'You must believe,' she said, and then she faded.
I stood in that deserted restaurant for a long time. Now was the moment when I had to make my decision. I had already seen how cruelly and how callously Mictantecutli could destroy people; and how he could raise the dead and send them to slaughter the living. Yet I knew all this time that I wanted Jane back with me with a desperation that had somehow gone beyond love. It had become a matter of proving to myself that miracles could actually happen, that the dead could be restored, that everything that I had ever believed about the world could be turned upside-down.
Since Jane had died, I had witnessed some extraordinary and frightening things. But somehow they seemed to me then to have been nothing more than terrifying tricks. It was only when I could hold Jane in my arms again that I would actually believe in powers that were far greater than human experience could testify to, or human imagination encompass.
It didn't occur to me, of course, that more than at any other time since Jane had died, I was now very close to a complete emotional collapse. When I think today of the way in which I persuaded myself that Mictantecutli should be released, I still go physically cold.
I left the restaurant and walked back across the cocktail deck. It was so dark outside that I had forgotten it was only just past noon, and that it wasn't night-time at all. The corroded green casket was still lying on the boat-ramp, under its draped tarpaulins. On the far side of the ramp was a locked cupboard marked FIREHOSE. I walked around the casket to the cupboard, examined its rusted hinges, and then gave it a good kicking with the heel of my shoe until the left-hand door split, and I was able to wrench it open. Inside was a mildewed hose and just what I had been looking for: a long-handled fire-axe.
I walked back to the casket, and pushed aside the tarpaulins. The casket seemed larger than it had before: green and bulky and silently malevolent. I touched its scaly side with my bare fingers and I felt curiously alarmed, almost as if I had unwittingly put my hand on a giant centipede in the dark. Then, on impulse, I swung back the fire-axe and dealt the side of the casket a tremendous blow with the blade.
There was a deep, reverberating boom, and the casket seemed to shudder. I felt the place where the axe-blade had struck, and I could tell that it had bitten quite deep, and almost penetrated the metal. The copper couldn't have been more than an inch thick to begin with, and the corrosive salt of the sea had reduced it by more than half.
I swung the axe again. 'I release you,' I panted, as the blade banged into the top of the casket. 'I release you in the name of the Father.'
I swung back the axe again, and struck again. 'I release you,' I chanted. I could hear my own voice speaking in my ears, as if I was someone else. 'I release you in the name of the Son.'
Above me, the sky was threateningly black. The wind began to shriek across the harbour, and the waves rose so high that they were flecked with foam. It was almost impossible to see the farther shore, and on the Granite-head shoreline itself the trees were bending and writhing like tortured souls.
Once more I raised the axe, and once more I brought it down on top of the casket. ‘I release you!' I shouted. ‘I release you in the name of the Holy Spirit!'
There was a screech that could have been the wind or could have been something else altogether: the screech of a despairing world. In front of my eyes, the dark green copper casket cracked, and gaped open, and then cracked again, scales of corroded metal dropping to the concrete boat-ramp. A dry, fetid smell arose from the open vessel, a smell like an animal that had long since died and decayed, a giant rat found between the floorboards of an old house, a baby discovered in a chimney.
In front of my eyes, the Fleshless One was exposed, lying inside his casket; and to my horror he was not simply a giant skeleton, but a giant skeleton made of dozens of human skeletons. Each arm was made of two skeletons connected by a skull, each finger was a whole human arm. Each rib was made of curved and twisted skeletons of children, and its pelvis was a white basin of scores of smaller pelvises. And as it turned and stared at me with eye-sockets that were deep and sightless and infinitely evil, I saw that its head was made of hundreds of human skulls, somehow fused together to form the greatest skull I had ever seen.
'Now,' whispered a voice that was as thunderous as a church-organ. 'Now my reign can begin again. Now I can garner all those souls that my spirit has craved for. And you, my friend, you will be my high priest. That is your reward. You will stay with me always, at my right-hand side, interpreting for me my every demand, seeking for me those souls which will fulfill my appetite.'
'Where's Jane?' I shouted at it, even though I was utterly terrified by its appearance. 'You promised me Jane! Just like she was before the accident, unhurt! Alive and unhurt! You promised!'
'You are impatient,' boomed Mictantecutli. 'There will be time for that; all in good time.'
'You promised me Jane and I want her now! Just like she was before the accident!'
The wind was howling so loudly that I could scarcely hear what the demon said next. But then I heard a screaming, somewhere close to the old restaurant building. It was high-pitched, terrified, the sound of a woman in total fear. I made my way around the casket, steadying myself against the wind by holding on to the railings beside the boat-ramp, and stared out into the darkness.
She was there. Jane. It was really her. She was standing by the restaurant door, her hands over her face, and she was screaming, on and on and on, screaming and screaming until I could hardly bear to listen to it any longer. I made my way across the cocktail deck again, tearing my socks against a loose board, and went up to her, holding her shoulders, shaking her.
She was real, and she was alive. She was wearing the same clothes that she had been wearing on the night of the accident. But no matter how hard I shook her and shouted at her, I couldn't get her to take her hands away from her face, and I couldn't get her to stop screaming. In the end, I turned away from her, and struggled back to the broken casket, where Mictantecutli still lay, grinning in the fixed grin of all skeletons, a grin that is neither loving nor humorous, but the expression of death.
'What have you done?' I shouted at it. 'Why won't she answer me? Why is she screaming like that? If you've hurt her — '
'She isn't hurt,' whispered the demon. 'She thinks that she is about to be hurt, just as she did in the seconds before her accident. But she is safe, and well, and alive.'
'And terrified!' I yelled at it. 'For God's sake, stop her screaming! How can I live with her when she's like this?'
'You wanted her just as she was before the accident,' Mictantecutli reminded me. 'That is the way she was; and that is the way you must have her.'
'What are you trying to tell me? That she'll always be screaming? That she'll always be terrified that she's going to have a crash?'
'Always and always,' grinned Mictantecutli. 'Until the day she returns to the region of the dead.'
I looked back towards the old restaurant. Jane was still there, screaming at the top of her voice, her hands pressed over her eyes. She had been screaming for nearly five minutes now, without stopping, and I knew that Mictantecutli had tricked me. It had no power to restore the dead as their loved ones had known them: it had only the power to take them back to the moment when they were first fatally doomed. That was the moment when their spirits were first consigned to the region of the dead, and that was the boundary of Mictantecutli's kingdom.