Death Trance

Five

As I turned off Lafayette Road and drove northwards up the Granitehead peninsula towards Quaker Lane, black Atlantic storm clouds began to rise from the north-east horizon, like a horde of dark and shaggy beasts. By the time I reached the cottage, they were almost overhead, and the first drops of rain were beginning to spatter the hood of the car, and measle the garden path.

I hurried up the path with my coat-collar tugged up on one side, and fumbled for my keys. The rain pattered and whispered through the winter-dried creeper beside the porch, and behind me there was the first soft applause of the laurel bushes, as the wind got up.

As I slid my key into the front-door lock, I heard a woman's voice whisper, 'John?' and I froze all over, and turned around, although I was almost too scared to move.

The front garden was deserted. Only the bushes, and the overgrown lawn, and the rain-circled pond.

'Jane?' I said, clearly.

But there was nothing, and nobody; and plain sanity told me that it couldn't be Jane.

Nevertheless, there was something different about the house; whether it was just a feeling or whether somebody had actually been here. I stepped back into the garden, my eyes wincing against the falling rain, trying to see what it could possibly be.

I had loved Quaker Lane Cottage from the first day I had set eyes on it. I adored its slightly neglected-looking 1860s Gothic appearance, its diamond-leaded windows, its dressed stone parapets, its creeper. It had been built on the site of a much earlier cottage, and the old stone hearth in what was now the library was engraved with the numerals 1666. Tonight, however, as the rain dripped from the carved green gables, and one of the upstairs shutters creaked backwards and forwards in the unsettling wind, I began to wish that I had chosen to live somewhere more cozy, without this dark sense of disturbed spirits, and restless memories.

‘John.’ somebody whispered; or maybe it was nothing but the wind. The black shaggy beasts of the clouds were right overhead now, and the rain grew heavier, and the drainpipes and gutters began to chuckle like goblins. I began to feel a sense of deep foreboding; a feeling that chilled the bones in my legs. A feeling that Quaker Lane Cottage was possessed with some spirit that had no earthly right to be there.

I walked back down the garden path, and then around to the back of the house. The rain plastered down my hair and stung my face, but before I went inside, I wanted to make sure that the house was empty; that there were no vandals or housebreakers inside. Well, that's what I told myself. I walked through the weedy garden to the leaded living-room window, and peered inside, shading my eyes with my hand so that I could see better.

The room looked empty. The grate was still heaped with cold gray ash. My teacup stood on the floor where I had left it this morning. I walked back round to the front of the cottage again, and listened, while the rain truckled straight down the back of my neck. A glimmer of light showed through the clouds, and for a moment the surface of the ornamental pond looked as if it were sprinkled with nickels and dimes.

I was still standing out there in the rain when one of our neighbours came churning up the lane in his Chevrolet flatbed. It was George Markham who lived at No. 7 Quaker Lane with his invalid wife Joan and more yipping and yapping Dalmatians than you could count. He wound down his window and peered out at me. He wore a plastic rain-cover over his hat, and his spectacles were speckled with droplets.

'Anything wrong, neighbour?' he called. 'You look like you're taking yourself a shower out there.'

'I'm okay,' I told him. 'I thought I could hear one of the gutters leaking.'

'Don't catch your death.'

He was just about to wind up his window again, when I stepped across the puddly lane towards him, and said, 'George, did you hear anybody walking up the lane last night? Round about two or three o'clock in the morning?'

George pouted thoughtfully, and then shook his head. 'I heard the wind last night, for sure. But nothing else. Nobody walking up the lane. Any special reason?'

'I'm not sure.'

George looked at me for a moment or two, and then said, 'You'd best get yourself inside, get yourself dry. You can't go neglecting yourself, just because Jane isn't here no more. You want to come down later, play some cards? Old Keith Reed might be coming over, if he can get that truck of his started.'

'I might do that. Thanks, George.'

George drove away, and I was left alone in the rain again. I walked back across the lane, and up the garden path. Well, I thought, I can't stand out here all night. I opened the door, and gave it a push, and it swung back with its usual dour groan. I was greeted by shadows, and the familiar smell of old timber and woodsmoke.

'Anybody home?' I asked. The stupidest question of all time. The only person home was me. Jane was a month dead and I just wished I could stop imagining her accident over and over again, I just wished I could stop replaying the last blurry seconds of her life like one of those auto crashes they show on TV, with helpless dummies being flung through windshields. Except that Jane hadn't been a dummy; and neither had our crushed and curled-up child.

I stepped inside the house. There was no question about it: there was something different in the air, as if things had been moved around while I had been away. At first I thought: damn it, I was right, I've been burgled. But the long-case clock was still ticking away with weary sedateness in the hallway, the 18th-century painting of foxhounds still hung over the old oak linen-chest. Jane had given me that painting for Christmas, as a kind of affectionate joke about the day we had first met. I had tried to blow the hunting-horn that day, to impress her, and produced nothing more than a loud ripping noise, like a hippopotamus with gas. I could still hear her laughing now.

I closed the door and went upstairs to the bedroom to change out of my wet clothes. I still had this disturbing sensation that somebody had been here apart from me; that things had been touched, picked up and put down again. I was sure that I had left my comb on the bureau, instead of the bedside table. And my bedside clock had stopped.

