Death Trance

Nineteen

I was praying all evening that the Bedfords wouldn't come, but a few minutes after the half-past eleven chimes had struck, I heard the crunching of tires on the lane outside, and when I went to open the front door, there they were, in their shiny gray limousine, bouncing to an expensive stop behind my used-looking Toronado.

I hooked my golf umbrella out of the forged-iron stand in the hallway, and took it out to the front gate, so that Mrs Bedford wouldn't get showered on. She was wearing a dark mink jacket and her hair must have been waved that afternoon, for it swept up from her forehead in a blue-gray wing, and her little black hat was perched on top of it precariously. She presented her right cheek to be kissed, and when I duly did so, I smelled a heavy Italian perfume that probably could have been used to fuel municipal buses.

Constance Bedford was a handsome woman, there was no question about that. But she could also be suspicious and snobbish and tiresome, and all those characteristics showed in the slittiness of her eyes, and the dragged-down wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. I looked over her shoulder at Walter Bedford, and I could tell by the tight, tense look on his face that he had warned Constance to be on her best behaviour. He wanted desperately to see Jane, and he knew that the price of that was for Constance at least to be cordial.

'I see you haven't done very much to the cottage recently,' said Constance, as she stepped into the hallway and looked around. She twitched her nose a little, as if she didn't approve of the smell.

'I've been busy,' I told her. 'Can I take your jacket?'

'I believe I'll keep it on for a moment, thank you. It's not exactly climate-controlled in here, is it?'

'Jane always liked a log fire,' I replied.

‘I’d like a log fire,' put in Walter, trying to keep the party sociable. 'A log fire, and a glass of punch. Nothing like it, in the winter. It's the most romantic thing you can think of.'

'When was the last time that we sat in front of a log fire with a glass of punch?' Constance asked him, sharply. She turned back to me, and pulled a face that showed that even if Walter were actually to offer, she wouldn't be seen dead in front of a log fire with a glass of punch. 'Walter's idea of romance is halfway between a second-rate ski-lodge in Aspen and the centre-spread of the Christmas issue of Playboy,' she said, stalking ahead of us into the living-room.

'Well,' she sniffed. 'You haven't done very much in here, either.'

Walter said to me, sotto voce, 'Let her settle down, John. Give her time. She's very up in the air about this; very emotional.'

'Do you want a drink?' I asked him, as if he hadn't said anything at all.

'Is that Chivas Regal you're drinking?' he asked. 'Sure. I'll have one of those, with a little water.'

'Constance,' I said, 'would you care for a glass of wine?'

'Thank you, but I don't drink before six or after eleven.'

After I had fixed Walter's whisky, we all sat down around the fire and looked at each other. The rain sprinkled against the windows again, and upstairs I could hear that loose shutter banging. Constance tugged down the hem of her dress, and said impatiently, 'Aren't we supposed to do something? Like hold hands, or close our eyes, and think of Jane?'

'This isn't a séance, Constance,' I said. 'In a séance, you call the spirits and with any luck they answer. If Jane's going to appear here tonight, she's going to do it whether we want her to or not.'

'But don't you think she's more likely to appear if she knows her mother is here?' asked Constance, earnestly.

I looked at Walter. I could have said that I didn't believe for one moment that Constance's presence was going to make the slightest difference. But the truth isn't always necessary; and the last thing I wanted was an argument. I was very tired after my aqualung diving experience, and all I really wanted to do was go to bed, and sleep. I was so tired, in fact, that I was almost glad that I wasn't with Gilly tonight.

'I expect that your being here will increase our chances of seeing Jane quite a lot,' I said to Constance, and smiled as benignly as I could manage.

'A girl always goes to her mother in times of trouble,' said Constance. 'She may have been a father's girl when she was little, but whenever it came to anything serious… she always came to me.'

I nodded, and kept on smiling.

Walter checked his watch. 'Almost midnight,' he said. 'Do you think she'll appear?'

'I don't know, Walter. I don't have any control over it at all. I don't even know why she appears, or what she wants.'

'Does she look well?’ asked Constance.

I stared at her. 'Constance, she's dead. How can she look well, when she's dead?'

'I don't have to be reminded that my daughter's been taken away from me,' Constance retorted. 'I don't have to be reminded how it happened, either.'

'Good. Because that was the last thing I was going to talk about.'

'Oh,' said Constance. 'I suppose you accept no responsibility at all.'

