Death Trance

Seven

I was tempted, as I walked up Quaker Lane, to stop off at George Markham's house and play a few hands of cards with him and old Keith Reed. I had been neglecting my neighbours ever since Jane was killed, and if I was going to continue to live here, well, I thought I ought to do something about visiting more often.

But even as I approached George's front fence, I knew that I was only making excuses for myself. Visiting George would be nothing more than a way of deferring my return to Quaker Lane Cottage, and to whatever fears were concealed behind its doors. Visiting George would be cowardice: letting the whispers and the voices and the strange movements scare me away from my own home.

I hesitated, though, and looked in at George's parlour window, where I could just see the back of Keith Reed's head as he dealt out the cards, and the lamplit table, and the beer-bottles, and a sudden blue drift of smoke from George's cigar. I hoisted my sacks of groceries a little higher, and took in a deep breath, and carried on up the hill.

Quaker Lane Cottage was in complete darkness when I approached, even though I was sure that I had left the front porch light on to guide me home. The gale blew around the house and rustled its creepers like hair, and the two shuttered upstairs windows looked like tightly-closed eyes. A house that was keeping its secrets to itself. In the far distance I could hear the endless dejected grumbling of the North Atlantic surf.

I put down my sacks of groceries, took out my keys, and opened the front door. Inside, it was warm, and calm, and I could see the dancing light from the living-room fire reflected on the ceiling. I brought in my bags and closed the door behind me. Perhaps the house wasn't really haunted after all. Perhaps the creaking of that swing last night had simply put me on edge, and given me a temporary attack of mild hysteria.

Nevertheless, once I had stacked away the groceries and the liquor, and switched on the oven for my lasagna dinner, I went all the way around the house, upstairs and down, looking into every room, opening up every closet, kneeling down and peering under every bed. I just wanted to know when I sat down and ate my meal tonight that there wasn't anything hiding in the cottage that might come down and catch me unawares.

Ridiculous; but, what would you have done?

I watched television for an hour or so, although reception was blurry because of the weather. I watched Sanford and MASH and even Trapper John, M.D. Then I cleared up the remains of my meal, poured myself a large whisky, and went into the library. I wanted to take a look at that painting that Edward Wardwell had made such a fuss about in Salem, and see if perhaps I couldn't identify the ship in it.

It was strikingly cold in the library. Usually it was one of the warmest rooms in the house. It wasn't worth laying a fresh log fire; but I switched on the electric fan heater. After only a few seconds, though, the heater abruptly short-circuited, crackled sparks, whirred, and died. There was a smell of burned plastic and electricity. Outside, creepers tapped against the window; a soft and complicated pattern, like unremembered spirits seeking access.

I picked up the painting, still in its wrapper, and selected one or two books from the shelves that I thought might help me discover what the ship might be. Osborne's Salem Marine; Walcott's Massachusetts Merchant Vessels 1650–1850; and, just out of inspiration, Great Men of Salem, by Douglass. I remembered that many of the leading commercial and political figures in Old Salem used to own private ships, and Douglass' book might contain some clues about the one in the picture.

By the time I was ready to leave the library, it was so cold in there that I could actually see my breath. The barometer must be dropping like a stone, I thought to myself. Yet, in the hallway, it was as warm as it had been before, and the barometer pointed to the optimistic side of Unsettled. I looked back at the library, wondering if there was something wrong with it. Rising damp, perhaps. A freak draught down the chimney. And again I thought I could hear — what was it, breathing? Whispering? I froze where I was, unsure if I ought to go back and face whatever might be in there; or if I ought to carry on with what I was doing with as much apparent unconcern as I could. Maybe if you believed in ghosts, that gave them even more strength to manifest themselves. Maybe if you didn't believe in them, they'd get weak, and dispirited, and eventually leave you alone.

Whispering. Cold, soft, persistent whispering; like someone relating a very long and very unpleasant story.

'All right!' I said aloud. 'All right, that's it!' and hurtled open the library door. It shuddered on its hinges, and then creaked to rest. The library, of course, was deserted. Only the creepers tapping at the windows. Only the wind, and the occasional spatter of rain. My breath smoked, and I couldn't help thinking of all those creepy movies like The Exorcist where the presence of an evil demon is betrayed by a steep and sudden drop in temperature.

'Okay,' I said, trying to sound like a tough guy who's decided to be generous, and not to pulverize the sarcastic barfly who's been making comments about his wife. I reached out for the library door handle and firmly closed the room behind me. Back in the hallway, I said to myself, 'It's nothing. Nothing whatsoever. No ghosts. No spirits. No demons. Nothing.'

