Death Trance

Thirty-Three

'Make it fast,' ordered Quamus, and Walcott backed up the boat, engines beating slow astern, while Laurie and I leaned over with billhooks and drew the copper vessel closer. The surface of the vessel was heavily corroded, and time had turned it a dark, poisonous green, but all the same it was remarkable how long it had lasted underneath the silt of Salem Harbour.

There were copper rings along either side of the casket, which presumably had been used for fastening the ropes with which the casket had first been hoisted on board the David Dark. Some of these rings had been eaten right through, but I managed to hook one that was intact, and then Laurie actually swung herself off the stern-rail, and stood on the floating casket while she ran a rope through it.

'There's no point in heading straight for Salem,' I said. The police will catch us before we've gone half a mile. How about making for the wharf at Granitehead?'

Walcott revved up his diesels. 'They'll probably catch us anyway,' he said, 'but it may be worth a shot. What do we do when we get there? That damn coffin-thing is far too big for anybody to lift.'

'There's a ramp there, and a boat-winch. Maybe we can drag it ashore with that.'

'And then what? The police will be all over us by then.'

'I don't know. Maybe we can borrow a truck. Just give it a try, will you?'

'Sure I'll give it a try. I'll give anything a try. I'm just asking if you had a plan in mind, that's all.'

‘I’ll think of something, all right?'

'You're the boss.'

Even before we had covered quarter of a mile, however, it was clear that the police boat was going to head us off long before we could reach the Granitehead shoreline. Walcott was pressing his lugger to go as fast as it possibly could, but he wasn't keen on burning out his bearings, and the huge green casket that we were towing behind us was nothing but sheer dead weight.

'You must go faster,' insisted Quamus, but Walcott shook his head.

Now the police boat was within earshot, and they killed their siren and began to curve around in front of our bows, neat and fast and unavoidable. One of the officers was already balancing his way along the deck with a loud-hailer, and another stood behind him with a carbine.

'Okay, slow down,' I told Walcott. 'There's no point in getting shot at.'

Walcott eased off his engines, and the lugger began to dip and drift towards a slow rendezvous with the waiting police-boat. The copper vessel caught up with us, still propelled by its own inertia, and bumped noisily against our stern.

'Come out on deck with your hands on your heads,' ordered the police officer. 'I want all of you right where I can see you.'

He started to walk back along the deck, but he had scarcely gone three paces when he suddenly gripped his stomach, and collapsed out of sight.

'What's happened?' asked Walcott, standing up on the foredeck to get a better view. 'Did you see that? He just kind of fell over.'

The second officer, the one who had been carrying the carbine, suddenly ran to the police-boat's cabin. Then their pilot appeared, carrying a towel and a first-aid kit.

'What's happened?' I shouted. 'Is everything all right?'

The second officer glanced up at us, and then waved us away. I turned to Walcott and said, 'Pull up alongside. Come on, quick!'

'Are you kidding?' said Walcott. 'This is our chance to get away.'

'Pull up alongside!' I ordered him. He shrugged, spat, and turned over the engines so that we nudged up against the trim hull of the police-boat.

It was only when we actually touched their boat that I saw the blood. It was sprayed all over the deck as if someone had been painting the boat crimson with a firehose. The second officer appeared again, his shirt splashed with gore, his hands so bloody that he looked as if he were wearing gloves.

'What happened?' I asked him, in horrified awe.

'I don't know,' the policeman said, in a shocked voice. 'It was Kelly. His stomach just blew open. I mean it just blew open, and everything came out, all through his shirt.'

He stared at me. 'You didn't do it, did you? You didn't shoot him or anything?'

'You know damn well we didn't.'

'Well… go back to Salem… you got me? Go back to Salem and report to police headquarters. I have to get Kelly to hospital.'