'What particular responsibility do you want me to accept?' I asked her.

'Come on, now,' put in Walter. 'Let's not start digging over old graves.' He was immediately sorry that he had chosen that particular metaphor, and sat back in his chair, and blushed.

'Jane was pregnant,' insisted Constance. 'And the whole idea of allowing a pregnant woman to drive all that way in a snowstorm… all alone, unprotected, while you sat at home and watched some juvenile football game… As far as I'm concerned, it amounts to criminal negligence. Manslaughter.'

'Constance,' said Walter, 'forget the recriminations, will you? It's over and done with.'

'He murdered them, or as good as,' said Constance. 'And I'm not supposed to feel bitter about it? My only daughter; my only remaining child. My only chance of a grandson. All wiped out, because of a football game, and a husband who was too lazy and too careless to look after the people who were under his care.'

'Constance,' I said, 'get out of my house. Walter, take her home.'

'What?' said Walter, as if he hadn't quite heard me.

'I said take Constance home. And don't bother to bring her back. Ever. She's been here five minutes and already she's started. When is she going to realize that there was no snowstorm blowing when Jane went out to see you; that if anybody's at fault it's you, for letting her drive home when the weather was so bad. And when is she ever going to realize that I lost far more than either of you did. I lost my wife, the girl who was going to be my companion for the rest of my life; and I lost my son. So goodnight, okay? I'm sorry you had a wasted journey, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to Constance slandering me, and that's all.'

'Listen,' said Walter, 'we're just on edge.'

'Walter, I am not on edge,' I told him. 'I just want Constance out of here before I do something enjoyable, like pushing her teeth down her throat.'

'How dare you speak about me like that!' snapped Constance, and stood up. Walter stood up too, and then half sat down, and then stood up again. 'Constance,' he appealed to her, but Constance was too irritated and too tense to be mollified by anything, or anybody.

'Even her spirit isn't safe in your custody!' she snapped at me, wagging her long-clawed finger. 'Even when she's dead, you can't take care of her!'

She stalked to the door, Walter turned to me, and gave me a resigned look which, if I knew anything about Walter, meant partly that he blamed Constance for being so volatile, and partly that he blamed me for setting her off again.

I didn't even bother to get out of my chair. I might have guessed the evening was going to develop into another row. I reached for the Chivas Regal bottle and refilled my glass, almost to the top. 'I drink,' I said to myself, in my best barfly slur, 'to forget.'

'What do you want to forget?' I asked myself.

'I forget,' I slurred.

It was then that I heard a furious rattling at the front door; and Walter came back into the living-room again. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'The front, door's jammed. I can't open it.'

'Don't apologize, Walter, just tell him to open the door!' Constance demanded.

Wearily, I got up, and walked into the hallway. Constance was standing there with her hands planted furiously on her hips, but the first thing I noticed wasn't Constance. It was the cold. The strange, sudden cold. 'Walter,' I said, 'it's colder.'

'Colder?' he frowned.

'Can't you feel it? The temperature's dropping.'

'Will you please open this door,' barked Constance. But I raised my hand to silence her.

'Listen, do you hear something?'

'What's he talking about, Walter? For God's sake, make him open the door. I'm upset and I want to go home. I don't want to stay in this horrible dilapidated cottage a moment longer.'

Walter said, softly, 'I hear whispering.'

I nodded. 'That's what I hear. Where would you say it's coming from?'

'Upstairs, maybe,' said Walter. His eyes were bright now, and he had completely forgotten about Constance. 'Is this what happens? Is this the way it starts?'

'Yes,' I told him. 'Whispering, cold, and then the apparitions.'

'If you don't open this front door at once, you son-of-a-bitch,' screeched Constance, 'then by God I'm going to-'

'Constance, shut your mouth!' roared Walter.

Constance stared at him with her mouth wide open. I don't suppose he'd dared to speak to her like that more than once in 35 years of marriage. I looked at her and gave her a sour little smile which meant that she had better keep it shut, too, if she knew what was good for her. She said, 'Oh,' in utter frustration, and then 'Oh!'

The whispering grew no louder, but seemed to circle around us so that sometimes the voices seemed to be coming from upstairs, and sometimes from the library, and sometimes they sounded as if they were right behind us, only a few paces away. All of us strained to make out the words, but it was useless: it was a long, persistent, discursive conversation, in what language we couldn't make out. And yet there was something unmistakably obscene about it; a feeling that the whisperers were relishing some filthy sexual act or some unspeakably sadistic torture, and discussing it in relentless detail.

