Harold prayed all evening that the Wildman's wouldn't come, but a few minutes after the 1/2 past eleven chimes had struck, he heard the crunching of tires on the lane outside, and when he went to open the front door, there they were, in their shiny gray limousine, bouncing to an expensive halt behind his crummy-looking Toronado.533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFvDFzuxS5X
He hooked his golf umbrella out of the forged-iron stand in the hallway, and took it out to the front gate, so that Mrs. Wildman wouldn't get rained on. She was wearing a dark mink jacket and her hair must have been waved that afternoon, for it swept up from her forehead in a blue-gray wing, and her little black hat was perched on top of it precariously. She presented her right check to be kissed, and when he duly did so, he smelled her heavy French perfume.
Claudia Wildman was a handsome woman, no doubt about it. But she could also be suspicious and tiresome, and all those characteristics showed in her narrow eyes, and the dragged-down wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. Harold looked over her shoulder at Bruce K. Wildman, and he could tell by the tight, tense look on his face that he had warned Claudia to be on her best behavior. He wanted desperately to see Nancy, and he knew that the price of admission was for Claudia to at least be cordial.
"I see you haven't done very much to the cottage recently," said Claudia, as she stepped into the hallway and looked around. She twitched her nose a little, as if she didn't approve of the smell.
"I've been busy," Harold told her. "Can I take your jacket?"
"I think I'll be keeping it on for the moment, thank you. It's not exactly climate-controlled in here, is it?"
"Nancy always liked a log fire," Harold replied.
"I like a log fire," put in Bruce, trying to keep the party sociable. "A log fire, and a glass of punch. Nothing in the winter. It's the most romantic thing you can think of."
"When was the last time we sat in front of a log fire with a glass of punch?" Claudia asked him, sharply. She turned back to him, and pulled a face that showed that even if Bruce were actually to offer it, she wouldn't be caught dead in front of a log fire with a glass of punch. "Bruce's idea of romance is halfway between a second-rate ski-lodge in Aspen and the center-spread of the Christmas issue of Playboy," she said, stalking ahead of them into the living-room.
"Well," she sniffed. "You haven't done very much in here, either."
Bruce said to Harold, sotto voce, "Let her settle down, Harold. Give her time. She's very up in the air about this; very emotional."
"Do you want a drink?" Harold asked him, as if the latter had said nothing at all.
"Is that Chivas Regal you're drinking?" Bruce asked him. "Sure. I'll have one of those, with a little water."
"Claudia," Harold said, "would you care for a glass of wine?"
"Thank you, but I don't drink before six or after eleven."
After Harold had fixed Bruce's whiskey, they all sat down around the fire and looked at one another. The rain sprinkled against the windows again, and upstairs Harold could hear that loose shutter banging. Claudia tugged down the hem of her dress, and said impatiently, "Aren't we supposed to do something? Like hold hands, or close our eyes, and think of Nancy?"
"This isn't a séance, Claudia," Harold said. "In a séance, you call the spirits and with any luck they answer. If Nancy's going to appear here tonight, she's going to do it whether we want her to or not."
"But don't you think she's more likely to appear if she knows her mother is here?" asked Claudia, earnestly.
Harold looked at Bruce. Harold could have said that he didn't believe for a single moment that Claudia's presence was going to make a difference either way. But the truth isn't always necessary; and the last thing he wanted was an argument. He was really very tired after his aqualung diving experience, and all he really wanted to do was go to bed, and sleep.
"I expect that your being here will increase our chances of seeing Nancy tenfold," Harold said to Claudia, smilingly benignly.
"A girl always goes to her mother in times of crisis," said Claudia. "She may have been a father's girl when she was little, but whenever it came to anything serious---she always came to me."
Harold nodded, kept on smiling.
Bruce checked his watch. "It's almost midnight," he said. "Do you think she'll appear?"
"I don't know, Bruce. I don't have any control over it at all. I don't even know why she appears, or what she wants."
"Does she look well?" asked Claudia.
Harold stared at her. "Claudia, she's dead. How can she look well when she's dead?"
"I don't have to be reminded that my daughter's been taken away from me," Claudia retorted. "I don't have to be reminded how it happened, either."
"Good. Because that was the last thing I was going to talk about."
"Oh," said Claudia. "I suppose you accept no responsibility whatsoever?"
"What responsibility do you want me to accept?" Harold asked her.