I picked up the watercolour and the books once more, and carried them through to the living-room, where I spread them all out on the rug in front of the fire. I unwrapped the painting, and held it up so that I could examine it closely. The firelight played patterns across it, so that it almost appeared as if the painted sea were moving.

It was strange to think that this same sheet of handmade paper had been pinned to an easel over 290 years ago, only a quarter-mile or so away from here, and that an unknown artist had recreated in paints a day that had really passed; a day when men in frock coats had walked on beside the harbour, and Salem had been alive with horses and carts and people in Puritan clothes. I touched the surface of it with my fingertips. It was a crude painting, in many ways. The perspective and the colouring were strictly amateur. Yet there was some quality about it which seemed to bring it to life, as if it had been painted for a heartfelt reason. As if the artist had wanted more than anything to bring that long-lost day to life, and to show the people who were to be his descendants what Salem Bay had actually looked like, in every detail.

I could now understand why the Peabody Museum people were so interested in it. Every tree had been carefully recorded; it was even possible to make out the winding curve of Quaker Lane, and one or two small cottages there. One cottage could very well have been the forebear of Quaker Lane Cottage; a tiny lopsided dwelling with a tall chimney and weather-boarded sides.

Now I examined the ship on the other side of the bay. It was a three-master, conventionally-rigged, although there was one distinctive feature which I hadn't noticed when I had looked at the picture earlier in the day. There were two large flags flying from the stern-castle, one above the other, one of which appeared to be a red cross on a black background, and the other one of which was obviously meant to be the colours of the ship's owner. No Stars-and-Stripes, of course, because this was 1691. Some people say that it was a Salem sea-captain, William Driver, who had first dubbed the Union flag 'Old Glory,' but that was in 1824.

Pouring myself some more whisky, I looked into Walcott's book on merchant vessels, and discovered that 'it was the custom of some Salem dignitaries to fly on their ships two flags; one to denote their ownership and the other to celebrate the voyage on which they were engaged, particularly if it was expected to be especially significant or profitable.'

At the back of the book, I found a chart of owner's flags, although they were printed in black-and-white, and it was hard to distinguish between the various designs of stripes and crosses and stars. There were two which appeared to be vaguely similar to the owner's flag on the ship in my picture, and so I cross-referred to Osborne's Salem Marine to find out something about the fleets of the men they belonged to.

One of them was obviously hopeless: the flag of Joseph Winterton, Esq., who was said to have run one of the first ferries from Salem to Granitehead Neck. But the other belonged to Esau Hasket, a wealthy merchant who had escaped from England in 1670 because of his extreme religious views, and who had quickly established in Salem one of the largest fleets of merchantmen and fishing-vessels on the east coast of the colonies.

The text said, 'Little is known today about Hasket's fleet, although it probably numbered four 100-ft merchantmen and numerous smaller vessels. Although tiny by modern standards, a 100-ft ship was the largest that Salem's harbour could comfortably accommodate, since it had a 9-ft tidal range, and ships which had sailed quite easily into harbour when the tide was high would settle into the mud when the tide ebbed again. The names of only two of Hasket's vessels have survived to the present day: the Hosannah and the David Dark. A scrimshaw rendition of the Hosannah made in about 1712 by one of her retired crewmen shows her as a three-masted vessel flying a palm-tree flag to indicate that she usually traded in the West Indies. No known illustration of the David Dark exists, although it can fairly be assumed that she was a similar vessel.'

I turned to Great Men of Salem and read all that I could about Esau Hasket. A vigorous and firebreathing forerunner to Elias Derby, Hasket had obviously been feared and respected as much for his Puritanical religious fervour as he was for his sea-trading. Derby had made Salem into one of the busiest and wealthiest seaports on the eastern seaboard, and earned himself the distinction of being America's first-ever millionaire, but Hasket had apparently shaken the community's souls as well as their pockets. One contemporary account said that 'Mr Haskette firmlie believes in the existence on Earth bothe of Angelles & daemones, and is forthright in so sayinge; for if a manne is to believe in the Lord & His hostes, sayes Haskette, so must he believe with equalle certaintie in Satan and his miniones.' Derby had subsequently made Salem into one of the busiest and wealthiest seaports on the eastern seaboard, and earned himself the distinction of being America’s first-ever millionaire.