The temperature kept on dropping, too, until our breath was smoking. Constance tugged her rnink jacket around herself, and stared at me as if this was all some kind of barbaric hoax. I think she had come to the cottage in the genuine and excited belief that she was going to encounter Jane, but I don't think that Walter had done what I had told him to do, and warned her what it was going to be like; that it could be frightening, and unpleasant, and even potentially dangerous. Constance had probably walked through the door with the expectation that Jane would be sitting in front of the fire in the pink and natural flesh, knitting baby-bootees, no more harmed by death than if she had spent a month in Miami.

'Who is that whispering?' she said, with her eyes wide. 'Is that you?’

'How can it be me? Do you see my lips moving?'

The whispering went on. Constance came closer, and stared at me even harder. 'I saw your lips move,' she said, with obvious uncertainty.

'I'm breathing through my mouth, that's why. I went diving today and my sinuses are sore.'

'He makes excuses, at a time like this. He always has excuses,' Constance told Walter, although she kept on staring at me.

Behind her, although Constance didn't realize it, the front door had silently opened itself. I reached over and touched Walter's arm, but he had seen the door already, and he said softly, 'I know. I know, John. The handle turned by itself.'

The door smoothly swung open, without its familiar squeaking noise. We were looking out now into the front garden, into the dark and blustery night. And there, halfway along the garden path, much smaller than she had appeared in my bedroom, only the height of an eleven-year-old child, stood Jane.

'Constance,' said Walter gently. 'She's here.'

Constance turned, slowly, hypnotically, and stared out into the garden. She said nothing at all, but I could tell by the shaking of her shoulders that she was sobbing, and trying to suppress her sobs.

'I didn't realize,' she wept, her mouth twisted into a snarl of grief. 'Oh my God, Walter, I didn't understand.'

Jane appeared to be floating a few inches above the path; a flickering image of her that faded and sparkled in the wind. Her arms were straight down by her sides, her face was hollow-eyed and expressionless, but her hair floated around her head like a electrostatic crown.

'John,' she whispered. 'John, don't leave me.'

Constance took two or three uncontrolled steps towards her, lifting one arm. 'Jane, it's your mother,' she appealed. 'Jane, listen to me, wherever you are, darling, it's your mother.'

'Don't leave me, John,' Jane begged me. Constance must have been terrified, but she approached the apparition even more closely, her hands raised like a plump madonna. 'Jane, I want to help you,' she said. 'I'll do anything to help you. Speak to me, Jane, please. Tell me you can see me. Tell me you know that I'm here. Jane, I love you. Please, Jane. Please, I'm pleading with you.'

'Constance,' warned Walter. 'Constance, come back here.'

Jane's image shifted and altered, both in size and appearance. She appeared taller now, and her face was different, thinner-cheeked, gaunt, like a starving angel. She raised one arm, leaving in the air for a moment a succession of after-images, so that it looked as if she had five arms instead of one.

'John,' she whispered, more affirmatively now. 'You mustn't leave me, John. You mustn't leave me, not here.'

Constance was down on her knees on the garden path in front of her spectral daughter. Walter choked, 'No, Constance!' and shouldered his way past me to bring her back; but just as he did so, Jane turned her head and stared down at her mother with eyes that were as black and expressionless as the shadowy windows of Quaker Lane Cottage.

'Jane, don't you know me?' Constance wailed. 'Jane, it's your mother! You're all I have left, Jane, don't leave me! Come back to me, Jane! I need you!'

Walter seized Constance's shoulders, and cried, 'Constance, don't! This is madness! She's dead, Constance, she can't come back!'

Constance turned and struck out at Walter with a flailing arm. 'You never cared about her the way I did, did you?' she screamed. 'You never cared anything about our children! You never cared about me, either! You don't want her back because you're guilty, that's why; just as guilty as John; and because you're afraid.'

'Constance, this is a ghost!' shouted Walter.

'He's right, Constance,' I told her. 'You'd be safer if you kept away.'

Jane's blue-white electrical image hovered and flickered, and seemed to grow even taller, until it was taller than Walter. But it never once turned its eyes away from Constance, as she groveled at its feet on the garden path. Walter stared up at it in abject dread, and took one or two paces back. He turned around to me, his face gray with fright, and mutely appealed to me to do something. Anything. He hadn't understood what it was going to be like, either, and now he was scared out of his mind.

