Jane passed her hand over the boy’s head, and he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared; but not before he had left me with a heartrending image of the child I had helped Jane to conceive, and then lost. I had tears in my eyes as Jane said to me,
‘Salvage the David Dark; open the copper vessel; but do not attempt to hurt me, because my power at that moment will be devastating, and invincible. If you assist me, I will reward you the same way that I rewarded David Dark, with his life and with his sanity. I will also reward you one more way: and listen close. If you assist me, I will return your Jane to you, and your son. I have that power, since I am lord of the region of the dead, and they only pass through this region who have my authority. I can turn them back, and you will be able to live again the life you believed you had lost. Constance Bedford, too, could be returned to you. Had you thought of that? Help me, John, and you could regain your happiness. ‘
I stared at Jane speechlessly. The thought of having her back again seemed wild and impossible; yet so many wild and impossible things had happened since I had first heard the garden-swing creaking on that dark and windy night that I could almost believe it. And, God, what a temptation, to have her here again, to have her back in my arms again, to talk to her again!
‘I don’t believe you can do it,’ I said. ‘Nobody can resurrect the dead. And besides, her body is smashed. How can you bring back somebody whose body is smashed? I don’t want to be like that mother, in The Monkey’s Paw. The one who hears her son knocking on her door at night.’
Jane smiled. Blandly, artlessly, as if she were dreaming a dream of other existences, other places; as if she already had memories that I would never be able to share. ‘Am I smashed now?’ she asked me, hauntingly. ‘I have been recreated from the matrix from which I was very first born. You are dealing with one who controls the process of life, as well as death. That ruined body of mine is well-decayed by now; but I can live again, as I was meant to have been. And so could your child. ‘
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said; although I half-believed already. God, just to hold Jane’s hand again, to kiss her, to feel her hair, to make love to her. There were tears streaming down my cheeks and I didn’t even notice.
Jane’s image began to waver again, and shrink. Soon, she was almost invisible, nothing more than a shadow on the landing, a silhouette without substance.
‘John,’ she whispered, as she vanished.
‘Wait!’ I called her. ‘Jane, for God’s sake, wait!’
‘John,’ she murmured, and was gone.
I stood on the landing for a very long time, until my back began to ache, and then I went downstairs. I went into the living-room and poured myself a whisky from a bottle of Chivas Regal that was already well below the label. I would stay here tonight, I decided.
I would light a fire. Perhaps the warmth would tempt the spirits back here. To think that the time might come when Jane and I could sit down beside this fire together, as we used to, watching the flames and telling each other stories of what we would do when we were rich. It was almost more than I could take.
I sat up very late that night, until the fire that I had built had eventually died away to ashes, and the room began to grow distinctly cold. I locked the doors, wound up the clock, and went upstairs, more than ready for sleep. I stared at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, and wondered if I was actually going mad, if at last the supernatural stresses and strains of the past week had tipped me over the edge.
Yet Jane had been here, hadn’t she, speaking to me in the voice of Mictantecutli, the lord of Mictlampa, the region of the dead? She had promised me my happiness back, hadn’t she? Jane and our unborn son, restored to life; and maybe Constance Bedford, too. I couldn’t have imagined anything like that, and if it was only a dream, why did I feel so torn about committing myself to helping Mictantecutli to be free? Scores of people would die if it were to be released unchecked from its copper vessel; yet what did that matter to me? Scores of people die on the highways every day in road accidents, and there was nothing I could do about it. I would only be assisting destiny to take its natural course; and think of the rewards of it.
I was almost asleep when the telephone rang. I picked it up clumsily and said, ‘Hello, John Trenton here.’
‘Oh, you’re there, are you?’ a girl’s voice said sharply. ‘Well, you must be, since you’re obviously not here. Thank you for a great evening, John. I’m just scraping your filetto al barolo down the sink-disposal.’
‘Laura?’ I said.
‘Of course it’s Laura. Who else do you know who would be stupid enough to cook you an Italian meal and then wait for you to turn up, thinking that you actually would?’
‘Laura, I’m so sorry. Something happened tonight … something that totally threw me off.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Laura, please. I’m sorry. I got all caught up in something very emotional and the whole thing of going to dinner with you got wiped out of my mind.’
‘I suppose you want to make it up to me.’
‘You know I will.’
‘Well , don’t bother. And next time you come into the cookie shop, go sit someplace else, where Kathy can serve you.’
She put down the phone and I was left with a flat whining tone. I sighed, and cradled my own receiver.
As I did so, I heard the faintest high-pitched singing.
‘O the men they sail’d from Granitehead, To fish the foreign shores…’
And the haunting quality of the voice was made even more chilling now that I knew what the words actually meant.
It wasn’t an old sea-chanty after all; and it certainly wasn’t a song about fishing. It was a rhyme about Mictantecutli, and how David Dark and the crew of the Arabella had sailed to Mexico to bring him back to Salem. It was a song of death and supernatural destruction.
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!
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