Pauline and Harold had an early supper at The King's Table, an elegant pink-and-white decorated restaurant that had just opened on Fleet Street. Pauline had changed into one of her own dresses from Satin & Calico, a simple off-the-shoulder design with a lace bodice and silk-ribbon ties. They ate moules marinieres and pintadeaux aux raisins. The candles flickered between them; and if the George Badger and all its attendant ghosts hadn't been hanging over them like the relentless menace it was, they would have had a happy, cheerful evening, and probably gone back to Pauline's place and made love.452Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8oXfkZfepy
As it was, they didn't dare. Pragmatic as Pauline was, she nonetheless knew that he was still carrying with him the unexorcized memory of his recently-dead wife; and that any intimacy between them would at as a catalyst for vicious psycho-kinetic forces. Pauline personally believed that the forces came from inside his own mind, that his own guilt was strong enough to make windows shatter and ghosts appear. She just didn't believe in ghosts, no matter what any of them told her. But however the forces were unleashed, she didn't want to risk a repetition of what had happened at the Hawthorne Inn. Next time, either she, or he, might be seriously hurt, or even killed.
"Do you think you'll ever remarry?" she asked Harold, as they finished their brandies after dinner.
"It's hard to say," he replied. "I can't envisage it just yet."
"But you're feeling lonely?"
"Not right now."
She reached across the table and traced a line across the knuckles of his left hand with her fingertip. "Don't you sometimes wish you were Superman, and that you could turn the world backwards, and rescue your wife just before the accident?"
"It's no use wishing for the impossible," Harold said. But at the same time, his mind said slyly, you've done it, Harold, you've already arranged it; when the George Badger comes up from the bottom of the ocean, you'll have your wife back again, just as she was before the crash. Smiling, warm, and loving; pregnant, too, with your first-born child. Only Anne Putnam knew what he had done; what bargains he had made to have his family returned to him from the region of the dead, and to save Anne herself from Supay's anger. And when he had driven her to Dr. Lockwood's clinic last night, Anne had promised him solemnly that she would tell nobody what he had pledged to the Devil-In-Gold; and that his bargain with the demon would always remain a secret. After all, her life depended on it, as much as Nancy's.
He felt guilty, naturally. He felt that he had betrayed Michael and Hubert, and Pauline, too, in a way. But there are times in your life when you have to make a decision in favor of your own happiness at the possible expense of other people's, and Harold believed that this was one of them. At least, he had managed to convince himself that this was one of them; and that with Anne's life so dangerously at risk, he was powerless to do otherwise.
There are always 100 good excuses for cowardice and selfishness; whereas courage is its own justification.
After dinner, Harold drove Pauline home to Witch Hill Road, kissed her, and promised to drop into Satin & Calico in the morning. Then he took routes 128 and 1 southwards to Boston, and to Dedham. He thought he would probably be wasting his time, going to talk to Bruce K. Wildman, but Michael had been so insistent that he felt a need to try. He played Rachmaninoff on his car stereo and tried to relax, while the lights of Melrose and Malden and Somerville went gliding by him.
When he drew up outside the Bedford house, it was in darkness. Even the coach lamps outside the front door were switched off. Shit, Harold thought, a 20-mile drive for nothing. It hadn't even occurred to him that Bruce wouldn't be home. He always went home, every night; or at least he had when Claudia was still alive. He should have called him first; he was likely spending a few days with neighbors, to get over the shock.
All the same, Harold walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He heard it ringing in the hallway; and he stood there for a while, rubbing his hands and shuffling his feet to keep himself warm. A whip-poor-will called somewhere in the tall trees at the back of the house; and then again. He was reminded of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, in which the appearances of grisly primeval monsters like Yog-Sothoth was always preceded by the crying of thousands of whip-poor-wills.
Harold was about to walk around the back of the house, to see if Bruce was in his TV room, when the front door suddenly opened, and Bruce stood there staring out at me.
"Bruce?" Harold said. He stepped closer, and saw that he looked unusually pale, and that his eyes were circled and puffy, as if he hadn't slept. He was wearing blue pajamas and a herringbone sport coat, with the collar turned up.
"Bruce?" Harold said, "are you all right? You look terrible."
"Harold?" he replied, pronouncing his son-in-law's name as if it were his first word in years.
