The Vanishment by Jonathan Aycliffe Page A

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.
    One fragment of fresh information did emerge, however. In one of the police files, Raleigh had discovered a short report appended to the coroner's summary. It had been written by James Curry, the parish constable at Tredannack. According to Curry, local gossip had it that Susannah Trevorrow had given birth to a girl child four years earlier and that, as far as anyone knew, this child had still been alive and living at Petherick House until the time of her mother's disappearance. People said her name was Catherine or Katy—no one knew for certain. I remembered with a shudder the voice I had heard in Petherick House, calling that same name.
    A second rumor maintained that the child's father had been none other than Jeremiah Trevorrow, Susannah's father. Curry was inclined to dismiss the rumors about the father as malicious. Jeremiah