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.