Death Trance

Six

I left the house and walked down the lane between the wind-whipped yew trees to the main Granitehead highway, and then north-east towards Granitehead Market, on the outskirts of the village itself. It was a good three miles' walk, there and back, but I usually walked because it was the only real exercise I ever managed to get, and tonight I wanted the rain in my face and the wind in my eyes and anything that would reassure me that I was sane and that I was real.

A dog barked somewhere off to my right, as persistent as a child with a chesty cough. Then a sudden burst of dried-up leaves scurried out of the hedgerow and whirled around in front of me. It was one of those nights when slates are blown off rooftops, and television antennae are brought down, and trees collapse across roadways. It was one of those nights when ships go down, and sailors are drowned. Rain and wind. Granitehead people call them 'Satan's nights'.

I passed my neighbours' cottages: the austere gambrelled rooftops of Mrs Haraden's house; the picturesque huddle of Breadboard Cottages, all shiplap and trellised porches; the Stick Style Gothic of No. 7, where George Markham lived. There were warm lights inside, televisions flickering, people eating supper; each window like a happy memory, brought to mind in the rainy wildness of the night.

I felt loneliness as well as fright, and as I neared the highway I began to have the unnerving sensation that somebody had been following me down the lane. It took all the determination I could muster not to turn around and take a look. Yet — weren't those footsteps? Wasn't that breathing? Wasn't that a stone, chipped up by somebody's hurrying feet?

It was a long, wet and blowy walk all the way along the main road to Granitehead Market. A couple of cars passed by, but they didn't stop to offer me a ride, and I didn't attempt to canvass one. The only other people I saw, apart from car-drivers, were three young men from the Walsh place, all dressed up in oil-skins, lifting a fallen tree from their front fencing. One of them remarked, 'Just glad I ain't out at sea, not tonight.'

And I thought of that song, that curiosity from Old Salem:

'But the fish they caught were naught but bones with hearts crush'd in their jaws.'

After a while I saw the floodlights shining across the market's parking-lot, and the red illuminated sign saying Market Open 8 -11. The store window was all misted up, but inside I could see the bright colours of modern reality, and people shopping. I opened the door, stepped inside and stamped my feet on the mat.

'Been for a swim, Mr Trenton?' called Charlie Manzi, from behind the counter. Charlie was fat and cheerful, with a thick rug of black curly hair, but he could also talk surprisingly sharply.

I briskly brushed the rain off my coat, and shook my head like a wet dog. ‘I’m seriously thinking of trading in my car for a birch-bark canoe,' I told him. 'This must be the wettest place on God's good earth.'

'You think so?' said Charlie, slicing salami. 'Well, on Waileale Mountain in Hawaii, it rains 460 inches every year, which is about ten times more than it does here, so don't go knocking it.'

I'd forgotten that Charlie's hobby was records. Weather records, baseball records, altitude records, speed records, fattest-man records, eating cantaloupes upside-down records. There was a standing advisory among the residents of Quaker Hill that you didn't mention anything that was either the best or the worst of anything whenever Charlie Manzi was within earshot; Charlie would always prove that you were wrong. The lowest temperature ever recorded on the North American continent was minus 81F, at Snag, in the Yukon, in 1947, so don't try to tell Charlie that 'this has got to be the coldest night that America has ever known.'

For a general-store owner, Charlie was friendly, loquacious, and enjoyed ribbing his customers. In fact, swapping smart remarks with Charlie was one of the major attractions of the Granitehead Market, apart from the fact that it was the nearest general store to Quaker Lane. Some customers actually rehearsed what they were going to say to Charlie before they went shopping, to see if they could get the better of him; but they rarely did. Charlie had learned his bantering the hard way, from being a fat and unpopular child.

Because of his unhappy childhood and his lonely growing-up years, Charlie's personal tragedy was in many ways more poignant than most. By one of those Godsent miracles of circumstance and fate, Charlie had met and married at the age of 31 a handsome and hardworking lady schoolteacher from Beverly; and although she had suffered two anguished years of gynecological complications, she had at last given him a son, Neil. However, the doctors had warned the Manzis that any more pregnancies would kill Mrs Manzi, and so Neil would have to remain their only child.

