Death Trance

'John — what's happening? John!'

I opened my mouth but I couldn't speak. Gilly's eyes had brought Jane's deathmask to life, and it was the eeriest vision I had ever seen. It was like a painted portrait, with eyes that moved. And it was so cold. So heartless. So accusing.

'John — I'm freezing! — John — '

There was a roaring, screeching, mind-shattering crack. Every window in the room imploded, and a devastating gale swept the drapes aside, so that the air was thick with glittering, tumbling, razor-sharp shards of glass. I hunched down over Gilly as much as I could, but even so the frigid gale brought a vicious scattering of glass all over my back, and into the flesh of my buttocks, and into the muscles of my thighs. The bedspread was sliced to shreds, and feathers rose from the glass-slashed pillows like snow.

I kept my eyes closed until the last tinkle of falling glass had subsided. The cold March wind blew steadily in through the windows, and flapped at the cover of the magazine I had left on top of the television. I looked down at Gilly and she was just Gilly, nobody else, not Jane; although she was white-faced with fright and there was a cut on the side of her forehead.

'I want you to slide out from under me,' I whispered. 'Watch out — there's glass on the bed. There's a whole lot of it sticking out of my back. I don't think it's too serious, but I can't move until you've taken it out.'

Tears began to pool in Gilly's eyes; tears of shock and distress. 'What happened?’ she trembled. 'I don't understand what happened.'

'I think I overdid the climax,' I told her, trying to be ridiculously nonchalant.

'You're shaking,' she said. 'Don't move.'

She managed to wriggle out naked from beneath me. Then she said, 'Lie flat. You've got about twenty pieces in your back. They don't look too deep, though.'

She found her shoes, and went to the bathroom to fetch a facecloth and a towel. Then she sat down beside me and plucked the fragments of glass out of my back. There wasn't much blood, but the wounds were sore, and I was glad when she had managed to take out the last piece, on the inside of my right thigh.

There was a knock at the door. A voice said, 'Sir? Are you there, sir? Assistant manager, sir.'

'What is it?' I called.

'Someone reported a loud noise in your room, sir, and the sound of glass breaking. Is everything all right?'

'Wait a minute,' I said. Gilly found my trousers for me, and I shook the glass out of them, pulled them on, and then tiptoed to the door. I opened it on the chain and peered out. The assistant manager was a tall man in a tuxedo with very shiny black hair and very shiny black shoes.

'I bought my cousin a set of collins glasses today,' I told him. 'A souvenir of Salem. Unfortunately I caught my foot in my bathrobe when I was carrying them across the room. I fell over the table, too.'

The assistant manager looked at me beadily. 'I hope you're not hurt in any way, sir.'

'Hurt? No. No, no. Not hurt.'

He paused, and then he said, 'You won't mind if I just take a look?'

'A look?'

'If you don't mind.'

I took a deep breath. There was no point in trying to bluff it out. If the assistant manager wanted to take a look, then there was nothing at all I could do to stop him.

'The thing is,' I said, 'we had a little trouble with the windows. But, I'll pay for them. As long as you understand that.'

Sixteen

We drove up to Gilly's apartment on Witch Hill Road, overlooking Gallows Hill Park. The apartment was small but scrupulously neat, with framed fashion designs on white-painted walls, and yuccas in tasteful white Portuguese planters. I was still smarting from all those glass-cuts, but all of them had been clean, and only one of them, on my shoulder, was actually bleeding.

'Would you like some wine?' asked Gilly.

I sat down stiffly on the beige corduroy sofa. ‘I’ll have a large Scotch if you've got it.'

'Sorry,' she said, coming in from the kitchen with a large frosted bottle of Pinot Chardonnay. 'Everybody I know is a wine-drinker.'

'Don't tell me they're vegetarians, too.'

'Some of them,' she smiled. She set two tall-stemmed glasses down on the table, and sat down beside me. I took the bottle and poured us both brimful measures. At that moment I felt that if I had to drink wine, I might just as well drink a lot of it.

'How much do you think the Hawthorne will charge you?' Gilly asked.

'Couple of thousand, at least. Those plate-glass windows must cost a fortune.'

'I still don't really understand what was going on.'

I raised my glass in a silent toast and swallowed half of it almost straight away. 'Jealous wife,' I told her.

She stared at me uncertainly. 'You told me your wife was — '

'She is,' I said, assertively. Then, more quietly, 'She is.'

'Then you mean to say that what happened tonight — that was her! Your wife? She did that?'

'I don't know. It's a possibility. It could have been nothing more than a freak gust of wind. You remember that high-rise in Boston, with the windows that kept falling out? Maybe the same thing happened at the Hawthorne.'

Gilly frowned at me in complete non-comprehension. 'But if your wife is dead, how could it have been even a possibility that it was her? You're telling me that she's a ghost, too? Your dead wife is a ghost?'

‘I’ve seen her, yes,' I admitted.

'You've seen her,' said Gilly. 'My God, I can't believe it.'

'You don't have to. But it's the truth. I've seen her two or three times now, and tonight, when we were making love, I saw her again. I looked at your face and instead it was her face.'

Gilly took a drink of wine and then looked at me levelly. 'This is getting very hard to play along with, you know that?'

'It isn't any easier for me.'

'Do you know how often I've been to bed with a man, almost the moment I've met him, the way I did with you?'

'I wish you'd stop trying to justify yourself,' I told her. 'I went to bed with you just as quickly as you went to bed with me. Just because you're the woman and I'm the man, does that make any difference?'

'It's not supposed to,' said Gilly, a little defensively.

'In that case, don't let it.'

'But now you've put me in a weird position.'

'Weird?' I asked her, picking up my wine again.

'Well, weird, yes — because the first man I've ever picked to pounce on — the very first man ever — and he turns out to have some obsession with his dead wife. And the windows of his goddamned hotel room fall in.'

I stood up, and walked across to the patio doors which overlooked Gilly's narrow third-storey balcony. Outside, geraniums trembled in the vibrant night wind. Beyond, I could see the smattering of lights that was Witchcraft Heights. It was past two o'clock in the morning now, and I was tired and shaken beyond argument, beyond reproaches. My ghostly reflection in the dark glass lifted his wine, and drank.

'I wish I could say that I'm obsessed with my wife,' I said quietly. 'I wish I could say that I'm suffering from hysteria; that I've never seen her or heard her anywhere else except inside of my mind. But she's real, Gilly. She's haunting me. Not just the cottage where we used to live, but me, as a person. That's another reason why I'm going to go diving tomorrow, even though I don't want to. I want my wife to be put at rest.'

Gilly said nothing. I came back from the window and sat opposite her, although she wouldn't look at me.

'If you want to forget we ever met, that's all right by me,' I told her. 'Well — it's not exactly all right. It'll upset me. But I can understand how you feel. Anybody else would feel the same. Even my doctor thinks it's nothing but post-bereavement shock.'

I hesitated, and then I said, 'You're a very attractive person, Gilly. You do exciting things to me. And I still stand by what I said earlier on — how amazing it is that two people can work up a storm together only minutes after they've met. We could both have a good time; you know that. But I have to tell you that Jane's spirit is still around me, and that there may be danger, the way there was tonight.'