Death Trance

Twenty-Two

I dropped Edward and Forrest off at Edward's house on Story Street, and then drove directly to Salem Hospital, a gray squarish complex of concrete blocks off Jefferson Avenue, and not far from Mill Pond, where David Dark had once lived. The sky had cleared, and there was a high thin sunset, which was reflected in the puddles of the parking-lot. I walked across to the hospital doors with my hands jammed into the pockets of my jacket, and hoped to hell that Constance Bedford was making a reasonable recovery. I should have insisted that she and Walter stay away from Quaker Lane Cottage. A warning hadn't been enough. Now the woman was blind and it was all because of me.

I found Walter sitting in the waiting area on the fourth story, his head bowed, staring at the polished vinyl floor. Behind him there was a lithograph of a pelican by Basil Ede. Walter didn't look up, even when I sat down next to him. A soft chime sounded, and a seductive telephonist's voice called, 'Dr Murray, pick up the white phone please. Dr Murray.'

'Walter?' I said.

He raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, both from tiredness and from weeping. He looked about a hundred years older, and I was reminded of what Duglass Evelith had said about the man who had sailed on the Arabella. He opened his mouth, but somehow his throat seemed too dry to say anything.

'What's the latest?' I asked him. 'Is she any better? Have you seen her yet?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I've seen her.'

'And?'

'She's better.'

I was about to say something encouraging, but then I realized that there was something wrong about the way he had spoken, some flatness in the intonation that didn't quite ring true.

'Walter?' I asked him.

Unexpectedly, he reached over and took hold of my hand, and held it very tight. 'You just missed her,' he said. 'She died about twenty minutes ago. Massive cerebral damage, caused by intense cold. Not to mention shock, and the physical trauma to the eyes and face. She didn't really have much of a hope.'

'Oh God, Walter, I'm sorry.'

He took a deep, sad breath. 'I'm a little giddy, I'm afraid. They gave me something to calm me down. What with that, and the tiredness, and the shock of it all, I guess I'm not much good for anything right at this moment.'

'Do you want me to take you home?'

'Home?' He stared at me questioningly, as if he didn't know what 'home' was any more. Home was only a building now, filled with unpossessed possessions. Rows of dresses that would never be worn; racks of shoes whose owner would never return. What does a single man do with drawers full of lipsticks and stockings and brassieres? The most painful part of a wife's sudden death, as I had discovered for myself, was clearing out the bathroom. The funeral had been nothing on clearing out the bathroom. I had stood there with a wastebasket full of nail varnish and hair-conditioner and skin-toner, and cried my eyes out.

'You mustn't blame yourself for it,' said Walter. 'You warned me explicitly enough. I somehow thought — well, I somehow thought that Jane would be benign. At least to her mother.'

'Walter, I saw her later myself. She tried to kill me, too. She isn't Jane, that's what I was trying to warn you about. Not the Jane that either of us used to know. She's like a kind of addict now, can you understand what I mean? Her spirit can't rest until she claims another life, to help feed the force that's controlling her.' 'Force? What are you talking about, force?' 'Walter,' I said, 'this isn't the time or the place. Let me drive you home; then you can get some sleep and tomorrow we'll talk it over.'

He glanced around over his shoulder, towards the room where Constance must have been lying. 'She's there?' I asked him, and he nodded.

'I shouldn't leave her,' he said. 'It doesn't seem right.'

'You won't be leaving her, Walter. She's gone already.'

He was silent for a very long time. Every line in his face seemed to have been filled with ash; and he was so numbed by exhaustion and tranquillizers that he could scarcely stay upright.

'Do you know something, John,' he told me. 'I don't have anybody now. No son, no daughter, no wife. All that family that I thought I would see growing up around me; all those people I loved. They're all gone, and now there's nobody but me. I don't even have anybody to will my gold watch to.'

He drew back his cuff, and unfastened his watch, and held it up. 'What's going to happen to this watch, when I die? Constance had it engraved, you know, with my name; and what she said was, "Someday, your great-grandson's going to wear this watch, and he's going to look at your name engraved on the back, and he'll know who he is, and where he came from. And do you know something? That boy will never be.'

'Come on, Walter,' I told him. ‘I’ll just go check with the doctor, and then I'll drive you home.'

'Are you going back to — that place tonight? Quaker Lane Cottage?'

‘I’ll stay with you if you want me to.'

He pursed his lips, and then nodded. Td like that. If it isn't any trouble.'