'Jane!' screamed Constance. 'Jane!'

And it was then that Jane's death-pale lips curled slowly back over her incandescent teeth, and her mouth stretched wider and wider until she was as hideous and as horrifying as a stone gargoyle. Her hair flew up behind her head, and she raised her other arm so that she was standing in a cruciform shape. Then she rose slowly into the air until she was floating over Constance horizontally, her bare feet close together, her white funeral vestments flapping silently in the midnight wind.

Constance stretched back and screamed and screamed, in utter hysteria. Walter cried, 'Constance! For God's sake!' and tried to grab her again; but Jane's stretched-apart mouth suddenly let out a hollow roar that made him stumble back towards the house, too frightened even to cry out. It was a roar like nothing I had ever heard before: the roar of coldly-blazing furnaces, the roar of enraged demons, the roar of the North Atlantic Ocean, in a catastrophic storm.

Out of Jane's mouth gushed a fuming stream of freezing vapour, straight into Constance's face. I could feel how cold it was, even from ten feet away, by the door. Constance cried out in agony, and collapsed on the path, and as Walter hurried towards her again, Jane's apparition tumbled slowly head-over-heels through the night air, over the garden hedge, and across Quaker Lane, uphill, in the direction of the shore. Arms stretched wide, a quivering crucifix of blue-white light, over and over, singing as she went.

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

I knelt down beside Walter and Constance. Constance had buried her face in her hands, and she was twitching and shuddering. 'My eyes,' she whimpered. 'Oh God, Walter, my eyes!'

I helped Walter to drag her inside the house, and lie her down on the sofa by the living-room fire. She kept her hands pressed against her eyes, and shook, and moaned, and I was worried that she might have been severely shocked. She wasn't a young woman any more, and she had a history of heart trouble. 'Call an ambulance,' I told Walter. And whatever you do, try to keep her warm.'»

'Where are you going?' Walter wanted to know.

'I'm going after Jane. I've got to end this, Walter, once and for all.'

'What the hell do you think you can possibly do? That's a supernatural being there, John. That's a ghost, for Christ's sake. What can you possibly do against a ghost?'

'I don't know. But if I don't go after her, I'll never find out.'

'Well, take care. Please. And don't be too long.'

I ran back out into the windy night. All around me, the telephone wires were droning, and the trees were whistling, as if everything had come mysteriously alive, and was warning me in chorus. Upstairs, at the cottage window, the loose shutter clapped and clapped like a frantic slapstick.

Tugging up my collar, I began to run up Quaker Lane until I ran out of road and found myself jogging across tufted sea-grass. There was no sign of Jane, but the last time I had seen her she had been tumbling through the air in the direction of Waterside Cemetery, where she had been buried, and it seemed reasonable, if frightening, to assume that her ghost had actually come from there.

It was a good three-quarters of a mile to the cemetery gates, and I had to stop jogging after the first few hundred yards, and walk, trying to catch my breath back. On my right, in the darkness, I could just distinguish the white breakers of the Salem Harbour shoreline. Somewhere out there, beneath the black and chilly waters, buried in the mud of three hundred years, lay the wreck of the David Dark. The sound of the sea was infinitely lonely and alien. Jane had said that it always made her think of the moon, cold and uncompromising. The sea, after all, is the moon's mistress.

Through the night, I glimpsed the white arch of the cemetery gates. Beyond it, as I started to jog again, the headstones appeared, spires and crosses and plaques; frozen cherubs and saddened seraphim. A small city of Granitehead's dead, isolated out on this shoreline. I reached the black-painted wrought-iron gates, and clutched them, peering as hard as I could into the rows of graves, looking slightly to the left, to the place where Jane was buried.

‘I saw pale kings and princes too; pale warriors, death-pale were they all.'

There was no flickering light, no sign of Jane's manifestation. I turned the knob of the gates, and opened them up, and stepped inside.

Whatever clichés are written about cemeteries at night, there was no question that Granitehead's graveyard that gusty night in March had an unsettling atmosphere all of its own. Every headstone seemed to possess an unearthly gleam, and as I walked towards Jane's grave between the silent ranks of tombs, I was frighteningly conscious that I was walking amongst scores of people; people who were dead, and would now be quiet forever, eyes closed or eyeless, robed or in tatters, all lying in their numerous company beneath the blackness of the soil. This was not ordinary ground: this was an enclave of buried memories, a noiseless community of lived-out lives, an acre of human beings who would never speak again.