"What happened, Bruce? Have you been to the office? You look as if you haven't slept since I last saw you."
"No," he said, "I haven't. I guess you'd better come in."
Harold followed him into the house. It was chilly and dark in three; and he saw from the thermostat on the wall that he had turned down the heat. As he passed, Harold turned it up again; and by the time they reached the sitting room, the radiators were starting to click and clonk as they warmed up. Harold watched him with a curiously stunned expression on his face as he went around switching on the lamps and drawing the drapes.
"Now then," Harold asked him. "How 'bout a drink?"
He nodded. Then, rather suddenly, he sat down. "Yes," he said, "I guess I will.
Harold poured them two whiskeys and handed Bruce one. " How long have you been wandering around in the dark?" he asked him.
"I don't know. Ever since...."
Harold sat down next to him. He looked even worse than he had first thought. He hadn't shaved since the weekend, and his chin was covered in white prickly stubble. His skin was unwashed and greasy. When he lifted the whiskey glass to his lips, his hands trembled almost uncontrollably, likely from hunger and fatigue as much as anything else.
"Listen," Harold told him, "get yourself cleaned up and then I'll take you down the road to the Taco Bell. It's not the Four Seasons but you need some hot food inside you."
Bruce downed the whiskey, coughed, and then looked anxiously all around him. "She's not still here, is she?" he asked. His eyes were haunted and bloodshot.
"Who do you mean?" Harold asked him.
"I've seen her," he told Harold, clutching hold of his wrist. Close up, he smelled of stale sweat and urine, and his breath was foul. Harold could hardly believe that this was the same fastidious Bruce who had once raised an eyebrow at him because the backs of his shoes were unpolished. "After you left, she came; and she spoke to me. I thought I was dreaming. Then I thought that maybe it hadn't happened after all, that she wasn't dead, and that I must have been dreaming before. But she was here, right here, right in this room, and she spoke to me."
"Who was here? What are you talking about?"
"Claudia," he insisted. "Claudia was here. I was sitting by the fire and she spoke to me. She was standing right there, just behind that chair. She was smiling at me."
Harold felt a deep chill of fear. There was no doubt now that the power of Supay was spreading, and flourishing. If it could raise Claudia's ghost as far away as Dedham, then it wouldn't be long before it could wreak havoc over half the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and that was while it was still lying on the sea-bed.
"Bruce," Harold said, as comfortingly as he could, "Bruce, you don't have any reason to worry."
"But she said she wanted me. She said I should come to join her. She begged me to kill myself, so that we could be together again. She begged me, Harold. Cut your throat, Bruce, she told me. There's a sharp knife in the kitchen, you won't even feel it. Cut your throat as deep as you can, and join me."
Bruce was shaking so much that Harold had to grasp his arms to make him settle down.
"Bruce," said Harold, "that wasn't Claudia who was talking to you. Not the real Claudia; any more than it was the real Nancy who killed her. You may have seen something that looked like Claudia, but it was the demon that lies inside of the George Dark that was controlling it, and making it say things like that. That spirit feeds on human life and human hearts. It's taken Nancy's, and Claudia's; now it wants yours."
Bruce didn't appear to get it. He gazed at Harold, his eyes shooting from side to side in high tension. "Not Claudia?" he asked him. "What do you mean? She had Claudia's face, appearance, voice....How could it not have been Claudia?"
"All things considered, it was a sort of projected image. That is to say, when you see Faye Dunaway on the motion picture screen, the picture has Faye Dunaway's face, and voice, and everything, except you know damn well that what you're seeing is really Faye Dunaway."
"Faye Dunaway?" asked Bruce, perplexed. He was obviously in a mild state of shock; and what he needed right now was food, reassurance, and rest, not a complex argument about psychic illusions.
"Come on," said Harold. "I'll take you out for something to eat. But you need to get yourself changed first, and showered. Do you think you can manage to do that? It'll make you feel a whole lot better."
Upstairs, in his large blue-and-white bedroom, Harold laid out some fresh underwear and slacks for him, as well as a warm sweater and a tweed coat. Bruce looked very thin and frail when he came into the bedroom from the shower, but at least he seemed to have calmed down, and a wash and a shave seemed to have refreshed him. "To tell you the truth," he said, "I don't much care for tacos. There's a little restaurant on the John Milton road where they make excellent steak-and-oyster pies; Tudor's, it's called. It's like a British pub."
