Death Trance

Twenty-Four

The following morning, Tuesday, I was visited at the shop by my friendly local police department, who wanted to ask me a few questions about Constance Bedford. The medical examiner had determined that death had been caused by irreparable damage to the frontal lobes of the brain consistent with sudden freezing. A detective in a badly-fitting locknit suit asked me if I kept any liquid gases at the cottage, oxygen or nitrogen. It was a ridiculous question, but I suppose he had to ask it for the sake of procedure.

'You don't keep any ice, either? Large quantities of ice?'

'No,' I assured him. 'No oxygen, no nitrogen, no ice.'

'But your mother-in-law died from freezing.'

'Freezing or something like freezing,' I corrected him.

'What's like freezing?' he wanted to know. The M.E. said she was subjected to such intense cold that her eyeballs had actually pulverized. Now, how did that happen?'

'I don't have any idea.'

'You were there.'

'It must have been a freak of the weather. I saw her collapse on to the pathway, that was all.'

'Then you went running off along the shoreline. Why did you do that?'

'I was going for help.'

'The nearest house to yours was only 100 yards away, in the opposite direction. Besides, you had a telephone.'

'I panicked, that's all,' I told him. 'Is there a law against panic?'

'Listen,' the detective told me, fixing my attention with eyes as green as peeled grapes, 'this is the second unusual death in which your name has come up in a week. Just do me a favour: stay away from trouble. You're under suspicion in both incidents and any more funny business out of you and I'm going to have to haul you in. You understand me?'

'I understand you.'

The police interview irritated and depressed me, so half an hour later I closed the shop and drove over to Salem. I parked on Liberty Street and walked over to Street Mall to see Gilly. As I walked in she was serving a blonde-haired girl with a red floor-length gown, but she smiled and she was obviously pleased to see me.

'I've been thinking about you,' she said, when her customer had left.

'I've been thinking about you, too,' I told her.

'Edward said you had an interesting trip up to Tewksbury, and that old man Evelith told you where the wreck might be located.'

That's right. I'm on my way to see Edward now.'

'Well, you don't have to bother. Edward and I have a lunch date at twelve, why don't you join us?'

'Miss McCormick, it would be a pleasure.'

We met Edward outside the Peabody Museum and then walked down to Charlie Cheng's restaurant on Pickering Wharf. 'I felt a sudden urge to eat Chinese,' said Edward. 'I was spending the whole morning cataloguing Oriental prints, and the more I thought about Macao and Whampoa Anchorage, the more I thought about crispy noodles and butterfly prawns.'

We were shown to a corner table, and the waiter brought us hot towels, and then a plate of, dim sum, Chinese hors d'oeuvres.

Torrest and Jimmy both have their regular free day tomorrow,' said Edward, 'and I've decided to join them and take a little French leave, so that we can do some preliminary echo-soundings over the spot where old man Evelith thought the wreck might be. Do you want to come?'

'I don't think so, not this time,' I said. Much as I wanted to help to locate the David Dark, I knew that my presence tomorrow wouldn't particularly help. The Alexis would be sailing backwards and forwards for hours in a tedious parallel search, and even if the sea was calm, which it would have to be for an accurate echo-sounding of the sea-bed, the trip would be very much less than enjoyable.

Edward picked up a morsel of paper-wrapped chicken with his chopsticks, and deftly opened it. There's only one thing that bothers me,' he said. 'Why is old man Evelith so insistent that only he should take charge of this giant skeleton thing once we've brought it up to the surface?'

'If it turns out to be as dangerous and as malevolent as he says it is, then how are we going to handle it?' I asked. 'At least he seems confident that he can keep it in check.'

'We only have his word for that. Whatever's inside that copper vessel may be incredibly valuable, and yet all we're supposed to do is to deliver it unopened, right to his door, meek and unprotesting.'

