After dinner, I drove Gilly home to Witch Hill Road, kissed her, and promised to drop into Linen & Lace in the morning. Then I took routes 128 and 1 southwards to Boston, and to Dedham. I thought I would probably be wasting my time, going to talk to Walter Bedford, but Edward had been so insistent that I could scarcely have shirked it. I played Grieg on my car stereo and tried to relax, while the lights of Melrose and Maiden and Somerville went gliding by me.
When I drew up outside the Bedford house, it was in darkness. Even the coach lamps outside the front door were switched off. Shit, I thought, a 20-mile drive for nothing. It hadn't even occurred to me that Walter wouldn't be home. He always went home, every night; or at least he had done when Constance was still alive. I should have called him first; he was probably spending a few days with neighbours, to get over the shock.
All the same, I walked up to the front door and rang the bell. I heard it ringing in the hallway; and I stood there for a while, rubbing my hands and shuffling my feet to keep myself warm. A whip-poor-will called somewhere in the tall trees at the back of the house; and then again. I was reminded of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, in which the appearance of grisly primeval monsters like Yog-Sothoth was always preceded by the crying of thousands of whip-poor-wills.
I was about to walk around the back of the house, to see if Walter was in his television room, when the front door suddenly opened, and Walter stood there staring out at me.
'Walter?' I said. I stepped closer, and saw that he looked unusually pale, and that his eyes were circled and puffy, as if he hadn't slept. He was wearing blue pajamas and a herringbone sport coat, with the collar turned up.
'Walter,' I said, 'are you all right? You look terrible.'
'John?' he replied. He pronounced my name as if it were a dry pebble on a dry tongue.
'What happened, Walter? Have you been to the office? You look as if you haven't slept since I last saw you.'
'No,' he said, 'I haven't. I guess you'd better come in.'
I followed him into the house. It was chilly and dark in there; and I saw from the thermostat on the wall that he had turned the heating right down. As I passed, I turned it up again; and by the time we reached the sitting-room, the radiators were beginning to click and clonk as they warmed up. Walter watched me with a curiously stunned expression on his face as I went around switching on the lamps and drawing the drapes.
'Now then,' I asked him. 'How about a drink?'
He nodded. Then, rather suddenly, he sat down. 'Yes,' he said, 'I guess I will.'
I poured us two whiskies and handed him one. 'How long have you been wandering around in the dark?' I asked him.
'I don't know. Ever since — '
I sat down next to him. He looked even worse than I had first thought. He hadn't shaved since the weekend, and his chin was covered in white prickly stubble. His skin was unwashed and greasy. When he lifted the whisky glass to his lips, his hands trembled almost uncontrollably, probably from hunger and fatigue as much as anything else.
'Listen,' I told him, 'get yourself cleaned up and then I'll take you down the road to the Pizza Hut. It's not the Four Seasons but you need some hot food inside you.'
Walter swallowed his whisky, coughed, and then looked anxiously all around him. 'She's not still here, is she?' he asked. His eyes were blood-shot and starey.
'What do you mean?' I asked him.
'I've seen her,' he told me, clutching hold of my wrist. Close up, he smelled of stale sweat and urine, and his breath was foul. I could hardly believe that this was the same fastidious Walter who had once raised an eyebrow at me because the backs of my shoes weren't polished.
'After you left, she came; and she spoke to me. I thought I was dreaming. Then I thought that perhaps it hadn't happened after all, that she wasn't dead, and that I must have been dreaming before. But she was here, right here, right in this room, and she spoke to me.'
'Who was here? What are you talking about?'
'Constance,' he insisted. 'Constance was here. I was sitting by the fire and she spoke to me. She was standing right there, just behind that chair. She was smiling at me.'
I felt a deep chill of fear. There was no question now that the power of Mictantecutli was spreading, and flourishing. If it could raise Constance's ghost as far away as Dedham, then it wouldn't be long before it could wreak havoc over half the commonwealth of Massachusetts; and that was while it was still lying on the sea-bed.
'Walter,' I said, as comfortingly as I could, 'Walter, you don't have any cause to worry.'
'But she said she wanted me. She said I should come to join her. She begged me to kill myself, so that we could be together again. She begged me, John. Cut your throat, Walter, she told me. There's a sharp knife in the kitchen, you won't even feel it. Cut your throat as deep as you can, and join me.'
Walter was shaking so much that I had to grasp his arms to make him settle down.
'Walter,' I said, 'that wasn't Constance who was speaking to you. Not the real Constance; any more than it was the real Jane who killed her. You may have seen something that looked like Constance, but it was the spirit that lies inside of the David Dark that was controlling it, and making it say things like that. That spirit feeds on human life and human hearts, Walter. It's taken Jane's, and Constance's; now it wants yours.'
Walter didn't seem to understand. He stared at me, his eyes darting from side to side in high anxiety. 'Not Constance?' he asked me. 'What do you mean? She had Constance's face, appearance, voice… How could it not have been Constance?'
'Well, if you like, it was a kind of projected image. I mean, when you see Faye Dunaway on the movie screen, the image has Faye Dunaway's face, and voice, and everything, but you know very well that what you're seeing isn't actually Faye Dunaway.'
'Faye Dunaway?' asked Walter, perplexed. He was obviously in a mild state of shock; and what he needed right now was food, reassurance, and rest, not a complex argument about psychic images.
'Come on,' I said. ‘I’ll take you out for something to eat. But you ought to get yourself changed first, and showered. Do you think you can manage to do that? It'll make you feel a whole lot better.'
Upstairs, in his large blue-and-white bedroom, I laid out some fresh underwear and slacks for him, as well as a warm sweater and a tweed coat. He looked very thin and frail when he came into the bedroom from the shower, but at least he seemed to have calmed down, and a wash and a shave seemed to have refreshed him. To tell you the truth,' he said, 'I don't much care for pizzas. There's a little restaurant out on the Milton road where they make excellent steak-and-oyster pies; Dickens, it's called. It's like a British pub.'
'If you're feeling like steak-and-oyster pies, you're feeling better,' I told him. He toweled his hair, and nodded.
Dickens restaurant was just the right place for an intimate dinner: it had small enclosed booths, lit by mock-gas-lamps, and scrubbed deal tables. We ordered the London Particular green-pea soup, and one Tower Bridge steak-and-oyster pie, with Guinness to wash it down. Walter ate in silence for almost ten minutes before he put down his soup spoon and looked at me in relief.
'I can't tell you how glad I am that you came,' he said. 'I think you just about saved my life.'
'That's one of the reasons I drove over,' I told him. 'I wanted to talk to you about saving lives.'
Walter tore off some wholemeal bread, and buttered it. 'You're still talking about raising money for this salvage operation of yours?'
'Yes, I am.'
'Well, I'm sorry, John, I did give it some more thought, but I still can't see my way clear to raising that much money out of people who trust me to keep their capital locked up as safely as possible. They're not looking for large dividends, these people; they're cautious, careful, long-term family investors.'