He left No. 7 and walked out into the drizzling night again. He turned right, to make his way back up Harvest Mills; but then he stopped, and hesitated, and looked downhill, towards the main highway, and the house where Mrs. Donald Baylor lived. It was just a little before 10:00, and he doubted if she would mind if Harold payed her a visit. She couldn't have too many friends these days; and there were few neighbors on the main Ol' Spithead-Salem highway. Most of the big old houses had been sold now, and demolished, to make way for gas stations and food markets and shops selling live bait and shitty souvenirs. The old Ol' Spithead people had gone with them, too old and too tired and not nearly rich enough to be able to relocate themselves to one of the fashionable waterfront houses that bordered Lobster Bay.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡU2MRbTdMCN
It was a good ten minutes' walk, but he reached the house at last---a large Federal mansion, foursquare yet graceful, with rows of shuttered windows and a curved porch with Doric pillars. The gardens that surrounded it had once been formal and well-tended, but now they were wild and hideously overgrown. The trees that surrounded the mansion itself had remained unpruned for nearly five years, and they clung around the house like spidery creatures trying to consume a brave and exquisite princess. This princess, however, had long ago faded: as he walked up the weedy shingle path, he saw that the decorative balconies had corroded, the brickwork had cracked in long diagonal zigzags, and even the decorative basket of fruit over the front porch, a design specifically favored by Ives Newmixon, was chipped and stained with bird dung.
The Atlantic wind whined across the gardens, and around the corners of the house, and chilled Harold's already-soaking back.
He went up the stone steps into the porch. The marble flooring was broken, and the paint was flaking from the front door as if the woodwork were suffering from a leprous disease. He pulled the bell handle, and he heard a muffled jangling somewhere within the house. He rubbed his hands briskly together trying to keep himself warm, but with that wind whipping around the corner it wasn't easy.
There was no answer, so Harold rang again, and knocked, too. The knocker was fashioned in the shape of a gargoyle's head, with curved horns and a glaring face. Enough to scare anyone away, even in broad daylight. What was more, it made a dead, flat sepulchral sound, like, nails being driven into the lids of solid mahogany caskets.
"Come on, Mrs. Baylor," he urged her, under his breath. "I'm not standing out here all night."
Harold decided to give it one final try. He slammed the knocker and jangled the bell, and even shouted out, "Mrs. Baylor? Mrs. Donald Baylor? You there, Mrs. Baylor?"
There was no reply. He stepped away from the door, and back down the porch steps. Maybe she had gone out visiting, although he couldn't think who she would want to visit at this time of night, in the middle of a vicious gale. Still, there didn't appear to be any lights in the house, and although it was hard to tell in the darkness, the upstairs drapes didn't appear to be drawn. So she wasn't downstairs, watching TV or anything; and it didn't look as if she were upstairs, asleep.
Harold walked around the side of the house just to make sure there were no lights on in back. It was then that he saw Mrs. Donald Baylor's Buick, parked just outside her open garage doors. The garage doors were trembling and rattling in the wind, but there was nobody there, no lights, no sounds, nothing but the rain sprinkling around the car's hood.
Well, he thought, uncertainly----maybe someone's called by and taken her out. It's none of my business, anyway. He turned around to retrace his steps around the house, but suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, thought he saw a white light flash in one of the upstairs rooms.
He stopped, and squinted against the rain. There was nothing for a while, then the light flashed again, so briefly that it could have been anything at all---the reflected headlights from some faraway car, a distant flash of lightning, mirrored in the glass. Then it flashed again, for a long sustained flicker, and he could have sworn that he caught sight of a man's face, looking down at him as he stood in the garden.
His first inclination was to run like hell. He'd tried to be calm and collected after he had seen that flickering hallucination of Nancy, but after he had got back to the cottage, he had immediately been taken by a terrified panic, and he had wrenched open the front door and cantered down Harvest Mills as fast as his legs could carry him.
Now, however, he was a little braver. Maybe Andy and Tracker had been right and all that he'd been witnessing around Harvest Mills tonight was St. Elmo's Fire, or some other kind of scientific phenomenon. Andy had said that he had witnessed it hundreds of times. so what was so odd about his seeing it twice?
All these kinds of thoughts had been teeming around in his brain during his walk down to Mrs. Donald Baylor's place, and that was why he didn't run off when he saw the face at the upstairs window. If ghosts were nothing more than formations of electricity, then how could they hurt him? The worst he could suffer would be a mild shock.
Harold went back to the front door to see if he could force it open. He even tried wangling my Bank AmeriCard into the latch, the way that thieves do in the movies, but he couldn't make it budge. Early 19th-century locks were likely impervious to 1984 vintage plastic. He 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 he found a small cellar window. It had once been screened by mesh, but the salt ocean air had 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. He picked it up, carried it quickly over to the window, and tossed 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. He kicked out the remaining splinters, and then put his own head through to see what was inside.