'What do you suggest?' I asked him. I suddenly found myself interested in keeping Mictantecutli away from old man Evelith, for the simple reason that if I did decide to let the demon loose, it would be far easier to do so if it was in our custody, instead of Evelith's. Besides, Evelith or Enid or maybe his manservant Quamus must know a way of binding it with spells, or occult ritual, or special artifacts, like keeping a vampire at bay with cloves of garlic; and once they had been able to imprison Mictantecutli, it was extremely unlikely that I would be able to set it free. It would be difficult enough gaining access to the Evelith mansion, what with Quamus and that Doberman on guard. Breaking a spell would be something else altogether.

Edward said, 'Why don't you try the aromatic crispy duck? It's especially good here. Do you know how they make it?'

I said, 'Yes, I know how they make it, but I think I prefer the chicken in black bean sauce.'

'We'll share,' said Gilly.

Edward said, 'We don't have to take the copper vessel out to Tewksbury straight away. We can always rent a refrigerated truck and have it ready at the wharf when we bring up the wreck of the David Dark, and take the copper vessel down to Mason's Cold Storage. Then we can open it ourselves and see exactly what it is we've got there.'

'You actually believe what Mr Evelith said, about that Aztec skeleton?' asked Gilly. 'I find it incredibly farfetched, I really do.'

'You don't think that what happened to us at the Hawthorne Inn was far-fetched?' I asked her.

'Well, sure, but — I don't know. A demon. Who believes in demons?'

'It's just a convenient word to use,' Edward explained. 'I don't know what the hell else to call it. An occult relic? I don't know. Demon is just a handy word, that's all.'

'All right, then, call it a demon,' said Gilly. 'But I don't think it's going to help anybody to believe in and sympathize with what you're trying to do, do you?'

'Well, we'll see,' said Edward. Then, to me, 'Did you have any luck with your father-in-law, as far as finance is concerned?'

'Not yet. I've left him to think about it.'

'Keep pressing him, won't you? We can just about afford these echo-soundings, but not much else. I've already emptied my investment account at the bank, not that that amounted to much. Two thousand, one hundred dollars.'

'Have you seen any more manifestations?' Gilly asked me. 'Any more spooky apparitions? Edward told me what happened to you on Saturday night, that must have been so scary.'

'You still don't believe it, do you?' I asked her.

'I'd like to believe it — ' she said.

' — but you can't,' I added.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I guess I'm too pragmatic, too down-to-earth. I see these girls screaming on horror films whenever they're threatened by a monster or a vampire, and I just know that I wouldn't react that way. I'd want to know what the monster was, and what it wanted, or maybe if it was somebody dressed up to look like a monster. I'm not denying that what happened at the Hawthorne was scary. It could even have been occult. But I think if it was occult it came from inside your own mind; it was you doing it yourself. I've been changing my opinion about once every five minutes for the past few days, do I believe in ghosts or don't I, and I think I've come out on the side of the non-believers. People are seeing them; all right; you're seeing them. I believe that. But that doesn't mean to say that they're actually there.'

'Well, well, little Miss Sensible,' I said. 'Here's the beef in ginger, help yourself.'

'You think I'm too direct,' she said.

'Did I say I think you're too direct?' I asked her.

'Not in so many words.'

'Well, then, keep my opinions to yourself.'

After lunch, I bought a large bouquet of flowers and drove back to Granitehead to present them to Laura, and tell her how sorry I was for forgetting to show up for dinner. I had looked into the Crumblin' Cookie earlier, but she hadn't been there. It was obvious from the way the rest of the staff had stared at me, however, that she had told them what had happened. As I drove along West Shore Drive, I decided to drop into the Granitehead Market, and pick up a fresh bottle of whisky and maybe a bottle of wine for Laura, to go with the flowers. It was a bright, springlike afternoon, and lunch with Gilly and Edward had cheered me up. I whistled as I parked the car and walked across the parking-lot to the market door.

Charlie wasn't there, but his part-time assistant Cy was serving behind the counter, a good-humoured young teenager with bright red spots and what was probably the last crewcut on the eastern seaboard. I went to the liquor shelf and picked out a bottle of Chivas and a bottle of Mouton Cadet red.