The pilot came past, his shirt flecked with blood. He was very pale and he didn't say anything; but went straight to the wheelhouse and started up the police-boat's engine. Within a minute, the police-boat had angled away towards the harbour, its siren wailing, leaving the lugger and its attendant casket alone on the incoming tide. I looked at Quamus, and Quamus looked back at me.

'We will continue to make for Granitehead,' he decided. 'Once they have recovered from their shock, those officers will alert the police at Salem that we are coming, and we will be arrested if we go back there. Let us tow this burden of ours on to the wharf, and I will rent or borrow a car and go back to Salem Harbour to bring the refrigerated truck.'

'Do you think Mictantecutli will be safe for all that time, without refrigeration?' I asked him.

Quamus looked astern, at the floating casket. 'I do not know,' he said solemnly. Tor all I am aware, that officer on the police-boat… Mictantecutli could well have been responsible for that.'

Laurie glanced at her father. 'Dad,' she said, 'let's get this thing to shore, hunh?'

Walcott nodded. 'It doesn't carry anything catching, does it?' he wanted to know. 'It isn't diseased?'

'Not in the way you mean it,' I told him. 'But let's get a move on, shall we? The longer we stay out here, the more dangerous it's going to be.'

We passed the Waterside Cemetery and then turned in towards the boat ramp at Brown's Jetty. It had once been a fashionable place to launch your pleasure-boats, back in the 1930s. There had been a restaurant there, and a cocktail verandah, and lights strung out along the pier. But these days the buildings were sagging and deserted, and all that remained of the cocktail verandah was a rotting deck on which dozens of skeletal beach-chairs lay heaped as if they had been consigned to a mass grave.

Walcott brought the lugger in as close as he could, and then we untied the casket and let it drift up to the weed-slimy boat-ramp on the persistent flow of the tide. With a little prodding from our billhooks, it lodged itself listlessly against the lower reaches of the ramp, and then Quamus and I jumped off the lugger into the sea, and swam and waded ourselves ashore.

I climbed dripping wet to the top of the ramp, and tried out the winch. Fortunately someone had kept it greased and in good working order, and it didn't take long to unwind enough cable to reach down to the casket's rings. As soon as he was sure that we had the casket secure, Walcott gave us a toot on his whistle and began to steer his lugger out into the harbour again. I can't say I blamed him, even though he probably faced immediate arrest. Even a couple of months in jail is preferable to having your intestines blown out.

Quamus and I said nothing as we worked the handles of the winch, gradually edging the huge copper vessel up the concrete ramp. It made a shifting, grating sound as we inched it upwards, and there was a terrible hollowness about it, a slight rumbling, like very distant thunder. I sweated and gasped at the winch-handle, and tried not to think what the creature inside this ponderous vessel was actually like, and what it might conceivably do to me.

It took us almost half an hour, but at last the casket had been dragged right up to the top of the ramp, where we covered it with two tarpaulin sheets which were usually used for protecting boats during the winter. Quamus looked out across the harbour, but there was no sign of the police or the coastguard, or even of Edward and Forrest and the rest of the David Dark fellowship.

'Now,' said Quamus, 'I will go back to Salem and collect the refrigerated truck. You must stay here and guard Mictantecutli.'

'Wouldn't it be better if I collected the truck? You can't say that you're exactly unnoticeable. A six-foot Narragansett in a wet quilted jacket.'

'They will not notice me,' said Quamus, with quiet confidence. 'I have a technique which the Narragansett developed centuries ago to hunt wild animals. We call it "No Hunter." '

'"No Hunter"?'

'It is a way of making oneself invisible to other people, even though one is there. A strange technique, but it can be taught.'

'All right, then,' I said. I didn't really like the idea of waiting beside this monstrous burial-casket too much, but I guess I really didn't have any choice. 'Just don't be too long, that's all; and if you do get arrested, tell the police where I am. I don't intend spending all night out here, with nobody but Mictantecutli for company, not while you're eating steak-and-eggs in the Salem City jail.'

'Now you are afraid,' smiled Quamus.

