Death Trance

I sat up very late that night, until the fire that I had built had eventually died away to ashes, and the room began to grow distinctly cold. I locked the doors, wound up the clock, and went upstairs, more than ready for sleep. I stared at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, and wondered if I was actually going mad, if at last the supernatural stresses and strains of the past week had tipped me over the edge.

Yet Jane had been here, hadn't she, speaking to me in the voice of Mictantecutli, the lord of Mictlampa, the region of the dead? She had promised me my happiness back, hadn't she? Jane and our unborn son, restored to life; and maybe Constance Bedford, too. I couldn't have imagined anything like that, and if it was only a dream, why did I feel so torn about committing myself to helping Mictantecutli to be free? Scores of people would die if it were to be released unchecked from its copper vessel; yet what did that matter to me? Scores of people die on the highways every day in road accidents, and there was nothing I could do about it. I would only be assisting destiny to take its natural course; and think of the rewards of it.

I was almost asleep when the telephone rang. I picked it up clumsily and said, 'Hello, John Trenton here.'

'Oh, you're there, are you?' a girl's voice said sharply. 'Well, you must be, since you're obviously not here. Thank you for a great evening, John. I'm just scraping your filetto al barolo down the sink-disposal.'

'Laura?' I said.

'Of course it's Laura. Who else do you know who would be stupid enough to cook you an Italian meal and then wait for you to turn up, thinking that you actually would?'

'Laura, I'm so sorry. Something happened tonight… something that totally threw me off.'

'What was her name?'

'Laura, please. I'm sorry. I got all caught up in something very emotional and the whole thing of going to dinner with you got wiped out of my mind.'

'I suppose you want to make it up to me.'

'You know I will.'

'Well, don't bother. And next time you come into the cookie shop, go sit someplace else, where Kathy can serve you.'

She put down the phone and I was left with a flat whining tone. I sighed, and cradled my own receiver.

As I did so, I heard the faintest high-pitched singing.

'O the men they sail'd from Granitehead, To fish the foreign shores…'

And the haunting quality of the voice was made even more chilling now that I knew what the words actually meant.

'But the fish they caught were naught but bones With hearts crush'd in their jaws.'

It wasn't an old sea-chanty after all; and it certainly wasn't a song about fishing. It was a rhyme about Mictantecutli, and how David Dark and the crew of the Arabella had sailed to Mexico to bring him back to Salem. It was a song of death and supernatural destruction.

Twenty-Four

The following morning, Tuesday, I was visited at the shop by my friendly local police department, who wanted to ask me a few questions about Constance Bedford. The medical examiner had determined that death had been caused by irreparable damage to the frontal lobes of the brain consistent with sudden freezing. A detective in a badly-fitting locknit suit asked me if I kept any liquid gases at the cottage, oxygen or nitrogen. It was a ridiculous question, but I suppose he had to ask it for the sake of procedure.

'You don't keep any ice, either? Large quantities of ice?'

'No,' I assured him. 'No oxygen, no nitrogen, no ice.'

'But your mother-in-law died from freezing.'

'Freezing or something like freezing,' I corrected him.

'What's like freezing?' he wanted to know. The M.E. said she was subjected to such intense cold that her eyeballs had actually pulverized. Now, how did that happen?'

'I don't have any idea.'

'You were there.'

'It must have been a freak of the weather. I saw her collapse on to the pathway, that was all.'

'Then you went running off along the shoreline. Why did you do that?'

'I was going for help.'

'The nearest house to yours was only 100 yards away, in the opposite direction. Besides, you had a telephone.'

'I panicked, that's all,' I told him. 'Is there a law against panic?'

'Listen,' the detective told me, fixing my attention with eyes as green as peeled grapes, 'this is the second unusual death in which your name has come up in a week. Just do me a favour: stay away from trouble. You're under suspicion in both incidents and any more funny business out of you and I'm going to have to haul you in. You understand me?'

'I understand you.'

The police interview irritated and depressed me, so half an hour later I closed the shop and drove over to Salem. I parked on Liberty Street and walked over to Street Mall to see Gilly. As I walked in she was serving a blonde-haired girl with a red floor-length gown, but she smiled and she was obviously pleased to see me.

'I've been thinking about you,' she said, when her customer had left.

'I've been thinking about you, too,' I told her.

'Edward said you had an interesting trip up to Tewksbury, and that old man Evelith told you where the wreck might be located.'

That's right. I'm on my way to see Edward now.'

'Well, you don't have to bother. Edward and I have a lunch date at twelve, why don't you join us?'

'Miss McCormick, it would be a pleasure.'

We met Edward outside the Peabody Museum and then walked down to Charlie Cheng's restaurant on Pickering Wharf. 'I felt a sudden urge to eat Chinese,' said Edward. 'I was spending the whole morning cataloguing Oriental prints, and the more I thought about Macao and Whampoa Anchorage, the more I thought about crispy noodles and butterfly prawns.'

We were shown to a corner table, and the waiter brought us hot towels, and then a plate of, dim sum, Chinese hors d'oeuvres.

Torrest and Jimmy both have their regular free day tomorrow,' said Edward, 'and I've decided to join them and take a little French leave, so that we can do some preliminary echo-soundings over the spot where old man Evelith thought the wreck might be. Do you want to come?'

'I don't think so, not this time,' I said. Much as I wanted to help to locate the David Dark, I knew that my presence tomorrow wouldn't particularly help. The Alexis would be sailing backwards and forwards for hours in a tedious parallel search, and even if the sea was calm, which it would have to be for an accurate echo-sounding of the sea-bed, the trip would be very much less than enjoyable.

Edward picked up a morsel of paper-wrapped chicken with his chopsticks, and deftly opened it. There's only one thing that bothers me,' he said. 'Why is old man Evelith so insistent that only he should take charge of this giant skeleton thing once we've brought it up to the surface?'

'If it turns out to be as dangerous and as malevolent as he says it is, then how are we going to handle it?' I asked. 'At least he seems confident that he can keep it in check.'

'We only have his word for that. Whatever's inside that copper vessel may be incredibly valuable, and yet all we're supposed to do is to deliver it unopened, right to his door, meek and unprotesting.'

'What do you suggest?' I asked him. I suddenly found myself interested in keeping Mictantecutli away from old man Evelith, for the simple reason that if I did decide to let the demon loose, it would be far easier to do so if it was in our custody, instead of Evelith's. Besides, Evelith or Enid or maybe his manservant Quamus must know a way of binding it with spells, or occult ritual, or special artifacts, like keeping a vampire at bay with cloves of garlic; and once they had been able to imprison Mictantecutli, it was extremely unlikely that I would be able to set it free. It would be difficult enough gaining access to the Evelith mansion, what with Quamus and that Doberman on guard. Breaking a spell would be something else altogether.