I took hold of the bedroom doorhandle, and, as I did so, I heard the singing. Faint, fainter than faint, but clear enough to freeze me where I stood.
'O the men they sail'd from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores…'
I closed my eyes, and then immediately opened them again in case something or somebody appeared when I wasn't looking.
'But the fish they caught were nought but bones With hearts crush'd in their jaws.'
I found myself clearing my throat, as if I were about to propose a toast. Then I turned the doorhandle, and cautiously started to push open the door.
There was a fierce crackle, and a blinding flash of light, and the door was banged wide open, the knob wrenched right out of my grasp. I stood in the doorway terrified, staring into the room, and the sight that I encountered left me open-mouthed, unable to speak, unable to move.
It was one of the huge master bedrooms, with a wide curtained window and a draped four-poster bed. In the far corner, dazzling and flickering, stood the figure of a man, his arms spread wide. All around him, in the air, there was a living, crawling, aura of electrical power, rising up from the floor with a jerking motion that put me horribly in mind of incandescent maggots. The man's face was long and thin, strangely distorted, and his eyes were impenetrable sockets. But I could see that his eyes were raised towards the ceiling, and with an inexplicable feeling of dread I raised my own eyes up towards the ceiling, too.
A vast glass chandelier was suspended there, with tier upon tier of crystal droplets, and a dozen gilded candle-holders. To my alarm, the chandelier was swaying from side to side, and as the crackling of electricity died down, I could hear the crystal pendants tinkling and ringing, not musically, but frantically, as if someone were trying to shake them down, like apples from a tree.
There was something spreadeagled on the chandelier. No, worse than that, there was somebody impaled on it. I took two or three mechanical steps into the bedroom, and stared up at the chandelier in complete horror, unable to believe what was suspended in front of my eyes.
It was Mrs Edgar Simons. Somehow, unbelievably, the chain which held up the chandelier had penetrated right through her stomach, and now she was lying face down on top of its twelve spreading branches, writhing and shuddering like a hooked fish, clutching at the candle-holders and the crystal droplets, twisting herself in the agonizing impossibility of her torturous situation.
'God, God, God,' she babbled, and strings of blood and saliva dangled from her mouth. 'God, get me free, God, get me free, God, God, God, get me free.'
I stared wide-eyed at the flickering apparition which still stood on the opposite side of the room, his arms raised. There was no smile on his face, no scowl, just dark and incomprehensible concentration.
'Let her down!' I screamed at him. 'For Christ's sake, let her down!' But the apparition only flared and crackled, and ignored me, if he could even hear me at all.
I looked up again at Mrs Edgar Simons, who stared back down at me through the sparkling crystal pendants with bulging eyes. Blood began to drip on to the carpet, a few patters at first, then more quickly, and then there was a sudden gouting gush of it. She clutched at the crystal, and it shattered in her hands, so that shards of it penetrated the flesh of her fingers and sliced right through her palms.
I took two or three steps back, and then rushed forward and jumped up to catch hold of the chandelier's branches, in an effort to pull it down from the ceiling. At the first try, I only managed to catch hold of the chandelier with one hand, dangled for a moment, and then had to let go. At the second try, I managed to get a better grip, and swung grimly backwards and forwards, while Mrs Edgar Simons shuddered and bled and wept for God to save her.
There was a cracking noise, and the chandelier dropped a few inches. Then, with a hideous jingling sound, like a thousand angry Christmases, the chandelier collapsed to the floor, bringing Mrs Edgar Simons down with it. The whole bedroom was scattered with blood and broken glass.
I got up off my knees, where I had awkwardly fallen when the chandelier began to drop. On the other side of the room, the apparition had flickered away almost to nothing now, a dim and fitful flame. I crunched through the glass to Mrs Edgar Simons, and crouched down beside her, resting my hand on her head. She felt deathly cold, although her eyes were still open, and she was murmuring under her breath.
'Help me,' she appealed, but there was no hope in her voice at all.
'Mrs Simons,' I told her, ‘I’ll call for an ambulance.'
She tried to lift her head a little, so that she could look at me. 'Too late for that,' she murmured. 'Just… take out this chain.'
'Mrs Simons, I'm not a qualified medic. I couldn't even begin to — '
'It's so cold,' she said. Her head dropped back against the broken glass. 'Oh, God, Mr Trenton, it's so cold. Don't leave me.'
I didn't know what to say to her. I held her hand for a moment, but she didn't seem to be able to feel it, so I let her go. 'Listen,' I insisted, 'I'm going to have to call an ambulance. Tell me where the phone is. Is there a phone upstairs?'
'Don't leave me. Please, whatever you do. He might come back.'
'Who might come back? Who was it, Mrs Simons?'
'Don't leave me,' she repeated. Her eyelids were beginning to flutter now. I could see the whites of her eyes in the darkness of the room, sending a few last hopeless signals to a dimming world. 'Don't leave me. Don't let him hurt me again.'
'Who was it, Mrs Simons?' I asked her. 'You have to tell me. It's important. Was it Edgar? Was it your husband? Will you nod if it was Edgar?'
Her eyes closed. Her breath rattled in her throat, slowly and laboriously. I knew that I ought to go call for the ambulance, but I also knew that it was useless, and that it was far too late.
I bent down close to her ear. There was drying blood in it, and blood on her diamond earring, too. 'Mrs Simons, you have to tell me. Was it Edgar?'
She died without saying anything more. The last breath came out of her lungs like a long regretful sigh. I stayed beside her for a while, and then stood up, my feet crunching on the broken glass.
It hadn't really been necessary for her to tell me whether it was Edgar who had appeared in this room tonight or not. I knew it had to be him. The same way that the apparition which had appeared on my swing had inevitably been Jane. The dead had returned to haunt the living who had once loved them.
I now knew something else, though, something terrifying. And that was that, far from being harmless flickers of cerebral electricity, these apparitions had the power to do strange and horrifying things. Not only the power, but the will.
I found a telephone on the hall table downstairs. I picked it up, and said unhappily, 'Get me the police department, please. Yes, it's an emergency.'
Ten
The police sergeant unlocked my cell and Walter Bedford came in at a bustle that was far too fast for the size of the room. He pulled up, and looked at me, and gave his head a little shake, and said, 'John?' as if he were amazed that it was actually me.
Thank you for coming, Walter,' I told him. 'I appreciate it.'
'They say you killed this woman?' asked Walter. He didn't put down his briefcase.
'She was killed, yes. But not by me.'
Walter turned around to the sergeant who had let him in. 'Do you have someplace more comfortable where we can talk?'