Graham Masterton - Death Trance

I stopped, and squinted up against the rain. There was nothing for a while, then the light flashed again, so briefly that it could have been anything at all — the reflected headlamps from some faraway car, a distant flash of lightning, mirrored in the glass. Then it flashed again, and again, and for a moment there was a long sustained flicker, and I could have sworn that I caught sight of a man's face, looking down at me as I stood in the garden.

My first inclination was to run like hell. I had tried to be calm and collected after I had seen that flickering hallucination of Jane, but after I had got back to the cottage, I had immediately been seized by a terrified panic, and I had wrenched open the front door and cantered down Quaker Lane as fast as I could humanly go.

Now, however, I was a little braver. Maybe Keith and George had been right, and all that I had been witnessing around Quaker Hill tonight was St Elmo's Fire, or some other kind of scientific phenomenon. Keith had said that he had witnessed it hundreds of times, so what was so unusual about my seeing it twice?

There was another reason why I didn't run away, a deeper reason, a reason tied up with the sad and complicated feelings I had about Jane. If Jane had really appeared to me as an electrical ghost, then I wanted to know as much about these manifestations as I possibly could. Even if she couldn't be brought back physically, maybe there was a way of communicating with her, even talking to her. Maybe all this séance stuff was true after all; maybe people's souls were nothing more extraordinary than all the electrical impulses which had made up their brain-pattern in life, released from their fleshly body but still integrated, still functioning as a human spirit. And since the brain contained the sensory matrix for the body as well, wouldn't it make sense if occasionally the body was able to appear as a flickering illusion of electrical discharges?

All these kind of thoughts had been teeming around in my brain during my walk down to Mrs Edgar Simons' place, and that was why I didn't run off when I saw the face at the upstairs window. If ghosts were nothing more than formations of electricity, then how could they hurt me? The worst I could suffer would be a mild shock.

I went back to the front door to see if I could force it open. I even tried wangling my Bank AmeriCard into the latch, the way that thieves do in the movies, but I couldn't make it budge. Early 19th-century locks were probably impervious to late 20th-century plastic. I walked around to the other side of the house, skirting the twisted and briar-infested trunks of the trees which clung around the brickwork, until I found a small cellar window. It had once been screened by mesh, but the salt ocean air had corroded the wire, and it took only two or three hard tugs to pull the meshing loose.

Close by, on the overgrown garden path, lay the blind and broken head of a stone cupid. I picked it up, carried it quickly over to the window, and tossed it like a bowling-ball through the glass. There was a splintering smash, and then a heavy thud as the head hit the floor down below. I kicked out the remaining splinters, and then put my own head through to see what was inside.

It was utterly black, and it smelled of damp, and mould, and the peculiar fustiness of hundred-year-old buildings, as if the accumulated experiences of all those decades of time had permeated the timbers, and dried out, leaving a saltpeter of sadness, and passion, and evaporated joys.

I withdrew my head, and re-entered the cellar window feet first. I tore the knee of my pants on a glazier's nail on the window-frame, and said, 'Shit,' in the stuffy stillness of the cellar; but it turned out to be quite easy to lower myself down to the floor. There was a sudden scurrying noise in the far corner of the cellar, and a flurry of squeaks. Rats, and vicious ones, too, if they ran true to the tradition of Granitehead rodents, most of whom had jumped from ships. I groped my way across the floor, hands out in front of me, feeling like Blind Pew for the cellar steps.

I went around three walls before I eventually found the wooden banister rail, and the first stone step, and everywhere I shuffled around the rats would squeak and scamper and jump.

Inch by inch, I worked my way up the cellar steps to the cellar door itself, and turned the knob. Mercifully, the door was unlocked. I eased it open, and stepped out into the hall.

Mrs Simons' house had been built when Salem was the fifth most prosperous seaport in the world, and the sixth city in the United States, collecting one-twentieth of the entire Federal revenue in import duties. Its hallway ran all the way from the front door to the back garden door, and a magnificent suspended staircase came curving down one wall. Even though I was wearing soft-soled shoes, my footsteps set up a murmuring of echoes as I walked across the black-and-white marble floor, echoes that came back to me from the darkened living-rooms, the empty kitchens, and the galleried landing upstairs.

'Mrs Edgar Simons?' I called; too quietly for anyone to have heard. And my voice whispered back to me, from quite close by, 'Mrs Edgar Simons?'

I walked into the main living-room. It was high-ceilinged, and smelled of lavender and dust. The furniture was old-fashioned but not antique, the kind of traditional furniture that had been popular in the middle of the 1950s, clumsy and expensive, Jacobite by way of Grand Rapids. I saw my own pale face across the room in the looking-glass over the fireplace, and I looked quickly away, before I started getting the wind up again.

Mrs Simons was nowhere to be found, not downstairs. I went into the dining-room, which smelled of snuffed-out candles and stale pecan nuts; the pantry, which would have been an innovation when this house was first built; the old-fashioned kitchen, with its white marble working surfaces. Then I took a deep breath, and went back out into the hallway, to mount the stairs.

I was halfway up the stairs when I saw the blue-white flickering again, from one of the bedroom doors that led off the landing. I stopped for a moment, with my hand on the banister rail, but I knew that it was no use hesitating. Either I was going to find out what this electrical flickering was, or else I was going to run away and forget about Mrs Edgar Simons and Neil Manzi and everything, including Jane.

'John,' said a familiar whisper, close to my ear. I felt that tightness in my scalp again, that prickle of slowly-sinking fear. The light flashed again, from under the bedroom door. It was quite silent, unlike the buzzing, crackling flash you usually get from a heavy electrical discharge; and there was a coldness about it which unnerved me.

'John,' whispered the voice again, but more blurrily this time, as if it were two voices whispering in chorus.

I reached the top of the stairs. The landing was covered in carpet, once thick but now threadbare. There were very few pictures on the walls, and it was so dark in the house that it was impossible to tell what they were. An occasional wan face peered out of the blackness of the oil paint but that was all; and I didn't want to turn on the lights in case I frightened away whatever it was that flickered and flashed in the bedroom.

I stood outside that bedroom door for a very long time. What are you frightened of? I asked myself. Electricity? Is that it? You're frightened of electricity? Come on, you've just invented a really neat explanation for the appearance of ghosts, electrical matrices and discharge impulses and all that garbage, and now you're scared to open the door and take a look at a few sparks going off? Do you believe your own theory or not? Because if you don't, you shouldn't be here at all, you should be hightailing it down that highway to the nearest Ramada Inn, which is the only place where you certainly won't be disturbed by ghosts.