They had brought Neil up with a care and a love that, according to Jane, had been the talk of Granitehead. 'If they spoil that boy any more, they'll ruin him for good,' old Thomas Essex had remarked. And, sure enough, on the brand-new 500 cc motorcycle which his doting parents had bought him for his eighteenth birthday, Neil had skidded one wet afternoon on Bridge Street, in Salem, and hurtled headfirst into the side of a passing panel van. Massive cranial injuries, dead in fifteen minutes.

Charlie's hard-won paradise had collapsed after that. His wife had left him, unable to cope with his obsessive preoccupation with Neil's death; or with her own inability to give him another child. He had been left with nothing but his store, his customers, and his memories.

Charlie and I often talked about our bereavement. Sometimes, when he thought I was looking particularly down, he would invite me into the small office at the back of the store, hung with lists of wholesale orders and sexy Japanese calendars, and he would pour me a couple of shots of whisky and give me a lecture on what he had felt like when he had heard that Neil had been killed, telling me how to manage, how to come to terms with it, and how to learn to live my life again. 'Don't let anyone tell you that it ain't hard, or miserable, because it is. Don't let anyone tell you that it's easier to forget about someone who's dead rather than someone who's simply left you, because that ain't so, either.' And I had those very words in mind as I stood wet and chilled in his store that stormy March evening.

'What are you looking for, Mr Trenton?' he asked me, as he measured out coffee beans for Jack Williams, from the Granitehead Gas Station.

'Liquor, mainly. My outside's drowned, I thought I might as well drown my inside as well.'

'Well,' said Charlie, pointing down the aisle with his coffee scoop, 'you know where it is.'

I bought a bottle of Chivas, two bottles of Stonegate Pinot Noir, the very best, and some Perrier. At the freezer, I collected a lasagna dinner, a frozen lobster-tail, and a couple of packs of mixed vegetables. By the counter, I picked up half a pecan pie.

That it?' asked Charlie.

'That's it,' I nodded.

He began to punch out the prices on the cash register. 'You know something,' he said, 'you should eat better. You're losing weight and it doesn't suit you. You look like Gene Kelly's walking-stick after he'd been singing in the rain.'

'How much did you lose?' I asked him. I didn't have to say when.

He smiled. 'I didn't lose nothing. Not a single pound. In fact, I put twelve pounds on. Whenever I felt low, I cooked myself up a big plate of fettuccine and clam sauce.'

He shook out two brown-paper sacks, and began to pack away my liquor and groceries. Tat?' he said. 'You should have seen me. Charlie the Great.'

I stood there for a while, watching him put everything away. Then I said, 'Charlie, do you mind if I ask you a question?'

'Depends what it is.'

'Well, let me ask you this. Did you ever get the feeling, after what happened with Neil — '

Charlie looked at me carefully, but he didn't say anything. He waited while I tried to put into words what had happened to me up at Quaker Lane Cottage, while I tried to find some plausible way of asking if I was hallucinating, or if I was going crazy, or if I was simply experiencing the exaggerated effects of withdrawal and loss.

'Let me put it this way,' I said. 'Do you ever get the feeling that Neil is still here?’

He licked his lips, as if they tasted of salt. Then he said, 'That's your question?'

'Well, I guess it's half question and half statement. But did you ever feel anything which led you to believe that — well, what I'm trying to say is, did you at any time think that he might not be completely — '

Charlie kept on staring at me for what seemed like a very long time. But at last he lowered his eyes, and then his head, and looked down at his meaty hands resting on the counter.

'You see these hands?' he said, without looking up.

'Sure. I see them. They're good hands. Strong.'

He lifted them up, both of them, big red joints of bacon with calloused fingers. 'I could cut them off, these fucking hands,' he said. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear, and it gave me a prickling feeling at the back of my neck. 'Everything these hands ever touched turned to shit. King Midas in reverse. Wasn't that a song? "I'm King Midas, in reverse." '

'If it was, I never heard it.'

