Death Trance

Jane stared at me with those impenetrable eyes. Electricity crept around her mouth, and outlined her teeth. 'Baby?’ she said, in a resonant echo.

'Yes,' I told her, brokenly. I was so scared that I hardly knew what I was saying, or what I was trying to prove to her. 'That baby you were carrying when you were killed. Our baby.'

Jane's apparition seemed to consider what I had said with burning deepness. Around us, the graveyard creatures whispered and sang; and above our heads, the midnight clouds raced past as if they were fleeing from the same kind of fate that now awaited me.

'The baby…' she said. She hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to back away from me; or rather, to shrink away, in both size and distance. 'The baby…' she repeated, in a whisper that was just as close as before. 'But the baby was never born.'

I looked around me. It appeared as if the other apparitions were shrinking away from me as well, and by twos and threes the crowd of them was beginning to disperse. I suddenly felt the pressure relieved from my chest, and I was able unsteadily to stand up, and brush my windblown hair. I watched in awe and indescribable relief as the apparitions floated and tumbled and hobbled away, descending the grassy hillside with their heads bowed; until they had vanished into the gates of the cemetery.

Only Jane's apparition remained, quite a long way away, duller and dimmer now that she was no longer trying to electrocute me. Her hair flew around her, and her white gown rippled around her ankles, but I could scarcely make her out in the darkness.

'You are lost to me, John… I can never have you now…'

'Why?' I asked her, not out loud, but inside my mind.

'Entry into the region of the dead is by succession…you are always called by the relative who died immediately before you…that is the power which enables the dead to summon the living. Our baby died in hospital, long after I was already dead, and therefore he and he alone can call you to join us… But he was never born, and therefore his spirit is still in the higher realm, and still at peace, and he cannot appear here to guide you into the region of the dead…:

I didn't know what to say to her. I thought of the way she had once been, and the joy she had felt when she knew that she was pregnant. If only I had known that day that Dr Rosen had called me up and said that I was going to be a father that my baby would one night save my life.

'What will happen to you now?' I asked Jane, out loud this time.

She diminished even further. 'Now, I will have to stay in the region of the dead for ever… now, I will never be able to rest…'

'Jane, what can I do?' I shouted. 'What can I do to help you?'

There was a lengthy silence. Jane's apparition flickered even more dimly than before, and then disappeared, except for a flapping darkness against the darkness of the hillside.

Then, blurry and deep, a parody of Jane's voice said, 'Salllvagge…'

'Salvage? Salvage what? The David Dark, or what? Tell me! I have to know what it is!'

'Sallvagge…: the voice repeated, growing slower and deeper until it was almost incomprehensible.

I waited by myself for any more voices, any more apparitions, but it appeared now that they had left me in peace. I walked back towards Quaker Lane Cottage, feeling as weary and as beaten as I had ever felt in my whole life.

As I reached the top of Quaker Lane, I saw an ambulance parked outside the cottage, with its red-and-blue lights flashing. I broke into a tired jog, and reached the front gate just as two paramedics were bringing out Constance Bedford on a stretcher. Walter Bedford was following close behind, looking distraught.

'Walter,' I asked him, breathlessly. 'What's the matter?'

Walter watched the paramedics lift his wife into the back of the ambulance, and then he took my arm and led me around to the front of the vehicle, out of earshot. The blood-red light flashed on and off against his face, as if he were Dr Jekyll one second and Mr Hyde the next.

'She's not seriously hurt, is she?' I asked. 'Jane just sort of breathed on her, that was all.'

Walter lowered his head. 'I don't know what she breathed, or how she breathed it, but whatever it was, it was colder than liquid nitrogen, they said, minus 200 degrees Centigrade.'

'And?' I asked him, frightened even to speculate what might have happened to Constance.

'Her eyes were frozen solid,' said Walter, in an unsteady voice. 'Absolutely solid; and of course they became brittle. When she clapped her hands against them, to try to stop the pain, they shattered, like china. She's lost both of them, John. She's blind.'

I put my arm around his shoulders and held him close. He was trembling all over, and he clutched at me as if he didn't have the strength or the ability to be able to stand up any more. One of the paramedics came over and told me, 'It's okay now, sir. We'll take care of him. He's had a pretty bad shock.'

'His wife? Is she — ?'

The paramedic shrugged. 'We've done what we can. But it looks like the septum of the nose and part of the forehead have been frozen as well. It's possible that parts of the brain are affected as well; the doctors won't be able to tell until they've run some tests.'

Walter quaked in my arms. The paramedic said, 'You don't have any idea how this happened, sir? I mean, nobody around here has any reason to store liquid gases, do they? Nitrogen, or oxygen? Something like that?'

I shook my head. 'Nobody that I know of. Nothing as cold as that.'

Walter said, 'She was always so loving… she always loved her mother so dearly. Cold, never. Never, ever cold.'

'He'll be okay,' the paramedic repeated, and helped Walter into the back of the ambulance. He closed the doors, and then came up to me and said, 'She's your mother-in-law, right?'

That's right.'

'Well, keep an eye on the old man. He's going to need your help.'

'You don't think that she's going to die?'

The paramedic raised a hand. 'I'm not saying she will and I'm not saying she won't. But it always helps if the patient has some kind of a will to keep on living, and right at the moment this lady doesn't seem to have that will. Something about her daughter, I don't know. Your wife, I suppose.'

'My late wife. She died about a month ago.'

'I'm sorry,' said the paramedic. 'It hasn't been your year, has it?'

Twenty

It was raining in torrents when we drove out to Dracut County to talk to old man Duglass Evelith. The sky was an unrelenting gray, like layers of sodden flannel, and the rain just kept on pouring and pouring until I thought it would never end, all year; that Massachusetts would never be dry again.

The three of us went in my car — myself, Edward, and Forrest Brough. Jimmy Carlsen had wanted to come, but at the last moment his mother had insisted that he go over to Cambridge for Sunday lunch to meet his cousins from Arizona. 'Jimmy's mother is one of those ladies who won't take no for an answer,' explained Forrest, as we drove through the rain.

'Show me a mother who will,' replied Edward; and I thought, with sadness and regret, of Constance Bedford. Walter had called me this morning and told me that she was still in intensive care, and that the doctors at Granite-head Clinic were extremely reticent about her chances of survival. 'Overwhelming psychological and physiological trauma,' they had diagnosed.

So far, I hadn't yet told Edward or Forrest about the grisly events of the previous night. I needed to think them all out for myself before I discussed them with anybody, particularly with anybody as opinionated as Edward. I would tell them, later today or early tomorrow, but right at the moment my mind was still a clamour of rushing apparitions, opening graves, and shattered eyeballs. I couldn't make any sense of what had happened, and I didn't want to confuse myself any further by attempting to rationalize it. This had all gone way beyond Dr Rosen's 'post-bereavement hysteria.' This was another world, another existence, more mystical and more powerful than anything that doctors or psychiatrists could handle; and if I was going to be able to do anything at all for Jane or Neil Manzi or any of those hundreds of restless spirits who had pursued me last night, then I was going to have to understand it clearly, without prejudice or easy assumptions.