I approached Jane's headstone, and stood beside it, shivering and uncertain. Jane Elizabeth Trenton, Beloved Wife of John Paul Trenton, Daughter of Mr and Mrs Walter K. Bedford. 'Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.'

Now I had come here, I didn't know what to do. Should I talk to her? Call her? Should I wait for her to appear? I looked around, and saw the pale marble sentinels of all the other headstones standing close, and felt hemmed-in, and breathless, in spite of the wind. A marble angel watched me from two rows away, staring with sightless eyeballs.

I swallowed, and then I said unsteadily, 'Jane? Can you hear me, Jane?'

It was ridiculous, of course, and I found myself seriously hoping that there wasn't anybody else in the cemetery who could hear me. I know people do talk to their lost relatives, but they don't often do it in the middle of the night; and they very rarely expect an answer, like I did.

'Jane?' I said again. 'Jane, can you hear me?'

There was no response. Nothing at all but the wind, rustling in the long grass outside the cemetery fence. I stayed where I was for a minute or so, shivering with cold, half-hoping that Jane would appear to me and half-hoping that she wouldn't; and then I turned to leave.

Out loud, I said, 'Oh, Christ.'

She was standing behind me, no more than two or three feet away, a few inches above the ground. She was back to her normal height, but she seemed to have become desperately thin and emaciated, as if there were nothing beneath that wind-flapped gown but skin and bones. She wasn't smiling or frowning or anything. Her expression was empty and remote, her eyes too dark to read. I couldn't actually see through her, she wasn't spectral in that sense, but she was somehow melting and moving and insubstantial. I felt that if I should try to snatch at her, I would end up with nothing more than a handful of cobwebs.

'You came,' she said, in a voice which sounded like four Janes speaking at once. 'I knew, in the end, you would come.'

'What do you want?' I asked her. I couldn't stop myself from stuttering.

‘I want you to make love to me,' she whispered. ‘I want you to make love to me forever.'

'Jane, you're dead.'

‘No, John, not dead.'

'Then what, if you're not dead? And what do you want?’

‘I belong to the others. Join me, John. Come with me. Don't leave me here alone.'

I held out my hands towards her, very gingerly. 'Jane, it's impossible. You're dead, you should rest. I can't stand any more of this, Jane; it frightens me.'

'Did you want me to die?’ she whispered.

'Of course not. I miss you. I miss you like hell.'

'But I'm here, John. You can have me. We can be lovers again.'

'Jane, you're dead, you're not real. Don't you understand that?'

'Real?’ she asked. 'What is real?’

And as she spoke, she turned, and raised her right arm.

‘I will show you what is real,' she said.

'What?' I said. 'What are you talking about?'

I heard a sound like singing, only it wasn't singing. It was more like the keenings of mourners at a funeral, or the high unearthly ululation of native women in the Soudan; one of those weird intense ultra-violet sounds which can make your skin crawl around on you as if it had a life of its own. It was coming from everywhere: out of the sky, out of the ground, sometimes setting up an almost unbearable vibration.

I looked around the cemetery, and to my complete horror, other apparitions were rising out of the graves. Their heads appeared first, blind-eyed, growing out of the ground like grotesque pumpkins. Then their shoulders, and the rest of their bodies, rising up and up until they were hovering like Jane above the windblown grass.

There were hundreds of them, one from each grave; men and women and children, each of them flickering dully in the darkness of the night, the faint electrical charge of lives gone by. And as more of them appeared, so the keening they were making grew louder, until the cemetery was echoing with it.

Jane whispered, somewhere inside of my head, 'This is real. This is real, John, come and see.'

I walked stiffly along one of the aisles of gravestones. The apparitions remained motionless, hovering, staring back at me out of eyes that were like holes in a ragged curtain. Some of the apparitions were badly-decayed. A woman stood with no flesh on her skull at all, just bare shining bone and a few scraggy tufts of hair. One man's ribcage was revealed, and inside it wriggled heaps of glowing maggots, struggling and jerking as they devoured his bowels. There was a teenage boy with no lower jaw, just a puffy and ulcerous tongue hanging down from his open throat like a scarf. Hundreds of them, the dead of Granitehead, some almost perfect, untouched, scarcely looking as if they had died at all. Others in ruins, smashed and rotted and barely recognizable as human beings.