"If you're feeling like steak-and-oyster pies, you're feeling better," Harold told him. He toweled his hair and nodded.
Tudor's restaurant was just the right place for an intimate dinner: it had small enclosed booths, lit by mock-gaslamps, and scrubbed deal tables. They ordered the London Particular green-pea soup, and one Tower Bridge steak-and-oyster pie, with Guinness to wash it down. Bruce ate quietly for almost ten minutes before he put down his soup spoon and looked at Harold, relieved.
"I can't tell you how glad I am that you came," he said. "I think you just about saved my life."
"That's one of the reasons I drove over," Harold told him. "I wanted to talk to you about saving lives."
Bruce tore off some wholemeal bread, and buttered it. "Oh, not that salvage operation of yours?"
"Yes."
"Then, I've got bad news for you, Harold. Yes, I gave it some more thought, but I still can't see my way clear to raising that much money out of people that trust me to keep their money locked up as safely as possible. They're not looking for large dividends, these people; they're cautious, careful, long-term family investors."
"I can't take no for an answer, Bruce," said Harold. "Nancy came to visit me two nights ago, and this time she wasn't like a ghost at all. She could have been solid, she could have been real. She said that the influence that's down in this shipwreck, this demon, or whatever it is, is capable of bringing back to life people who have recently died, people who are still wandering in what she called the region of the dead. A kind of purgatory, I'd guess."
"What are you saying?" asked Bruce.
"Just this: that the demon offered me three lives in exchange for its own freedom. If I help to raise it up off the ocean floor, and then make sure that it's not handed over to Mr. Knight, or anybody at the Peabody Museum, I get Nancy restored to me; and our unborn son; and our unborn son; and Claudia, too."
"Claudia? Are you serious?"
"Do you think I'd make up a story like this? Come on, Bruce, you know me better than that. The demon is offering me Nancy, and the baby, and Claudia; back to life just as they were before any of this ever happened. No blindness, no injuries, nothing. Perfect and whole."
"I'm not going for it," said Bruce.
"Well, why the hell can't you go for it? You've seen Nancy flying through the air like a cartwheel. You've seen your own wife frozen blind right on my front path. You believed before, when I first told you about Nancy. Why can't you believe now?"
Bruce put down his piece of bread, and chewed his mouthful unhappily. "It sounds too good to be true, that's why," he said. "Miracles like that just don't happen. Not to me, anyway."
"Think about it," Harold insisted. "You don't have to come to any decisions tonight. There may be some risk in letting the demon go, judging from how it behaved in the 17th century; but on the other hand, people aren't so superstitious these days, the way they were then, and it's unlikely that the demon is going to be able to exert the same powerful influence that it did then, in 1690. According to Mr. Knight, it actually made the sky turn dark, so that for days on end it was permanently night. I can't see that happening today."
Bruce slowly finished his soup. Then he said, "It really offered to give Claudia back to me? Not blinded? Not hurt in any way?"
"Yes," said Harold.
"To have her back...." he said, slowly shaking his head. "It would seem like none of this nightmare ever happened."
"That's right."
"But how can it do that? How can the demon actually do that?"
Harold shrugged. "As far as I can tell, Supay is the final arbiter of all human dead, at least according to the Incas, anyway. On other continents he likely appears in different forms."
"So what's been happening to the dead while he's been lying beneath the sea?"
"How the hell should I know? I assume they've been going to their ultimate destinations without having to worry about Supay using them to recruit more blood, more hearts, more restless ghosts. According to old man Knight, Supay is shunned by every other supernatural creature, good or bad. It's a total outcast; diseased and utterly malevolent, disregarding any of the protocol of Heaven or Hell. But its power is such that it can afford to; or at least it was, before it was sealed in that copper vessel and sunk to the bottom of Lobster Bay."
"And it can really bring Claudia back? And Nancy?"
"So it says. From what it's done so far, I don't have any reason to doubt it. Can you imagine how much psychic power it must have taken just to bring Claudia's image into your house? There's nothing on earth that can do anything like that, nothing human, at least."
Bruce sat there for a long time, thinking. Then he said, "What do your buddies from the Peabody have to say about it? I don't suppose they're particularly happy."
