The Pariah (11 page)

‘Go on,’ I said. I poked the fire to keep it crackling.

There isn’t very much to tell,’ said Edward, ‘but one summer there was an unusually low tide in Salem Bay, and even the smaller ships were stranded on the mud. This was 1704, I think, or 1705. The low tide is mentioned in several other diaries and records as well, so it’s soundly authenticated. It was during this low tide that a friend of Pearson Turner’s spotted in the mud banks to the west of Granitehead Neck a protrusion from the mud which he took to be part of the bow castle of a sunken and half-buried ship.

Pearson walked out to the wreck himself, in wading boots, although he was unable to get as close as he might have liked because the ooze was so soft. He did manage, however, to bring back to the shore a fragment of decorative moulding, and Esau Hasket, who owned the
David Dark,
tentatively identified it as part of his lost ship.’

‘Lost? The
David Dark
was lost?’

‘Oh, yes. She sailed out of Salem Harbour on the last day of October, 1692, and the only reason I know that is because it happens to be mentioned in the diaries kept by one of the early Salem wharfingers. He says something like, “A tempestuous north-westerly gale had been blowing for three days and showed no sign of letting up, but in spite of the perilous weather the
David Dark
set sail, the only vessel to do so during that whole wild week. She vanished into the storm and was never again seen in Salem.”

That’s the gist of it, anyway. I can show you the diary itself, if you like.’

‘But what’s the connection with apparitions in Granite-head?’ I asked. There must be scores of wrecks around these shores.’

As the fire blazed up, Edward unbuttoned his jacket. ‘Let me get you another beer first,’

I told him.

I went outside to the kitchen. At the foot of the staircase, I paused for a second or two, listening. I hadn’t been upstairs yet, not since I had seen the flickering light in there last night. I hoped to God there wasn’t anything up there which I didn’t want to see. I hoped to God that Jane wouldn’t appear again, not for her father, not for her mother, and especially not for me. She was dead but I wanted her to stay dead, for her own sake, and for the sake of our child who never was.

When I came back with the beer, Edward was leafing through
Great Men of Salem.

‘Thanks,’ he said, then, ‘you’re not having trouble yourself, are you?’

 Trouble?’

 ‘You haven’t seen anything which might suggest that Jane’s trying to get in touch with you? Or maybe
heard
something? A lot of the Granitehead hauntings have been aural, rather than visual.’

I sat down, realized my glass was empty, and stood up again. ‘I, er, I - no. No, nothing like that. I guess it only happens to old Graniteheaders. Not to us strangers.’

Edward nodded, as if he accepted what I was saying, but didn’t completely believe me.

‘You were telling me about the connection between the
David Dark
and the hauntings,’ I reminded him.

‘Well ,’ he said, ‘it’s only fair to warn you that in strictly scientific terms, it’s a pretty tendentious connection. It wouldn’t win a history award. But I don’t know what sort of a world we’re dealing with here: I don’t know why these spirits are manifesting themselves, or what for, or how. It may just be an unpleasant freak of nature, something to do with weather conditions, or maybe it’s something to do with geographical location.

Granitehead may be like Easter Island, a spot on the map that for completely incomprehensible reasons happens to be conducive to spiritual apparitions.’

‘But you think it’s the ship.’

‘I’m
inclined
to think it’s the ship. And the reason why I’m inclined to think it’s the ship is because I’ve discovered two accounts of the
David Dark
being prepared for her last voyage - one written before she sailed and the other written nearly eighty years later. I found the contemporary account in the most boring old book you could think of, a late 17th century treatise on maritime shipfitting and metalwork. It was written by a shipbuilder from Boston called Neames, and let me tell you that man was tedious. But right near the very end of the book he mentions the Salem coppersmiths of Perly and Fisk, and says what a magnificent job they were making of a “huge copper vessel” to be fitted inside the
David Dark
for the purpose of “containing that Great Foulness which has so plagued Salem, that we may look forward to its final removal.” ‘

‘You know this stuff by heart,’ I remarked, not altogether admiringly.

‘I’ve studied it often enough,’ said Edward. ‘But Jane was the one for learning history by heart. She could reel off dates and names like a memory bank.’

‘Yes,’ I said, remembering the way Jane could memorize telephone numbers and birthdays. I didn’t really want to discuss Jane with Edward Wardwell; it was too sensitive a subject, and besides, I felt absurdly but strongly jealous that Edward had known her before me.