I walked all around the perimeter of the cemetery until I reached the gates again. I had an almost irrepressible urge to break out of there, and run, but I also had the fearful suspicion that if I did so, the apparitions would pursue me, in one ghostly rush, and hunt me down.

I stood by the gate, looking out across the city of restless dead; shimmering and decayed. Jane stood a little way off, watching me.

‘I cannot come back to you,' Jane told me, in that soft, distant voice. 'But you could come to me.'

I turned away from her. I could remember how she had looked, the day we were married. I could remember her sitting on the side of that bed, still wearing her bridal veil, her skirts drawn up to her thighs, unfastening her white stockings from her white garter-belt. There had been flowers everywhere, the whole room had been heady with sweet-peas and carnations. And her face had seemed to me magical, outlined as it was with morning sunlight, the face of the girl that I loved.

This apparition wasn't Jane. Or at least, it wasn't the Jane I had loved. It was like all of these grisly manifestations in the Waterside Cemetery, dead and decaying, an erratic electrical impulse from a lost life. There was no point in staying here. Ugly and frightening as they were, these spirits were unable to help me in my search for a way to put them to rest. If they were anything like Jane, or Edgar Simons, all they desired was that their living loved ones should join them in whatever half-world they now inhabited. And I didn't really believe that they wanted even this: they were too emotionless, too concerned with their own unseen agonies. Rather, it was the influence of some greater force that was using them to recruit the living to the realms of the dead, a force that may be lying beneath the mud of Salem Harbour, in the wreck of the David Dark.

I started walking back towards Quaker Hill, away from the cemetery. I heard Jane calling after me, but I didn't listen. She would only beg me not to leave her, to come and join her, to stay with her and be her lover, and no matter how painfully I missed her, no matter what I would have done for a chance to see her again, touch her again, be with her again, I wasn't prepared to kill myself. When you've met the dead, you understand the value of life.

I was only about a third of the way back to the top of Quaker Lane when I caught sight of two or three of the apparitions from the cemetery, keeping abreast of me on the brow of the hill, about twenty yards away. I looked back, and there were more behind me, twelve or thirteen of them at least. And off to my left, about a half-dozen more were following me along the shoreline.

As they came, they kept up that high keening sound. Sometimes it was shrill and distinct, at other times it was blown away by the wind. But it was all around me, an eerie supernatural warcry, as if the dead of Waterside Cemetery were after my blood.

I began to jog, not too fast at first, to see whether the apparitions could keep up with me. They flickered and flew just as quickly, in a strange pell-mell motion, some of them running, some of them tumbling over in the way that Jane's ghost had done, some of them soaring arms-stretched with their burial robes fluttering in the ocean wind, like charnel-house kites. I felt a deep and historical terror within me, the kind of terror that people must have felt in the 17th century when leprous beggars came to town, hopping and skipping and horrendously diseased. And all the time there was that whistling and keening, almost joyous now, as if they knew that they could catch me.

I started running in earnest now. But how fast could they go? Perhaps they could easily outstrip me, and they were simply keeping their distance for the sport of it. Still, I couldn't worry too much about that. The only thing I could do was to get back to Quaker Lane Cottage as fast as I could.

And then what? I thought. Jane's apparition found it easy enough to get inside. This evening, she had opened the front door without even touching the handle. I heard my breath whining and my trouser-legs jostling against each other as I ran, and I thought to myself: don't even consider the possibility. Just run.

I glanced to my right. The grisly apparitions were keeping well up with me, dancing and turning in the wind. On my left, the shoreline began to narrow and to edge in closer, and I could see the apparitions distinctly, running towards me in mesmerizing slow motion, and yet easily catching up. I didn't dare to look over my shoulder, because the keening behind my back had seemed to be closer than ever, and I could have sworn that I heard the sea-grass whispering as the apparitions rushed through it.

I was only 200 yards away from Quaker Lane Cottage when I realized that I couldn't possibly make it. My legs felt as if they were clumsy prosthetics, carved out of heavy wood. My breath shrieked in and out my lungs, and I was smothered in ice-cold sweat. And all the while, the blue-white apparitions were rushing after me, with decayed and inhuman urgency, the beggars of the night.

