Death Trance

'You betcha,' said Forrest, and he was serious.

Gilly came over to my car as I was about to leave. She leaned in at the open window, her hair blown about by the breeze, and said, 'You're really going back to the cottage tonight?'

'I have to.'

She looked at me without saying anything, then raised her face against the wind. T wish you wouldn't,' she said.

'I wish I didn't have to. But there's no point in running away from it. I have to face up to what's going on, and I have to find some way of sorting it out. I'm not going through another night like last night. Sooner or later, one or other of us, or both of us, are going to get hurt. I haven't forgotten what happened to poor old Mrs Edgar Simons. I don't want anything like that happening to you. Or to me, for that matter.'

'Well,' she said, with a sad and philosophical smile, 'that was a whirlwind romance that whirled itself in and whirled itself out again.'

'I hope you don't think that it's over,' I told her.

'It isn't, not as far as I'm concerned. Not unless you want it to be.'

I held out my hand, and Gilly took it, and squeezed it.

'Can I call you later?' I asked her.

She nodded, and said, 'I'd like that,' and made a kiss with her eyes.

As I drove off, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw her standing there on the dock, her hands in the pockets of her Parka. She hadn't made me forget Jane. I don't think any girl could have done that. But for the first time since Jane had died, I felt alive again, and that the world might be worth living in, after all. I thought how strange it was that human optimism is rarely invested in hoped-for events, or the fateful course of future history; but rather in other people, each of them as uncertain and confused as we are. There is no stronger courage than the courage of knowing that someone loves you, and that you are not alone.

I drove back to Quaker Lane. At the bottom of the hill, fixing his fence, I saw George Markham, and I pulled the Toronado to a halt and climbed out.

'How are you doing, George?' I asked him.

He stood up, wiping his creosote-stained hands on his Oshkosh overalls. 'I heard they dropped the charges against you,' he said. He was trying to be blunt, but I could tell that he was embarrassed.

'Insufficient evidence,' I told him. 'Besides which, I didn't do it.'

'Well, nobody said you did,' said George, hastily.

'Nobody said that I didn't. But somebody said that I was rambling that evening, and not myself.'

'You wasn't yourself. You have to be fair about that.'

I thrust my hands into my pants, pockets and looked at him with a grin. 'You're right, George. I wasn't myself. But then who would have been, if they'd seen what I'd seen.'

George looked at me narrowly, one eye half-closed, as if he were trying to weigh me up. 'You really did see Jane, swinging on the swing?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And I've seen her again since.' He was silent for a long time, thinking. It was cold out there, in the front garden, and he wiped his nose with his hand. I stayed where I was, hands in my pockets, watching him.

At last he said, 'Keith Reed didn't believe you. But then Keith don't like to believe anybody too much when it comes to hauntings.'

'Do you believe me?'

George, ashamed, nodded.

'You've seen a ghost for yourself, haven't you?' I asked him. I wasn't sure that he had, not at all, but there was something about the way he was looking at me, something scared and uncertain and deeply impressionable, something that told me: this man has seen an apparition with his own eyes.

'I, uh… heard my brother Wilf,' he said, in a throat-dry voice.

'Did you see him, as well as hear him?'

George lowered his head and looked down at the ground. Then he raised his head again, and said, 'Come on inside. Let me show you something.'

I followed him into the house. As I closed the door behind me, the first collision of thunder sounded in the distance, out to sea, and the wind suddenly rose, and banged George's garden gate. George led me into the living-room, and went across to a dark-oak bureau next to the fireplace, which he opened up and rummaged around inside. At last he produced a framed photograph, quite a large one, which he solemnly handed to me, as if he were presenting me with an honorary degree.

I examined the photograph carefully, even turning the frame around and looking at the back of it. It was a black-and-white picture of a highway, somewhere local by the look of it, with trees in the background, and a parked car a little way off by the side of the road. That was all. One of the dullest photographs I think I had ever seen.

'Well?' I asked George. 'I don't quite know what I'm supposed to be looking for.'

George took off his spectacles and folded them. 'You're supposed to be looking for my brother,' he said, pointing to the picture.

I peered more closely. 'I don't see him. I don't see anyone.'

'That's the point,' said George. 'This used to be a photograph of my brother, standing right in the front. Then, two or three weeks ago, I saw that he'd moved back a ways, no more than six or eight feet, but back. I didn't credit it at first, thought I was making a mistake, but the next week he moved even further back, and last week he disappeared back down the highway altogether. That's why I took the picture down from the shelf. My brother's gone from that picture, and that's all there is to it. I don't know how, or why, but he's gone.'

I handed the photograph back. 'The same thing's been happening to my pictures of Jane,' I told him. They've been moving, and changing. Nearly the same, but not quite.'

'What do you think it is?' asked George. He grasped my arm anxiously, and looked at me right in the face. 'Do you think it's witchcraft?'

'Of a kind,' I said. 'It's very hard to tell. But some of the people from the Peabody Museum are looking into it. They may find a way of putting your brother to rest. Jane, too. And all the other spirits that have been haunting Granitehead. At least, well, I hope they will.'

George put his spectacles back on again. 'I heard Wilf crying,' he said, staring sadly at the empty highway in the photograph. 'Night after night, in the spare room upstairs, I heard him crying. There was nobody there, nobody that I could see, anyway. But this sobbing and weeping that went on and on, like a man in terrible despair. I can't tell you how much that affected me, John.'

I gripped his shoulder as reassuringly as I could. 'Try not to let it worry you, George. It may sound like Wilf's unhappy, but maybe he's not. Maybe you're only hearing the most stressful side of what he feels like, now that he's dead. It's possible that people's personalities divide up, when they die, and that somewhere there's a happy Wilf, as well as a sad one.'

George shrugged. 'I don't really believe that, John. Thanks for the thought.'

'I don't know what else to tell you,' I said. 'I don't know anything about it myself, except that these people from the Peabody think that they may have guessed the cause of all these hauntings.'

'What is it? Radiation, something like that?'

'Not exactly. But listen, when I know some more, I'll come down and let you know. I promise. Especially if you give me that game of stud you promised.'

We shook hands, although I wasn't quite sure why. Then I left George to fix up his fence, got back in my car, and drove up the uneven roadway to Quaker Lane Cottage.

I had been dreading coming back to the cottage ever since I drove away from the dock at Salem. I had dawdled along West Shore Drive at less than 20 miles an hour, much to the annoyance of a truck driver behind me. But there it was at last, at the top of the hill, looking gray and old and peculiarly squalid under the threatening sky. I made up my mind as I turned around and parked in front of it that this was going to be the last night I was going to sleep here. The cottage seemed so cold and hostile that there wasn't any reason for me to stay.