Graham Masterton - Death Trance

Nothing. Just the clock, measuring out the rest of my life the same way it had measured out Jane's. Just the wind, which would blow across Granitehead Neck long after I had left there. Even the sea seemed to have been stilled.

'Is anybody there?' I called, in a voice that started off loud and ended up strangled. And waited, for somebody or nobody to answer.

Was that singing? Distant, faraway singing?

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

Or was it nothing more than the draught, sucking at the bottom of the garden door?

At last, I eased open the latch which secured the kitchen door; hesitated, and then pushed the door inwards. No groaning or squeaking, I had oiled the hinges myself. I took one step, then another, then patted my hand a little too frantically against the wall, trying to find the light switch. The fluorescent light flickered, paused, then blinked on. I reared up the poker in front of me in nervous reaction, and then I realized that the old-style kitchen was empty, and I lowered it again.

The garden door was still locked and bolted, and the key was still lying where I had left it on top of the softly-humming icebox. The polished Delft tiles behind the kitchen range shone as blandly as ever, windmills and Dutch boats and tulips and clogs. The copper saucepans hung in mildly-shining rows; and my soup-bowl from last night's supper was still there, waiting to be washed.

I opened up cupboards, banged doors, made a lot of noise to reassure myself that I was really alone. I stared fiercely out of the window, into the absolute ebony blackness of the night, to frighten off anybody who might be lurking in the garden. But all I saw was the shadowy reflection of my own face, and I think that frightened me more than anything. Fear itself is frightening. To see yourself frightened is worse.

I walked out of the kitchen, and back into the hallway, and called out again, 'Who's there? Is anybody there?' and again there was silence. But I had a curiously unsettled feeling that something or somebody was passing through the air, as if atmospheric molecules were being disturbed by unseen movements. There was a sensation of coldness, too: a sensation of loss and painful unhappiness. The same coldness you feel after a road accident, or when you hear your own child crying in the night, an infant's dread of what the dark might bring.

I stood in the hallway, unsure of what to do or even of how to feel. It was quite plain that there was nobody here; that apart from me the house was empty. There was no physical evidence of any intrusion. No doors were forced, no windows were broken. And yet it was equally obvious that somehow the perspective of the house had been subtly altered. I felt as if I was now looking at the hallway from a new viewpoint, the right-hand picture of a stereoscopic photograph, instead of the left.

I went into the kitchen, hesitated again, and then decided to make myself a cup of tea. Maybe a couple of aspirin would help, too. I went over to the worktop where the kettle was standing, and to my alarm there was already a thin curl of steam rising out of the spout.

With the tips of my fingers, I touched the kettle's lid. It was scalding hot. I stepped back from the kettle and frowned at it. My frowning reflection, ridiculously distorted, stared back at me from its stainless-steel sides. I knew that I had been thinking of making tea, but had I actually switched on the kettle myself? I couldn't remember doing it. Yet the kettle had boiled, which usually took two or three minutes, and automatically switched itself off.

I must have done it myself. I was tired, that was all. I reached up to the wall-cupboard to take myself down a cup and saucer. And as I did so I could hear it again, I was convinced that I could hear it again, that faintest of singing. I paused, straining my ears, but it was gone. I took out the cup and saucer, and the small Spode teapot, and switched on the kettle again to bring the water back to the boil.

Maybe Jane's sudden death had affected me more than I had realized. Maybe bereavement found ways of expressing itself in visions, tricks of the mind, and odd sensations. Hadn't Jung talked about a collective unconscious, a pool of dreams in which we all shared? Maybe if one soul was lost to that pool, it set up ripples that everybody could feel, especially those who were closest.

The kettle was almost boiling again when, slowly, its shiny surface began to mist over, as if the temperature in the kitchen had suddenly dropped. But it was a chilly night, and so it didn't surprise me too much. I went across to the other side of the kitchen to fetch the old pewter tea-caddy. When I came back, however, for a few brief seconds, I was sure that I saw writing on the misted side of the kettle, as if somebody had quickly scrawled something there with their finger. At that instant, the kettle boiled, and the switch clicked out, and the mist faded away. But I peered at the kettle intently for a sign of what I had seen, and after I had filled up the teapot I boiled the kettle again to see if the writing reappeared. There was a smear which might have been an 'S' and another smear which might have been an 'e', but that was all. I was probably going quietly bananas. I took my tea into the living-room, and sat down by the still-warm fireplace, and sipped it, and tried to get my mind straight.

That couldn't have been writing. It couldn't have been anything more than greasy marks on the side of the kettle, where the condensation wouldn't cling. I didn't believe in ouija boards or automatic writing, or 'presences'. I didn't believe in poltergeists and I didn't believe in any of that occult thought-transference stuff, psychokinetics, moving ashtrays around just by thinking about them, any of that. I wasn't saying that people weren't entitled to believe in them if they wanted to, but I didn't. Not really. I mean, I wasn't prepared to reject occult phenomena out of hand. Maybe some people had actually witnessed that kind of thing. But I hadn't, and more than anything else I prayed that I wasn't going to.

I very much didn't want to think that Quaker Lane Cottage might possibly be haunted, especially by anyone I knew. Especially, God forbid, by Jane.

I stayed in the living-room until the long-case clock in the hallway struck five, sleepless and unhappy and deeply disturbed. At last the North Atlantic dawn came austerely through the leaded windows, and dressed the living-room in gray. The wind had died down now, to a chilly breeze, and I went out through the back door and took a barefoot walk in the dewy garden, dressed in nothing but my bathrobe and my old sheepskin jacket, and stood by the garden swing.

It must have been low-tide, because far out over the sands of Granitehead Neck, the terns were already swooping down for clams. Their cries were like the cries of children. Off to the north-west, I could see the Winter Island lighthouse, still winking. A cold photographic morning. A picture of the gone world.

The swing was more than 70 or 80 years old, constructed like an armchair, with a wide carved splat. On the cresting-rail was chiseled the face of the sun, Old Sol, and the words 'All, except their sun, is set,' which Jane had discovered was a quotation from Byron. The chains of the swing were suspended from a kind of gallows; but this was hard to make out, because whoever had built the swing all those years ago had planted a small apple-tree beside it, and now the swing was completely umbrellaed with gnarled old fruit-branches, and in the summer the apple-blossom showered all around you when you were swinging, like snow.

Swinging (Jane had said, as she swung and sang) was the pastime of fools and jesters, a kind of medieval madness not unlike the whirling of whirling Dervishes. It reminded her of motley and mummers and pig's-bladders on sticks, and she said that it had once been a way to conjure up imps and devils and hobgoblins. I remembered laughing at her, as she swung; and as I stood there that early morning alone, I found my eyes following the arc in which she had once been swinging, although the swing-chair itself now hung still, beaded with dew, unmoved by the breeze, and quite unmoved by my memories.