Death Trance

We chatted for a little while longer. Gilly told me about the shop, and how she had come to open it. She had studied fashion and textiles at Salem State, and then, with a $150,000 legacy from her grandfather, and some extra finance from the Shawmut-Merchants Bank, opened up a small fashion shop out at Hawthorne Square Shopping Centre. Business had been so good that when a lease had become available in the centre of Salem itself, she had 'seized it with all ten claws,' as she put it.

‘I’m independent,' she said. 'An independent business lady selling my own designs. What more could I want?'

'You married?' I asked her.

'Are you kidding? I don't even have time for boyfriends. Do you know what I have to do this evening? I have to drive over to Middleton to collect a whole lot of lace day-dresses that are being hand-sewn for me by two old New England spinsters. If I don't do it tonight, they won't be in the shop in time for tomorrow, and tomorrow's Saturday.'

'All work and no play,' I remarked.

To me, work is play,' she retorted. 'I love my work. It's my whole life. It completely fulfils me.'

'But you are coming diving tomorrow.'

'Oh, sure. I do like to prove that I'm as good as a man in other areas as well.'

'Did I say you weren't as good as a man?'

She blushed. 'You know what I mean.'

At that moment, Edward came into the shop, carrying an untidy collection of papers and books. 'Sorry to keep you,' he said, trying to rearrange his papers and scratch his ear at the same time. 'The Director wanted to make sure that everything was ready for the Jonathan Haraden exhibition tomorrow. Do you want that drink now?'

'Sure,' I said. 'How about you, Gilly? Do you want to come?'

'I have to be in Middleton by seven,' she said. "Then I have to get back to press all the dresses and price them.'

'Drop into the Hawthorne on your way back, then,' I asked her. ‘I’ll still be in the Tavern.'

‘I’ll try.'

We left Gilly at Linen & Lace and walked over to Liberty Street to collect my car. 'She's an interesting girl, Gilly,' said Edward. 'Underneath that good-looking exterior she's got herself a real tough business brain. That's women's liberation at its best. Can you guess how old she is?'

'I don't know. Twenty-four maybe, twenty-five.'

'You didn't look at the skin closely enough, or the figure. She's just turned twenty.'

'Are you putting me on?'

'You wait until tomorrow, when you see her in a bathing-costume. Then you'll realize.'

'Do you fancy her?' I asked him.

Edward shrugged. 'She's too dynamic for me. Too much of a go-getter. I prefer the dreamy young college-girl types, you know, mulled cider in front of the fire, poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Led Zeppelin on the stereo.'

'Did you ever get stuck in your era.'

Edward laughed. 'Maybe I did, too.'

We managed to arrive at the Tavern on the Green at the Hawthorne Inn just as one of the tables in front of the fireplace was being vacated. The Tavern was crowded with homegoing businessmen and shop people, a warm oak-panelled room decorated with pictures of ships and maritime chinaware. I ordered Chivas Regal and Edward asked for a beer.

'I have to tell you something,' I said. 'Something which I omitted to tell you yesterday, for personal reasons, I guess.'

Edward sat forward in his chair and laced his hands together. 'If it's going to make it any easier, I think I already know what you're going to say.'

'For the past three nights,' I told him, ‘I’ve been visited by an apparition of Jane, my dead wife. The first night, I didn't see anything, but I heard her swinging on the garden-swing. The next night I actually saw her there. Last night, after you'd left, I saw her again. She came into my bedroom.'

Edward looked at me with concern. 'I see,' he said, thoughtfully. 'Well, I can understand why you didn't want to tell me. Not many people do, not at first. Did she my anything to you? Did she give you any kind of message? Were you able to communicate with her in any way?'

'She — spoke my name a few times. Then she asked me to make love to her.'

'Yes,' Edward nodded. 'Several people have had that experience. Go on. What else did she do? Did she actually make love to you?'

'I had — well, I don't know what to call it. I had some kind of a sexual experience. It was extremely cold. I'll never forget how cold it was. Do you remember in The Exorcist how the room got so cold? It reminded me of that. It all ended when I saw her as she must have been when she was involved in her car crash. You know — blood, bones — it scared the living hell out of me.'

'Is that why you're not going back to Granitehead tonight?'

'Do you blame me?'

'Of course not. I want you calm for tomorrow, anyway, when we dive. Anxiety leads to stress, and stress leads to mistakes. You don't want to drown your first time out.'

'I wish you'd stop being so damned optimistic about this dive.'

A waitress in a black tuxedo vest and black bow-tie brought us our drinks. While Edward sampled his beer, I took out my ballpen and said, 'There's something else. A kind of written message, burned on the sheets of the bed. It was still there this morning.'

I wrote on my paper coaster the letters that had appeared on my bed, copying them as exactly as I could. SALVAGE. I pushed them over to Edward and he examined them carefully.

'Salvage?' he asked. 'You're sure it's not "savage"?'

'No. It's definitely salvage. It's the second or third time the letters have appeared. Once they were scrawled on my bathroom mirror, and once on the side of my kettle. It's salvage. It's an appeal to me to salvage the David Dark.'

Edward pouted his lips skeptically. 'You really think that?'

'Edward, when you see one of these apparitions, you're aware of feelings and thoughts that you've never ever had before in your life. It's an intuitive experience, as well as a sensory one. Nobody said, "This means that you're supposed to salvage the David Dark." They didn't have to. I knew.'

'Now listen,' said Edward, 'I know that I'm given to drawing tendentious historical conclusions, but I really think that you're jumping a whole lot of logical steps here without any substantive reasoning at all. To find and bring up the David Dark we have to be analytical, as well as theoretical.'

'Do you have anybody close to you, who's recently died?' I asked him, in the softest of voices.

'No, I don't.'

'In that case, trust what I'm saying. I've seen my own dead wife, right in front of me. I've had sex with her spirit, if that's what it was. I'm already beginning to realize that there's another existence right alongside of ours, and it's crowded with pain and self-doubt and fear and longing. Maybe if we bring up the David Dark, like you've always wanted to do, we can find a way to ease that pain, and settle that doubt, and calm all those fears and those longings, for good.'

Edward looked down at the table. He puffed out his cheeks. 'Well,' he said, without any trace of sarcasm, 'you sounded almost religious there, for a moment.'

This is religious, isn't it? It's all tangled up with religion?'

Edward looked doubtful. 'To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is. If you've actually seen those apparitions, then you know more than I do, at least in terms of practical experience.'

I raised my glass. 'Here's to tomorrow's dive. I don't want to go, but I think I'm going to have to.'

Fifteen

Shortly after ten o'clock, I left the Tavern on the Green and went upstairs to my room. Edward had left around nine-thirty to go home to his sister, and there had been no sign of Gilly, so I decided to have a steak and a jacket potato on room service, and spend the rest of the evening boning up on the diving manual which Edward had lent me.