Graham Masterton - Death Trance

I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets. It looked as if it was going to be one of those clear, fresh Atlantic days, cold as hell, but bright. I pushed the swing a little so that the chains complained, but even when I pushed it harder, I couldn't reproduce the noise I had heard last night. To set up that distinctive creakkk-squik, you had to sit right on the swing, right up on that high-backed seat, and push yourself back, and up, and back, and up, until your toes were almost brushing the lower branches of the apple-tree.

I walked down through the orchard, right to the end of my garden, and looked down the twisting slope of Quaker Lane towards Granitehead Village. Two or three chimneys were already smoking, fishermen's houses, and the smoke was leaning off westwards, towards Salem, whose skyline was already becoming clearer across the harbour.

Slowly, I returned to the house, glancing from side to side as I went for any signs of crushed grass, or footprints, any sign that somebody had visited my garden in the night; but there was none. I went back into the kitchen, leaving the door open, and brewed myself another cup of Bohea, and ate three Pepperidge Farm coconut cookies, feeling unreasonably guilty that this was my entire breakfast. Jane had always insisted on cooking me bacon, or waffles, or shirred eggs. I took my cup of tea upstairs with me, and went to the bathroom to shave.

We had fitted out the bathroom with a large Victorian basin we had rescued from a derelict house in Swampscott, and we had adorned it with huge brass faucets. Over the basin was a genuine barbershop mirror, surrounded by an oval frame of inlaid kingwood. I inspected myself in the glass and decided I didn't look too bad for a man who had been awake for most of the night — not only awake, but scared to go to sleep. Then I turned on the faucets and filled up the basin with hot water.

It was only when I raised my head to start shaving that I saw the writing scrawled across the mirror. At least, it could have been writing; although it might almost as easily have been nothing more than curving drips of moisture. I stared at it closely, frightened and fascinated, and I was sure that I could make out the letters S, V, E, but with indistinguishable letters in between.

S something V something-something E? What on earth could that mean? SAVE? SAVE ME?

I was suddenly sure that I caught the reflection of a movement, something white flickering past the open bathroom doorway behind me. I turned around and said, over-loudly, 'Who's there?' and then I stalked on fright-stiffened legs out on to the landing, and looked down the dark carved staircase towards the hallway. Nobody there. No footsteps, no whispers, no mysteriously closed doors, nothing. Only a small Edward Hicks painting of a matelot, staring back at me in that bovine, placid way that all Edward Hicks people stare at you.

Nobody there. And yet, for the first time since she had died; for the first time in a whole month of loneliness and silent pain, I found myself whispering, 'Jane?'

Walter Bedford sat behind his wide leather-topped desk, his face half-obscured by his green-shaded lamp, and said, 'I'm taking her mother away next month. A few weeks in Bermuda, maybe, something to settle her mind, help her to come to terms with it. I should have taken her away earlier, I guess; but, you know, what with old Mr Bibber so sick…'

'I'm sorry she's taken it so badly,' I said. 'If there's anything you want me to do…'

Mr Bedford shook his head. To both himself and his wife Constance, Jane's death had been the fiercest tragedy of their whole lives; even fiercer in some ways than losing their only other child, Jane's brother Philip, at the age of five, of polio. Mr Bedford had told me that he felt when Jane died that he was cursed by God. His wife felt even more bitter, and considered that the agent of the curse was me.

Although one of Mr Bedford's younger partners in the Salem law firm of Bedford & Bibber had offered to execute Jane's will, and to arrange for her funeral, he had insisted on handling all the details himself, with a kind of agonized relish. I understood why. Jane had been such a vivid light in all of our lives that it was difficult to let her go; and harder still to think that the day would one day pass when we didn't think about her, even once.

She had been buried at the Waterside Cemetery, in Granitehead, on a sharp February afternoon, aged 28, sharing her coffin with our unborn child, and her headstone read 'Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.'

Mrs Bedford had refused even to look at me throughout the ceremony. I think that in her eyes I was worse than a murderer. I hadn't even had the civility to kill Jane in person, with my bare hands. Instead, I had allowed fate to do my dirty work for me. Fate had been my hired assassin.

I had met Jane by accident; at a foxhunt, of all places, near Greenwood in South Carolina, less than two years before, although now it seemed like 20. My presence at the hunt had been compulsory: it was being run across the 1200-acre estate of one of my employer's most influential clients; whereas Jane was there simply because a gushing girlfriend from Wellesley College had invited her to come for the excitement of being 'blooded.' There was no blood, the foxes escaped. But afterwards, in the quiet upstairs gallery of the elegant colonial house, we sat in extraordinary Italian armchairs and drank champagne, and fell in love. Jane quoted Keats to me, and that was why Keats was quoted on her headstone after she was dead.

' I saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry'd — "La belle Dame sans merci hath thee in thrall!" '

Ostensibly, we had nothing in common, Jane and I: neither style nor education nor mutual friends. I had been born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a shoe-store owner, Trenton's Heel-&-Toe, and although my father had done everything he could to give me a superior schooling — 'no son of mine is going to spend the rest of his life looking at the bottom of other people's feet' — I was an irredeemable mid-Westerner. Speak to me of Chillicothe, Columbia, and Sioux Falls; those are the names that move me. I studied business at Washington University, and when I was 24 I found myself a sales job with MidWestern Chemical Bonding, of Ferguson.

I was a 31-year-old business executive who wore gray suits and dark socks and carried undogeared copies of Fortune in my personalized leather briefcase. Jane, on the other hand, was the only daughter of a venerable but not-so-wealthy family from Salem, Massachusetts, the only daughter and now the only child; brought up in prettiness and grace and old-fashioned ways, but sophisticated, too. What you might describe as the local Vivien Leigh. She liked antique furniture and American primitive paintings and hand-sewn quilts, but she had no time for any sewing of her own, and she very rarely wore any underwear, and whenever she went out into the garden she put on high-heeled French slippers, and sank into the dirt alongside the curly kale.

'Damn it, I should have been a good country wife,' she always used to tell me, when her bread lay doggedly unrisen in its tin; or her marmalade turned to tar. 'But somehow I just don't have that edge.'

She tried on New Year's Eve to make Hopping John, a dish of bacon and black-eyed peas traditional in the South, but it turned out like red rubber gloves and scorched glue, and when she took the lid off the casserole we laughed until we were weak, and I guess that's what really close marriages are all about. But she said afterwards, as we lay in bed, 'The legend is, if you don't serve Hopping John on New Year's Day, you'll have a year's bad luck.'

She wasn't as hopeless as Honey, in the country-and-western song, who wrecked the car and cried when the snow melted, but I expect you can understand why 'Honey' wasn't one of those songs I ever wanted to hear. When it comes to people we've loved, and lost, all of us have an infinite capacity for deep-down slush.