there was somebody else in the house. After a month on my own, a month of complete quiet, I had become alert to every little fidget, every little squeak, every little scurry of mice; and the larger vibrations of human beings. Human beings resonate, like cellos.

I was sure there was somebody there, in the kitchen. There was somebody there, but strangely there was no warmth, and none of the usual friendly noises of humanity. I crossed the brown shagpile carpet as silently as I could, and went to the fireplace, still ashy and glowing from yesterday evening's logs. I picked up the long brass grate-poker, with its heavy seahorse head, and hefted it in my hand.

In the hallway, my bare feet made a squeaking sound on the waxed pottery tiles. The long-case Tompion clock which Jane's parents had given us for a wedding-present ticked deeply and thoughtfully inside its crotch-mahogany torso. I reached the kitchen door, and listened and listened for the slightest creak, the slightest breath, the slightest frisson of material against wood.

Nothing. Just the clock, measuring out the rest of my life the same way it had measured out Jane's. Just the wind, which would blow across Granitehead Neck long after I had left there. Even the sea seemed to have been stilled.

'Is anybody there?' I called, in a voice that started off loud and ended up strangled. And waited, for somebody or nobody to answer.

Was that singing? Distant, faraway singing?

'O the men they sail'd from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores…'

Or was it nothing more than the draught, sucking at the bottom of the garden door?

At last, I eased open the latch which secured the kitchen door; hesitated, and then pushed the door inwards. No groaning or squeaking, I had oiled the hinges myself. I took one step, then another, then patted my hand a little too frantically against the wall, trying to find the light switch. The fluorescent light flickered, paused, then blinked on. I reared up the poker in front of me in nervous reaction, and then I realized that the old-style kitchen was empty, and I lowered it again.

The garden door was still locked and bolted, and the key was still lying where I had left it on top of the softly-humming icebox. The polished Delft tiles behind the kitchen range shone as blandly as ever, windmills and Dutch boats and tulips and clogs. The copper saucepans hung in mildly-shining rows; and my soup-bowl from last night's supper was still there, waiting to be washed.

I opened up cupboards, banged doors, made a lot of noise to reassure myself that I was really alone. I stared fiercely out of the window, into the absolute ebony blackness of the night, to frighten off anybody who might be lurking in the garden. But all I saw was the shadowy reflection of my own face, and I think that frightened me more than anything. Fear itself is frightening. To see yourself frightened is worse.

I walked out of the kitchen, and back into the hallway, and called out again, 'Who's there? Is anybody there?' and again there was silence. But I had a curiously unsettled feeling that something or somebody was passing through the air, as if atmospheric molecules were being disturbed by unseen movements. There was a sensation of coldness, too: a sensation of loss and painful unhappiness. The same coldness you feel after a road accident, or when you hear your own child crying in the night, an infant's dread of what the dark might bring.

I stood in the hallway, unsure of what to do or even of how to feel. It was quite plain that there was nobody here; that apart from me the house was empty. There was no physical evidence of any intrusion. No doors were forced, no windows were broken. And yet it was equally obvious that somehow the perspective of the house had been subtly altered. I felt as if I was now looking at the hallway from a new viewpoint, the right-hand picture of a stereoscopic photograph, instead of the left.

I went into the kitchen, hesitated again, and then decided to make myself a cup of tea. Maybe a couple of aspirin would help, too. I went over to the worktop where the kettle was standing, and to my alarm there was already a thin curl of steam rising out of the spout.

With the tips of my fingers, I touched the kettle's lid. It was scalding hot. I stepped back from the kettle and frowned at it. My frowning reflection, ridiculously distorted, stared back at me from its stainless-steel sides. I knew that I had been thinking of making tea, but had I actually switched on the kettle myself? I couldn't remember doing it. Yet the kettle had boiled, which usually took two or three minutes, and automatically switched itself off.

I must have done it myself. I was tired, that was all. I reached up to the wall-cupboard to take myself down a cup and saucer. And as I did so I could hear it again, I was convinced that I could hear it again, that faintest of singing. I paused, straining my ears, but it was gone. I took out the cup and saucer, and the small Spode teapot, and switched on the kettle again to bring the water back to the boil.

Maybe Jane's sudden death had affected me more than I had realized. Maybe bereavement found ways of expressing itself in visions, tricks of the mind, and odd sensations. Hadn't Jung talked about a collective unconscious, a pool of dreams in which we all shared? Maybe if one soul was lost to that pool, it set up ripples that everybody could feel, especially those who were closest.

The kettle was almost boiling again when, slowly, its shiny surface began to mist over, as if the temperature in the kitchen had suddenly dropped. But it was a chilly night, and so it didn't surprise me too much. I went across to the other side of the kitchen to fetch the old pewter tea-caddy. When I came back, however, for a few brief seconds, I was sure that I saw writing on the misted side of the kettle, as if somebody had quickly scrawled something there with their finger. At that instant, the kettle boiled, and the switch clicked out, and the mist faded away. But I peered at the kettle intently for a sign of what I had seen, and after I had filled up the teapot I boiled the kettle again to see if the writing reappeared. There was a smear which might have been an 'S' and another smear which might have been an 'e', but that was all. I was probably going quietly bananas. I took my tea into the living-room, and sat down by the still-warm fireplace, and sipped it, and tried to get my mind straight.

