The Vanishment (10 page)

There was already an understanding, I think, that Susan should know nothing of this. She had a hatred of things supernatural that was born in part of her innate skepticism, and in part of fear. Once, when we were sleeping together, I had offered to take her to see
The Exorcist
and she had refused. She pretended not to take such matters seriously, but I suspected that quite the opposite was true, that she had once seen or heard something that had left her fearful.

Before going to bed, I looked in on Rachel. She was fast asleep. A toy monkey lay on the pillow beside her. His name was Morris. Sarah and I had bought it for her before leaving for Cornwall. I kissed her on the cheek and went to my room.

Later, I was wakened by the muffled sound of Tim and Sarah making love. I turned over and tried to regain sleep, but I could not. I felt alone and confused.

Petherick House had started to feel like a bad dream. There were no slamming doors in Tim and Susan's house, no babies crying when they should not be there at all. I was feeling safe for the first time in months. Only Sarah's disappearance lay over me like a shadow betokening a deeper darkness. And then, the very next morning, I was plunged back into the horror.

The phone rang while I was washing up after breakfast. Rachel was watching television in the sitting room. I recognized the voice at once: it was Alan, my editor.

"Peter, how are you feeling?"

"Not too bad. How'd you know I was here?"

"You left the number on your answering machine."

"Did I? I can't remember."

"Peter, what's this about Sarah? You say she's vanished. Has she left you, is that it?"

I explained briefly. There was silence at the other end, then Alan's voice again, subdued.

"I'm sorry, Peter. My God, what can I say? Except that I hope she turns up soon."

"No, Alan, she won't turn up. Not like that, anyway. Sarah's dead. I'm beginning to accept that."

"But surely, without a body . . ."

"It's just a matter of time. That's what they told me. They'll find her. In the end they’ll find her."

Another silence. I waited. On the street outside, a group of children played. Their voices were high and resonant. I could hear my own breathing. Alan cleared his throat and continued.

"Peter, in a way it's a bit of a relief to hear what you've just told me."

"That Sarah's dead?"

He stammered, "No . . . no, I. . . I didn't mean that. Quite the opposite. But . . . Well, it explains something that's been worrying me."

He paused.

"Yes?"

"Well," he went on, "I imagine you've been preoccupied, that you've hardly been yourself these past few weeks."

"I don't understand, Alan. What are you trying to say?"

"Well, it's these stories, Peter—the ones you sent me."

"What's wrong with them? Don't you like them? For God's sake, Alan, they're the best thing I've written in years. I was back on my old form."

A protracted silence.

"Peter, maybe it's just a simple mistake. Have you started using a word processor?"

"Of course not. You know my feelings about computers. I typed every page out with my own dainty fingers."

"Every page?"

"Obviously."

"In that case, how come all you've sent me is twenty copies of the same piece?"

I felt myself go cold.

"I'm sorry, Alan," I said. "I don't think I understand. I sent you everything I had in my box from Cornwall. There was one set of carbons, which I've still got at the flat. I made no photocopies. What you have is twenty separate stories. Maybe your secretary tried to copy them and made a hash of it."

"Corinne hasn't even seen them. She's off ill. What I have, Peter, is twenty identical copies of a document which isn't even a story. It looks more like the transcript of an inquest. The style is late Victorian English. It could be part of a story, I suppose, but it's a bit on the long side."

The room seemed to spin. I thought of Sarah and her paintings, the ones she had done at Petherick House, so alike, yet so dissimilar in one particular.

"That's impossible," I said.

"Why don't you check?" said Alan. "Get back to me once you've sorted it out. And don't worry about it. From the sound of it, you've been under a lot of strain, Peter. A hell of a lot. You’re entitled to a few cock-ups."

But it had not been a cock-up, and I think Alan knew it. He knew my working methods as well as I did. I had never been anything but careful and methodical. I did not make unconsidered slips.

I drove back to my flat. The box of carbons was where I had left it, beneath my desk. I went through them one page at a time. It took me about two hours. By the time I had finished, I was sweating. Alan had been right: what I had was a single document repeated again and again.