'No trouble, Walter. In fact, I'm glad to have an excuse not to go back there.'

We left the hospital, and walked across the parking lot to my car. Walter shivered in the evening wind. I helped him to climb into the passenger seat, and then we drove out through the suburbs of Salem, southwards towards Boston and Dedham. Walter said very little as we drove; but stared out of the window at the passing traffic, at the houses and the trees and the darkness of the oncoming night, the first night he had known for 38 years which he couldn't share with Constance. As we approached Boston, the lights of airplanes circling Logan Airport looked as lonely as anything I had ever seen.

The house at Dedham had been passed down by the Bedfords for four generations, father to son, and although Walter and his father had both worked in Salem, they had kept up residence in the old Dedham house for tradition's sake. For some years, Walter's father had also rented a small apartment near the centre of Salem, but Constance had insisted that Walter should drive the 25 miles home every evening, especially after Walter's mother had discreetly told her at Walter's father's funeral that Walter's father had been seeing 'women' at the Salem apartment, and that items of underclothing had been discovered under the bed.

It was a huge colonial house set in seven acres of ground; the original 41 acres having been parceled up by succeeding generations of Bedfords and sold off for property development. White-painted, with a peaked five-gable roof, it was approached by a curving driveway lined with maple trees, and in the fall it looked so picturesque you could hardly believe it was a real dwelling. I remembered how impressed I had been the first time that Jane had brought me back here: and I thought how much better it would have been for the Bedford family if I had turned around that morning and driven all the way back to St Louis, non-stop, day and night, anything to save them from the tragedy which had visited them these past few weeks, and from the fear which I knew was still to come.

I parked the car outside the front door and helped Walter to climb out. He gave me the front door key and I let us in. The house was still warm: the Bedfords had left the central heating on last night because they had walked out of the house with every intention of coming back. The first thing I saw when I switched on the hall light was Constance's spectacles, lying on the polished hall-table, just where she had left them only 24 hours ago. I looked up, and saw my distorted face in a circular gilt mirror, and behind me, Walter looking shrunken and strange.

'Number one priority is a large Scotch,' I told Walter. 'Come on into the sitting-room and take your shoes off. Relax.'

Walter fastidiously hung up his coat and scarf, and then followed me into the spacious sitting-room, with its waxed honey-coloured floors, its Persian rugs, and its mellow 19th-century furniture. Over the wide fire-place hung an oil-painting of old Suffolk County, in the days before Century 21 Realty and weekend cottages and the Massachusetts Turnpike. Beneath the painting, on the mantelshelf, there was a collection of Dresden figures which had obviously belonged to Constance.

'I feel numb,' said Walter, easing himself down into his armchair.

'You're going to feel numb for quite some time to come,' I cautioned him. I poured two large whiskies out of his heavy crystal decanter, and handed him one. 'It's your mind, protecting itself from the shock of what's happened.'

Walter shook his head. 'I can't believe it, you know. I can't believe any of it. I keep thinking back on what happened last night, the way that Jane appeared like that, and it seems like a horror movie, something I saw on television. Not real.'

'I guess it depends what you mean by real,' I said, sitting down opposite, and pulling my chair a little closer.

Walter looked at me. 'Will she always be there? Jane, I mean? Will she always be a ghost like that? Won't she ever rest?'

'Walter,' I said, 'that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. But not now. Let's wait until tomorrow.'

'No,' said Walter. 'Let's talk about it now. I want to think this whole thing out. I want to think about it and think about it until my mind gets tired of thinking about it, and I can't think about it anymore.'

'You're sure that's wise?'

'I don't know, but it's what I want to do. Anyway, who cares about wisdom? I don't have anybody. Have you thought about that? I have a ten-bedroomed house, and nobody to live in it but me.'

'Finish your whisky,' I instructed him. 'Let's have another. I need to be partially smashed to tell you about this.'

Walter swallowed, shivered, and then handed me his empty glass. When I had poured us both a refill, I sat down again and said, 'As far as I know, there's only one way in which Jane's spirit can be put to rest. Even that isn't certain. I've been hard put to keep believing in all this myself, because the more I find out about it, the weirder it gets. I think the only reason I've kept on believing it is because four or five other people believe it as well: three guys I know from the Peabody Museum, and a girlfriend of theirs.’