'Charlie not here?' I asked Cy, as I took out my wallet.

'He went out,' said Cy. 'I mean, like, he really rushed out.'

'Charlie rushed? I don't think I've ever seen Charlie rush in the whole time I've been here.'

'He surely did this time. He went out of that door like a bat out of hell. He said something about Neil.'

I felt that familiar, unsettling prickle. 'Neil? You mean his dead son Neil?'

'Well, I don't think so,' said Cy. 'It couldn't have been. He said he'd seen him. "I just saw him!" he said, and then he rushed out of that door like a bat out of hell.'

'Which way?' I demanded.

'Which way?' said Cy, surprised. 'I don't know which way. Well, maybe kind of up that way, past the parking-lot and up the hill. I was serving, I didn't take too much notice.'

I pushed my two bottles to the side of the counter. 'Keep these here for me, will you?' I told him, and then wrenched open the market door and ran out into the parking-lot. I shaded my eyes against the afternoon sun and stared up the hill, but I couldn't see any sign of Charlie. However, he was fat, and unfit, and he couldn't have got far. I ran across the parking-lot and started climbing the hill as rapidly as I could.

It was a long, hard climb. Up here, the range of hills of which Quaker Hill was the southernmost was steeper and rougher than anywhere else. I had to cling on to the rough grass to keep my balance, and several times my foot slid on the crumbling soil, and I scraped my ankles.

After four or five minutes, panting and sweating, I reached the crest of the hill and looked around. Off to the north-east, I could see Granitehead Village, and beyond it, the glittering North Atlantic. To the west I could see Salem Harbour and Salem itself, strung along the shoreline; to the south I could see Quaker Hill and Quaker Lane Cottage, and off to the south-west, Waterside Cemetery.

It was breezy and cold up here, in spite of the sunshine. My eyes watered as I looked frantically around for any sign of Charlie. I even cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, 'Charlie! Charlie Manzi! Where are you, Charlie?'

I descended the gentler slope that eventually led down towards the sea. The grass whipped against my legs, and whistled in the wind. I felt chilly and very alone up here, and even the smoke which rose from Shetland Industrial Park, right next to Derby Wharf, didn't seem to be any guarantee that there was any human life around here. I could have been alone, in a world which had become suddenly deserted.

Not much further down the slope, however, I caught sight of Charlie. He was jogging through the grass, heading diagonally towards the shoreline, his shoulders hunched, his white apron flapping like a semaphore signal. I shouted out, 'Charlie! Wait, Charlie! Charlie!' but either he didn't hear me or he was determined to ignore me.

Although I was already out of breath, I ran as fast as I could down the slope, and at last caught up with him. He didn't even turn to look at me, and I had to keep on running just to stay abreast of him. His cheeks and jowls were white with effort, and his forehead glistened with sweat. As he ran, his breasts joggled up and down under his checkered shirt.

'Charlie!' I shouted at him. 'What are you running for?' 'You stay away, Mr Trenton!' he gasped. 'You stay away and leave me alone!'

'Charlie, for Christ's sake, you'll have a heart attack!' 'None of your goddamned business! Stay away!' I stumbled on a rock, and almost fell, but then I caught up with Charlie again and yelled, 'He isn't real, Charlie! He's an illusion!'

'Don't you give me that,' puffed Charlie. 'He's real and I've seen him. I prayed for God to bring him back and now God's brought him back. And if I get Neil back, then Moira will come back, too. So stay away, you got me? Don't question miracles.'

'Charlie, this is a miracle,' I panted, 'but it's not God's miracle.'

'What are you talking about?' Charlie slowed down to a hobbling, jerky walk. 'Who else does miracles, apart from God?'

I pointed to the north-west, to the sparkling stretch of water about a half-mile south of Winter Island. 'Charlie, under the ocean — right there — where I'm pointing — lies the wreck of a 300-year-old ship. Inside that ship are the remains of a kind of demon, a devil, do you understand me? An evil spirit, like in The Amityville Horror, only worse.'

