THE TRANCE

Graham's strange stillness does not end with the arrival of a doctor.

The rigid state that terrified Isbister continues. His body can be positioned and remains fixed, as though ordinary muscular life has been suspended. Attempts are made to rouse him, some of them harsh by modern standards, but nothing restores consciousness.

After a time the rigidity fades. Graham becomes physically relaxed, almost peaceful. Yet he does not wake.

He is moved first from Boscastle to medical care, and eventually to London. Doctors continue observing him, preserving the body and maintaining it as best they can.

Nothing reaches Graham.

There are no dreams that he can remember, no sensation of passing days, no awareness of doctors, rooms or changing seasons. The chaos that had filled his exhausted mind in Cornwall has become absolute silence.

Years begin separating Graham from the life he knew.

Isbister returns much later to see him. The young artist from the Cornish cliffs is no longer young. His career has changed, he has married, raised a family and watched the world transform around him.

Standing beside him is Warming, Graham's relative and solicitor, now himself an older man.

Between them lies Graham.

He looks diminished by the long suspension but not aged in the ordinary sense. While the men who once knew him have accumulated years, Graham has accumulated almost none.

To Isbister, the sight is profoundly unnatural: a human body still occupying the world while the person who should inhabit it appears completely absent.

Life continues outside the glass.

Politics changes. Technology changes. Wars and crises pass. People build careers, grow old and die.

Graham remains.

That creates another problem: property.

When Graham entered the trance he possessed a modest estate. Warming has been administering it while its owner sleeps.

The costs of maintaining Graham are relatively small. The investments do not stop. Returns are reinvested. Property appreciates. Interest earns interest.

Isbister sees immediately what that means.

The longer Graham sleeps, the richer the Sleeper becomes.

Warming is less amused by the situation.

If Graham lives for decades more, who should ultimately administer a fortune belonging to a man who neither dies nor wakes?

The normal machinery of inheritance assumes that human beings eventually leave the world. Graham refuses to do so.

They discuss whether some enduring public institution might eventually have to become his guardian.

But bureaucracy is not designed for immortality either.

Meanwhile the numbers continue growing.

Compound interest does not need Graham to be conscious.

The two men remember what Graham had been before the trance.

He was intelligent, impulsive, politically intense and prone to throwing himself completely into controversy. Warming believes the overwork that destroyed Graham's sleep grew partly from that temperament.

Some of Graham's old political predictions now look absurd. Others, unsettlingly, have already come true.

If he ever wakes, Warming observes, he will have an enormous amount to learn — and perhaps even more to unlearn.

Isbister would like to witness that moment.

Warming does not believe he ever will.

Looking through the glass at the unmoving young man, he concludes that Graham will never wake again.