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panic, and I had wrenched open the front door and cantered down Quaker Lane as
fast as I could humanly go.
Now, however, I was a little braver. Maybe Keith and George had been right,
and all that I had been witnessing around Quaker Hill tonight was St Elmo's
Fire, or some other kind of scientific phenomenon. Keith had said that he had
witnessed it hundreds of times, so what was so unusual about my seeing it
twice?
There was another reason why I didn't run away, a deeper reason, a reason tied
up with the sad and complicated feelings I had about Jane. If Jane had really
appeared to me as an electrical ghost, then I wanted to know as much about
these manifestations as I possibly could. Even if she couldn't be brought back
physically, maybe there was a way of communicating with her, even talking to
her. Maybe all this seance stuff was true after all; maybe people's souls were
nothing more extraordinary than all the electrical impulses which had made up
their brain-pattern in life, released from their fleshly body but still
integrated, still functioning as a human spirit. And since the brain contained
the sensory matrix for the body as well, wouldn't it make sense if
occasionally the body was able to appear as a flickering illusion of
electrical discharges?
All these kind of thoughts had been teeming around in my brain during my walk
down to Mrs Edgar Simons' place, and that was why I didn't run off when I saw
the face at the upstairs window. If ghosts were nothing more than formations
of electricity, then how could they hurt me? The worst I could suffer would be
a mild shock.
I went back to the front door to see if I could force it open. I even tried
wangling my Bank AmeriCard into the latch, the way that thieves do in the
movies, but I couldn't make it budge. Early 19th-century locks were probably
impervious to late 20th-century plastic. I walked around to the other side of
the house, skirting the twisted and briar-infested trunks of the trees which
clung around the brickwork, until I found a small cellar window. It had once
been screened by mesh, but the salt ocean air had
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corroded the wire, and it took only two or three hard tugs to pull the meshing
loose.
Close by, on the overgrown garden path, lay the blind and broken head of a
stone cupid. I picked it up, carried it quickly over to the window, and tossed
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it like a bowling-ball through the glass. There was a splintering smash, and
then a heavy thud as the head hit the floor down below. I kicked out the
remaining splinters, and then put my own head through to see what was inside.
It was utterly black, and it smelled of damp, and mould, and the peculiar
fustiness of hundred-year-old buildings, as if the accumulated experiences of
all those decades of time had permeated the timbers, and dried out, leaving a
saltpetre of sadness, and passion, and evaporated joys.
I withdrew my head, and re-entered the cellar window feet first. I tore the
knee of my pants on a glazier's nail on the window-frame, and said, 'Shit,' in
the stuffy stillness of the cellar; but it turned out to be quite easy to
lower myself down to the floor. There was a sudden scurrying noise in the far
corner of the cellar, and a flurry of squeaks. Rats, and vicious ones, too, if
they ran true to the tradition of Granitehead rodents, most of whom had jumped
from ships. I groped my way across the floor, hands out in front of me,
feeling like Blind Pew for the cellar steps.
I went around three walls before I eventually found the wooden banister rail,
and the first stone step, and everywhere I shuffled around the rats would
squeak and scamper and jump.
Inch by inch, I worked my way up the cellar steps to the cellar door itself,
and turned the knob. Mercifully, the door was unlocked. I eased it open, and
stepped out into the hall.
Mrs Simons' house had been built when Salem was the fifth most prosperous
seaport in the world, and the sixth city in the United States, collecting
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