'You're trying to tell me it was that which raised up my Neil?'

'Not just your Neil, Charlie, but my wife, too, and the wives and husbands and brothers and children of scores of other people in Granitehead. Charlie, Granitehead is cursed because of that demon. The dead of Granitehead are never allowed to rest, and your Neil is the same.'

Charlie stopped, and stared at me for a very long time, while he caught his breath. 'Why are you telling me this?' he said, at last. 'Is it true?'

'As far as I know it. I'm working with several other people, including three custodians from the Peabody Museum. We're doing what we can to raise that ship off the bottom, and get rid of the demon forever.'

Charlie wiped his mouth with his hand, and narrowed his eyes towards Waterside Cemetery. 'I don't know what to say, Mr Trenton. I saw him, and he was real. Real and alive as I am.'

'Charlie, I know. I've seen Jane the same way. But, believe me, it isn't the Neil you used to know when he was alive. He's different, and he's dangerous.'

'Dangerous? I used to take my belt to that boy, when he misbehaved himself.'

'That was the Neil you knew when he was alive. This

Neil is something else altogether. Charlie, he's controlled by that demon, and he's out to kill you.'

Charlie sniffed, and then cleared his throat. He looked at me and then looked down towards the cemetery.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know what to believe. You, or my own eyes.'

It was then that we both heard calling. A boy's voice, carried on the wind. We both strained our eye's to see where it was coming from, and at last Charlie said, There… look, over there!' and when I followed his stubby pointing finger I saw Neil, young Neil Manzi, standing on a small grassy promontory, waving to us as freely and cheerfully as if he were alive.

'Dad…'he was calling. 'Come on, Dad…'

Charlie immediately started jogging again, down the hill.

'Charlie, for God's sake!' I shouted at him, and ran after him, and tried to catch his arm. 'Charlie, that isn't Neil!'

'Don't give me that, look at the boy,' Charlie puffed at me. 'Look at him, the same as always. It's a miracle, that's all. A plain miracle, just like they used to happen in the Bible.'

'Charlie! He'll kill you!'

'Well, maybe I deserve it!' Charlie shouted. 'Maybe I deserve it, for buying him that motorcycle. Get away, Mr Trenton, I warn you. Leave me alone.'

'Charlie — '

'Mr Trenton, I can't be any unhappier than I am now, alive or dead.'

That last shouted remark stopped me in my tracks. I watched Charlie Manzi galloping fatly down that hill, waving as he ran to the slender boy in denims who stood just a little way away from him, waving back; and I knew that there was nothing I could do. I could have football-tackled Charlie, I suppose, or tried to knock him out. But what was the point of that? I'd never be able to watch over him night and day, to make sure that Neil didn't come back to get him; and besides which, if I did knock him out, he wouldn't even want to talk to me again.

I stood where I was, my hands down by my sides, as Charlie ran further and further away. Soon he was a tiny fat figure in the distance, his white apron blinking at me from almost a quarter of a mile away.

I decided to go back to the market, and pick up my car, and maybe drive around to the cemetery to see if there was anything I could do; but then I saw Neil run down from his promontory, and disappear, only to reappear much nearer the cemetery gates, almost the same distance away as Quaker Lane Cottage. Charlie kept after him, and I knew then that however hopeless it was, I was going to have to chase up behind and see if there was anything I could do to make him change his mind.

I ran down that hillside as fast as I used to run at High School, when I was swimming and running every day and generally considered myself to be a junior edition of Johnny Weissmuller. I was exhausted by the time I was within hailing distance of Charlie, and I could scarcely croak, let alone shout, but I kept on running at a slow, even pace, until there were only 20 yards between us.

'Dad!' came the cry on the south-west wind. 'Come on, Dad!' And the sound of it was all the more chilling because it was so young. I saw Charlie reach the cemetery gates, and open them, and disappear inside, somewhere behind the headstones.