I felt something claw at my hair, like a bat or a half-rotted hand. I frantically beat it off, and started running faster again, forcing my legs to take me up the sloping hill, forcing my knees through the barrier of total exhaustion and total pain. The rushing noises came nearer, until I knew that the apparitions were almost at my shoulder, keening and crying and whispering to me, stop, stop, join us, don't leave us, come back.

I felt myself suddenly lifted up — physically lifted up off the ground — and then tossed and tumbled head over heels on to the rough grassy hillside. I tried to scramble to my feet, but then I was hurled on to my back by some completely invisible force, hurled so forcibly that I heard my vertebrae crack, and the air gasp out of my lungs. I tried to get up a second time, but I was slammed back to the ground yet again, and this time I was paralyzed, pinned against the grass and the rocks as if some enormous weight were pressing on to me.

The apparitions gathered around me, the fading electrical power that had once been their spirits crawling like glow-worms across their scaly and ulcerated faces. They made a noise, like soft old tissue-paper, crumpled and recrumpled over years of use; like the breathing you can hear in an old and deserted attic, when there's no-one there. And there was a distinctive odour, too, not so much of fleshy decay, but.of burned electricity terminals, and rotting fish.

They surrounded me, but they made no immediate move to touch me. I lay where I was, pinned down panting for breath, scared out of my mind and yet still wondering what the hell I could do now. Even in the throes of a scarlet panic, the human mind still plots and schemes and programmes for its own survival.

The apparitions stood back a little, and Jane appeared, very tall now, her face stretched out almost beyond recognition.

'You are mi-i-i-ne,' she said, blurrily. I felt as if time had slowed down, as if the atmosphere had turned to glycerin, and even my struggles against the unseen weight that was holding me down seemed to take endless minutes.

Jane spread out her long-fingered hands, and electricity crackled from one fingertip to the other, like a Van der Graaf generator. She seemed to have built up more power now, because her body was flickering and flashing, and processions of sparks teemed off her shoulders and out of her hair as if she were infested with them. The smell of burning grew even stronger, and I felt a shudder go through the assembled apparitions, as if they were all sharing in Jane's massive discharge of psychic energy.

It had to be enough to kill me. It had to be enough to release my spirit, and leave my body electrocuted on the hillside, another strange and inexplicable fatality. Then I too would be haunting Granitehead, searching for Gilly perhaps, to bring her into the hosts of the dead.

Jane touched me with her fingers, and I felt a numbing shock of current. My left leg involuntarily jerked, and my left eyelid fluttered uncontrollably.

'You can join me now,' whispered Jane. 'It would have been better if you had done it by accident, or of your own free will… but I cannot wait for you any longer. I love you, John. I want to make love to you.'

Her outstretched fingers came closer. I could see the electricity creeping along the lines on her palms, along the lifeline and the heartline and the head-line. There were even sparkling charges in her nails, and around her wrists. The human energy of a lifetime was being expended to bring me with her to the grave.

I struggled and fought, but the pressure on my chest remained immovable. All round me, the apparitions began to sing and scream, a terrible high cacophony like a madhouse. Right next to my face stood the fleshless leg of a decaying woman, the bones of her toes glowing phosphorescently. A little further away, a hooded man stood with half of his face corroded away, one lidless eye glaring at me ferociously.

'You can't call this love!' I shouted at Jane, my voice high with fear. This isn't what we got married for! This isn't why we wanted to have our baby! God, if you love me, Jane, let me go!'

Jane stared at me with those impenetrable eyes. Electricity crept around her mouth, and outlined her teeth. 'Baby?’ she said, in a resonant echo.

'Yes,' I told her, brokenly. I was so scared that I hardly knew what I was saying, or what I was trying to prove to her. 'That baby you were carrying when you were killed. Our baby.'

Jane's apparition seemed to consider what I had said with burning deepness. Around us, the graveyard creatures whispered and sang; and above our heads, the midnight clouds raced past as if they were fleeing from the same kind of fate that now awaited me.

'The baby…' she said. She hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to back away from me; or rather, to shrink away, in both size and distance. 'The baby…' she repeated, in a whisper that was just as close as before. 'But the baby was never born.'

I looked around me. It appeared as if the other apparitions were shrinking away from me as well, and by twos and threes the crowd of them was beginning to disperse. I suddenly felt the pressure relieved from my chest, and I was able unsteadily to stand up, and brush my windblown hair. I watched in awe and indescribable relief as the apparitions floated and tumbled and hobbled away, descending the grassy hillside with their heads bowed; until they had vanished into the gates of the cemetery.