That couldn't have been writing. It couldn't have been anything more than greasy marks on the side of the kettle, where the condensation wouldn't cling. I didn't believe in ouija boards or automatic writing, or 'presences'. I didn't believe in poltergeists and I didn't believe in any of that occult thought-transference stuff, psychokinetics, moving ashtrays around just by thinking about them, any of that. I wasn't saying that people weren't entitled to believe in them if they wanted to, but I didn't. Not really. I mean, I wasn't prepared to reject occult phenomena out of hand. Maybe some people had actually witnessed that kind of thing. But I hadn't, and more than anything else I prayed that I wasn't going to.

I very much didn't want to think that Quaker Lane Cottage might possibly be haunted, especially by anyone I knew. Especially, God forbid, by Jane.

I stayed in the living-room until the long-case clock in the hallway struck five, sleepless and unhappy and deeply disturbed. At last the North Atlantic dawn came austerely through the leaded windows, and dressed the living-room in gray. The wind had died down now, to a chilly breeze, and I went out through the back door and took a barefoot walk in the dewy garden, dressed in nothing but my bathrobe and my old sheepskin jacket, and stood by the garden swing.

It must have been low-tide, because far out over the sands of Granitehead Neck, the terns were already swooping down for clams. Their cries were like the cries of children. Off to the north-west, I could see the Winter Island lighthouse, still winking. A cold photographic morning. A picture of the gone world.

The swing was more than 70 or 80 years old, constructed like an armchair, with a wide carved splat. On the cresting-rail was chiseled the face of the sun, Old Sol, and the words 'All, except their sun, is set,' which Jane had discovered was a quotation from Byron. The chains of the swing were suspended from a kind of gallows; but this was hard to make out, because whoever had built the swing all those years ago had planted a small apple-tree beside it, and now the swing was completely umbrellaed with gnarled old fruit-branches, and in the summer the apple-blossom showered all around you when you were swinging, like snow.

Swinging (Jane had said, as she swung and sang) was the pastime of fools and jesters, a kind of medieval madness not unlike the whirling of whirling Dervishes. It reminded her of motley and mummers and pig's-bladders on sticks, and she said that it had once been a way to conjure up imps and devils and hobgoblins. I remembered laughing at her, as she swung; and as I stood there that early morning alone, I found my eyes following the arc in which she had once been swinging, although the swing-chair itself now hung still, beaded with dew, unmoved by the breeze, and quite unmoved by my memories.

I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets. It looked as if it was going to be one of those clear, fresh Atlantic days, cold as hell, but bright. I pushed the swing a little so that the chains complained, but even when I pushed it harder, I couldn't reproduce the noise I had heard last night. To set up that distinctive creakkk-squik, you had to sit right on the swing, right up on that high-backed seat, and push yourself back, and up, and back, and up, until your toes were almost brushing the lower branches of the apple-tree.

I walked down through the orchard, right to the end of my garden, and looked down the twisting slope of Quaker Lane towards Granitehead Village. Two or three chimneys were already smoking, fishermen's houses, and the smoke was leaning off westwards, towards Salem, whose skyline was already becoming clearer across the harbour.

Slowly, I returned to the house, glancing from side to side as I went for any signs of crushed grass, or footprints, any sign that somebody had visited my garden in the night; but there was none. I went back into the kitchen, leaving the door open, and brewed myself another cup of Bohea, and ate three Pepperidge Farm coconut cookies, feeling unreasonably guilty that this was my entire breakfast. Jane had always insisted on cooking me bacon, or waffles, or shirred eggs. I took my cup of tea upstairs with me, and went to the bathroom to shave.

We had fitted out the bathroom with a large Victorian basin we had rescued from a derelict house in Swampscott, and we had adorned it with huge brass faucets. Over the basin was a genuine barbershop mirror, surrounded by an oval frame of inlaid kingwood. I inspected myself in the glass and decided I didn't look too bad for a man who had been awake for most of the night — not only awake, but scared to go to sleep. Then I turned on the faucets and filled up the basin with hot water.

It was only when I raised my head to start shaving that I saw the writing scrawled across the mirror. At least, it could have been writing; although it might almost as easily have been nothing more than curving drips of moisture. I stared at it closely, frightened and fascinated, and I was sure that I could make out the letters S, V, E, but with indistinguishable letters in between.

S something V something-something E? What on earth could that mean? SAVE? SAVE ME?

I was suddenly sure that I caught the reflection of a movement, something white flickering past the open bathroom doorway behind me. I turned around and said, over-loudly, 'Who's there?' and then I stalked on fright-stiffened legs out on to the landing, and looked down the dark carved staircase towards the hallway. Nobody there. No footsteps, no whispers, no mysteriously closed doors, nothing. Only a small Edward Hicks painting of a matelot, staring back at me in that bovine, placid way that all Edward Hicks people stare at you.

Nobody there. And yet, for the first time since she had died; for the first time in a whole month of loneliness and silent pain, I found myself whispering, 'Jane?'