I summoned up a last burst of effort, and reached the cemetery gates just in time to see Charlie making his way down the centre aisle of tombstones. He was walking now, holding his chest with both hands because he was so deeply out of breath, but not stopping to rest, not even for a moment, not while Neil was waiting for him at the end of the aisle, his arms outstretched, smiling, welcoming his father so warmly, and with such encouragement, that I knew I would never be able to persuade Charlie to turn around.

'Charlie!' I shouted, in a strained voice. 'Charlie, for one minute, wait!'

I wrestled with the wrought-iron cemetery gates, but somehow they refused to open. They weren't bolted; and they couldn't be locked, because Charlie had walked through them so easily. But no matter how violently I shook them and kicked at them, I couldn't get them to budge.

'Charlie!' I screeched at him. 'For one second, Charlie, just listen! Don't go near him, Charlie! Don't go near! Charlie, it isn't Neil! Don't go near!'

I rammed against the gates with my shoulder, but they weren't going to move. There was nothing I could do but stand there and shout, while Charlie plodded slowly between the gravestones towards the son he thought he had lost.

It was then that I heard a deep, gravelly, grating noise. It sounded like a ton of rock being dragged slowly across a cement floor; and I wasn't sure if I was hearing it through my ears or through the soles of my feet. Then there was another noise, grittier than the first, and louder.

Maybe it was an earthquake. Maybe something was shifting, under the ground. I had heard there were caverns underneath parts of Granitehead, where the ocean had eroded the softer subsoil. I peered in to the cemetery through the bars of the gates, and tried to see if anything was happening there.

To my horror and astonishment, I saw that one of the tombs, a large white-marble catafalque with an engraved marble coffin on top of it, had somehow slid across the aisle in front of Charlie, and was now separating him from his son. Charlie turned around, bewildered, and I heard him shout, 'Neil! Neil, what's going on here? Neil, answer me!'

Before he could walk back towards the gates, another huge tomb began to slide across the aisle behind him, boxing him in. It moved with a slow, grinding sound, like shingle being crushed beneath the wheels of a road-roller; but it blocked the aisle completely, a wall of solid Barre granite.

'Charlie!' I yelled. 'Charlie, get yourself out of there! For God's sake, Charlie, get out!'

I heard Charlie calling for Neil again; but then I also heard another sound. The steady grating of more tombstones, as they shifted themselves in on both sides, narrowing the aisle in which Charlie was standing by slow but inexorable inches.

'Charlie!' I shouted. 'Charlie!'

The tombstones pressed further and further into the space that was left, until I heard above the grinding noise they were making a sudden high-keyed shout for help.

'Mr Trenton, my sleeve's caught! Mr Trenton!'

I rattled furiously at the cemetery gates but there was nothing I could do to get in there. I could only watch in horror and disbelief as Charlie tried to claw his way up the polished side of the marble catafalque, desperate to escape two huge upright gravestones which ground their way in towards him on either side. They must have weighed nearly a ton each, those stones, decorated with stone lilies and sobbing cherubs; and they moved like giant funeral carriages, des chars funebres, gray and grotesque, faceless and unstoppable.

'Oh, God!’ shrieked Charlie. 'Oh my God! Neil! Help me! Oh God, somebody help me!'

By some unimaginable effort, Charlie managed to heave his bulky body halfway out of the relentlessly-closing space. His face was crimson with fear, his eyes starting out of his head. He raised one arm towards me, but then the massive tombstones closed in on him, trapping him between two upright faces of solid granite.

Without hesitation, the tombstones crushed him. I heard the bones in his legs snapping like a fusillade of pistol-fire; and then he soundlessly stretched open his mouth, gagging for a moment in utter agony, before a gouting fountain of blood and raw flesh surged from between his lips and darkly splattered the gravestones all around him. He was pinned upright for a moment, jerking and writhing, and then he mercifully collapsed.

I closed my eyes, still clutching the bars of the wrought-iron gates. I was shivering all over, and I could hear the blood pumping through my veins like the rushing traffic to hell itself. Then, without looking towards Charlie any more, I turned around, and began to walk back up the hillside.