I was about to put the books away, satisfied at least that I could now sell the painting either to the Peabody or to one of our regular customers with the catch-all caption, 'Thought to be a rare depiction of one of the merchant ships of Esau Hasket', when it occurred to me to look up the name of David Dark. It was a curious name, but there was something about it which rang very distant bells. Maybe it was something that Jane had once said, or one of our customers. I thumbed through Great Men of Salem again until I found it.

The entry was tantalizingly short. Twelve lines altogether.

‘David Ittai Dark, 1610 (?) — 1691. Fundamentalist preacher of Mill Pond, Salem, who enjoyed brief local celebrity in 1682 when he claimed to have had several face-to-face conversations with Satan, who had provided him with a list of all those souls in the Salem district who were surely damned, and to whose 'inevitable incineration' Satan was looking forward with 'relishe'. David Dark was a protégé and adviser to the wealthy Salem merchant Esau Hasket (ibid.) and for some years was engaged with Hasket in trying to establish extreme fundamentalist principles in Salem's religious community. He died in mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1691, some say by the phenomenon of 'spontaneous explosion.' In Dark's honour, Hasket named his finest merchant-vessel the David Dark, although it is interesting to note that all contemporary records of this ship were excised from every logbook, chart, account-ledger and broadsheet of the period, supposedly on Hasket's instruction.'

It was then that I found what I had been looking for. I traced the words with my finger as I read them, and when I had read them silently I read them again out loud. I felt that heady surge of excitement that every antique dealer experiences when he discovers for certain that the goods he has bought are unique and valuable.

'David Dark’s insignia was that of a red cross on a black field, to indicate the triumph of the Lord over the powers of darkness. Contrarily, however, this insignia was adopted intermittently for several decades after his death by secret covens of 'witches' and practitioners in the black arts. The insignia was declared illegal in 1731 by Deputy Governor William Clark, presiding officer of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.'

I laid the book flat on the floor, and picked up the painting again. So this ship was the David Dark, a ship which had been named for a man who had claimed to have conversations with the Devil, and whose name had been expunged from every possible local record.

Damn it, no wonder Edward Wardwell had been so desperate to acquire the painting for the Peabody. This could, quite simply, be the only pictorial record ever made of the David Dark. Or at least the only pictorial record which had survived through 290 years and a purge against anyone ever knowing what she had looked like or where she had sailed.

The David Dark, with her forbidden banner of black and red, sailing out of Salem Harbour. I examined her closely, and realized that the artist had painted her in quite considerable detail, especially for a vessel that was so far away, and especially since dozens of ships must have sailed in and out of Salem every day.

Perhaps the artist had never intended to paint a straightforward landscape of the Granitehead shoreline at all. Perhaps he had meant to paint nothing less than an historical record of the David Dark sailing away on a voyage of great importance. But where was she going? And why?

The log fire suddenly dropped, making my head jerk up in frightened reaction, and my heart pump blood as if it were trying to empty a sinking lifeboat. The wind had stilled, and I could hear the rain falling more steadily now, rustling through the orchard and through the trees. I knelt on the rug, with my books all around me, listening, listening, daring the house not to whisper, daring the doors not to open and close, daring the ghosts of 300 years not to flow through the corridors and down the stairs.

And in front of me, on its gray painted sea, the David Dark sailed on its unknown voyage, mysterious and indistinct against the Massachusetts treeline. I stared at it as I listened, and as I listened I heard myself whispering its name.

'David Dark…:

Silence for a while, except for the ashy crackling of the fire, and the soft sound of the rain. Then, scarcely audible, a noise which I was so frightened to hear that I actually let out a peculiar grunt; the sort of mortally-despairing exclamation you sometimes hear from airplane passengers when their plane drops into an unexpected dive. I felt tingling cold, and I wasn't even sure that I would be able to run if I had to.

It was the garden-swing. Regular and rhythmic, that same creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik that I had heard the night before. There was no mistaking it.

I stood up and made my way jerkily across to the hallway. I had closed the library door and now it was open. The latch hadn't caught! No. I had closed it, and now it was open. Someone, or something, had opened it. The wind! Impossible. Stop blaming the damned wind. The wind can rattle and shake and whisper and howl, but the wind can't open a latched door, and the wind can't change people's places in photographs, and the wind can't make that garden-swing go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, not on its own. There's somebody out there, swinging. Face up to the damned fact that things are happening in this house and somebody's making them happen, human or inhuman. There's somebody out there swinging, for God's sake, so go and look. Go and see for yourself what it is that's making you so frightened. Face up to it.