'Still, it's true. These hands, look at them.'

'Strong,' I repeated. 'Capable, too.'

'Oh yes, sure. Strong, and capable. But not strong enough to bring my wife back to me; and not capable of resurrecting my son.'

'No,' I said, oddly aware that this was the second time in a single day that 'resurrection' had been mentioned. It wasn't, after all, a concept you heard about too frequently, except on Sunday morning television. 'Resurrection' always reminded me of fear, and of the smell of shoe-leather, because my father used to lecture me about the two resurrections when I was helping him out in the shoe store. Resurrection into Heaven for those who were good; resurrection to judgement for those who were evil. For a long time, when I was a boy, I used to mix up 'souls' with 'soles', because of the way my father tried to educate me as a Christian when I was at work with him. 'Don't you ever let me catch you being resurrected to judgement,' he used to warn me. ‘I’ll tan your hide.'

I was silent for a moment, and then I said to Charlie, 'You never feel that — I mean, you never feel that Neil comes back to you in any way? Talks to you? I'm only asking because I've had feelings like that myself, and I was just wondering if — '

'Comes back to me?' asked Charlie. His voice was very soft. 'Well, now. Comes back to me.'

'Listen,' I said, 'I don't know whether I'm going crazy or not, but I keep hearing somebody whispering to me, whispering my name, and it sounds like Jane. There's a kind of feeling in the house, like there's somebody there. It's hard to explain it. And last night, I could have sworn I heard her singing. Do you think that's normal? I mean, did it happen to you? Did you ever hear Neil?'

Charlie looked at me as if he were about to say something for a moment; his expression seemed to be congested with unexpressed anxieties. But then he suddenly pushed my sacks of groceries towards me, and smiled, and shook his head, and said, 'Nobody comes back, Mr. Trenton. That's the really hard lesson you have to learn when you lose someone you love. They just don't come back.'

'Sure,' I said, nodding. 'Thanks for listening, anyway. It always helps to have people to talk to.'

'You're tired, that's all,' said Charlie. 'You're imagining things. Why don't I sell you some Nytol, just to get you off to sleep?'

'I still have the Nembutal tablets that Dr Rosen gave me.'

'Well, take them, and make sure you eat good. Any more of these TV dinners and your skin is going to start breaking out in separate compartments.'

'Come on, Charlie, you're not his mother,' said Lenny Danarts, from the Granitehead gift store, impatient to be served.

I picked up the new TV Guide from the rack, waved Charlie goodnight, and pushed my way out of the store with my arms full of shopping. It was still windy outside, but the rain seemed to have eased off, and there was a fresh smell of ocean and wet stony soil. The walk back to Quaker Lane and up the hill between the elm trees suddenly seemed like a very long way, but I hefted my packages and started off across the parking-lot.

I was only halfway across, however, when a cream-coloured Buick drew up alongside of me and the driver tooted the horn. I bent down and saw that it was old Mrs Edgar Simons, a frail and rather dotty old widow who lived just beyond Quaker Lane in a large Samuel Mclntire house that I had always envied. She put down the passenger window and called, 'May I offer you a ride, Mr Trenton? It's an awfully stormy night to be walking home with your arms full of groceries.'

'I appreciate it,' I said, and I did. She opened up the trunk for me, and I stored my packages away next to the spare wheel, and then joined her inside the car. It smelled of leather and lavender, an old woman's perfume, but not unpleasant.

'Walking to the store is the only exercise I get,' I told her. 'I always seem to be too busy for squash these days. In fact, I always seem to be too busy for anything but work and sleep.'

'Maybe that's a good thing, keeping busy,' said Mrs Edgar Simons, peering out over the long rain-beaded hood of her car. 'Now, is it clear your way? Can I pull out? Edgar used to give me such a hard time for pulling out without looking. I went straight into a horse once. A horse!' I looked northwards, up the highway. 'You're okay,' I told her, and she pulled away from the parking-lot with a screech of wet tires. It was always an interesting and slightly peppery experience, accepting a ride from Mrs Edgar Simons. You never quite knew if you were going to arrive at the place you wanted to go, on time, or at all.