"Come on, now," put in Bruce. "Let's not start digging up dead and buried things." He was immediately sorry that he'd chosen that particular metaphor, and sat back in his chair, blushing.
"Nancy was pregnant," insisted Claudia. "And the whole idea of allowing a pregnant woman to drive all that way in a blizzard----all alone, unprotected, while you sat at home and watched some childish football game.....As far as I'm concerned, it amounts to criminal negligence. Manslaughter!"
"Claudia," said Bruce, "forget the recriminations, will you? It's over and done with."
"He murdered them, or as good as," said Claudia. "And I'm not supposed to feel bitter about it?! My only daughter, my only remaining child. My only chance of a grandson. All wiped out, because of a football game, and a husband who was too lazy and careless to look after the people who were under his care."
"That's it!" Harold bellowed. "Claudia, you're out of here. Bruce, take her home."
"What?!" said Bruce, as if he hadn't quite heard Harold.
"I said take Claudia home. And don't you ever---ever---bring her back here. She hasn't been here five minutes and already she's started. When is she going to remember that there was no blizzard when Nancy came out to see you. If anybody's at fault it's you for letting her drive home during very bad weather. And I'll thank her to understand that I lost far more than either of you did that day. I lost my wife, the girl who was going to be my companion for the rest of my life; and I lost my son. So goodnight, okay? I'm sorry you had a wasted trip, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to Claudia bad-mouth me. End of story!"
"Now, listen," said Bruce, "we're just on edge, that's all."
"Bruce, I'm not on edge," Harold told him. "I just want Claudia out of here before I do something I might regret, like punching her teeth out!"
"How dare you talk to me that way!" snapped Claudia, and stood up. Bruce stood up too, and then half sat down, and then stood up again. "Claudia," he appealed to her, but Claudia was too irritated and tense to be mollified by anything, or anybody.
"Even her spirit isn't safe in your custody!" she snapped at Harold, wagging her long-clawed finger. "Even when she's dead, you can't take care of her!"
She stalked to the door. Bruce turned to Harold and gave him a resigned look which, if he knew anything about Bruce K. Wildman, meant partly that he blamed Claudia for being so volatile, and partly that he blamed Harold for setting her off again.
Harold didn't even bother to get out of his chair. He might have guessed the evening was going to turn into yet another fight. He reached for the Chivas Regal bottle and refilled his glass, almost to the top. "I drink," Harold said to himself, in his best barfly slur, "to forget."
"To forget what?" he asked himself."
"I forget," Harold slurred.
It was then that Harold heard an insane rattling at the front door. Bruce came back into the living room again. "Sorry to bother you," he said. "The front door's jammed. I can't get it open."
"Don't apologize, Bruce, just tell him to open the door!" Claudia demanded.
Wearily, Harold rose and walked into the hallway. Claudia was standing there with her hands planted furiously on her hips, but the first thing he noticed wasn't Claudia. It was the cold. The strange, sudden cold. "Bruce," Harold said, "it's gotten colder?"
"Colder?" Bruce K. Wildman frowned.
"Can't you feel it? The temperature's falling."
"Open this goddam door, will you?!" barked Claudia. But Harold raised his hand to quiet her.
"Listen, do you hear something?"
"What's he talking about, Bruce? For God's sake, make him open the door. I'm upset and I want to go home. I don't want to stay in this horrible run-down cottage a moment longer."
Bruce said, softly, "Yeah, now that you mention it. It's some kind of whispering."
Harold nodded. "That's what I hear. Where do you think it's coming from?"
"I'd say it's coming from upstairs," said Bruce. HIs eyes were bright now, and he'd totally forgotten about Claudia. "Is this what happens. Is this how it starts."
"Yes," Harold replied. "Whispering, cold, and then the ghosts."
"If you don't open this front door at once, you piece of shit," screeched Claudia, "then by God I'm going to...."
"Shut up, Claudia!" roared Bruce.
Claudia stared at him with her mouth wide open. Harold didn't suppose he'd dared to speak to her like that more than one time in 35 years of marriage. He looked at her and gave her a sour little smile that meant she'd better keep it shut, too, if she knew what was good for her. She said, "Oh," in utter frustration, and then "Oh!"
The whispering grew no louder, but seemed to circle around the trio so that sometimes the voices seemed to be coming from upstairs, and sometimes from the library, and sometimes they sounded like they were right behind them, only a few paces away. All of them strained to make out the words, but it was useless: it was a long, persistent, discursive conversation, in what language they couldn't make out. And yet there was something unmistakably obscene about it; a feeling that the whisperers were relishing some filthy sexual act, or some unspeakably sadistic torture, and discussing it in relentless detail.