‘What was the other account?’ I asked him.

‘The later one - 82 years later, as a matter of fact -was contained in the memoirs of the Reverend George Nourse, who had lived and worked in Granitehead for most of his life.

He said that one day in 1752 he attended the deathbed of an old-time Salem bo’sun, and the bo’sun asked him particularly to commend his soul to heaven,, since when he was younger he had spied on the secret loading of the
David Dark’s
last cargo, even though he had been warned that al who set eyes on it would be condemned to walk the earth forever, neither alive nor dead. When the Rev. Nourse asked the bo’sun what the cargo might have been, the bo’sun went into convulsions and started screaming about

“Mick the Cutler”. The Rev. Nourse was greatly disturbed by this, and went to speak to all the cutlers in the Salem district to see if he could throw some light on what the bo’sun had said, but without success. But he later said himself that he was sure that he had seen the bo’sun after his death, just turning the corner by Village Street.’

I sat back in my chair and considered what Edward Wardwell had been suggesting.

Under normal circumstances, I would have dismissed it immediately as a fairy-story. But I knew now that fairies and goblins and all kinds of other manifestations might actually exist, and if a young man as serious as Edward Wardwell were convinced that the wreck of the
David Dark
was somehow influencing the community of Granitehead, then I was not too far away from taking him seriously.

And what had that old witch-woman said to me on Salem Common? ‘It’s
the place
you die, not the time, that makes the difference. There are spheres of influence; and sometimes you can die within them, and sometimes you can die without them. The influence came, and then the influence fled; but there are days when I believe that it didn’t flee for good and all.’

‘Well ,’ I said at last, ‘I suppose you want this picture because it might give you some clues about what the
David Dark
might have been carrying?’

‘More than that,’ said Edward, T want to know what she looked like, as exactly as possible. I do have one sketch which is supposed to be the
David Dark,
but it isn’t even half as graphic as this.’

He looked at me, and took off his spectacles. I knew that he wanted me to say that he could have the picture, that I would drop my thousand-dollar price to $300; but I wasn’t going to. There was always the remote possibility that he was a glib and creative confidence trickster, and that he had simply invented all these stories about Pearson Turner and the Rev. Nourse and ‘Mick the Cutler’. I didn’t really believe that he had, but I still wasn’t going to let my picture go.

‘The detail in this painting is vitally important,’ he said. ‘Although it isn’t very artistic, it looks reasonably accurate, and that means I can more or less estimate the size of the
David Dark,
and how many frames her hull was likely to have, and how her superstructure was fashioned. And
that
means that when I do find her, I can be sure I’ve located the right ship.’

‘When you
what?’
I asked him. ‘When
you find
her?’

Edward replaced his spectacles and gave me a small smile of modest pride. ‘I’ve been diving off Granitehead Neck for seven months now, trying to locate her. I haven’t been able to do too much diving during the winter, but now that spring’s here, I intend to start again in earnest.’

‘What the hell do you want to find her for?’ I asked him. ‘Surely, if she’s having this kind of influence on Granitehead, she’s better off under the water.’

‘Under the mud, you mean,’ said Edward. ‘She’ll be pretty deeply buried by now. We’ll be lucky if there’s even a few frame-tops showing.’

‘We’ll
be lucky?’

‘There’s a couple of other guys from the museum helping me, and Dan Bass from the Granitehead Aqualung Club. And Gilly McCormick’s been my unofficial lookout and log-keeper.’

‘You really believe you can find this wreck?’

‘I think so. It’s not too deep around that side of the Neck, because of the way the mud builds up. There are dozens of wrecks down there, but almost all of them are yachts and small dinghies, all comparatively recent. We did come across the remains of a fabulous 1920s Dodge motorboat, but that couldn’t have sunk more than six months ago. When the summer comes, we intend to scan the seabed with EG & G sub-mud sonar, and see if we can pinpoint the
David Dark
precisely.’

‘Surely she would have decayed by now. There won’t be anything left to pinpoint.’

‘I think there will,’ Edward disagreed. ‘The mud there is so soft that you can plunge your arm into it right up to the elbow without any trouble at all. Once, I almost sank down to my waist. The
David Dark,
if she sank around there, would have been buried almost up to her original waterline pretty well straight away, and over the next few weeks she would have sunk deeper. All the timber under the mud would have been preserved intact, and as it happens a particularly cold current runs into Salem Bay around Granitehead Neck, and that would have had the effect of inhibiting decay in the timbers that remained exposed. Fungi and bacilli don’t like cold water, any more than gribble or
nototeredo norvavica -
that’s a woodboring mollusc, to you.’