Behind me, there was a shuddering, screeching, scraping sound, as the tombstones moved back into their proper positions. It was a sound that crawled into my bones, as Yiddish people sometimes say. I knew that I would wake up at night for years to come and think that I could hear that noise; the grating noise of an impossible and unavoidable death.

I could have reported Charlie's death to the police, I suppose. I could have knelt beside him until somebody came. But I was already involved in enough mysterious fatalities; already tangled up in enough fear and enough complications. How could I possibly explain Charlie's crushing to anybody who hadn't seen it for themselves? I couldn't even believe it myself, the way those massive tombs had moved of their own terrifying volition. I kept on walking up the hill, past the end of Quaker Lane, and back at last to the Granitehead Market.

It seemed to take me three times as long to get back to the store as it had to run down to the cemetery, and I was bushed when I walked back in there to collect my liquor.

'Did you find him?' asked Cy.

'Not a sign,' I lied.

'You're worried about him?' Cy wanted to know.

There was something I wanted to tell him, that's all. But I guess it can wait.'

The way you ran out of here, like a bat out of hell, I thought that…'

'Forget it, okay?' I said, more sharply than I meant to. I picked up my wine and my whisky. 'I'm sorry. Thanks for taking care of the booze.'

'Any time,' said Cy, looking puzzled.

I drove into Granitehead. Somebody had taken my favourite parking spot and so I had to go all the way down to the municipal lot by the harbour. By the time I had trudged back uphill to the square, I wasn't in the best of tempers: shocked, tired, and edgy. I walked into the Crumblin' Cookie with a scowl on my face like Quasimodo with a hunch-ache.

'Well,' said Laura, 'you've actually dared to show yourself.'

By the simple fact that she was speaking to me I knew that I was halfway forgiven. I set the flowers and the bottle of wine on the counter, and said, ‘The flowers are to say sorry. The wine we should have shared last night. If you want to throw the flowers away and drink the wine on your own, I'll understand.'

'You could have called me,' she said, resentfully.

'Laura, I don't know what else to say. I feel like a total Pig-'

She took the bottle of wine and examined the label.

'All right,' she said, 'since you have such excellent taste, I forgive you. But only just. And if it happens again, I may unforgive you very fast.'

'Whatever you say, Laura.'

'Well, you could look as if you're sorry.'

'I'm just upset, that's all.'

'You don't think I'm upset?'

'I didn't say you weren't.'

'At least when you're saying "forgive me" you might look as if you want to be forgiven.'

'What do you want me to do?' I demanded. 'Sing I'm Sorry and pour ashes all over my head?'

'Oh, get out of here. You're about as sorry as I don't know what.'

'You don't even know what it is I'm as sorry as, and you're telling me to get out?'

'John, for God's sake.'

'All right,' I told her, 'I'm going.'

Take your wine and your flowers with you,' she said.

'Keep them. Just because you don't know what it is I'm as sorry as, that doesn't mean to say that I'm not sorry.'

'You're about as sorry as Gary Gilmore,' she snapped at me.

'Well, you know what his famous last words were, don't you? "Let's do it." '

I walked out of the Crumblin' Cookie and left Laura to her justified anger. I liked her, I didn't want to upset her. Maybe I'd call her later this evening and see whether she'd cooled down. I knew that, sure as hell, I wouldn't have been very happy if I'd spent all evening preparing an Italian meal for somebody who couldn't be bothered to turn up.

I was crossing the cobblestones of Granitehead Square when I thought I glimpsed the girl in the hooded brown cape on the other side of the street just turning into Village Place. I changed direction, and followed after her, determined this time to catch up with her and find out who she was. Maybe she was nobody special at all: maybe her frequent appearances had been coincidence. But after Charlie's death and Constance's death, I was determined that I was going to lay the ghost of the David Dark, and that meant I was going to track down anything and everything that could help me.

I turned the corner into Village Place: a little narrow cul-de-sac lined with fashionably chintzy shops. The girl was standing in front of the Granitehead Bookmart, staring into the window, either at the books that were displayed inside, or at her own reflection.