'You're going to think me a frightful old busybody,' she said, as she drove. 'But I couldn't help overhearing what you were saying to Charlie in the store. I don't have many people to talk to these days, and I do tend to eavesdrop more than I ought to. You don't mind, do you? Say if you do.'

'Why should I mind? We weren't discussing any State secrets.'

'You asked Charlie about his son coming back,' said Mrs Edgar Simons. 'And the funny thing is, I knew exactly what you meant by coming back. When dear Edgar died — that was six years ago next July 10 — I had the same kind of experience. I used to hear him walking around in the attic, for nights on end. Can you believe that? And sometimes I would hear him coughing. You never met dear Edgar of course, but he had a distinctive little cough, clearing his throat, ahem.'

'Do you still hear him?' I asked her.

'I do from time to time. Once or twice a month maybe, sometimes more frequently. And I still have the feeling when I walk into certain rooms in the house that Edgar has only just been there, that only a moment ago he walked out of another door. Once, you know, I even thought that I saw him, not in the house but in Granitehead Square, wearing a peculiar brown coat. I stopped the car and tried to go after him, but he disappeared into the crowds.'

'So — after six years — you still have these feelings? Have you told anybody?'

'I talked to my doctor, of course, but he wasn't very helpful at all. He gave me pills and told me to stop being hysterical. The funny thing is, the feelings vary in strength, and they also vary in frequency. I don't know why. Sometimes I can hear Edgar clearly; at other times he sounds so faint it's like a radio station you can't quite pick up. And the feelings seem to be seasonal, too. I hear less of Edgar in the winter than I do in the summer. Sometimes, on summer nights, when it's very mild, I can hear him sitting outside on the garden-wall, humming or talking to himself.'

'Mrs Simons,' I said, 'do you really believe that it's Edgar?'

'I used not to. I used to try to persuade myself that it was all my silly imagination. Oh — look at that stupid girl, walking in the road with her back to the traffic. She'll end up dead if she's not careful.'

I looked up, and glimpsed in the light from our headlamps a brown-haired girl in a long windblown cloak, walking by the side of the highway. We were approaching the bend that took us around the western side of Quaker Hill, and so we passed the girl comparatively slowly; and as we passed I twisted around in my seat to look at her. It was beginning to rain again, and it was very dark, and I suppose I could easily have been mistaken. But in the fractions of a second in which I could see her through the tinted rear window of Mrs Simons' car, I was sure that I saw a face that I recognized. White, white as a lantern, with dark eye sockets. A face like the blurry face at the cottage window; a face like the girl who had unexpectedly turned around when I was photographing Jane by the statue of Jonathan Pope. A face like the staring secretary in the Salem sandwich shop.

I felt a prickle of shock, and incomprehension. Could it be her? But if it was, how? And why?

'No consideration, these pedestrians,' complained Mrs Simons. 'They stroll around as if the roads were theirs. And who do they blame if they get struck by a car? Even if they're almost invisible, it's the driver who gets the blame.'

I kept on staring back at the girl until she had disappeared from sight around the curve. Then I turned around in my seat, and said, 'What? I'm sorry? I didn't catch what you said.'

'I'm just grumbling, that's all,' said Mrs Edgar Simons. 'Edgar always said that I was a terrible fussbudget.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Edgar.'

'Well, that's the strange thing,' Mrs Edgar Simons told me, abruptly resuming our conversation about hauntings and visitations. 'You see, I've heard Edgar, and I even believe that I've seen him; and now you seem to think that your Jane may be trying to come back to you. Well, you do, don't you? And yet all Charlie could say was that you must be imagining things.'

'You don't blame him, do you?' I asked her. 'It must be pretty hard for anyone to swallow, anyone who hasn't actually felt anything like it.'

'But for Charlie to dismiss it, of all people,' she said.

'What do you mean?' I asked her, frowning.