‘Thanks for the marine biology lesson. But what are you hoping to do if you eventually locate the
David Dark!’

 Edward spread his hands in surprise. ‘Bring her up, of course,’ he said, as if it had been obvious, all along. ‘Bring her up and find out what it is she’s carrying in her hold.’

   
TWELVE

Edward Wardwell drove us down to the West Shore Fishery in his dented blue Jeep, and I bought him a dinner of oyster stew and entrecote steak. For the first time in two days I discovered that I was really hungry, and I ate two portions of Irish barmbrack with my stew, and a heap of salad with my steak.

The Fishery was decorated in that nets-and-lobsters style ubiquitous in restaurants all along the New England shoreline; but it was dim and relaxing and very normal in there, and the clams and flounder were better than most. All I wanted was good food and normality, especially after last night.

Edward told me that he had started sub-aqua diving in San Diego, when he was 15 years old. ‘I’m not especially good at it,’ he said, buttering another piece of tea-bread, ‘but it did whet my appetite for underwater archaeology.’

Contrary to the popular notion that the Pacific and the Caribbean were littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure-ships, Edward said that the best-preserved vessels were almost always in northern waters. ‘In the Mediterranean, for example, a timber ship will last about five years under the water. In the Pacific, you’ll be lucky if it lasts just over a year. Ironwork, in warm water, will last only 30 or 40 years.’

He drew circles on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger. ‘What you grow to understand when you get involved with underwater archaeology is that there is no such thing as “The Ocean”. The conditions under the ocean vary as much from one location to another as they do on land. Take the
Wasa,
which sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628 and was raised almost intact in 1961. She was in amazing condition, simply because the water was too cold for teredo molluscs to survive there, and attack her woodwork. And in the Solent, which is the entry to Southampton and Portsmouth harbours in England, the
Royal George
was still pretty solid after 53 years on the bottom, and the
Edgar
was still an obstruction to shipping after 133 years. The classic example, of course, was the
Mary Rose,
which sank in 1545. That was nearly 150 years before the
David Dark
went down, and yet half of her hull, the half that had been buried in the mud, had survived.’

‘It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring up the
Wasa
and the
Mary Rose,’
I reminded him. ‘How are you going to bring up the
David Dark
when you can’t even afford a thousand dollars for a picture?’

‘The first step is to locate her, to prove that she’s there. Once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to approach the Peabody and the Essex Institute and City Hall, and see what I can do about raising finance.’

‘You’re pretty confident.’

‘I think I have to be. There are two compelling reasons for bringing up that wreck. One is its straightforward historical importance. The other is that it’s having this weird effect on the people of Granitehead.’

‘Well , I’ll go along with that,’ I said. I beckoned to the waiter to bring me another whisky.

‘I have a terrific idea,’ said Edward. ‘Why don’t you come diving with me over the weekend? If the weather’s reasonable, we plan to go down on Saturday morning, and maybe Sunday, too.’

‘Are you kidding? I never dived in my life. I’m from St Louis, remember?’

‘I’ll teach you. It’s as easy as breathing. It’s pretty murky down there, not like diving off Bermuda or anything like that. But you’ll love it, once you get used to it.’

‘Well , I don’t know,’ I said, reluctantly.

‘Just come try it,’ urged Edward. ‘Listen, you want to find out what happened to Mrs Edgar Simons, don’t you?

You want to find out why all these ghosts have been walking in Granitehead?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll give you a call then, Saturday morning, if the weather clears. All you need to bring is a warm sweater, a windbreaker, and a pair of swimming shorts. I’ll supply the wet suit, and al the sub-aqua gear.’

I drained the last of my drink. ‘I hope I haven’t let myself in for anything terrifying.’

‘I told you, you’ll love it. Oh - just remember not to have anything too rich for breakfast. If you vomit underwater, it can be really dangerous, sometimes lethal.’

I gave him a slanted smile. ‘Thanks for the warning. Is a bowl of Wheaties overdoing it?’

‘Wheaties are fine,’ said Edward, quite seriously. Then he checked his waterproof diver’s watch, and said, ‘I’d better be going. My sister’s coming up from New York tonight, and I don’t want to leave her on the doorstep.’

