At five o'clock after I had closed the shop, I went across to the Harbour Lights Bar and sat by myself in a corner booth and drank two glasses of Scotch. I don't know why I bothered to drink, except out of habit. With all the problems that were pressing on my mind, I never seemed to get drunk, only irritable and blurry. I was just considering the possibility of another one before I hit the road when a girl walked past my booth, a girl in a brown cape, and just before she disappeared she turned and glanced at me and I felt myself jump with involuntary nervous spasm, the way you do when you're about to fall asleep. I could have sworn that it was the same girl I had seen on the road to Quaker Lane, that night when I had been driving home with Mrs Edgar Simons; and the same girl who had been watching me in Red's Sandwich Shop in Salem. I struggled out of my seat, banging my thighs on the fixed table, but by the time I had reached the door the girl had disappeared. 'Did you see a girl walk past just then?' I asked Ned Sanborn, behind the bar. 'She was wearing a kind of a brown cape, very pale face, but pretty.'
Ned, shaking up a whisky sour, pulled a face that meant sorry. But Grace, one of the waitresses, said, 'A tall girl, was she? Well, quite tall? Dark eyes and a pale face?'
'You saw her too?'
'Sure I saw her. She came out of the back room and I couldn't work out how she got in there. I didn't see her come in, and she hasn't been drinking here.'
'Probably a hippie,' remarked Ned. According to Ned, any girl who didn't dress in "a sensible skirt-and-blouse and wear flat-heeled court shoes and subscribe to Red-book was a hippie. 'Summer must be coming. First hippie of the summer.'
Normally I would have teased Ned about his use of the word 'hippie', but this evening I was too disturbed and too worried. If the influence of the demon beneath Granitehead Neck was steadily growing, then who could tell who was one of its ghostly servants and who wasn't? Maybe that girl was a manifestation, more solid than most. Maybe more people than I realized were actually manifestations; maybe Ned was, and Laura, and George Markham. How was I to tell who was a living human being and who wasn't? Supposing Mictantecutli had already claimed them all? I began to feel like the doctor in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, who couldn't tell which of his friends and associates were aliens and which ones weren't.
I left the Harbour Lights Bar and walked over to my car, which was parked in the middle of the square. There was a torn-off note under one of the windshield wipers, on which was scrawled in lipstick 'Eight sharp, don't forget, L.' I climbed into the car and drove out of the village centre, heading towards Quaker Hill. I wanted to check that the cottage was all right, and pick up some wine at the Granitehead Market.
At the top of Quaker Lane, the cottage waited for me old and forbidding and now more neglected-looking than ever. I still hadn't fixed that upstairs shutter, and as I got out of the car it gave a slow shuddering squeak. I walked up to the front door, and took out my key. I almost expected that familiar whisper to say 'John?' but there was no sound at all, just the frustrated seething of the ocean, and the soft rustle of the laurel hedges.
Inside, the cottage was very cold, and beginning to smell damp. The long-case clock in the hallway had stopped, because I hadn't wound it. I went into the living-room and stood for a long time listening for scurries and whispers and footsteps, but again there was silence. Perhaps Jane had given up haunting the cottage now that she knew she was unable to claim me for the region of the dead. Perhaps I had actually seen the last of her. I went into the kitchen, and opened up the icebox to make sure there was nothing in there which was growing mould on it; no hot dogs with green fur or peach preserve with penicillin. I took out a bottle of Perrier water and drank four or five large swallows of it straight from the neck. Afterwards I stood there grimacing at the coldness on the roof of my mouth, and the uncompromising fizz of bubbles which seemed to be stuck in my throat forever.
I was going back into the living-room to light the fire when I thought I heard a single footfall upstairs. I hesitated in the hallway, listening hard. It wasn't repeated, but I was so sure that I had heard somebody in one of the bedrooms that I took my umbrella out of the umbrella-stand and began to climb the dark ornamented stairs to see who was up there. I paused halfway up, gripping the pointed umbrella tightly, breathing more tightly and tensely than I wanted to.
I thought to myself: don't panic. You know that Jane has no hold over you now. You've faced up to hordes of apparitions from the Waterside Cemetery, and you're still sane and still alive; so there can't be anything up here that's any worse, or any more likely to harm you.
Yet it was the silence that alarmed me, more than the squeaking of the swing had done; more than the whispering and the sudden coldness. This cottage was never silent. Old buildings rarely are; they're always creaking or settling or shifting in their dreamless sleep. They're never silent, utterly silent, as Quaker Lane Cottage was at that moment.
I reached the top of the stairs, and walked along the darkened landing until I reached the end bedroom. No sound, no breathing, no whispering, no footsteps. I carefully put my hand into the room and switched on the light, then I eased open the door with my foot. The bedroom was empty. Just a painted pine bureau, a narrow single bed covered with a plain woven coverlet. An embroidered sampler was hung on the far wall, with the legend LOVE THY LORD. I looked around, my umbrella half-raised, and then I switched off the light and closed the door behind me.
She was waiting on the landing, under the harsh light of an old marine lantern I had borrowed from the shop. Jane, in the flesh. Not flickering this time, like a half-seen movie; but in the flesh. Her brushed hair shone in the lantern-light, and her face, though white, looked as solid and as real as it had on the morning before she died. She was wearing a simple calico nightgown, off-white, which trailed on the floor, and her hands were clasped in front of her demurely. Only her eyes betrayed the fact that there was something supernatural about her: they were as black and as deep as pools of oil, pools in which a man and all his convictions could easily drown.
'John,' she said, somewhere inside of my head, without moving her lips. ‘I came back for you, John.'
I stayed where I was, my skin tingling with the sight of her, with the sound of her voice. She had frightened me enough when she had looked like a distant holographic image; but now she stood here in the flesh, I felt as if I were actually going mad. How could this possibly be an illusion? How could a woman look so alive, and yet be dead? Jane had been crushed and destroyed, and yet here she was, my saddest memory brought to life.
The most horrifying thought of all, though, was that the power of Mictantecutli must be increasing every day, if he could bring Jane back to me in such a solid form.
What kind of influence and energy it must have taken to conjure her up as she was now, I could only guess. Sometimes I thought I detected her image waver, as if I were seeing her through water, but she remained as solid as ever, smiling slightly, as if she were thinking of all of those times we had spent together when she was alive, times which we could never spend together again.
She had come back for me. But what she was offering now was not fun and laughter and companionship. What she was offering now was death, in the most grisly form imaginable.