He walked off between the derelict restaurant buildings towards West Shore Drive. I sat down on the jetty and looked cautiously at the corroded copper vessel in which David Dark’s Aztec demon had been incarcerated for over 290 years. I turned around to tell Quamus to bring me a half-bottle of whisky while he was away, but he was already gone. The 'No Hunter' had disappeared. I tried to make myself comfortable, and propped one leg up on the tarpaulins which covered the casket, as if it were simply a rather odd-looking boat that I happened to own.

It was only noon, but the sky was strangely gloomy, as if I were looking at it through dark glasses. A wind was getting up, too: a wind that hadn't been forecast. It ruffled the gray waves of Salem Harbour, and whipped the dead leaves and collected rubbish on the sagging cocktail verandah. A salt-faded sign above the restaurant still said Harbourside Restaurant, Lobster, Clams, Steaks, Cocktails. I could imagine summer nights out there, with Dixieland bands and men in straw hats and girls in shimmering shimmy dresses.

I tugged up the collar of my jacket. The wind was really cold now, and the sky was so dark that some of the cars on the opposite shoreline were driving with their headlights on. There was probably a storm brewing up, one of those heavy North Atlantic numbers that made you feel as if you were caught in a mackerel-boat at sea, even though you were sitting right there in your own living-room.

Then, I heard that singing. High, faint, and eerie. It came from somewhere inside the derelict restaurant, a thin controlled voice that made the hair crawl up the back of my neck as if it were electrified.

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

I stood up, and walked across the decayed cocktail-deck, looking up at the restaurant to see where the singing might be coming from. I had to jump once or twice across missing planks; and beneath the deck I could see dripping darkness, where crabs scuttled. I approached the restaurant and went right up to the front door. It was locked, and the glass was so thick with years of salt and grime that I could scarcely see inside.

The song was repeated, louder this time; in the same cold, clear voice. It was definitely coming from inside the restaurant. I looked around to make sure there was nobody watching me, and then I kicked in the door with three or four hefty kicks. The door was held only by a cheap rimlock, which splintered away from the frame; and then it juddered open and stayed open, almost as if it were inviting me inside. Come in, Mr Trenton, destiny is served.

I walked carefully inside. The floor was laid with bare splintered boards, dusty and littered with old newspapers and odd fragments of green linoleum. A revolving fan hung from the ceiling, in between two frosted glass lampshades. On the far wall was a wide mirror, spotted and blighted with dirt. I could see myself standing in the restaurant like a long-dead man in a stained old photograph. I took two or three steps forward.

'John?' she whispered. I turned slowly around, and she was standing behind me. Her face was almost completely skull-like now, and it was fixed in a grisly grimace. 'John, you must set me free.'

'How can I do that?' I asked. I watched her as she glided around the room, her funeral robes silently flowing. 'I've brought you up from the bottom of the sea. What else do I have to do?'

'Break the vessel open,' she whispered. 'The vessel is sealed with bonds that I cannot break alone; the bonds of the Holy Trinity. You must break the vessel open in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Just as it was sealed.'

'I still have no guarantee that I will get Jane back alive, and in one piece.'

'This is a world without guarantees, John. You must trust me.'

'I'm not sure whether I can.'

'Would you trust me to burst open your stomach, like that man who tried to stand in your way? Or to explode you, like David Dark? I may be imprisoned, John, but I still have substantial strength.'

I said, hesitantly, 'I just want to know, that's all… I mean, what you're asking me to do…'

Jane glided towards the mirror. Like a vampire out of a Dracula story, just as Gilly had jokingly warned me, she made no reflection. But she walked straight through the mirror until she was standing in the reflected room, watching me, and there was no image of her on my side of the mirror at all.

'You must believe,' she said, and then she faded.

I stood in that deserted restaurant for a long time. Now was the moment when I had to make my decision. I had already seen how cruelly and how callously Mictantecutli could destroy people; and how he could raise the dead and send them to slaughter the living. Yet I knew all this time that I wanted Jane back with me with a desperation that had somehow gone beyond love. It had become a matter of proving to myself that miracles could actually happen, that the dead could be restored, that everything that I had ever believed about the world could be turned upside-down.