Edward drove me back up to Quaker Lane Cottage. ‘Do you know something interesting?’ he asked me, as he drew the Jeep to a jerking halt. ‘I once checked back on the origin of the name “Quaker Lane” because it always struck me as incongruous that a lane should have been named for the Quakers when there were never any around here. I mean, most of them, as you know, were centred around Pennsylvania; and as far as I could discover there were no records of any Friends in Granitehead, not until the middle of the 19th century.’

‘Did you find out why it was named “Quaker Lane”?’ I asked him.

‘Eventually, almost by accident. In the flyleaf of an old book that was sent in to the Peabody by old Mrs Seymour, she’s always sending us stuff, most of it trash out of her attic. But in this one, someone had written, “Craquer Lane, Granitehead.” ‘

‘ “Craquer”? That sounds French.’

‘It is. It means to crack, or break.’

‘So why should anyone have called this Craquer Lane?’

‘Don’t ask me. I’m only a maritime historian. Maybe the surface of the lane was notoriously broken-up. This was the way they used to carry the coffins up to Waterside Cemetery, remember, so maybe they called it Craquer Lane because they were always dropping the coffins and breaking them. Who knows?’

‘That’s what I like about historians,’ I told him. ‘They always bring up more questions than they answer.’

I climbed down from the Jeep and closed the door. Edward reached over and put down the window. ‘Thanks for the dinner,’ he said. ‘And, you know, good luck with the cops.’

He drove off downhill, the wheels of the Jeep splashing and jolting in the puddles. I went back into the cottage and poured myself another drink, and started to tidy up a little. Mrs Herron from Breadboard Cottages sent her maid Ethel up to ‘do’ for me twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, change the bed, Hoover the rugs, clean the windows; but I liked to have the cottage reasonably clean and tidy in any case, and I always liked fresh flowers around. They reminded me of the happy days here with Jane; the best days of my whole damn life.

That evening, I sat in front of the fire and read as much as I could find about sunken ships, and sub-aqua diving, and the old days in Salem and Granitehead. By the time the Tompion clock in the hallway struck midnight, the wind had dropped and the rain had eased off, and I probably knew as much about raising wrecks as anybody, apart from the real experts. I poked the last crumbling log in the dying fire, and stretched myself, and wondered whether I deserved a last drink or not. It was a peculiar thing about drinking on my own: I never quite managed to get drunk. I got the hangovers, though. It was the punishment without the pleasure.

I locked up the cottage and took a last measure of Chivas upstairs with me. I ran a deep, hot, tub full of water, and slowly undressed. I hadn’t slept properly for two nights now, and I felt exhausted.

Once in the bath, I lay back and closed my eyes and tried to let the tension slowly soak out of me. All I could hear was the steady dripping of the hot faucet, which had never turned off properly, and the crackling of Badedas bubbles.

Now that the weather had quietened down, and the wind had stopped sucking and breathing its way around the house, I felt strangely less afraid. Maybe it was the wind that had brought the spirits, the way that it had brought Mary Poppins; and when it changed or dropped, the spirits left us in peace. I prayed to God that they would. But I also added a codicil that the weather should work itself into a frenzy on Saturday morning, just for a few hours, so that I wouldn’t have to go diving.

I was still lying in the tub when I heard a faint whispering. I opened my eyes at once, and listened. There was no mistaking it. It was that same whispering I had heard downstairs in the library, a soft torrent of scarcely audible blasphemy. My shoulders felt chilled, and all of a sudden the bathwater felt uncomfortable and scummy.

There was no question about it. Quaker Lane Cottage was possessed. I could feel the coldness of whatever spirits were passing through it as if all the downstairs doors had silently been opened, and wintry draughts were blowing everywhere. I sat up in the bath and the splashing of the water sounded awkward and flat, like a cheap sound-effect.

It was then that I looked up at the mirror over the wash-basin. It had been misted over by the steam rising up from the bathtub, but now the mist seemed to be patchily condensing, forming itself into the pattern of a hollow-eyed
face.
Dribbles of condensation ran from the darkened eye-sockets like tears, and from the line of the lips like blood; and even though it was probably nothing more than the gradually-cooling vapour, it looked as if the face were alive and moving, as if somehow there was a captive spirit within the silvered surface of the mirror, trying desperately to show itself, trying desperately to speak to the outside world.