"They don't know. I haven't told them."
"Don't you think maybe you should?"
"No way. But we're not discussing should or shouldn'ts here, Bruce. We're discussing whether you and I want our dead wives back or not. I'm not saying there isn't a price. It's conceivable that other people may be put in danger, although I doubt if there'll be any less danger if the demon is kept in captivity than if we set it free. Both of us have to face up to what we've got here: an ancient an incomprehensible influence that controls the very process of death itself. The lord of the region of the dead, that's what they call it. And one way or the other, it's going to re-establish its reign, whether we like it or not. If we leave it under the ocean, the copper vessel will eventually corrode to the point where Supay will be able to escape of its own accord; if we bring it up and keep it at the Peabody, or send it off to old man Knight, who knows how long they'll be able to keep it under control? Even George Badger couldn't, and he was the man who first brought it here. So, from every angle, it looks like a catch-22 situation---in which case I'm suggesting that we at least rescue Nancy and Claudia."452Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡc19nCn2Xzy
Harold was glad he wasn't someone else, listening to himself presenting this argument. It was flawed in logic, flawed in fact, and most of all it was flawed in fundamental morality. I didn't know anything about old man Knight's ability to control Supay: according to Anne, he already had some kind of plan worked out, a plan involving Tyee and Sarah and the rest of the Salem witch-coven. Neither did he know for sure if Supay's copper vessel was corroding or not. Worst of all, he didn't know what hideous influence Supay would be able to exert over both the living and the dead once Bruce and I had set it free.
Harold thought of George Badger, literally exploding as he walked towards his house. He thought of Wilbur Price, and the crushing, grinding noise of those tombstones. He thought of Mrs. Donald Boyd, screaming for help. He thought, too, of Nancy: smiling and seductive, a solid form without any reality, a dead wife who walked. All of these images tumbled over in his mind as a confusion of fear, disbelief, depression, nightmare, and unrealized terror. But there was one hope to which he was clinging with fierce and illogical tenacity; one hope that enabled him to disregard the naked fear of Supay's walking dead, the children of The Undesirable; and the extreme danger of releasing an ancient demon into a modern world. That hope was the hope of seeing Nancy alive again, of being able to hold her again, against all the dictates of fate and human destiny, against all accepted logic. It was the only hope that Supay knew that he could never deny, no matter what the threatened consequences might be; and that was what made Supay a demon.
Bruce said, "All right, Harold, I'm in. But I still have the problem of how to present this as an investment portfolio to wrestle with."
"That's easy," Harold told him. "Just show your clients pictures of the Wasa, and the Mary Rose. Tell them how much prestige is going to be involved. And then explain how the salvaged ship is going to be displayed to the public, possibly as the central attraction in an recreational theme park. Come on, Bruce, five or six million dollars isn't asking for the world. A cheap movie costs five or six million dollars."
"My clients don't invest in cheap movies," said Bruce.
"Listen," Bruce said earnestly, "do you want Claudia back or not?"452Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzoP4Bn5ti6
The waitress brought him his steak-and-oyster pie. He prodded it with his fork like a man who has suddenly lost his appetite. "You can go back to the salad bar if you want to," the waitress told him. "There's no extra charge."452Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIaxYMDGUhL
"Thanks," he said, and then looked across the table with a haunted, tired expression. "Supposing nothing comes of this?" he asked Harold. "Supposing it's all a dream, all an illusion? I'll have lost my career, as well as Claudia."
"Supposing you never give it a try?" Harold retorted. "What will you think then, for the rest of your life? 'I could have had Claudia back, but I was too scared to make the effort.'"452Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyKOrgz3Q0g
Bruce cut into his pie-crust, and a curl of fragrant steam rose out of it. He slowly ate, and without much evident relish; but all the same he was still hungry enough to finish most of the pie, and his bread as well. He drained the last of his Guinness, and then drummed his fingers sharply on the deal tabletop.
"Five or six million, is that it?"
"That's the estimate."
"I'll need a more accurate costing than that."
"No problem."
He wiped his mouth with his napkin. "I don't see what I'm letting myself in for," he said. "But the least I can do is run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it."
"Think of Claudia," Harold reminded him.
"I am," he said. "That's what's bothering me."
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