I tugged on a navy-blue rollneck sweater and a pair of jeans. Then I went downstairs and poured myself my last half-mouthful of Chivas Regal. I had meant to buy more liquor while I was in Salem, but what with all that business with Edward Wardwell about the painting, I had completely forgotten to stop by the Liquor Mart. I swallowed the whisky straight down, and wished I had another. Maybe when the rain eased off I would walk down to the Granitehead Market, and pick up a couple of bottles of wine, and a Gourmet TV dinner, lasagna maybe. I couldn't have looked another Salisbury steak in the face if you'd threatened to break my fingers. Salisbury steak must be the loneliest food in America.

It was then that I heard the whispering again, as if there were two other people in the house who were discussing me under their breath. I stayed where I was for a little while, listening; but every time I listened too hard the whispering seemed to turn into the wind, gusting under the door, or the gurgle of rain down the waterpipes. I stood up, and walked out into the hallway, with my empty glass in my hand, and said, 'Hello?'

No answer. Just the steady shudder of loose window-casements. Just the sighing of the wind, and the distant thundering of the sea. 'It keeps eternal whispering around desolate shores.' Keats again. I almost damned Jane for her Keats.

I went into the library. It was cold in there, and damp. The desk was strewn with letters and bills and last month's auction catalogues, under a huge suspended brass lamp that had once hung in the cabin of Captain Henry Prince, in the Astrea II. On the windowsill there were five or six framed photographs: Jane when she was graduating from Wellesley; Jane and I standing outside a roadside diner in New Hampshire; Jane in the front garden of Quaker Lane Cottage; Jane with her mother and father, eyes squeezed up against the winter sunshine. I picked them up, one by one, and looked at them sadly.

Yet, there was something odd about them. None of them seemed to be quite the same as I remembered them. That day that I had photographed Jane standing outside the cottage, I was sure that she had been standing on the path, and not in the front garden itself — especially since she had only just bought herself a new pair of mulberry-coloured suede boots, which she wouldn't have wanted to muddy. There was something else, too. In the dark glass of the criss-cross leaded window only four or five feet behind her, I could make out a curious pale blur. It could have been a lamp, or a passing reflection; and yet it looked disturbingly like a woman's face, hollow-eyed and distressed, but moving too quickly to have been sharply caught by the camera.

I knew that, apart from Jane and myself, the cottage had been empty that day. I examined the picture as closely as I could, but it was impossible to tell exactly what that pale blur might have been.

I looked through all of the photographs again. In all of them, although it was impossible to be exact about it, I had the extraordinary feeling that people and things had been moved. Subtly, but noticeably. For instance, there was a picture of Jane beside the statue of Jonathan Pope, the founder of Granitehead Harbour, and the 'father of the tea-trade'. I was sure that when I had looked at the photograph last, Jane had been standing on the right side of the statue; and yet here she was on the left. The picture hadn't been reprinted in reverse, either, because the inscription on the statue clearly read 'Jonathan Pope' the right way around. I held the photograph close, and then far away, but there was nothing to suggest that anybody had tampered with it. All that disturbed me, apart from Jane's altered position, was a quick, unfocused shape in the background, as if someone had been running past when the photograph was taken, and had suddenly turned around. It looked like a woman in a long brown dress, or a long brown coat. Her face was unclear, but I could make out the dark sockets of her eyes, and the indistinct smudge of her mouth.

I suddenly began to feel very chilled, and peculiarly frightened. Either I was reacting to the stress of Jane's death by hallucinating, by going more than quietly mad; or else something unnatural was happening in Quaker Lane Cottage, something powerful and cold and strange.

A door closed, somewhere in the house. Quietly, the way that a door might be closed by a nurse as she leaves the bedside of a sick or dying child.

I thought for a terrible moment that I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and I barged my way clumsily into the hall. But there was nobody there. Nobody there but me, and my haunted memories.

I looked back into the library. On the desk, where I had left it, lay the picture of Jane in the front garden. I walked into the room and picked it up again, frowning at it. There was something grotesquely wrong about it, but I couldn't decide what. Jane was smiling at me quite normally; and apart from the pale reflection in the window behind her, the house seemed unchanged. But the photograph was different, wrong. It looked as if Jane were propped-up, rather than standing by herself; like one of those terrible police pictures of murder victims. Holding the photograph in my hand, I went to the library window and looked out into the front garden.

The photograph must have been taken about mid-afternoon, because the sun was low to the west, and all the shadows in it lay exactly horizontal, from one side of the picture to the other. Jane's shadow lay half-way along the path, so that even though she was nine or ten feet off to the left of it, and her legs were concealed by the low hedge of laurel bushes between us, I could work out exactly where in the garden she was standing.

I lifted the photograph again and again, comparing it with the front garden. I felt a desperation rise up inside me that almost made me bang my head against the window. This was impossible. This was totally and utterly impossible. And yet the evidence was here; in this blandly-smiling photograph. It was impossible and yet it was indisputable.

Jane, in this photograph, was standing in the one place in the garden where it was humanly out of the question for anyone to stand, on the surface of the ornamental pond.