'This morning we went up to Tewksbury, and talked to Mr Duglass Evelith. You know Mr Evelith? Well, you've heard of Mr Evelith, at least. Mr Evelith's been making a study of psychic disturbances in Salem and Granitehead, and he agrees with us that the probable cause of all these manifestations like Jane's and Mr Edgar Simons' is — well, is something that's submerged in an old wreck off the Granitehead coast. The wreck of a ship called the David Dark.'

'I don't understand,' said Walter.

'Neither do I, completely. But apparently the hold of that wreck contains a thing like a giant skeleton, which was brought to Salem in the late 1680s from Mexico. The skeleton was said to be a demon called… just a minute, I have it written down here… Mictantecutli. The lord of Mictlampa, the region of the dead. It was supposed to have been Mictantecutli's power that created all the havoc that led to the Salem witch-trials; and even though it's sunk beneath the ocean, and several feet of bottom-mud, it's still affecting the dead of Granitehead, and refusing to let them rest.'

Walter stared at me as if I was completely mad; but I knew that the only way in which I could convince both him and myself of the true danger of Mictantecutli was if I kept on, and described what needed to be done as rationally and as calmly as I could.

'The wreck of the David Dark is going to have to be located,' I said. Then, when we've located it, it's going to have to be raised, and the copper vessel containing Mictantecutli removed, and taken to Tewksbury for old man Evelith to deal with.'

'What can he do with it that nobody else can?' Walter wanted to know.

'He won't say. But he strongly advised us not to try to tackle the demon on our own.'

'Demon,' said Walter, skeptically; then looked at me narrowly. 'You really believe it's a demon?'

'Demon is kind of an old-fashioned way of putting it,' I admitted. 'I guess these days we'd call it a psychic artifact. But whatever it is, and whatever we call it, the fact remains that the David Dark appears to be the centre of some extremely intense hypernatural activity; and that the only obvious way of finding out what it is, and how to put a stop to it, is to raise the wreck.'

Walter said nothing, but finished his second glass of whisky and say back in his chair, exhausted, tranquillized, and already half-stoned. I don't suppose I should have been giving him alcohol on top of sedatives, but for my money he needed all the numbness he could get.

I said, as persuasively as I could, 'Even if the wreck isn't what we believe it to be, raising it off the seabed will still be a profitable enterprise. There'll be all kinds of archaeological spinoffs, as well as souvenirs, book rights, television rights, that kind of stuff. And once we've raised the wreck, it could be put on public show during restoration, and we could make quite a steady income out of admission fees.'

'You're asking me for money,' Walter surmised.

The David Dark can't be raised without finance.'

'How much finance?'

'Edward Wardwell — he's one of the guys from the Peabody — he reckons five to six million.'

'Five to six million! Where the hell am I going to get five to six million?'

'Come on, Walter, most of your clients are business people. If only twenty or thirty of them could be persuaded to invest in raising the David Dark, that would only mean about $150,000 each. It would give them the prestige of being involved in an historic salvaging operation, as well as the opportunity to write off all of the money against tax.'

'I couldn't advise anybody to put their money into raising a 300-year-old wreck that might not even be there.'

'Walter, you have to. If you don't, Jane's spirit and the spirits of hundreds of other people are going to be damned and cursed for all eternity; never resting; never finding peace. And if all these recent events have been anything to go by, the power of Mictantecutli is becoming stronger. Duglass Evelith believes that the copper vessel in which it's been lying for all these hundreds of years may be corroding. The plain fact of the matter is that we have to get to Mictantecutli before Mictantecutli gets to us.'

Walter said, 'I'm sorry, John. It can't be done. If any one of my clients gets to hear why I've asked him to invest $150,000 in a salvage operation, if any one of them suspects that I've done it to lay a ghost; well, there won't be any doubt about it. My reputation will be finished and so will the reputation of my partnership. I'm sorry.'

'Walter, I'm asking you this for the sake of your own daughter. Don't you know what she's going through, what she must be feeling?'

'I can't,' said Walter. Then, 'Let me think about it tomorrow. Right now I don't know what the hell I'm doing or thinking.'

'Okay,' I said, more gently. 'Do you want me to help you get to bed?'

'I'll just sit here for a while. But if you want to get some sleep, don't let me stop you. You must be as tired as I am.'

Tired?' I asked him. I didn't know whether I was or not. 'I think I'm more frightened than tired.'

'Well,' said Walter. He reached out and gripped my hand; and for the first time since we had met, I felt that there was a bond between us, father and son-in-law, even though we had both lost everything that was supposed to keep us together. 'I have to admit it,' he said, 'I'm frightened, too.'