Since Jane had died, I had witnessed some extraordinary and frightening things. But somehow they seemed to me then to have been nothing more than terrifying tricks. It was only when I could hold Jane in my arms again that I would actually believe in powers that were far greater than human experience could testify to, or human imagination encompass.

It didn't occur to me, of course, that more than at any other time since Jane had died, I was now very close to a complete emotional collapse. When I think today of the way in which I persuaded myself that Mictantecutli should be released, I still go physically cold.

I left the restaurant and walked back across the cocktail deck. It was so dark outside that I had forgotten it was only just past noon, and that it wasn't night-time at all. The corroded green casket was still lying on the boat-ramp, under its draped tarpaulins. On the far side of the ramp was a locked cupboard marked FIREHOSE. I walked around the casket to the cupboard, examined its rusted hinges, and then gave it a good kicking with the heel of my shoe until the left-hand door split, and I was able to wrench it open. Inside was a mildewed hose and just what I had been looking for: a long-handled fire-axe.

I walked back to the casket, and pushed aside the tarpaulins. The casket seemed larger than it had before: green and bulky and silently malevolent. I touched its scaly side with my bare fingers and I felt curiously alarmed, almost as if I had unwittingly put my hand on a giant centipede in the dark. Then, on impulse, I swung back the fire-axe and dealt the side of the casket a tremendous blow with the blade.

There was a deep, reverberating boom, and the casket seemed to shudder. I felt the place where the axe-blade had struck, and I could tell that it had bitten quite deep, and almost penetrated the metal. The copper couldn't have been more than an inch thick to begin with, and the corrosive salt of the sea had reduced it by more than half.

I swung the axe again. 'I release you,' I panted, as the blade banged into the top of the casket. 'I release you in the name of the Father.'

I swung back the axe again, and struck again. 'I release you,' I chanted. I could hear my own voice speaking in my ears, as if I was someone else. 'I release you in the name of the Son.'

Above me, the sky was threateningly black. The wind began to shriek across the harbour, and the waves rose so high that they were flecked with foam. It was almost impossible to see the farther shore, and on the Granite-head shoreline itself the trees were bending and writhing like tortured souls.

Once more I raised the axe, and once more I brought it down on top of the casket. ‘I release you!' I shouted. ‘I release you in the name of the Holy Spirit!'

There was a screech that could have been the wind or could have been something else altogether: the screech of a despairing world. In front of my eyes, the dark green copper casket cracked, and gaped open, and then cracked again, scales of corroded metal dropping to the concrete boat-ramp. A dry, fetid smell arose from the open vessel, a smell like an animal that had long since died and decayed, a giant rat found between the floorboards of an old house, a baby discovered in a chimney.

In front of my eyes, the Fleshless One was exposed, lying inside his casket; and to my horror he was not simply a giant skeleton, but a giant skeleton made of dozens of human skeletons. Each arm was made of two skeletons connected by a skull, each finger was a whole human arm. Each rib was made of curved and twisted skeletons of children, and its pelvis was a white basin of scores of smaller pelvises. And as it turned and stared at me with eye-sockets that were deep and sightless and infinitely evil, I saw that its head was made of hundreds of human skulls, somehow fused together to form the greatest skull I had ever seen.

'Now,' whispered a voice that was as thunderous as a church-organ. 'Now my reign can begin again. Now I can garner all those souls that my spirit has craved for. And you, my friend, you will be my high priest. That is your reward. You will stay with me always, at my right-hand side, interpreting for me my every demand, seeking for me those souls which will fulfill my appetite.'

'Where's Jane?' I shouted at it, even though I was utterly terrified by its appearance. 'You promised me Jane! Just like she was before the accident, unhurt! Alive and unhurt! You promised!'

