Death Trance

I lowered my eyes. 'Walter,' I said, huskily, 'I can appreciate your eagerness to see Jane again. But I have to warn you that she isn't exactly the Jane you knew. Nor the Jane I knew, either. She's — well, she's very different. For Christ's sake, Walter, she's a ghost.'

Walter stiffened his lower lip, and gave a little shake of his head. 'Don't use that word «ghost», John. I like «visitation» so much better.'

'We're arguing about what to call her? Walter, she's a ghost; a phantom; a restless spirit.'

'I know that, John. I'm not trying to hide myself away from the truth. But the point is — do you think she's happy? Do you think she likes it, where she is?'

'Walter, I don't know where she is.'

'But is she happy? That's all we want to ask her. And Constance wants to ask if she's managed to locate Philip. You know, Jane's young brother, who died when he was five.'

I simply couldn't answer that question. I tiredly rubbed the back of my neck and tried to think what I could possibly say to put Walter Bedford off. Something that wouldn't antagonize him again, and lose me my most munificent benefactor; not that 'munificent' was quite the word that anybody would use in connection with Walter Bedford. 'Prudently generous' was probably more accurate.

'I don't really think, Walter, that any of us are going to be able to determine whether she's happy or not. I have to tell you that she appeared again last night, and, well — '

'You've seen her again? You've actually seen her again?'

'Walter, please. She appeared last night, in my room. The whole experience was very upsetting. She spoke my name a few times, and then — well, she asked me to make love to her.'

Walter frowned, and stood suddenly rigid. 'John,' he said, 'my daughter is dead.'

'I know that, Walter, God preserve me.'

'Well, you didn't actually — '

'Didn't actually what, Walter? Didn't actually fuck my dead wife? What are you trying to say, that I'm a necrophiliac? There was no corpse there, Walter, only a face, and a feeling, and a voice. It was like freezing electricity, that's all.'

Walter Bedford appeared to be shaken. He walked across the shop and stood with his back to me for a while. Then he picked up a brass telescope, and began opening it and closing it, opening and closing it, in nervous distress.

'I think, John, that we will be able to discover whether she's happy or not. We are her parents, after all. We've known her all her life. So it's possible that some of the little nuances of expression that you may have missed, not knowing her so well; some of the little give-away words that you may not have recognized… it's possible that these may mean something to us that wasn't immediately apparent to you.'

'Walter, God damn it,' I said, 'we're not dealing with a cozy transparent version of Jane here. This isn't a warm and friendly ghost that you can have conversations with. This is a chilly, hostile, frightening manifestation with eyes that look like death itself and hair that crackles like fifty thousand volts. Do you really want to face up to that? Do you really want Constance to face up to it?'

Walter Bedford closed up the telescope and put it back on the table. When he looked at me, his eyes were very sorrowful, and he was near to tears.

'John,' he said, 'I'm prepared for the very worst. I know it won't be easy. But it can't be as bad as that day when they called us up and told us that Jane had been killed. That day was the blackest of all.'

'I can't put you off?' I said, quietly.

He shook his head. ‘I’ll have to come anyway, invited or uninvited.'

I bit my lip. 'All right then. Come tomorrow night, if you want to. I'm not staying at Quaker Lane Cottage tonight, I can't face it. But please do me one favour.'

'Anything.'

'Warn Constance, over and over, that what she may see may be horrifying, and cold, and even malevolent. Don't let her come to Quaker Lane Cottage thinking that she's going to be meeting the Jane she knew.'

'She is her mother, you know, John. The visitation may behave differently when her mother's there.'

'Well,' I said, not wanting to prolong the argument any further, 'I guess that's possible.'

Walter Bedford held out his hand, and I didn't have any option but to shake it. He gripped my elbow at the same time, and said, 'Thank you, John. You don't know what this means to us, you really don't.'

'Okay,' I told him. 'I'll see you tomorrow night. Make it late, will you? Eleven o'clock, something like that. And please, don't forget to warn Constance.'

'Oh, I'll warn her,' said Mr Bedford, and left the shop like a man who's just learned that he's come into money.

Fourteen

I kept the shop open until four o'clock in the afternoon, and considering it was early March, and the weather had been so poor, I was visited by quite a reasonable number of buying customers. I managed to sell a huge and hideous ship's telegraph to a gay couple from Darien, Connecticut, who excitedly took it away in the back of their shiny blue Oldsmobile wagon; and a serious silver-haired man spent nearly an hour going through my engravings and unerringly selecting the best.

After I had locked up the shop, I went over to the Crumblin' Cookie (God forgive me) for a cup of black coffee and a doughnut. I liked the girls behind the counter there; one of them, Laura, had been a friend of Jane's, and she knew just how to talk about Jane without upsetting me.

'Good day's business?' she asked me, handing over my coffee.

'Not bad. At least I managed to unload that ship's telegraph that Jane always used to hate so much.'

'Oh, that thing you bought up at Rockport, when you went out buying on your own?'

That's the one.'

'Well,' said Laura, 'you'd better make sure your taste in acquisitions improves, or she'll come back and haunt you.'

I gave an awkward grimace. Laura looked at me, her head tilted to one side, and said, 'Not funny? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to — '

'It's all right,' I told her. 'It wasn't your fault.'

'Really, I'm sorry,' Laura insisted.

'Forget it,' I told her. ‘I’m just having one of my moods.'

I finished my coffee, left Laura a dollar tip, and walked across Granitehead Square into the chilly afternoon. I felt like getting into my car and driving all night, as far away from Massachusetts as possible west, back to St Louis, or even further. In spite of the constant wind, in spite of the ocean, I felt that Salem and Granitehead were small and dark and constricting and old. A great suffocating weight of history pressed on me here, layer upon layer of ancient buildings, long-dead people, mysterious events. Layer upon layer of prejudice and argument and pain.

I drove south-west as far as Lafayette Street, and then crossed into Salem, passing the Star of the Sea cemetery. It was unusually sunny; and sharp reflections of light glanced off windows and car windshields and yachts. A distant airplane glittered in the sky like a needle as it circled in to Beverly Airport, five miles away.

On the car radio, WESX was playing Don't Let Him Steal Your Heart Away. I drove as far as Charter Street, opposite police headquarters, and then made a right to Liberty Street, where I parked. Then I crossed the road to the Peabody Museum, on East India Square.

Salem had been revitalized in the same way as Granitehead, and East India Square, newly created, was a clean, brick-paved enclave, with a fountain in the centre in the shape of a Japanese gate. Running west from, East India Square was a long mall of 'shoppes', jewelry stores, menswear boutiques, tasteful bric-a-brac emporia. In contrast, the original 1824 building in which the Peabody Museum had been started, East India Marine Hall, overlooked the square like an elderly relative who had been freshly scrubbed and clean-collared to attend a grandchild's wedding-party.