The temperature kept on plummeting, too, until their breath was visible. Claudia tugged her mink jacket around herself, and stared at him as if this was all some kind of barbaric hoax. I don't think that Bruce had done what I had told him to do, and warned her what it was going to be like; that it could be scary, and unpleasant, and even potentially dangerous. Claudia had no doubt walked through the door with the expectation that Nancy would be sitting before the fire in the pink and natural flesh, knitting baby-bootees, no more harmed by death than if she had spent a month in Miami.
"Who is that whispering?" she said, with her eyes wide. "You?"
"How can it be me? Do you see my lips moving?"
The whispering dragged on. Claudia came closer, and stared at him even harder. Behind her, the front door had silently opened by itself. Harold reached over and touched Bruce's arm, but he had seen the door already, and he said softly: "I know. I know, Harold. The handle turned by itself!"
The door smoothly swung open, without its usual squeaking noise. They were now looking out into the front garden, into the dark and blustery night. And there, halfway along the garden path, much smaller than she had appeared in Harold's bedroom, only the height of a twelve-year-old child, stood Nancy.
"Claudia," said Bruce gently. "She's here."
Claudia turned, slowly, hypnotically, and stared out into the garden. She said nothing at all, but Harold could tell by the trembling of her shoulders that she was sobbing, and trying to hold back her sobs.
"I didn't realize...." she wept, her mouth twisted into a snarl of grief. "Oh my God, Bruce, I had no idea!"
Nancy appeared to be floating a few inches above the path; a flickering image of her that faded and sparkled in the wind. Her arms were straight down by her sides, her face was hollow-eyed and expressionless, but her hair floated around her head like a crown made solely of lightning bolts.
"Harold," she whispered. "Harold, don't leave me!"
Claudia took two or three uncontrolled steps towards her, lifting one arm. "Nancy, it's mother," she appealed. "Nancy, listen to me, wherever you are, sweetheart, it's mother."
"Don't leave me, Harold," Nancy begged Harold.
Claudia must have been terrified, but she approached the ghost even more closely, hands raised like a chubby Madonna. "Nancy, I just want to help you," she said. "I'll do whatever I can to help you. Talk to me, Nancy, please! Can you see me? Do you know that I'm here? Nancy, I love you. Please, Nancy. Please, I'm pleading with you."
"Claudia," warned Bruce. "No! Claudia, don't!!!"
Nancy's image shifted an altered, both in size and appearance. She seemed taller now, and her face was different, thinner-cheeked, gaunt, like a starving angel. She raised one arm to shoulder height, leaving in the air for a moment a succession of after-images, so that it looked as if she had five arms instead of just one.
"Harold," she whispered, more affirmatively now. "You mustn't leave me, Harold. You mustn't leave me, not here."
Claudia was down on her knees on the garden path in front of her spectral daughter. Bruce choked, "Constance, you don't even know if that's really her!" and shoulder his way past Harold to bring her back; but just as he did so, Nancy turned her head and stared down at her mother with those black and empty eyes.
"That's right, Nancy," Claudia wailed, with a voice bordering on happiness. "Look at me. Look at your mother! You're all I have left, Nancy, don't leave me! Come back to me, Nancy! Mother needs you!"
Bruce seized Claudia's shoulders, and cried, "No, Claudia! This is crazy! She's dead, Claudia, she can't come back!"
Claudia turned and struck out at Bruce with a flailing arm. "Did you care about her the way I did? Did you?" she screamed. "You never gave a damn about our children! You never gave a damn about me, either! You don't want her back because you're guilty, that's why; just as guilty as Harold; and because you're afraid."
"Claudia, this is a ghost!" shouted Bruce.
"He's right, Claudia," Harold told her. "You'd be safer if you kept away."
Nancy's blue-white electrical image hovered and flickered, and seemed to grow even taller, until it was taller than Bruce. But it never once turned its "eyes" away from Claudia, as she groveled at its feet in the garden path. Bruce stared up at it in abject dread, and took one or two paces back. He turned around to Harold, his face gray with fright, and mutely appealed to him to do something. Anything. He hadn't understood what it was going to be like, either, and now he was frightened out of his mind.
"Nancy!" screamed Claudia. "Nancy!"