Harold withdrew his head, and reentered the cellar window feet first. He tore the knee of his pants on a glazier's nail on the window-frame, and said, "Fuck," in the stuffy stillness of the cellar; but it turned out to be quite easy to lower himself down to the floor. There was a sudden scurrying noise in the far corner of the cellar, and a flurry of squeaks. Rats, vicious ones, too, if they ran true to the tradition of Ol' Spithead rodents, most of whom were ship-jumpers. He groped his way across the floor, hands out in front of him, feeling like a blind man for the cellar steps.
He went around three walls before he eventually found the wooden banister rail, and the first stone step, and everywhere he shuffled the rats would squeak, scamper and jump.
Inch by inch, he worked his way up the cellar steps to the cellar door itself, and turned the knob. Mercifully, the door was unlocked. He eased it open, and stepped out into the hall.
"Mrs. Donald Baylor?" Harold called; too quietly for anyone to have heard. And his voice whispered back to him, from quite close by. "Mrs. Donald Baylor?"
He walked into the main living room. It was high-ceilinged, and smelled of lavender and dust. The furniture was old-fashioned but not antique, the kind of traditional furniture that had been popular in the middle of the 1950s, clumsy and expensive, Jacobite by way of Grand Rapids. He saw his own pale face across the room in the looking-glass over the fireplace, and he looked quickly away before he started getting hysterical again.
Mrs. Baylor was nowhere to be found, not downstairs. He went into the dining room, which smelled of snuffed-out candles and stale pecans; the pantry; which would have been an innovation when this house was first built; the old-fashioned kitchen, with its white marble working surfaces. Then he took a deep breath, and went back out into the hallway, to mount the stairs.
He was halfway up the stairs when he saw the blue-white flickering again, from one of the bedroom doors that led off the landing. He stopped for a moment, with his hand on the banister rail, but he knew that it was useless to hesitate. Either he was going to find out what this electrical flickering was, or else he was going to run away and forget about Mrs. Donald Baylor and Wilbur Price and everything, Nancy included.
"Harold," said a familiar whisper, close to his ear. He felt that tightness in his scalp again, that prickle of slowly-rising fear. The light flashed again, from under the bedroom door. It was quite silent, unlike the buzzing, crackling flash you usually get from a heavy electrical discharge; and there was a coldness about it which unnerved him.
"Harold, whispered the voice again, but this time as if it were two voices whispering in chorus.
He stood outside that bedroom door for a very long time. What are you scared of? he asked himself. Electricity? Is that it? You're scared of electricity? Come on, you've just invented a really neat explanation for the appearance of ghosts, electrical matrices and discharge impulses and all that bullshit, and now you're scared to open the door and take a look at a few sparks going off? Do you believe your own theory or not? Because if you don't, you shouldn't be here at all, you should be high-tailing it down that highway to the nearest Ramada Inn, which is the only place where you certainly won't be disturbed by ghosts.
He grasped the bedroom doorhandle, and, as he did so, he heard the singing. Faint, fainter than faint, but clear enough to freeze him where he stood
"O the men they sail from Ol' Spithead
To fish the savage waters....."
He shut his eyes, and then immediately opened them again in case something or someone appeared when he wasn't looking.
But the fish they catch are naught but bones
With hearts crush'd in their jaws."
He found himself clearing his throat, as if he were about to propose a toast. Then he turned the doorhandle, and cautiously started to push open the door.
There was a fierce crackle, and a blinding flash of light, and the door was banged wide open, the knob wrenched right out of his grasp. He stood in the doorway terrified, staring into the room, and the sight that he encountered left him open-mouthed, unable to speak or move.
It was one of the huge master bedrooms, with a wide curtained window and a draped four-poster bed. In the far corner, dazzling and flickering, stood a figure of a man, his arms spread wide. All around him, in the air, there was a living, crackling aura of electrical power, rising up from the floor with a jerking motion that put him horribly in mind of incandescent cockroaches. The man's face was long and thin, strangely distorted, and his eyes were impenetrable sockets. But Harold could see that the phantom's eyes were raised toward the ceiling, and with an inexplicable feeling of dread he raised his own eyes toward the ceiling, too.
A vast glass chandelier was suspended there, with tier upon tier of crystal droplets, and dozen gilded candle-holders. To his alarm, the chandelier was swaying from side to side, and as the crackling of electricity died down, he could hear the crystal pendants tinkling and ringing, not musically, but frantically, as though someone were trying to shake them down like apples from a tree.
There was something spread-eagled in the chandelier. No, worse than that, there was someone impaled on it! Harold took two or three mechanical steps into the bedroom, and stared up at the chandelier in total horror, unable to believe what was suspended in front of his eyes.