Later, when I was able to examine the repetitions in greater detail, I found that they were not, in fact, exact reproductions one of the other. Like Sarah's paintings, they contained minor differences—a word here, an emphasis there, a phrase dropped, a sentence added, an expression altered. But the sense never changed.

As Alan had thought, it was the transcript of an inquest, or a fragment of one. Each time it opened and ended in the middle of a sentence, always at the same point, as though it had at one instant erupted into my mind and installed itself there like a worm, creeping in slow circles through it, as through the heart of a green apple:

. . . has now been positively identified. The remains are those of Miss Susannah Trevorrow, spinster, aged twenty-two, of Petherick House in the parish of Tredannack, here adjacent. Identification was made by her sister, Miss Agnes Trevorrow, likewise a spinster, of the same address. The deceased was reported missing by her sister on the sixteenth of July, the day after her disappearance, and a little more than three months before the discovery of her body on the Zawn Quoit rocks, below Trowan Cliff, west of St. Ives. The body was found on the morning of the twenty-fifth of October, following the great storm of the previous night. It was in a state of advanced decay and was thought unrecognizable, but by good fortune a jet bracelet had remained fastened to the corpse's left wrist. It was by means of this bracelet that Miss Agnes Trevorrow was able to effect recognition of her lamented sister's remains.

This bracelet had indeed been given to Susannah Trevorrow by her sister Agnes on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday, and was inscribed with her initials, namely S. T., the letters incised within a circle

and still perfectly visible. Both parents of the missing woman being dead. Miss Agnes Trevorrow attended the coroner's office of St. Ives on the twenty-sixth of October. There, she was shown her sister's bracelet, which she identified. Having done this, she was overcome with grief, and was subsequently confined to bed by Dr. Gibney, her attendant physician.

In the course of the inquest, it was revealed by the coroner that the deceased showed signs of having given birth to a child some three to four years previously. When questioned about this, Agnes Trevorrow admitted that it Was true her sister had conceived and borne a female child in September 1883, and that this child was now a little above four years of age. Who the father had been was not known, nor was likely now to be, for Susannah Trevorrow had at all times refused to reveal his identity. In order to avoid the scandal that would necessarily have attended this sorry event, the child had been placed with an orphanage in another part of the county immediately after birth, and was thought either to be there still or to have been adopted. As is not uncommon in such cases, the mother was told that her child had died soon after its delivery. It would appear that the father of the dead woman, Mr. Jeremiah Trevorrow, a gentleman farmer, had died on the fifth of February of this year, and that Miss Trevorrow, already in a depressed state of mind following the supposed death of her child, went rapidly into a further decline.

It was the opinion of Agnes Trevorrow that her sister, weighed down by this double grief and no longer able to contain her feelings, took steps to end her own life by casting herself from the high cliff that lies only yards from Petherick House.

In view of the circumstances, the coroner, Mr. Worthy, directed that no further questions be directed to Miss Trevorrow, and that the matter of the child not be reported in the public press. Nor was it considered necessary to conduct further inquiries concerning the fate of the child of the deceased woman, this being held not material to the case.

A verdict of death by suicide was recorded, and permission was given for the burial of the remains in the public ground at St. Ives. In the course of the inquest, the following witnesses were brought to give testimony. . . .

The rest of the document provided a more detailed account of the proceedings, with transcriptions of various depositions given by the police, the fisherman who had found Susannah Trevorrow's body, the physician who had carried out the autopsy, and Agnes Trevorrow herself.

I read it all, not once, but several times, as though in search of something. What had I been thinking of when I wrote it? I still had my list of ideas, the ones I had set out to work on while in Cornwall. None bore the slightest resemblance to this. But I did not have to look far for my inspiration: Petherick House, the cliff, a missing woman, Agnes Trevorrow. Together, they had bewitched me.