It was then that Nancy's death-pale lips curled slowly back over incandescent teeth, and her mouth stretched wider, wider, until she was as hideous and terrifying as a stone demon. Her hair flew up behind her head, and she raised her other arm so that she was standing as if crucified. Then she rose slowly to her feet until she was floating over Claudia horizontally, her bare feet close together, her white funeral vestments flapping silently in the midnight wind.
Claudia stretched back and screamed and screamed, in utter hysteria. Bruce cried, "Claudia! For God's sake!" and tried to grab her again; but Nancy's stretched-apart mouth suddenly emitted a hollow roar that made him stumble back towards the house in mute terror. It was a roar like nothing any human ear had ever heard before: the roar of coldly-blazing furnaces, the roar of enraged dinosaurs, the roar of the North Atlantic Ocean, in a catastrophic storm.
Out of Nancy's mouth gushed a fuming stream of freezing vapor, straight into Claudia's face. Harold could feel how cold it was, even from ten feet away by the door. Claudia cried out in agony, and fell down on the path, and as Bruce hurried towards her again, Nancy's apparition tumbled slowly head-over-heels through the night air, over the garden hedge, and across Harvest Mills, uphill, in the direction of the shore. Arms stretched wide, a quivering crucifix of blue-white light, over and over, singing as she went.
"O the men they sail from Ol' Spithead
To fish the savage waters....."
Harold knelt down beside Bruce and Claudia. Claudia had buried her face in her hands, and she was twitching and shuddering. "I'm blind," she whimpered. "Oh, God, Bruce---I'm blind!!!"
Harold helped Bruce carry her inside the house, and lay her down on the sofa by the living-room fire. She kept her hands pressed against her eyes, and shook, and moaned, and Harold was worried that she might have been seriously shocked. She wasn't a young lady anymore, and she had a history of heart trouble. "Call the paramedics," Harold instructed Bruce. "And whatever you do, try to keep her warm."
"Where are you going?" Bruce wanted to know.
"I'm going after Nancy. I've got to end this, Bruce, one way or another."
"What the hell do you think you can possibly do? That's a supernatural entity out there, Harold. That's a ghost, for Christ's sake. What can you possibly do against a ghost?"
"If I don't go after her, I'll never find out."
"All right, son. Do what you have to. Just don't be too long."
Harold ran back out into the windy night. All around him, the telephone wires were droning, and the trees were whistling, as if everything had come mysteriously alive, and was warning him in chorus. Upstairs, at the cottage window, the lose shutter clapped frantically.
Tugging up his collar, Harold began to run up Harvest Mills until he ran out of road and found himself jogging across tufted sea-grass. There was no sign of Nancy, but the last time he had seen her she had been tumbling through the air in the direction of Angel Point Cemetery, where she had been buried, and it seemed reasonable, if scary, to assume that her ghost had actually come from there.
It was a good 3/4 of a mile to the cemetery gates, and Harold had to quit jogging after the first few hundred yards, and walk, trying to catch his breath. On his right, in the darkness, he could just make out the white breakers of the Salem Harbor shoreline. Somewhere out there, beneath the black and chilly waters, buried in the mud of three centuries, lay the wreckage of the George Badger. The sound of the sea was infinitely lonely and alien. Nancy had said that it had always made her think of the moon, cold and uncompromising. The sea, after all, is the moon's mistress.
Through the night, Harold glimpsed the white arch of the cemetery gates. Beyond it, as he started jogging again, the tombstones appeared, spires and crosses and plaques; frozen cherubs and saddened seraphim. A little necropolis of Ol' Spithead's dead, isolated out on the shoreline. Harold reached the black-painted wrought-iron gates, and clutched them, peering as hard as he could into the rows of graves, looking slightly to the left, to the place where Nancy was buried.
"Pale kings I did see, and princes too; pale warriors, death-pale were they all."
There was no flickering light, no sign of Nancy's spirit. Harold turned the knob of the gates, and opened them up, and stepped inside.
Whatever clichés are written about graveyards at night, there was no question that Ol' Spithead's graveyard that gusty March night had an unsettling atmosphere all its own. Every tombstone seemed to have an unearthly gleam, and as he walked towards Nancy's grave between the silent ranks of tombs, he was frighteningly conscious that he was walking amongst scores of people; dead people who would now be silent forever, eyes closed or eyeless, robed or in tatters, all lying beneath the blackness of the earth. This was not ordinary ground: this was an enclave of buried memories, a noiseless community of lived-out lives, an acre of human beings who would never speak again.
