Death Trance

'Jane,' I said, in a quavery voice, 'Jane, I want you to go away. You mustn't come back here, not ever.'

'But this is my home. I shall always be here.'

'You're dead, Jane. I want you to go away. Don't come around here any longer. You're not the Jane I once knew.'

'But this is my home.'

This is a home for living people, not travesties of living people from the graveyard.'

'John…' she said coaxingly. 'How can you speak to me like that?'

'I can speak to you like that because you're not Jane and because I want you to go. Get out of here, leave me alone. I loved you when you were alive but I don't love you now.'

Gradually, subtly, Jane's features began to change. I saw the face of Mrs Edgar Simons, contorted with incomprehensible agony, melt and change and then disappear again. I saw other women's faces, and men's faces, too, rippling across her features as if she couldn't make up her mind which character she wanted to be. I saw Constance, and Mrs Goult, freshly-dead faces whose expressions were still blank and tortured with the trauma of dying.

'They are all here,' said a deep, blurting voice. 'All their faces, all their characters. They are all here and they are all mine.'

'Who are you?' I demanded. Then, stepping closer, I shouted at the creature, 'Who are you?'

The creature laughed, a whole assembly of laughs, and then that soft, familiar voice said, 'It's me, it's Jane. Don't you recognize me?'

'You're not Jane.'

'John, darling, how can you say that? What are you saying to me?'

'Keep away,' I warned her. 'You're dead, so keep away.'

'Dead, John? What do you know of death?'

'I know enough to want you out of this house.'

'But I'm your wife, John. I belong here. I belong with you. Look, John — ' and here she proudly held her protuberant stomach ' — I'm going to have your baby.'

At that moment, I was close to snapping. I could feel my mind expanding and expanding as if it refused to believe any of the information which was being fed to it by my eyes and my ears. Your wife and baby son are dead, it insisted. This can't be real. What you're seeing and hearing is a delusion. This can't be real.

'What do you want?' I asked her. 'Just tell me what you want, and then go away and leave me alone.'

Jane smiled at me, almost lovingly, except for the terrible blankness in her eyes. And when she spoke, her voice was grating and rough, more like the voice of an elderly man than a girl who hadn't even turned 30.

'It's very cold down here… cold, and isolated… sealed off… a kingdom without subjects and without a throne…''

'You mean down there…in the David Dark?’ I asked her.

She nodded, and when she did so, I thought I caught the faintest glimpse of smouldering blue fire within her eyes. ‘I thought you would understand…' she told me. ‘I knew from the beginning that I would find an ally in you…'

'I intend to salvage the David Dark, if that's what you mean.'

'The ship? The ship is unimportant. It is what the hold contains that you must seek…the vessel in which those accursed people imprisoned me…'

'I intend to bring your vessel up, too. But I warn you that I also intend to destroy you.'

Jane let out a burst of hissing laughter. 'Destroy me? You cannot destroy me! I am part of the order of the universe, just as the sun is; just as life itself is. The region of the dead stretches for ever under dark skies, and I am its chosen lord. You cannot destroy me.'

'I'm going to try.'

'Then you will condemn yourself to a death far more terrible than any that you can imagine. And everyone you ever loved or cherished will be cursed by your action; and doomed to wander the region of the dead for ever, without rest, without peace, with nothing but eternal torment and misery and ceaseless dissatisfaction.'

'You can't do that,' I asserted.

'Do you want to see me try?' blared the demon's voice. 'Look for yourself, if you want to understand how powerful I am!'

At that moment, a small naked boy of about four or five appeared from my bedroom, and stared up at me. Shyly, slowly, he reached out for Jane's hand, and then clung close to her, staring at me all the time as if he knew me, but was frightened of me. Jane ruffled his dark hair with her hand, and then looked at me with an expression that was like a mask of complete contempt.

' This boy is your son, as he would have been if he had lived. I have taken his whole life; for if anybody dies before their time, I am rewarded with all the years that are left. All the energy, all the emotion, all the youthfulness; and all the blood. I feed off unused life, John, and believe me if you attempt to cross me in any way, then I will feed off yours.'

Jane passed her hand over the boy's head, and he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared; but not before he had left me with a heartrending image of the child I had helped Jane to conceive, and then lost. I had tears in my eyes as Jane said to me, 'Salvage the David Dark; open the copper vessel; but do not attempt to hurt me, because my power at that moment will be devastating, and invincible. If you assist me, I will reward you the same way that I rewarded David Dark, with his life and with his sanity. I will also reward you one more way: and listen close. If you assist me, I will return your Jane to you, and your son. I have that power, since I am lord of the region of the dead, and they only pass through this region who have my authority. I can turn them back, and you will be able to live again the life you believed you had lost. Constance Bedford, too, could be returned to you. Had you thought of that? Help me, John, and you could regain your happiness.'

I stared at Jane speechlessly. The thought of having her back again seemed wild and impossible; yet so many wild and impossible things had happened since I had first heard the garden-swing creaking on that dark and windy night that I could almost believe it. And, God, what a temptation, to have her here again, to have her back in my arms again, to talk to her again!

'I don't believe you can do it,' I said. 'Nobody can resurrect the dead. And besides, her body is smashed. How can you bring back somebody whose body is smashed? I don't want to be like that mother, in The Monkey's Paw. The one who hears her son knocking on her door at night.'

Jane smiled. Blandly, artlessly, as if she were dreaming a dream of other existences, other places; as if she already had memories that I would never be able to share. 'Am I smashed now?' she asked me, hauntingly. ‘I have been recreated from the matrix from which I was very first born. You are dealing with one who controls the process of life, as well as death. That ruined body of mine is well-decayed by now; but I can live again, as I was meant to have been. And so could your child.'

'I don't believe you,' I said; although I half-believed already. God, just to hold Jane's hand again, to kiss her, to feel her hair, to make love to her. There were tears streaming down my cheeks and I didn't even notice.

Jane's image began to waver again, and shrink. Soon, she was almost invisible, nothing more than a shadow on the landing, a silhouette without substance.

'John,' she whispered, as she vanished.

'Wait!' I called her. 'Jane, for God's sake, wait!'

'John,' she murmured, and was gone.

I stood on the landing for a very long time, until my back began to ache, and then I went downstairs. I went into the living-room and poured myself a whisky from a bottle of Chivas Regal that was already well below the label. I would stay here tonight, I decided. I would light a fire. Perhaps the warmth would tempt the spirits back here. To think that the time might come when Jane and I could sit down beside this fire together, as we used to, watching the flames and telling each other stories of what we would do when we were rich. It was almost more than I could take.