'You are impatient,' boomed Mictantecutli. 'There will be time for that; all in good time.'

'You promised me Jane and I want her now! Just like she was before the accident!'

The wind was howling so loudly that I could scarcely hear what the demon said next. But then I heard a screaming, somewhere close to the old restaurant building. It was high-pitched, terrified, the sound of a woman in total fear. I made my way around the casket, steadying myself against the wind by holding on to the railings beside the boat-ramp, and stared out into the darkness.

She was there. Jane. It was really her. She was standing by the restaurant door, her hands over her face, and she was screaming, on and on and on, screaming and screaming until I could hardly bear to listen to it any longer. I made my way across the cocktail deck again, tearing my socks against a loose board, and went up to her, holding her shoulders, shaking her.

She was real, and she was alive. She was wearing the same clothes that she had been wearing on the night of the accident. But no matter how hard I shook her and shouted at her, I couldn't get her to take her hands away from her face, and I couldn't get her to stop screaming. In the end, I turned away from her, and struggled back to the broken casket, where Mictantecutli still lay, grinning in the fixed grin of all skeletons, a grin that is neither loving nor humorous, but the expression of death.

'What have you done?' I shouted at it. 'Why won't she answer me? Why is she screaming like that? If you've hurt her — '

'She isn't hurt,' whispered the demon. 'She thinks that she is about to be hurt, just as she did in the seconds before her accident. But she is safe, and well, and alive.'

'And terrified!' I yelled at it. 'For God's sake, stop her screaming! How can I live with her when she's like this?'

'You wanted her just as she was before the accident,' Mictantecutli reminded me. 'That is the way she was; and that is the way you must have her.'

'What are you trying to tell me? That she'll always be screaming? That she'll always be terrified that she's going to have a crash?'

'Always and always,' grinned Mictantecutli. 'Until the day she returns to the region of the dead.'

I looked back towards the old restaurant. Jane was still there, screaming at the top of her voice, her hands pressed over her eyes. She had been screaming for nearly five minutes now, without stopping, and I knew that Mictantecutli had tricked me. It had no power to restore the dead as their loved ones had known them: it had only the power to take them back to the moment when they were first fatally doomed. That was the moment when their spirits were first consigned to the region of the dead, and that was the boundary of Mictantecutli's kingdom.

I felt tears springing in my eyes. But I was strong enough and determined enough to pick up the fire-axe which I had dropped beside the dark green copper vessel, and carry it with me back to the restaurant. I put it down beside Jane, and took hold of her again, and begged her to stop screaming, begged her to take her hands away from her face. But I heard in the back of my mind the soft coldness of Mictantecutli's laughter, and I knew that it was hopeless.

'Jane,' I said, trying not to listen to the screaming. I held her tight, trying to reassure her, trying to protect her from the fate which had already happened to her, and from which I couldn't save her, no matter what I did.

The screaming went on and on.

At last, I stepped away from her, and without looking at her, picked up the fire-axe, and swung it straight down so that it buried itself deep between her upraised hands.

Blood spurted out from between her fingers. One leg jerked uncontrollably. She turned and staggered, and then collapsed. I threw the axe as far away as I could into the wind, and then I walked away from Jane without looking back.

I passed Mictantecutli's casket. I didn't turn to look at Mictantecutli either. I headed for the highway, between the old restaurant buildings, walking at first, and then jogging.

'You will never escape me,' whispered the demon. 'I promise you, John, you will never escape me.'

I reached West Shore Drive, and looked around in the noontime darkness for a car, or a truck, or any sign of Quamus returning. It was then that I saw the pale figures in the distance; figures in rags and tags, like the beggars coming to town. I stared at them for a long time before I realized who they were. There was a whole company of them, shuffling and decaying and blind.

They were the dead of Granitehead, the corpses from the cemetery. The servants of Mictantecutli, searching for fresh blood and human hearts, anything to strengthen their newly-released lord.

I started to run.