It was Mrs. Donald Baylor. Somehow, unbelievably, the chain that held the chandelier had penetrated right through her stomach, and now she was lying face down on top of its twelve spreading branches, writhing and shuddering like a hooked fish, clutching at the candle-holders and the crystal droplets, twisting herself in the agonizing torment of her impossible situation. 496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡksSQFDxxL1
"God, God, God," she babbled, and strings of blood and spittle dribbled from her mouth. "God, get me free, God, get me free, God, God, God, get me free."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRVtLUYc6Mz
Harold stared wide-eyed at the flickering apparition standing on the opposite side of the room, his arms raised. There was no smile on his face, no scowl, just dark and incomprehensible concentration.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡg4rcm53LvN
"Hey, you son of a bitch!" Harold screamed at him. "Let her down! Now!"496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPgtnjsGjjD
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But the apparition only flared and crackled, ignoring him, if he could even hear him at all.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZTB0K0yuBK
He looked up at Mrs. Donald Baylor, who stared back down at him with bulging eyes through the sparkling crystal pendants. Blood began to drip on the carpet, a few patters at first, then more rapidly, and then there was a sudden gush of it. She clutched at the crystal and it shattered in her hands, so that shards of it penetrated the flesh of her fingers and sliced through her palms.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAqGBlp9S2q
Harold took two, three steps back, and then rushed forward and jumped up to catch hold of the chandelier's branches, in an effort to yank it down from the ceiling. At the first try, he only managed to catch hold of it with one hand, dangled for a moment, and then had to let go. At the second try, he managed to get a better grip, and swung grimly backwards and forwards, while Mrs. Donald Baylor shuddered and bled and wept for God to save her.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBgTJExiW8u
There was a cracking noise, and the chandelier dropped a few inches. Then, with a hideous jingling sound, the chandelier fell to the floor, bringing Mrs. Donald Baylor down with it. The whole bedroom was spattered with blood and broken glass. 496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUGoeMsaz5C
Harold got off his knees, where he had awkwardly fallen. On the other side of the room, the apparition had flickered away almost to nothing now, a dim and fitful flame. He crunched through the glass to Mrs. Donald Baylor, and crouched down beside her, resting his hand on her head. She felt death cold, although her eyes were still open, and she was murmuring under her breath.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2vGFroBN8Z
"Help me," she appealed, but there was no hope in her voice at all.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs2QKwNmjSp
"Mrs. Baylor," he told her, "I'll send for the paramedics."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjOUZuH6yiw
She tried to lift her head a little, so that she could look at him. "Too late for that," she murmured. "Just----take out this chain."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡO5M2JouLyK
"Mrs. Baylor, I'm not a rescue worker. I couldn't even begin to...."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0Nhc1iQyPr
"It's so cold," she said. "Her head dropped back against the broken glass. "Oh, God, Mr. Winstanley, it's so cold. Don't leave me."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFCyLe8Nq5j
What could he say to her? He held her hand for a moment, but she didn't seem to be able to feel it, so he let her go. "Listen," he insisted, "I'm going to call the paramedics. Tell me where the phone is. Is there a phone upstairs?"496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlEMR0o087p
"Don't leave me. Please, whatever you do. He might come back."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMXEqqCLG2u
"Who? Who do you mean, Mrs. Baylor?" 496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0USA2n7FOG
"Don't leave me," she repeated. Her eyelids were starting to flutter now. He could see the whites of her eyes in the darkness of the room, sending a few final hopeless signals to a dimming world. "Don't leave me. Don't let him hurt me again."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDaYjVscTqU
"Who was it, Mrs. Baylor?" he asked her. "You have to tell me. It's important. Was it Donald? Was it your husband? Will you nod if it was Donald?"496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDC1o9IlHaS
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Her eyes closed. Her breath rattled in her throat, slowly and laboriously. He knew that he should call the paramedics, but he also knew that it was useless, and that it was far too late.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡf54V04WdMU
He bent down close to her ear. There was drying blood in it, and blood on her diamond earring, too. "Mrs. Baylor, you have to tell me. Was it Donald?"496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOWHXLfTFKa
She died without saying anything else. The final breath came out of her lungs like a long regretful sigh. He stayed beside her for a while, and then stood up, his feet crunching on the broken glass. 496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsNpWUm2cWT
It hadn't really been necessary for her to tell him whether it was Donald who had appeared in this room tonight or not. He knew it had to be him. The same way that the apparition which had appeared on his swing had inevitably been Nancy. The dead returned to haunt the living who had once loved them.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaGuEFvlDn9
He now knew something else, though, something horrifying. And that was that, far from being harmless flickers of cerebral electricity, these apparitions had the power to do strange and terrible things. Not just the power, but the will.496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLdwjhvKCvu
Harold found a telephone on the hall table downstairs. He picked it up, and said stonily, "Get me the police department, please. Yes, it's an emergency."496Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2nrjUbFePX
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