'Where does Quamus come into this?' I asked her. 'I thought he was the butler.'
'He helps Mr Evelith to run the house, yes. But he is also the last of the great Narragansett wonder-workers. He was trained from childhood in the higher arts of Indian magic; and I have seen him with my own eyes set fire to pieces of paper by simply looking at them, and making a whole row of chairs fall over backwards one by one.'
'Quite a trickster.'
'Not a trickster, John. Definitely not a trickster. Not Quamus. He's been helping Duglass Evelith for years to invoke some ancient Indian spirit that was supposed to have taken the soul of one of his ancestors, way back in 1624, when the Puritans first came to Salem, and it was still called Naumkeag. It's very secret. Neither of them will tell me what they've achieved. Even Enid isn't allowed to know. But she says that they lock themselves in that library for days on end sometimes, and you can hear these terrible shouting and groaning noises, so loud and deep that they make the doors and the windows rattle, and that quite a few Tewksbury people got up a petition because of the strange lights that were appearing in the sky.'
I sat back, cupping my whisky-glass in my hands. Tell me I'm going to wake up in a minute,' I told her. 'Tell me I fell asleep last week and I'm still dreaming.'
'You're not dreaming, John,' she insisted. 'The spirits and the demons and the apparitions are all real. Within their own sphere, they're all much more real than you and I appear to be. They have always been here, and they always will be. They are the ones who inherited the earth, not us. We're just usurpers, shadowy little beings who have been meddling and interfering in whole realms of power and grandeur that we don't even begin to understand. Mictantecutli is real. It's really down there; and what it can do to us is real.'
'I don't know,' I said, tiredly. 'I think I've seen enough death and enough pain and enough spiritual torture to last me a lifetime.'
'You're not thinking of quitting?'
'Wouldn't you?'
Anne looked away. 'I suppose I might,' she said. 'If I didn't care about the lives of other people; if I didn't care whether my own dead wife ever found any rest or not. Then I'd quit.'
Upstairs, a bedroom door banged shut. I looked up, and then at Anne. There was a creak right above our heads as something stepped on a floorboard. There was a lengthy silence, and then another creak, as if the same something were walking back across the room again. The living-room door suddenly opened by itself, and a cold draught blew in, stirring up the ashes of the fire.
'Close,' said Anne, and raised one hand, palm forwards, towards the door. There was a moment's hesitation, and then the door closed, apparently by itself.
'I'm impressed,' I said.
'It's a simple enough thing to do if you have the power,' she said, but she wasn't smiling. 'But the spirits are in the house now, and they feel unsettled.'
'Is there anything you can do?'
'I can dismiss them for now; just for one night. That's if the Fleshless One hasn't increased his influence very much more than usual.'
'In that case, please dismiss them. It'll be a change to get a night's sleep that isn't disturbed by walking apparitions.'
Anne stood up. 'Do you have any candles?' she asked me. 'I shall also want a bowl of water.'
'Surely,' I said, and went into the kitchen to fetch what she wanted. As I crossed the hallway, I was conscious of the coldness and the restlessness of unhallowed spirits, and even the clock seemed to be ticking differently, almost as if it were ticking backwards. There was a dim flickering light under the library door, but the last thing in the world I was going to do was open it.
I brought Anne back two heavy brass candlesticks, complete with bright blue candles, and a copper mixing-bowl half-filled with water. She set them down in front of the fire, one candle on each side and the bowl in between. She made a sign over each of them, not the sign of the cross, but some other, more complicated sign, like a pentacle. She bent her head and whispered a lengthy chant, of which I could hear almost nothing except the repeated chorus.
'Dream not, wake not, say not, hear not; Weep not, walk not, speak not, fear not.'
After the chant was finished, she remained with her head bent for three or four minutes, praying or chanting in silence. Then she turned to me abruptly and said, 'I shall have to be naked. You don't mind that, do you?'
'No, of course not. I mean, no, why not? Go ahead.'
She tugged off her black sweater, revealing thin arms, a narrow chest, and small dark-nippled breasts. Then she unbuckled her belt and stepped out of her black corduroy jeans. She was very slim, very boyish; her dark hair swung right down to the middle of her back, and when she turned around and faced me I saw that her sex was shaved completely bare. A beautiful but very strange girl. There were silver bands around her ankles and silver rings on every toe. She raised her arms, completely composed and unembarrassed, and said, 'Now we shall see who has the greater power. Those poor lost spirits, or me.'
She knelt down in front of the candles and the bowl of water, and lit the candles with a sputtering piece of kindling from the fire. 'I can't use matches: there mustn't be any sulphur in the flame.' I watched in fascination as she bent forward and stared at her own reflection in the bowl of water, holding her hair back with her hands.
'All you who seek to penetrate the mirror here, turn back,' she said, in a sing-song tone. 'All you who try to cross again the borders of the region of the dead, go back. Tonight you must rest. Tonight you must sleep. There will be other times, other places; but tonight you must think on what you are, and turn away from the mirror which leads to the life you knew.'
The cottage became quiet, as quiet as it had last night. All I could hear was that odd backward-sounding ticking of the long-case clock, and the fizzing sound of the candles as they burned into their bright blue wax.
Anne stayed where she was, bent over, her breasts pressed against her thighs, staring into the copper bowl. She wasn't saying anything, but she gave no indication that the working of this particular wonder was over yet; nor that it was going to be successful.
To my amazement, the water in the bowl began to bubble a little, and steam, and then to boil. Anne sat up straight, her arms crossed over her chest, and closed her eyes. 'Go back,' she whispered. 'Do not try to penetrate the mirror tonight. Go back, and rest.'
The water in the bowl boiled even more noisily, and I stared at it in disbelief. Anne knelt where she was, her eyes tight closed, and I could see tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, and on her upper lip. Whatever she was doing, it obviously needed enormous effort and intense concentration.
'Go… back,' she whispered, as if it was a struggle to get the words out. 'Do not cross… do not cross…'
It was then that I began to get the feeling that she was involved in a struggle with something or someone, and that she was losing. I watched her anxiously as she began to quiver and shake, and the sweat ran down her cheeks and funneled between her breasts. Her thighs quaked as if she was being prodded with an electric goad, and she started to give little involuntary spasms and jumps.
The living-room door opened again, just a fraction; and again that coldness began to course through the room. The fire cowered down amongst its ashes, and the candles guttered and blew. In the bowl, the water went off the boil, and as suddenly as it had bubbled, began to form on its surface a thin skin of ice.