'My wife comes back to me almost every night,' I said. That's what you can feel.'
Anne approached the cottage with obvious trepidation. The loose upstairs shutter suddenly banged, and she reached for my hand in fright. I unlocked the front door, and we stepped inside, still holding hands; Anne raising her head slightly as if she were sniffing the darkness for evil and mischievous spirits.
I switched on the light. 'I wouldn't have thought that a witch would be afraid.'
'On the contrary,' she said. 'When you're a witch, you're far more sensitive to occult manifestations, and you can sense how malevolent they are, far more acutely than an ordinary person.'
'What do you feel in here? Is it bad?'
She shivered. 'It's like a cold draught from hell itself,' she told me. 'Because your wife used to live here, this cottage has become one of the portals through which the dead have been returning to the world of the living. Can you feel how cold it is? Especially here, where your library is. Do you mind if I go in?'
'Help yourself.'
Anne pushed the library door open a little wider, and stepped inside. As she did so, I felt a chilly wind run through the room, and the papers on my desk began to shift and stir, and one or two of them floated to the floor. Anne stood in the very centre of the room, and looked around, and I could see her breath fuming from her mouth, as if she were standing outside in five degrees of frost. There was a smell, too: a sour, cold smell, as if something had gone rotten in the icebox. I must have unconsciously noticed it yesterday, and that was why I had checked in the icebox to see if anything had gone bad. But it wasn't that at alclass="underline" it was freezing and sickly, like chilled vomit, and I felt my stomach tighten into knots with nausea.
Anne whispered, 'It knows that I am here. Have you ever felt it as strongly as this before? It knows that I am here, and it's restless.'
'What are you going to do?' I asked her.
'For the moment, nothing. There's nothing I can do. There isn't any point in closing this portal, because the Fleshless One will only find another. There are probably several more around here in any case. Every time someone dies, their home becomes susceptible to visitations not just from them, but from any apparition whom the Fleshless One chooses to send. Have you heard whispering, talking, anything like that?'
I nodded. The way Anne was going on, I was beginning to feel more than a little terrified. I felt that I could cope with Jane's spirit; and even the spirit of my unborn son. But if the cottage was an entrance to the region of the dead, through which any number of apparitions might be rustling and shuffling, then it was time to move, as far as I was concerned. It was like living on the brink of a gaping mass grave, in the bottom of which all the corpses were sightlessly waving and calling.
'I think I need a drink,' I said, unsteadily. 'Hold on a minute, I left a bottle of Chivas Regal in the car.'
I went outside, leaving the front door open, and walked down the garden path to the car. Unlocking it, I took out the bottle of whisky, and then turned to go back to the house.
I stopped where I was, and almost dropped the bottle on the ground. Standing behind the laurel hedge, smiling at me, was Jane. Just as real, just as solid as she had been yesterday night. Except that she was standing exactly where she had been standing in that photograph which I had believed to have changed, on the surface of the ornamental pool. And in the library window, just behind her, I could see Anne's face looking out in horror, just the same as she had done in the photograph.
I took two stiff steps towards the garden path, then another. Jane rotated exactly where she was, without moving her feet. She was smiling at me, coaxing, encouraging. But my own face was set into anoxolyte mask, nerveless and expressionless. As soon as I had passed the laurel hedge I saw that Jane's bare feet were resting on the weedy surface of the water without even breaking the water's green meniscus.
'John,' she said. 'Remember that you can have me back. Don't forget, John, you can have me back. And Constance. And our son. You can have us back alive, John, if you set me free.'
Slowly, still smiling, Jane began to sink into the pool. She didn't even disturb the surface as first her legs disappeared beneath it, then her body, then her face. The green water passed over her wide-open eyes and she didn't close them, or even blink. Then she was gone. And the most disturbing thing was that the pool was only two feet deep.
I walked over to the edge of the water and stared down at it. Then I picked up a dead stick, and cautiously prodded beneath the scum. There was nothing there, only stinking weed, and the white fungussy body of a dead goldfish.
Anne was standing in the front porch when I turned around, paler than ever. 'I saw her,' she said, and gave a sudden and slightly hysterical giggle. 'I actually saw her.'
'She's becoming stronger,' I said. 'First of all, she only appeared as a flickering light, and only at night. But then she started to look more solid, more real if you like. Now she's appearing just as frequently in the daylight.'
The Fleshless One must be breaking free from his casket,' said Anne. 'Did Jane say anything to you? I thought I heard a voice, but I couldn't make out what the words were.'
'She said that if I — well, she said that I had to be careful.'
'Was that all?'
I felt guilty, not telling Anne that Mictantecutli had promised to return my wife and my child to me; but then it was something I wanted to think about. There was no question of my doing anything to prevent Edward and Forrest and Jimmy from taking charge of the living skeleton, and eventually delivering it to old man Evelith; but all the same, I had been made an extraordinary offer, and there was no harm in considering it, thinking it through. I thought of all those days and evenings when Jane and I had been driving the length and breadth of the North Shore, looking for likely antiques to put in the shop, and the remembered happiness of those times was almost too sweet to bear.
'Let's have that drink,' said Anne, and led the way back into the cottage.
I lit a fire, switched on the television, and poured us each a sizeable whisky. Then I took my shoes off and warmed my toes by the crackling logs. Anne knelt on the floor beside me, the firelight reflected in her eyes and in her long shiny hair.
'We first began to feel vibrations about you when your wife was killed,' she said. 'We were having a meeting at Mercy Lewis' house; she's our senior wonder-worker, if you like. It was Enid who sensed that something was in the air. She said that a Granitehead girl had died, she could feel it, and that her spirit had fled back to Granite-head and been ensnared by the Fleshless One. Not all spirits are caught; only those which the Fleshless One believes will bring him more hearts, and more blood, and more years of unlived life.
'Because your wife's spirit was caught, we immediately sought your name.'
'By magic?' I asked.
Anne smiled. 'I'm afraid not. We looked in the obituary columns of the Granitehead Messenger. And there she was, Jane Trenton. We started watching you straight away, or I did, mostly, since I don't live too far away. I even went to the funeral.'
That's where I've seen you before,' I told her. 'I thought your face was familiar.'
'Anyway,' she said, 'the more we watched you, the more limited we realized our abilities were going to be to help you. Our power, what we have of it, comes from the Fleshless One himself, the very one we are determined to keep in check. That is why it will be better for you and your friends from the Peabody to raise the David Dark, and extricate Mictantecutli, and then for we witches to pacify it with ritual sacrifices and prayer, before Duglass Evelith and Quamus finally destroy it. It is quite possible, and all of we witches are prepared for this, that when the Fleshless One is brought up from the ocean-bed, we shall be completely in his thrall. But Duglass Evelith and Quamus are satisfied that they can handle this eventuality, and that the only way in which they can bring the Fleshless One to total destruction is by using us to serve and exalt him.'