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called the region of the dead. A kind of Purgatory, I guess.'
'What are you saying?' asked Walter.
'Simply 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 isn't handed over to Mr Evelith, or anybody at the Peabody Museum, I get
Jane restored to me; and our unborn son; and Constance, too.'
'Constance? Are you serious?'
'Do you think I'd joke about it? Come on, Walter, you know me better than
that. The demon is offering me Jane, and the baby, and Constance; back to life
just as they were before any of this ever happened. No blindness, no injuries,
nothing. Perfect and whole.'
'I just can't believe it,' said Walter.
'Well, what the hell can you believe? You've seen Jane, 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 Jane. Why can't you
believe now?'
Walter put down his piece of bread, and chewed his mouthful unhappily.
'Because it's too good to be true,' he said. 'Miracles like that, they just
don't happen. Well, not to me, anyway.'
'Think about it,' I insisted. 'You don't have to come to any decisions
tonight. There may be some risk in letting
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the demon go, judging from how it behaved in the 17th century; but on the
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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 Evelith, it
actually made the sky turn dark, so that for days on end it was permanently
night. I can't see that happening today.'
Walter slowly finished his soup. Then he said, 'It actually offered to give
Constance back to me? Not blinded? Not hurt in any way?'
'Yes,' I said.
'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?'
I shrugged. 'As far as I can tell, Mictantecutli is the final arbiter of all
human death, in the Americas at least. On other continents he probably appears
in different forms.'
'So what's been happening to the dead while he's been lying beneath the sea?'
'How should I know? I presume they've been going to their ultimate
destinations without having to worry about Mictantecutli using them to recruit
more blood, more hearts, more restless spirits. According to old man Evelith,
Mictantecutli is shunned by every other supernatural creature, good or evil.
It is a complete outcast; diseased and utterly malevolent, disregarding any of
the protocol of Heaven or of 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 Salem Harbour.'
'And it can really bring Constance back? And Jane?'
'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
Constance's image
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into your house? There's nothing on earth that can do anything like that,
nothing human, anyway.'
Walter sat there for a long time, thinking. Then he said, 'What do your
friends 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.'
'Do you think that's wise?'
'Not particularly. But we're not discussing wisdom here, Walter. 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 at risk,
although I doubt if there'll be any less risk if the demon is kept in
captivity than if we set it free. Both of us have to face up to what we have
here: an ancient and 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 another, it's going to re-establish its reign, whether we like [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]