Then came the coldness. An abrupt fall in temperature, just the same as the chill I had experienced in the library the night before. My breath began to vaporize, and I wrapped the comforter more tightly around me to keep myself warm.
I heard laughing, whispering. There were people in the cottage! There had to be. I heard shuffling on the stairs, as if four or five people were hurrying up to see me. But the noise died away in a flurry, and the door remained closed, and there was nobody there at all.
I stayed exactly where I was, wound up in that comforter. My elbow ached from supporting my body in the same position, but I was too scared to move a muscle. Yesterday morning, when I had thought back over the way in which I had broken into Mrs Edgar Simons' house, I had congratulated myself on how courageous I must have been to do it. But now, in the middle of the night, with all these rustlings and murmurings at my bedroom door, I remembered just how blatantly terrified I had actually been.
'John,' whispered a voice. I glanced around, my teeth clenched rigid with alarm.
'John,' the voice repeated. There was no mistaking whose voice it was.
Croakily, I answered, 'Jane? Is that you?'
She gradually began to appear, standing at the foot of the bed. Not so dazzlingly bright as before, but still flickering like a distant heliograph message. Thin, and sunken-eyed, her hair waving around her in some unfelt, unseen wind, her hands raised as if she were displaying the fact that she was dead but bore no stigmata. What frightened me most of all, though, was how tall she was. In those dim white robes, she stood nearly seven feet, her hair almost touching the ceiling, and she looked down at me with a serious and elongated face that sent dread soaking through me like the cold North Atlantic rain.
'John?' she whispered again, although her mouth didn't move. And she began to drift sideways around the end of the bed. My vision of her came and went, as if I were seeing her through a tattered gauze curtain. But the nearer she approached, the colder the temperature became, and the more distinctly I could hear the static crackling of her upraised hair.
'Jane,' I said, in a constricted voice, 'you're not real. Jane, you're dead! You can't be here, you're dead!'
'John… ' she sighed, and her voice sounded like four or five voices speaking at once. 'John… make love to me.'
For a moment, my courage and my confidence collapsed inside of me into that gravitational Black Hole called panic. I buried my face under the comforter, and squeezed my eyes tight shut, and shouted under the bedclothes, 'I'm dreaming this! It's a nightmare! For Christ's sake, tell me I'm dreaming!'
I waited under the comforter with my eyes shut until I could hardly breathe any more. Then I opened my eyes again and stared at the darkness of the quilting, right in front of my nose. The trouble with hiding is that at some point you have to come out of it again, and face up to what it was that made you hide in the first place. I said a silent prayer to myself that Jane would be gone, that the whispering would have stopped, that the cottage would have warmed and restored itself. I whipped down the comforter, away from my face, and looked up. What I saw just above me made me yell out loud. It was Jane's face, only four or five inches away from me, looking directly down at me. She seemed to melt and shift and change constantly; sometimes looking childish and young, at other times looking ravaged and old. Her eyes were impenetrable: there seemed to be no life there at all. And her expression never changed from that dreamless serenity which I had seen on her face as she lay in her casket, before burial.
'John,' she said, somewhere inside my head.
I couldn't speak. I was too frightened. For not only was Jane staring at me so closely, she was actually lying, or rather floating, on top of me, toe to toe, five or six inches above the bed. The coldness poured down from her like the vapour from dry ice, and I felt as if frost crystals were forming on my hair and on my eyelashes, but Jane kept floating above me, ethereal and freezing, suspended in some existence where gravity and substance seemed to have no meaning.
'Make love to me… ' she whispered. Her voice echoed, as if she were speaking in a long empty corridor. 'John… make love to me… '
The comforter slipped away from the bed as if it had a life of its own. Now I was lying naked, with this flickering manifestation of Jane hovering horizontally over me, whispering to me, chilling me, and yet begging me for love.
She didn't move her arm, and yet I felt a sensation like a cold hand drawing itself across my forehead, and touching my cheeks, and then my lips. The coldness crept down my bare sides, tingling my nipples, outlining the muscles of my chest, touching the sides of my hips. Then it touched my testicles, making them harden and shrink; but arousing a curious tingling in my penis which in spite of my fear and in spite of my discomfort, made it rise.
'Make love to me, John… ' she whispered, voice upon voice, echo upon echo. And the coldness massaged me, up and down, until feelings began to stir inside me that I hadn't felt for over a month now.
'John… ' she said again.
'This is a dream,' I told her. 'This cannot be happening. You cannot be real. You're dead, Jane, I've seen you dead and you're dead.'
The cold massage continued, on and on, until I began to feel that I was close to a climax. It was like having sex and yet totally unlike having sex: I could feel slipperiness and softness and the wiry stimulation of pubic hair. Yet it was utterly freezing. My penis felt white with cold, and my body was covered with goosebumps.
'Jane,' I told her, 'this isn't true.' And as my body tightened into a climax, I knew it wasn't true, I knew that it was completely impossible, I knew that I couldn't be having sex with my month-dead wife; and as the semen spattered over my bare stomach there was a hideously loud screech and Jane seemed to come hurtling towards me with her face exploding in a welter of blood and shattered glass and for one instant of total terror her skull seemed to collide face-to-face with mine, the cheeks torn raw from the cheekbones, the eyes gouged out, the lips spread in a smash of strawberries to bare beneath them the grinning bloodstained teeth.
I rolled out of bed and across the floor so fast that I collided with the bureau and knocked over a clinking assembly of after-shave bottles, photograph-frames, and ornaments. A vase of porcelain flowers dropped to the floor and shattered.
I stared at the rumpled-up bed, shivering. There was nothing there at all, no blood, no body, nothing. I felt the stickiness of semen sliding down my stomach and I put my hand down there and touched it. A nightmare, it must have been. An erotic nightmare. A mixture of sexual frustration and fear, all tangled up with images of Jane.
I didn't really want to get back into bed, and I was frightened to fall asleep, but it was two o'clock in the morning now, and I was so tired that I couldn't think of anything but crawling under the comforter and closing my eyes. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead and tried to calm myself down.
As I did so, gradually, I began to see brownish marks appearing on the bedsheet, like scorch marks. Some of them even smouldered slightly, as if they were being burned from beneath the sheet by someone with a red-hot poker, or a cigarette-end. I watched them in fearful fascination, as they formed themselves into curves and curls and straights.
They were blurry, difficult to read, but they were definitely letters; SA.V.GE.
SAVE ME? SAVAGE?
And then it occurred to me. It may only have been because I had been talking to Edward Wardwell this evening about that very thing. But it seemed to fit in so well that I could scarcely believe that the letters meant anything else. Not SAVE ME, not SAVAGE, but SALVAGE.
Through the spirit of my dead wife, whatever lay in the hold of the David Dark was pleading to be rescued.