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'Who is that whispering?' she said, with her eyes wide. 'Is that you?’

'How can it be me? Do you see my lips moving?'

The whispering went on. Constance came closer, and stared at me even harder. 'I saw your lips move,' she said, with obvious uncertainty.

'I'm breathing through my mouth, that's why. I went diving today and my sinuses are sore.'

'He makes excuses, at a time like this. He always has excuses,' Constance told Walter, although she kept on staring at me.

Behind her, although Constance didn't realize it, the front door had silently opened itself. I reached over and touched Walter's arm, but he had seen the door already, and he said softly, 'I know. I know, John. The handle turned by itself.'

The door smoothly swung open, without its familiar squeaking noise. We were looking out now into the front garden, into the dark and blustery night. And there, halfway along the garden path, much smaller than she had appeared in my bedroom, only the height of an eleven-year-old child, stood Jane.

'Constance,' said Walter gently. 'She's here.'

Constance turned, slowly, hypnotically, and stared out into the garden. She said nothing at all, but I could tell by the shaking of her shoulders that she was sobbing, and trying to suppress her sobs.

'I didn't realize,' she wept, her mouth twisted into a snarl of grief. 'Oh my God, Walter, I didn't understand.'

Jane appeared to be floating a few inches above the path; a flickering image of her that faded and sparkled in the wind. Her arms were straight down by her sides, her face was hollow-eyed and expressionless, but her hair floated around her head like a electrostatic crown.

'John,' she whispered. 'John, don't leave me.'

Constance took two or three uncontrolled steps towards her, lifting one arm. 'Jane, it's your mother,' she appealed. 'Jane, listen to me, wherever you are, darling, it's your mother.'

'Don't leave me, John,' Jane begged me. Constance must have been terrified, but she approached the apparition even more closely, her hands raised like a plump madonna. 'Jane, I want to help you,' she said. 'I'll do anything to help you. Speak to me, Jane, please. Tell me you can see me. Tell me you know that I'm here. Jane, I love you. Please, Jane. Please, I'm pleading with you.'

'Constance,' warned Walter. 'Constance, come back here.'

Jane's image shifted and altered, both in size and appearance. She appeared taller now, and her face was different, thinner-cheeked, gaunt, like a starving angel. She raised one arm, leaving in the air for a moment a succession of after-images, so that it looked as if she had five arms instead of one.

'John,' she whispered, more affirmatively now. 'You mustn't leave me, John. You mustn't leave me, not here.'

Constance was down on her knees on the garden path in front of her spectral daughter. Walter choked, 'No, Constance!' and shouldered his way past me to bring her back; but just as he did so, Jane turned her head and stared down at her mother with eyes that were as black and expressionless as the shadowy windows of Quaker Lane Cottage.

'Jane, don't you know me?' Constance wailed. 'Jane, it's your mother! You're all I have left, Jane, don't leave me! Come back to me, Jane! I need you!'

Walter seized Constance's shoulders, and cried, 'Constance, don't! This is madness! She's dead, Constance, she can't come back!'

Constance turned and struck out at Walter with a flailing arm. 'You never cared about her the way I did, did you?' she screamed. 'You never cared anything about our children! You never cared about me, either! You don't want her back because you're guilty, that's why; just as guilty as John; and because you're afraid.'

'Constance, this is a ghost!' shouted Walter.

'He's right, Constance,' I told her. 'You'd be safer if you kept away.'

Jane's blue-white electrical image hovered and flickered, and seemed to grow even taller, until it was taller than Walter. But it never once turned its eyes away from Constance, as she groveled at its feet on the garden path. Walter stared up at it in abject dread, and took one or two paces back. He turned around to me, his face gray with fright, and mutely appealed to me to do something. Anything. He hadn't understood what it was going to be like, either, and now he was scared out of his mind.

'Jane!' screamed Constance. 'Jane!'

And it was then that Jane's death-pale lips curled slowly back over her incandescent teeth, and her mouth stretched wider and wider until she was as hideous and as horrifying as a stone gargoyle. Her hair flew up behind her head, and she raised her other arm so that she was standing in a cruciform shape. Then she rose slowly into the air until she was floating over Constance horizontally, her bare feet close together, her white funeral vestments flapping silently in the midnight wind.

Constance stretched back and screamed and screamed, in utter hysteria. Walter cried, 'Constance! For God's sake!' and tried to grab her again; but Jane's stretched-apart mouth suddenly let out a hollow roar that made him stumble back towards the house, too frightened even to cry out. It was a roar like nothing I had ever heard before: the roar of coldly-blazing furnaces, the roar of enraged demons, the roar of the North Atlantic Ocean, in a catastrophic storm.

Out of Jane's mouth gushed a fuming stream of freezing vapour, straight into Constance's face. I could feel how cold it was, even from ten feet away, by the door. Constance cried out in agony, and collapsed on the path, and as Walter hurried towards her again, Jane's apparition tumbled slowly head-over-heels through the night air, over the garden hedge, and across Quaker Lane, uphill, in the direction of the shore. Arms stretched wide, a quivering crucifix of blue-white light, over and over, singing as she went.

'O the men they sail'd from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores.

I knelt down beside Walter and Constance. Constance had buried her face in her hands, and she was twitching and shuddering. 'My eyes,' she whimpered. 'Oh God, Walter, my eyes!'

I helped Walter to drag her inside the house, and lie her down on the sofa by the living-room fire. She kept her hands pressed against her eyes, and shook, and moaned, and I was worried that she might have been severely shocked. She wasn't a young woman any more, and she had a history of heart trouble. 'Call an ambulance,' I told Walter. And whatever you do, try to keep her warm.'»

'Where are you going?' Walter wanted to know.

'I'm going after Jane. I've got to end this, Walter, once and for all.'

'What the hell do you think you can possibly do? That's a supernatural being there, John. That's a ghost, for Christ's sake. What can you possibly do against a ghost?'

'I don't know. But if I don't go after her, I'll never find out.'

'Well, take care. Please. And don't be too long.'

I ran back out into the windy night. All around me, the telephone wires were droning, and the trees were whistling, as if everything had come mysteriously alive, and was warning me in chorus. Upstairs, at the cottage window, the loose shutter clapped and clapped like a frantic slapstick.

Tugging up my collar, I began to run up Quaker Lane until I ran out of road and found myself jogging across tufted sea-grass. There was no sign of Jane, but the last time I had seen her she had been tumbling through the air in the direction of Waterside Cemetery, where she had been buried, and it seemed reasonable, if frightening, to assume that her ghost had actually come from there.