Harold approached Nancy's tombstone, and stood beside it, shivering and unsure. Nancy Amelia Wildman, Beloved Wife of Harold Hugh Winstanley, Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bruce K. Wildman. "Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star."
Now he had come here, he didn't know what to do. Should he talk to her? Call her? Should he wait for her to appear? He looked around, and saw the pale marble sentinels of all the other tombstones standing close, and felt hemmed-in, and breathless, despite the wind. A marble angel watched him from two rows away, staring with sightless eyeballs.
He swallowed, and then he said unsteadily, "Nancy? Can you hear me, Nancy?"
It was absurd, of course, and he found himself seriously hoping that there wasn't anyone else in the graveyard who could hear him. He knew people did talk to their dead relatives, but they didn't often do it in the middle of the night; and they very rarely expect an answer, like he did.
"Nancy?" he said again. "Nancy, can you hear me?"
There was no response. Nothing at all but the wind, rustling in the long grass beyond the graveyard fence. He stayed where he was for a minute or so, shivering with cold, half-hoping that Nancy would appear to him and half-hoping that she would not; and then he turned to leave.
And then he said, "Oh, God!"
She was standing behind Harold, no more than one yard away, a few inches above the ground. She was her natural height, but she seemed to have become desperately thin and emaciated, as if there were nothing beneath that wind-flapped gown but skin and bones. Her expression was empty and remote, her eyes too dark to read. He could not actually see through her, she wasn't spectral in that sense, but she was somehow melting, moving, insubstantial . He felt that if he should try to snatch at her, he would end up with nothing more than one handful of cobwebs.
"You came," she said, in a voice that sounded like four Nancy's speaking simultaneously. "I knew, in the end, you would come."
"What do you want?" asked Harold.
"I want you to make love to me," she whispered. "I want you to make love to me forever."
"I can't, Nancy. You're dead."
"No, Harold, not dead."
"Then what, if you're not dead? And what do you want?"
"I belong now to the others. Join me, Harold. Come with me. Don't leave me here."
Harold held out his hand towards her, very gingerly. "Nancy, that's just not possible. You're dead, you should rest. I can't stand any more of this, Nancy; it's scaring the living hell out of me."
"Did you want me to die?" she whispered.
"No way! I miss you. I miss you like hell."
"But I'm here, Harold. You can have me. We can be lovers again."
"Nancy, you're dead, you're not real. Don't you understand?"
"Real?" she asked. "What is real?"
And as she spoke, she turned, and raised her right arm.
"I will show you what is real," she said.
"What are you talking about?" Harold said.
He heard a sound like singing, only it wasn't singing. It was more like the keening of mourners at a funeral, or the high unearthly ululation of Moslem women in the Sudan; one of those weird intense ultraviolet sounds that can make your skin crawl. It was coming from everywhere: out of the sky, out of the ground, sometimes setting up an almost unbearable vibration.
Harold looked around the graveyard, and to his total horror, other ghosts began rising out of their graves. Their heads appeared first, blindeyed, growing out of the ground like hideous pumpkins. Then their shoulders, and the rest of their bodies, rising up and up until they were hovering above Nancy like windblown grass.
There were hundreds of them, men and women and children, each of them flickering dully in the gloom of the night, the faint electrical charge of lives long over. And as more of them appeared, so the keening they were making grew louder, until the graveyard was echoing with it.
Nancy whispered, somewhere inside of his head. "This is real. This is real, Harold, come and see."
He walked stiffly along one of the aisles of gravestones. The ghosts remained motionless, hovering, staring back at him out of eyes that were like holes in a ragged curtain. Some of the ghosts were badly decayed. A woman stood with no flesh on her skull at all, just bare shining bone and a few tufts of hair. One man's ribcage was revealed, and inside it wriggled heaps of glowing maggots. There was a teenage boy with no lower jaw, just a puffy and ulcerous tongue hanging down from his open throat like a scarf. Hundreds of them, the dead of Ol' Spithead, some nearly perfect, untouched, hardly looking as if they had died at all. Others in ruins, smashed and rotted and barely recognizable as human beings.
Harold walked all around the perimeter of the cemetery until he reached the gates again. He had almost irrepressible urge to bust out of there, and run, but he also had the fearful suspicion that if he did so, the ghosts would pursue him, in one ghostly rush, and hunt him down.