'I mean nothing less than that Charlie has had the same feelings about Neil, ever since the poor boy died. He's been hearing him walking about his bedroom; he's even heard his motorcycle starting up. And seen him, too, from what I gather. I was quite surprised when he didn't tell you about it. After all, it's nothing to be ashamed of. How can it be?'

'Charlie's seen Neil?' I said, in disbelief.

'Quite so. Over and over again. That was the principal reason why Mrs Manzi left Granitehead. Charlie always says that it was something to do with her not being able to give him any more children, but the truth was that she couldn't bear to feel that her dead son was still walking around the home. She hoped that if she moved away, he wouldn't follow her.'

'Does Charlie still hear Neil now?' I asked.

'As far as I know. He's been much less forthcoming of late. I think he's worried that if too many people start taking an interest in Neil's reappearance, they might frighten him away. He loved Neil, you know, more than his own life.'

I thought about all this for a little while, and then I said, 'Mrs Simons, I very much hope that this isn't a joke.'

She peered at me with eyes like freshly-peeled green grapes. I pointed urgently forward, towards the front of the car, to remind her that both of us would be much better off if she looked where she was going, instead of at me.

'A joke?' she said, in a voice which started at middle-C and went all the way up to C-sharp, an octave above. She looked at me again, blinking, until I said sharply, 'The highway, Mrs Simons. Look at the highway.'

Tiff,' she said, disdainfully. 'A joke, indeed. Do you really believe it of me that I could have such low taste as to make a joke about our poor dead loved ones?'

'Then it's true? Charlie really told you that?'

'Charlie did indeed.'

'Then why didn't he tell me?’

'I don't know. He probably had his reasons. He only discussed it with me because he was so upset about Mrs Manzi leaving him. He hasn't mentioned it very much since. Only obliquely.'

'Mrs Simons,' I said, 'this is beginning to frighten me. Can I tell you that? I don't understand it. I don't understand what's going on. I'm frightened.'

Mrs Simons stared at me again, and narrowly missed colliding with the rear end of a parked and unlit truck.

'I wish you'd please keep your eyes on the road,' I told her.

'Well, you listen,' she said, 'you don't have any cause at all to be frightened, not the way I see it. Why should you be frightened? Jane loved you when she was alive, why shouldn't she still love you now?'

'But she's haunting me. Just like Edgar is haunting you. And Neil is haunting Charlie. Mrs Simons, we're talking about ghosts.'

'Ghosts? You sound like a penny-dreadful.'

'I don't mean ghosts in the sense that — '

'They're lingering feelings, that's all, pervasive memories,' said Mrs Simons. 'They're not phantoms, or anything like that. As far as I can see, they're nothing more at all than the stored-up joys of our past relationships — echoing, as it were, beyond the passing of the people we loved.'

We had almost reached the foot of Quaker Lane. I pointed up ahead and said to Mrs Edgar Simons, 'Do you think you could pull up here? Don't bother to drive all the way up the lane. It's too dark, and you'll probably wreck your shocks.'

Mrs Edgar Simons smiled, almost beatifically, and drew the Buick into the side of the road. I opened the door, and a gust of wet wind blew in.

'Thanks for the ride,' I told her. 'Maybe we should talk some more. You know, about Edgar. And, I don't know, Jane.'

Her face was illuminated green in the light from the instruments on her dash. She looked very old and very prophetic: a little old witch.

The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, you know,' she told me, and nodded, and smiled. 'The people we used to love are as benign to us in death as they were in life. I know. And you will find out, too.'

I hesitated for a moment or two, and then I said, 'Goodnight, Mrs Simons,' and closed the door. I lifted my groceries out of the trunk, slammed it shut, and slapped the vinyl roof of the car to tell her that she could go. She drove off silently, her rear lights reflected on the wet tarmac in six wide scarlet tracks.

The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, I thought. Jesus.

The wind sighed in the wires. I turned my face towards the darkness of Quaker Lane, where the elm trees thrashed, and began the long uncertain walk uphill.