I stood up, showering water everywhere, and reached for the washcloth on the side of the basin. With three violent strokes, I wiped the steam off the mirror until it was clear again; and al I could see was my own harassed face. Then I stepped out of the bath, and took down my towel.

It was no use, I told myself, as I went through to the bedroom. If I was going to be visited by whisperers and apparitions every night, then I was going to have to move out.

I had read in
Architectural Digest
about an Italian who happily shared his huge palazzo with a noisy poltergeist, but I was neither brave enough nor calm enough to handle the disturbances at Quaker Lane Cottage. There was a terrible lewdness about the whispering; and a terrible suppressed agony about all the visions I had seen. I felt that I was glimpsing and hearing things from Purgatory, the dreary and painful ante-chamber to hell. The worst part about it was that Jane was there, too, the woman I had loved, and married, and still loved.

I towelled myself dry, brushed my teeth, and went to bed with one of the sleeping capsules that Dr Rosen had given me, and a book about the building of the Panama Canal. It was well past one o’clock now, and the house was silent, all except for the steady ticking of the long-case clock in the hallway, and the occasional chime to mark the quarter-hours.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I was awakened by the sudden dimming of my bedside lamp, as if the neighbourhood were suffering a brown-out. It dimmed and dimmed, until I could see the element in the light-bulb glowing orange and subdued like an expiring firefly.

Then came the coldness. An abrupt fall in temperature, just the same as the chill I had experienced in the library the night before. My breath began to vaporize, and I wrapped the comforter more tightly around me to keep myself warm.

I heard laughing, whispering. There were people in the cottage! There had to be. I heard shuffling on the stairs, as if four or five people were hurrying up to see me. But the noise died away in a flurry, and the door remained closed, and there was nobody there at all.

I stayed exactly where I was, wound up in that comforter. My elbow ached from supporting my body in the same position, but I was too scared to move a muscle.

Yesterday morning, when I had thought back over the way in which I had broken into Mrs Edgar Simons’ house, I had congratulated myself on how courageous I must have been to do it. But now, in the middle of the night, with all these rustlings and murmurings at my bedroom door, I remembered just how blatantly terrified I had actually been.

‘John,’
whispered a voice. I glanced around, my teeth clenched rigid with alarm.

‘John,’
the voice repeated. There was no mistaking whose voice it was.

Croakily, I answered, ‘Jane? Is that you?’

She gradually began to appear, standing at the foot of the bed. Not so dazzlingly bright as before, but still flickering like a distant heliograph message. Thin, and sunken-eyed, her hair waving around her in some unfelt, unseen wind, her hands raised as if she were displaying the fact that she was dead but bore no stigmata. What frightened me most of all , though, was how tall she was. In those dim white robes, she stood nearly seven feet, her hair almost touching the ceiling, and she looked down at me with a serious and elongated face that sent dread soaking through me like the cold North Atlantic rain.

‘John?’
she whispered again, although her mouth didn’t move. And she began to drift sideways around the end of the bed. My vision of her came and went, as if I were seeing her through a tattered gauze curtain. But the nearer she approached, the colder the temperature became, and the more distinctly I could hear the static crackling of her upraised hair.

‘Jane,’ I said, in a constricted voice, ‘you’re not real. Jane, you’re dead! You can’t be here, you’re dead!’

‘John
… ‘ she sighed, and her voice sounded like four or five voices speaking at once.

‘John … make love to me.’

For a moment, my courage and my confidence collapsed inside of me into that gravitational Black Hole called panic. I buried my face under the comforter, and squeezed my eyes tight shut, and shouted under the bedclothes, ‘I’m dreaming this! It’s a nightmare! For Christ’s sake, tell me I’m dreaming!’

I waited under the comforter with my eyes shut until I could hardly breathe any more.

Then I opened my eyes again and stared at the darkness of the quilting, right in front of my nose. The trouble with hiding is that at some point you have to come out of it again, and face up to what it was that made you hide in the first place. I said a silent prayer to myself that Jane would be gone, that the whispering would have stopped, that the cottage would have warmed and restored itself. I whipped down the comforter, away from my face, and looked up. What I saw just above me made me yell out loud. It was Jane’s face, only four or five inches away from me, looking directly down at me. She seemed to melt and shift and change constantly; sometimes looking childish and young, at other times looking ravaged and old. Her eyes were impenetrable: there seemed to be no life there at all. And her expression never changed from that dreamless serenity which I had seen on her face as she lay in her casket, before burial.