He stood by the gate, looking across the necropolis of the restless dead; shimmering and decayed. Nancy stood a little ways off, watching him.
"I cannot come back to you," Nancy told him, in that soft, distant voice. "But you could come to me."
Harold turned away from her. He could remember how she had looked the day they were married. He could remember her sitting on the side of the bed, still wearing her bridal veil, her skirts drawn up to her thighs, unfastening her white stockings from her white garter-belt. There had been flowers everywhere, the whole room had been heady with sweet-peas and carnations. And her face had seemed to him magical, outlined as if it was with morning sunlight, the face of the girl that he loved.
This ghost was not Nancy, at least not the Nancy he'd known and loved. It was like all of those gruesome manifestations in the Angel Hill Cemetery, dead and rotting, an erratic electrical impulse from a bygone life. There was no point in staying there among those ugly and frightening spirits. They were unable to help him in his search for a way to put them all to rest. If they were anything like Nancy, or Donald Baylor, all they wanted was that their living loved ones should join them in whatever nether-world they now inhabited. And Harold didn't really believe that wanted even that: they were too emotionless, too absorbed in their own unseen agonies. Rather, it was the influence of some greater force that was using them to recruit the living to the kingdoms of the dead, a force that may be lying beneath the mud of Lobster Bay, in the wreck of the George Badger.
Harold began walking back towards Harvest Mils, away from the cemetery. He heard Nancy calling after him, but he didn't listen. She would only beg him not to leave her, to come and join her, to stay with her and be her lover. But no matter how painfully he missed her, no matter what he would have done for a chance to see her again, touch her again, be with her again, he wasn't prepared to commit suicide. When you've been among the dead, you understand the value of life.
Harold was only 1/3 of the way back to the top of Harvest Mills when he caught sight of two or three of the ghosts from the cemetery, keeping abreast of him on the brow of the hill, about 20 yards away. He looked back, and there were more behind him, twelve or thirteen of them at least. And off to his left, about a 1/2 dozen more were following him along the shoreline.
As they came, they kept up that high keening sound. Sometimes it was shrill and distinct, at other times it was blown away by the wind. But it was all around him, an eerie supernatural warcry, as if the dead of Angel Hill Cemetery were after my blood.
Harold began to jog, not too fast at first, to see whether the apparitions could keep up with him. They flickered and flew just as quickly, in a strange pell-mell motion, some of them running, some of them tumbling over in the way that Nancy's ghost had, some of them soaring arms-stretched with their burial robes fluttering in the ocean wind, like charnel-house kites. He felt a deep and historical terror inside him, the kind of people that people might have felt in the 17th century when leprous beggars came to town, hopping and skipping and horrendously diseased. And all the time there was that whistling and keening, almost joyous now, as if they knew that they could catch him.
He started running in earnest now. But how fast could they go? Maybe they could easily outstrip him, and they were simply keeping their distance for the thrill of it. Still, he couldn't worry too much about that. The only thing he could do was get back to Harvest Mills Cottage as soon as possible.
And then what? Harold thought. Nancy's ghost had found it easy enough to get inside. This evening, she had opened the front door without even touching the handle. He heard his breath whining and his trouser-legs jostling against one another as he ran, and he thought to himself: don't even consider the possibility. Just run!
He glanced to his right. The gruesome ghosts were keeping well up wit him, dancing and turning in the wind. On his left, the shoreline began to narrow and edge in closer, and he could see the ghosts distinctly, running towards him in mesmerizing slow motion, and yet easily catching up. He didn't dare to look over his shoulder, because the keening behind his back had seemed to be closer than ever, and he could have sworn that he heard the sea-grass whispering as the apparitions rushed through it.
He was only 200 yards away from Harvest Mills Cottage when he realized that he couldn't possibly make it. His legs felt as if they were clumsy prosthetics, carved out of heavy wood. His breath shrieked in and out of his lungs, and he was smothered in ice-cold sweat. And all the while, the blue-white ghosts were rushing after him, with decayed and inhuman urgency, the beggars of the night.
He felt something claw at his hair, like a bat or a half-rotted hand. He frantically beat it off, and started running faster again, forcing his legs to take me up the sloping hill, forcing himself through the barrier of total exhaustion and pain. The rushing noises came nearer, until he knew that the apparitions were almost at his shoulder, keening and crying and whispering to him, stop, stop, join us, don't leave us, come back.