Only Jane's apparition remained, quite a long way away, duller and dimmer now that she was no longer trying to electrocute me. Her hair flew around her, and her white gown rippled around her ankles, but I could scarcely make her out in the darkness.

'You are lost to me, John… I can never have you now…'

'Why?' I asked her, not out loud, but inside my mind.

'Entry into the region of the dead is by succession…you are always called by the relative who died immediately before you…that is the power which enables the dead to summon the living. Our baby died in hospital, long after I was already dead, and therefore he and he alone can call you to join us… But he was never born, and therefore his spirit is still in the higher realm, and still at peace, and he cannot appear here to guide you into the region of the dead…:

I didn't know what to say to her. I thought of the way she had once been, and the joy she had felt when she knew that she was pregnant. If only I had known that day that Dr Rosen had called me up and said that I was going to be a father that my baby would one night save my life.

'What will happen to you now?' I asked Jane, out loud this time.

She diminished even further. 'Now, I will have to stay in the region of the dead for ever… now, I will never be able to rest…'

'Jane, what can I do?' I shouted. 'What can I do to help you?'

There was a lengthy silence. Jane's apparition flickered even more dimly than before, and then disappeared, except for a flapping darkness against the darkness of the hillside.

Then, blurry and deep, a parody of Jane's voice said, 'Salllvagge…'

'Salvage? Salvage what? The David Dark, or what? Tell me! I have to know what it is!'

'Sallvagge…: the voice repeated, growing slower and deeper until it was almost incomprehensible.

I waited by myself for any more voices, any more apparitions, but it appeared now that they had left me in peace. I walked back towards Quaker Lane Cottage, feeling as weary and as beaten as I had ever felt in my whole life.

As I reached the top of Quaker Lane, I saw an ambulance parked outside the cottage, with its red-and-blue lights flashing. I broke into a tired jog, and reached the front gate just as two paramedics were bringing out Constance Bedford on a stretcher. Walter Bedford was following close behind, looking distraught.

'Walter,' I asked him, breathlessly. 'What's the matter?'

Walter watched the paramedics lift his wife into the back of the ambulance, and then he took my arm and led me around to the front of the vehicle, out of earshot. The blood-red light flashed on and off against his face, as if he were Dr Jekyll one second and Mr Hyde the next.

'She's not seriously hurt, is she?' I asked. 'Jane just sort of breathed on her, that was all.'

Walter lowered his head. 'I don't know what she breathed, or how she breathed it, but whatever it was, it was colder than liquid nitrogen, they said, minus 200 degrees Centigrade.'

'And?' I asked him, frightened even to speculate what might have happened to Constance.

'Her eyes were frozen solid,' said Walter, in an unsteady voice. 'Absolutely solid; and of course they became brittle. When she clapped her hands against them, to try to stop the pain, they shattered, like china. She's lost both of them, John. She's blind.'

I put my arm around his shoulders and held him close. He was trembling all over, and he clutched at me as if he didn't have the strength or the ability to be able to stand up any more. One of the paramedics came over and told me, 'It's okay now, sir. We'll take care of him. He's had a pretty bad shock.'

'His wife? Is she — ?'

The paramedic shrugged. 'We've done what we can. But it looks like the septum of the nose and part of the forehead have been frozen as well. It's possible that parts of the brain are affected as well; the doctors won't be able to tell until they've run some tests.'

Walter quaked in my arms. The paramedic said, 'You don't have any idea how this happened, sir? I mean, nobody around here has any reason to store liquid gases, do they? Nitrogen, or oxygen? Something like that?'

I shook my head. 'Nobody that I know of. Nothing as cold as that.'

Walter said, 'She was always so loving… she always loved her mother so dearly. Cold, never. Never, ever cold.'

'He'll be okay,' the paramedic repeated, and helped Walter into the back of the ambulance. He closed the doors, and then came up to me and said, 'She's your mother-in-law, right?'

That's right.'

'Well, keep an eye on the old man. He's going to need your help.'

'You don't think that she's going to die?'

The paramedic raised a hand. 'I'm not saying she will and I'm not saying she won't. But it always helps if the patient has some kind of a will to keep on living, and right at the moment this lady doesn't seem to have that will. Something about her daughter, I don't know. Your wife, I suppose.'

'My late wife. She died about a month ago.'

'I'm sorry,' said the paramedic. 'It hasn't been your year, has it?'