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road to Quaker Lane, that night when I had been driving home with Mrs Edgar
Simons; and the same girl who had been watching me in Red's Sandwich Shop in
Salem. I struggled out of my seat, banging my thighs on the fixed table, but
by the time I had reached the door the girl had disappeared. 'Did you see a
girl walk past just then?' I asked Ned
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Sanborn, behind the bar. 'She was wearing a kind of a brown cape, very pale
face, but pretty.'
Ned, shaking up a whisky sour, pulled a face that meant sorry. But Grace, one
of the waitresses, said, 'A tall girl, was she? Well, quite tall? Dark eyes
and a pale face?'
'You saw her too?'
'Sure I saw her. She came out of the back room and I couldn't work out how she
got in there. I didn't see her come in, and she hasn't been drinking here.'
'Probably a hippie,' remarked Ned. According to Ned, any girl who didn't dress
in "a sensible skirt-and-blouse and wear flat-heeled court shoes and subscribe
to Red-book was a hippie. 'Summer must be coming. First hippie of the summer.'
Normally I would have teased Ned about his use of the word 'hippie', but this
evening I was too disturbed and too worried. If the influence of the demon
beneath Gran-itehead Neck was steadily growing, then who could tell who was
one of its ghostly servants and who wasn't? Maybe that girl was a
manifestation, more solid than most. Maybe more people than I realized were
actually manifestations; maybe Ned was, and Laura, and George Markham. How was
I to tell who was a living human being and who wasn't? Supposing Mictantecutli
had already claimed them all? I began to feel like the doctor in Invasion of
the Bodysnatchers, who couldn't tell which of his friends and associates were
aliens and which ones weren't.
I left the Harbour Lights Bar and walked over to my car, which was parked in
the middle of the square. There was a torn-off note under one of the
windshield wipers, on which was scrawled in lipstick 'Eight sharp, don't
forget, L.' I climbed into the car and drove out of the village centre,
heading towards Quaker Hill. I wanted to check that the cottage was all right,
and pick up some wine at the Granitehead Market.
At the top of Quaker Lane, the cottage waited for me old and forbidding and
now more neglected-looking than ever. I still hadn't fixed that upstairs
shutter, and as I got
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out of the car it gave a slow shuddering squeak. I walked up to the front
door, and took out my key. I almost expected that familiar whisper to say
'John?' but there was no sound at all, just the frustrated seething of the
ocean, and the soft rustle of the laurel hedges.
Inside, the cottage was very cold, and beginning to smell damp. The long-case
clock in the hallway had stopped, because I hadn't wound it. I went into the
living-room and stood for a long time listening for scurries and whispers and
footsteps, but again there was silence. Perhaps Jane had given up haunting the
cottage now that she knew she was unable to claim me for the region of the
dead. Perhaps I had actually seen the last of her. I went into the kitchen,
and opened up the icebox to make sure there was nothing in there which was
growing mould on it; no hot dogs with green fur or peach preserve with
penicillin. I took out a bottle of Perrier water and drank four or five large
swallows of it straight from the neck. Afterwards I stood there grimacing at
the coldness on the roof of my mouth, and the uncompromising fizz of bubbles
which seemed to be stuck in my throat for ever.
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I was going back into the living-room to light the fire when I thought I heard
a single footfall upstairs. I hesitated in the hallway, listening hard. It
wasn't repeated, but I was so sure that I had heard somebody in one of the
bedrooms that I took my umbrella out of the umbrella-stand and began to climb
the dark ornamented stairs to see who was up there. I paused halfway up,
gripping the pointed umbrella tightly, breathing more tightly and tensely than
I wanted to.
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