He felt himself suddenly lifted up---physically lifted up off the ground---and then tossed and tumbled head over heels on to the rough grassy hillside. He tried to scramble to his feet, but then he was hurled on to his back by some of the completely invisible force, hurled so forcibly that he heard his vertebrae crack, and the air rush out of his lungs. He tried to get up a second time, but he was slammed back to the ground yet again, and this time he was paralyzed, pinned against the grass and the rocks as if some enormous weight were pressing on him.
The ghosts gathered around him, the fading electrical power that had once been their spirits crawling like glowworms across their scaly and ulcerated faces. They made a noise, like soft old tissue-paper, crumpled and recrumpled over years of use; like the breathing you can hear in an old and deserted attic, when there's nobody there. And there was a distinctive odor, too, not so much of fleshly decay, but of burned electricity terminals, and rotting flesh.
They surrounded him, but they made no immediate move to touch him. He lay where he was, pinned down, panting for breath, scared out of his mind and yet still wondering what the hell he could do. Even in the throes of a scarlet panic, the human mind still plots and schemes and programs for its own survival.
The apparitions stood back a little, and Nancy appeared, very tall now, her face stretched out almost beyond recognition.
"You are mi---I---I----I----ne," she said in a chorus of her own voices. He felt as if time had slowed, as if the air had thickened, and even his struggles against the invisible weight that was holding him down seemed to take endless minutes.
Nancy spread out her long-fingered hands, and lightning crackled from one fingertip to the other, like a Van der Graaf generator. She seemed to have built up more power now, because her body was flickering and flashing, and processions of sparks teemed off her shoulders and out of her hair as if she were infested with them. The smell of burning grew even stronger, and Harold felt a shudder go through the assembled ghosts, as if they were all sharing in Nancy's massive discharge of physical energy.
It had to be enough to kill hm. I had to be enough to release his spirit, and leave his body electrocuted on the hillside, another strange and inexplicable fatality. Then he too would be haunting Ol' Spithead, searching for Pauline, maybe, to bring her into the ranks of the dead.
Nancy touched him with her fingers, and he felt a numbing shock of current. His left leg involuntarily jerked, and his left eyelid fluttered uncontrollably.
"You can join me now," whispered Nancy. "It would have been better if you had done so by accident, or of your own free will----but I cannot wait for you any longer. I love you, Harold. I want to make love to you."
Her outstretched fingers came closer. He could see the lightning creeping along the lines of her palms, along the lifeline and the heartline and the headline. There were even sparkling charges in her nails, and around her wrists. The human energy of a lifetime was being expended to bring me with her to the grave.
Harold struggled, fought, but the pressure on his chest remained immovable. All around him, the ghosts began to sing and scream, a horrifying high cacophony like an insane-asylum. Right next to his face stood the fleshless leg of a rotting woman, the bones of her toes glowing phosphorescently. A little further away, a hooded man stood with half his face corroded away, one lidless eye glaring at him ferociously.
"You can't call this love!" Harold shouted at Nancy, his voice high with fear. Some hysterical thought process focused on their unborn child. "This isn't what we got married for! This isn't why we wanted to have our baby! God, if you love me, Nancy, let me go!"
Nancy stared at him with those impenetrable eyes. Lightning crept around her mouth, and outlined her teeth. "Baby?" she said, in a resonant echo.
"Yes," he told her, brokenly. He was so scared that he hardly knew what he was saying, or what he was trying to prove do her. "That baby you were carrying when you were killed. Our baby!"
Nancy's ghost seemed to consider what he had said with burning deepness. Around them, the graveyard creatures whispered and sang; and above their heads, the midnight clouds raced past as if they were fleeing from the same kind of fate now awaiting Harold Winstanley.
"The baby..." she said. She hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to back away from Harold; or rather, to shrink away in both size and distance. "The baby..." she repeated, in a whisper that was just as close as before. "But the baby was never born."
He looked around him. It seemed as if the other apparitions were shrinking away from him as well, and by twos and threes the crowd of them was starting to disperse. He suddenly felt the pressure relieved from his chest, and he was able unsteadily to stand up, and brush back his windswept hair. He watched in awe and indescribable relief as the ghosts floated and tumbled and hobbled away, descending the grassy hillside with their heads bowed; until they had vanished into the gates of the cemetery.
Only Nancy's ghost remained, quite a long way away, duller and dimmer now that she was no longer trying to electrocute him. Her hair flew around her, and her white gown rippled around her ankles, but he could barely make her out in the darkness.
