Graham Masterton - Death Trance

It could have been Thomas Essex, the old hermit in the wide-brimmed caballero hat who lived in that run-down sea-cottage close to Waterside Cemetery. Sometimes he passed this way, singing and hopping; and once he had confided in Jane that he could catch sea-bass just by whistling to them. Lillibulero, he said, that's what they liked. He could juggle, too, with clasp knives.

But then I thought: he's eccentric, sure. But he's old, too. Sixty-eight if he's a day. And what's a 68-year-old man doing on my swing, at well past two o'clock in the morning, on a night like this?

I made up my mind to ignore the creaking and go back to sleep. I bundled the soft hand-stitched comforter around my ears, burrowed down into the bed, closed my eyes, and breathed with exaggerated deepness. If Jane had still been here, she probably would have teased me into going to take a look out of the window. But I was tired. You're tired, right, you need your sleep. I hadn't been able to get more than four or five hours a night since the accident, often less, and tomorrow I had to be up early for a breakfast-time meeting with Jane's father; and then I had to go to Holyoke Square to Endicott's, where they were putting up a collection of maritime prints and paintings, rare ones, worth bidding for.

I managed to keep my eyes closed for something like an entire minute. Then I opened them again and the goblin-eyes were still watching me. And from the garden, no matter how forcefully I muffled my ears, that continual creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik.

And then… God, I could swear it, someone singing. Faintly, in a high-pitched voice, blown by the wind; so indistinct that it could have been nothing more than the draught blowing across the top of the chimney-stacks. But singing, all the same. A woman's voice, clear and particularly mournful.

I scrambled out of bed so quickly that I barked my knee on the mahogany bedside table, and sent the goblin-clock tumbling and ringing across the floor. I was too scared to get up slowly: it had to be a kamikaze charge or nothing at all. I dragged the comforter along with me, wrapping it around my waist, and stumbled to the window breathless and blind.

It was so damned dark out there that I could hardly see anything at all. The very faintest distinction in tone between hills and sky. The shadowy thrashing of the trees as the wind relentlessly bowed them down, and bowed them down again. I stared and listened, listened and stared, feeling ridiculous and heroic at the same time. I pressed the palm of my hand against the window-pane, to stop it from rattling. But the creaking of the garden-swing seemed to have died away, and there was nobody singing, nobody that I could hear.

And yet that tune seemed to echo in my head, that peculiar mournful tune. It reminded me of the sea-chanty that old Thomas Essex had been singing the very first time we came across him, as he walked up Quaker Lane.

'O the men they sailed from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores. But the fish they caught were naught but bones With hearts crush'd in their jaws.'

I had later found it written down in Sea Songs of Old Salem, by George Blyth; but unlike almost all the other chanties in the book, there was no explanation of what it meant, or whether it had any foundation in genuine local history. It was simply subtitled 'A Curiositie.' And yet who had been singing 'a curiositie' outside my cottage, so late at night; and why? There couldn't have been more than a dozen people in Granitehead who knew that song by heart, or its air.

Jane had always said the song sounded 'deliciously sad.'

I waited by the window until my shoulders began to feel cold. My eyes became slowly accustomed to the darkness, and I could indistinctly make out the black rocky reaches of Granitehead Neck, limned by the Atlantic surf. I took my hand away from the window-pane, and it was chilled and clammy. My handprint stayed on the glass for a moment, a ghostly greeting, and then faded away.

Groping my way back across the bedroom, I found the lightswitch and turned on the light. The room was the same as always. The big wooden early-American bed, with its puffy duck-down pillows; the carved double-fronted wardrobe; the wooden wedding-chest. On top of the bureau on the other side of the room was a small oval mirror in which I could just see the pale blur of my own face.

I wondered if it would be an admission that I was going to pieces if I went downstairs and poured myself a drink. I picked up the royal blue bathrobe I had dropped on the floor when I went to bed last night, and tugged it on.

The house had been so silent since Jane had gone. I had never realized how much noise, how much aura, a living person actually gives off; even when they're asleep. When Jane had been alive, she had filled the house with her warmth and her character and her actual breathing. Now, no matter which room I looked into, there was nothing but oldness and silence. Rocking-chairs which never rocked. Drapes which were never drawn unless I drew them myself. An oven which was never lit unless I went into the kitchen and lit it myself for one of my own solitary meals.

Nobody to talk to: nobody even to smile at when I didn't feel like talking. And the enormous incomprehensible thought that I would never see her again, ever.

It had been a month. A month and two days, and a handful of hours. I was over the self-pity. I think I was over the self-pity. I was certainly over the crying, although you can't lose someone like Jane without being susceptible for the rest of your life to unexpected tears. Dr Rosen had warned me that it would happen from time to time,

and it did: I would be sitting at an auction, ready to bid for some special piece of marine memorabilia which I particularly wanted to acquire for the shop; and I would suddenly find that tears were sliding down my cheeks, and I would have to excuse myself and retreat to the men's room and blow my nose a lot.

'Damn spring colds,' I would say to the attendant.

And he would look at me and know exactly what was wrong because there is an unadmitted kinship between all the closely-bereaved, a feeling which they can never share with anybody else because it would sound too much as if they were being morbidly sorry for themselves. And yet, damn it, I was.

I went into the low-beamed living-room, opened up the sideboard, and took stock of what liquor I had left. Half a mouthful of Chivas Regal; a teacupful of gin. A bottle of sweet sherry to which Jane had taken a fancy when she was first pregnant. I decided on tea instead. I almost always drank tea when I woke up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Bohea, without milk or sugar. A taste I had acquired from the people of Salem.

I was turning the key in the sideboard when I heard the kitchen door close. Not slam, as if it had been blown by the wind, but close, on its old-fashioned latch. I froze where I was, breath caught, heart banging, and listened. There was no other sound, only the wind blowing; but I was sure that I could sense a presence, a feeling that there was somebody else in the house. After a month on my own, a month of complete quiet, I had become alert to every little fidget, every little squeak, every little scurry of mice; and the larger vibrations of human beings. Human beings resonate, like cellos.

I was sure there was somebody there, in the kitchen. There was somebody there, but strangely there was no warmth, and none of the usual friendly noises of humanity. I crossed the brown shagpile carpet as silently as I could, and went to the fireplace, still ashy and glowing from yesterday evening's logs. I picked up the long brass grate-poker, with its heavy seahorse head, and hefted it in my hand.

In the hallway, my bare feet made a squeaking sound on the waxed pottery tiles. The long-case Tompion clock which Jane's parents had given us for a wedding-present ticked deeply and thoughtfully inside its crotch-mahogany torso. I reached the kitchen door, and listened and listened for the slightest creak, the slightest breath, the slightest frisson of material against wood.