I limped across the kitchen, limped as if I was injured, but it was only a combination of fright and pins-and-needles from kneeling on the living-room floor. I reached the back door. Locked. Key on top of the icebox. I fumbled for the key and dropped it on the floor. Purposely? You dropped that purposely. The real point is you don't want to go out there. The real point is that you're scared shitless, just because some mischievous kid has trespassed into your orchard and swung on your stupid swing.

On hands and knees, I found the key. Stood up again, jostled it into the lock, unlocked it, turned the doorhandle.

Supposing it's her'?

And freeze after freeze went through me; as if buckets of ice-water were being poured over me in slow-motion, one after the other.

Supposing it's Jane?

I don't remember actually opening the door. I remember feeling the rain prickling my face as I emerged from the kitchen porch. I remember walking, stumbling through the weeds and the long grass, hurrying faster and faster, afraid to miss whoever it was who was swinging on the swing, and yet even more afraid that I might get there before they ran away.

I came around the apple-tree, right next to the swing, and stopped dead. The rain-wet chair was swinging backwards and forwards, high and steady, all by itself. The chains went creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, but the chair was empty.

I stared at it, breathing harshly. Alarmed, but oddly relieved. It's a natural phenomenon, I thought. Thank God for that. Science, not ghosts. Some kind of magnetic disturbance. Maybe the moon pulls the chains at certain times of the year, the way it pulls the tide, and the momentum kind of builds up, you know about Newton's Law; some kind of inertia or whatever. Maybe there's a magnetic lode underneath the soil here, and certain weather conditions charge it up, like electricity from thunderclouds. Or maybe some sort of highly localized wind starts it off, a katabatic wind down the side of the house that -

Then I saw it. A brief, blueish flicker of light, in the seat of the swing. No more than a half-seen flash of distant lightning, but enough to make me stare even harder at the swing-seat as it squeaked backwards and forwards. Then another flicker, a little brighter than the first. I took a step away from the swing, two steps. The light flickered again and I thought I could make out something that I didn't like.

For what seemed like minutes on end, the light didn't flicker at all. Then suddenly it lit up again, four or five times, and what I saw on the seat of the swing was like an image illuminated by photographer's flash-bulbs, an image that was dazzling one instant and nothing but a retinal after-image the next. Half-formed, blurry, as if it were a hologram transmitted from somewhere years ago and far away.

It was Jane, and whenever the light flickered and I could see her, she was looking back at me. Her face was unmarked but odd, thinner somehow, as if her skull were elongated. She wasn't smiling. Her hair crackled as if it were blown by an electrical discharge rather than by the wind. She was wearing a white dress of some kind, a long white dress with wide sleeves and sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn't, but the swing kept on swinging, and the light flickered, and the chains went creakkk-squik, creakkk-squlk, creakkk-squik. And, God almighty, she was dead. She was dead and I could see her.

I opened my mouth. I couldn't even speak at first. My face was wet with rain but my throat was dry and constricted. Jane stared at me, unsmiling, and the flickers began to fade. Soon I could scarcely see her; only the glimpse of a pale white hand on the chain of the swing, the blur of a shoulder, the outline of flying hair.

'Jane,' I whispered. God, I was frightened. The swing began to lose momentum. The chains suddenly stopped squeaking.

'Jane!' I shouted. And somehow, for a moment, the fright of losing her again overcame the fright of seeing her. If she was really there; if by some unholy miracle she was actually still there, trapped somewhere in purgatory, or the spirit world, if she hadn't yet died forever, then perhaps -

I didn't shout to Jane again. I was about to, but something stopped me. The swing swung three or four more times, then came to a standstill. I stood looking at it, and then slowly approached it, and laid my hand on the wet wooden arm of the chair. There was nothing there, no sign that anybody had been sitting here at all. The two carved depressions in the seat were filled with rainwater.

'Jane,' I said, under my breath, but I no longer felt as if she were close. And I was no longer sure that I really wanted to call her. If she came back, what could she possibly come back to? Her body was crushed beyond repair, and a month decayed. There was no way that she could occupy her earthly self again. And did I really want her to occupy the cottage, and the garden, and me? She had lived, but she was dead now; and there are few people more unwelcome in the world of the living than the dead.

There was another reason I didn't call her. I remembered what Edward Wardwell had said to me today, in Salem. 'Did you know that Granitehead was called Resurrection, up until 1703? Did you know that Granitehead was called Resurrection?'

Drenched, and deeply disturbed, I walked back to the cottage. Before I went in, I looked up at the eyes of the bedroom windows. I thought I might have glimpsed a flicker of blue-white light there, but I was probably mistaken. Even nightmares have to end sometime.

The trouble was, I began to feel that my nightmare was just starting.