"You are lost to me, Harold----I can never have you now..."
"Why?" Harold asked her.
"Entry into the region of the dead is by succession....you are always called by the loved one who died immediately before you----that is the power that enables the dead to summon the living. Our baby died in the hospital, long after I was already dead, and therefore he and he alone can call you to join us.....But he was never born, and therefore his spirit is still in the higher realm, and still at peace, and he cannot appear here to guide you into the region of the dead...."
Harold didn't know what to say to her. He thought of the way she had once been, and the joy she had felt when she knew that she was pregnant. If only he had known the day Dr. Ismail had called him up and said that he was going to be a father that his baby would one night save his life.
"What's going to happen to you now?" Harold asked Nancy.
She diminished ever further. "Now, I will have to stay in the region of the dead forever----now, I will never be able to rest...."
"Nancy, what can I do?" Harold shouted. "What can I do to help you?"
There was a long silence. Nancy's ghost flickered even more dimly than before, and then vanished, except for a flapping darkness against the hillside's darkness.
Then, blurry and deep, a parody of Nancy's voice said, "Salllvaggge…."
"Salvage? Salvage what? The George Badger, or what? Tell me! I've got to know what it is!"
"Salllvaggge……" the voice repeated, growing slower and deeper until it was almost incomprehensible.
Harold waited by himself for any more voices, any more ghosts, but it now seemed that they had left him alone. He walked back towards Harvest Mills Cottage, feeling as weary and as beaten as he had ever felt in his entire life.
As he reached the top of Harvest Mills, Harold saw an ambulance parked outside the cottage, with its red-and-blue lights flashing. He broke into a tired jog, and reached the front gate just as two paramedics were bringing out Claudia Wildman on a stretcher. Bruce K. Wildman was following close behind, looking distraught.
"Bruce," Harold asked him, breathlessly. "What's the matter?"
Bruce watched the paramedics lift his wife into the back of the ambulance and then he took Harold's arm and led him around to the front of the vehicle, out of earshot. The blood-red light flashed on and off against his face, as if he were God one second and Satan the next.
"Is she seriously hurt?" Harold asked. "Nancy just kind of breathed on her, that was all."
Bruce lowered his head. "I don't know what she breathed, or how she breathed it, but whatever it was, it was colder than liquid nitrogen, they said, minus 200 degrees Centigrade."
"And?" Harold asked him, frightened even to speculate what might have happened to Claudia.
"Her eyes were frozen solid," said Bruce, in an unsteady voice. "Absolutely solid;' and of course they became brittle. When she clapped her hands against them, to try to stop the pain, they shattered, like china. She's lost both of them, Harold. She'll be blind for the rest of her life!"
Harold put his arms around Bruce's shoulders and held him close. The latter was trembling all over, and he clutched at Harold as if he didn't have the strength or the ability to be able to stand on his own two feet anymore. One of the paramedics came over and told Harold, "I think it'd be a good idea if you'd let us take care of him now, sir. He's had a pretty bad shock."533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZsEqdKPbwn
"His wife? Is she....?"
The paramedic shrugged. "We've done all we can. But it looks like the septum of the nose and part of the forehead have been frozen as well. It's even possible that parts of the brain are affected. The docs won't be able to tell until they've run a few tests."
Bruce quaked his arms. The paramedic said, "Can you explain to me how this happened, sir? Is anyone around here storing liquid gases? Nitrogen, oxygen, stuff like that?"533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsYT67zGhv3
Harold shook his head. "No one I know. At least nothing as cold as that."533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPPj8cOteAt
Bruce said, "She was always so loving---she always loved her mother so dearly. Cold, never. Never, ever cold."
"He'll be okay," the paramedic repeated, and helped Bruce into the back of the ambulance. He closed the doors, and then came right up to Harold and said, "I understand she's your mother-in-law. Is that correct?"533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbh9yidcWtZ
"It is."
"Well, keep an eye on the old man. He's going to need your help."
"Is she----going to die?"
The paramedic raised a hand. "I'm not qualified to give you a prognosis on that, sir. I can tell you that it always helps if the patient has some kind of a will to go on living, and right at the moment this woman doesn't seem to have that will. Something about her daughter, I don't know. Your wife, I suppose."
"Actually, my late wife. She died one month ago."533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJTfAZmFbqE
"I'm sorry to hear that," said the paramedic. "It hasn't been your year, has it?"
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