That night Rachel woke screaming from a nightmare. I heard her cry out, then the sound of her sobbing, and moments later Susan's footsteps on the way to her room. She was soon quieted. I lay awake long afterward, fearing my own dreams.

In the morning, I asked Susan what had happened.

"She had a bad dream, that's all."

"Did she say what it was about?'

Susan shook her head.

"No, she wouldn't say. She seemed badly frightened, though."

She paused to sip her coffee. I thought she looked tired. There were rings below her eyes.

"There was one thing, though." She looked at me thoughtfully. "She kept telling me she didn't want to go back. I asked her 'back where?' but she wouldn't or couldn't say. I can't think where she means. You don't have any idea, do you, Peter?"

I said no and left the table. In the garden, Rachel was playing with her dolls. Early sunlight lay on her. She looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back, but as I did so the sunlight faded and a shadow fell across the garden.

It was not until the evening that I remembered that the sixteenth of July—the day on which Susannah Trevorrow had disappeared in 1887—had also been the date of Sarah's disappearance. And according to the gravestone I had seen in Tredannack, the very day on which Agnes Trevorrow had died in 1953. I could no longer doubt that something in the past, something that had happened in Petherick House all those years ago, had drawn Sarah back to itself. Or reached out for her in the present.

I wrote to Raleigh, telling him of my little discovery and enclosing a copy of the inquest report. Would he, I asked, check the police files for that year to see if there was anything further on the death of Susannah Trevorrow? I was not convinced that the evidence given by Agnes had been true or complete, though I could not say in what particulars I doubted her. It was just that whatever had happened in that house had left a legacy of deep disturbance, and I did not think a simple suicide explained all I had seen and heard and felt there.

While waiting for Raleigh's reply, I started writing again, slowly and painfully, with none of the elan I had felt in Cornwall. Every few days I would show what I had written to Tim. He reassured me that I was no longer deluding myself, that what I had penned was fiction of my own making and not some incubus from the past.

My dreams continued no less intensely than before. Every night now, sometimes twice. The empty house seemed alive with presences. One night—it must have been the tenth or eleventh of September—I found myself at the top of the stairs on the second floor. As I turned the corner to pass into the corridor, I twisted around and looked back. On the stairs behind me, near the bottom, a small figure was standing, staring up at me. We looked at one another for a very long time. Neither of us said a word. I guessed her to be about four years old. Her face was very pale. She had dark, hollow eyes. Once, she seemed to be speaking, but when her mouth opened, no sounds came from it. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was gone. A door slammed hard, and I woke, covered in thick sweat and shivering.

I am ten years older now. My hair is white. My right hand trembles sometimes when I write, and I have to stop until it grows still. I know so much and so little.

Last week, they buried Alan Furst. The funeral was near Norwich, where he had grown up, in a churchyard planted with willows. His grave was newly dug, a narrow opening at the foot of a tall yew tree. The weather was black and cold, we were a bleak, windswept collection of mourners huddled about the grave. His wife and daughters were there in black, some people I knew from the publishing house, other authors come to say their good-byes. I watched from a distance as they lowered him. There were crows on the branches of the tree.

When will it be my turn? Will there be a yew tree? Will anyone come to see me laid to rest? But I do not think that even then I shall have true rest.

Raleigh took over a week to answer my letter. I did not recognize him in his writing. He adopted a formal, pedantic style, one at odds with the rough and direct manner that he used in person. Beneath the professional formality, I detected something else—an evasiveness, a sense of misdirection or concealment that again seemed alien. Behind his stilted wariness, I sensed that he was worried about something, but that he could not bring himself to tell me what it was.

He had dug up a heap of old files from both police and coroner's archives, but they said little that I did not know already. How had I found out about the case in the first place? he asked. The transcript I had sent him had been an almost verbatim copy of the original inquest report. In my letter, I had avoided telling him how I had come by my information, and now I felt myself trapped by my own lack of candor. How, after all, could I explain that my hand had been guided by a force outside myself, that I had never seen a report of the inquest or even known that it existed? It was something I could barely admit even to myself.