The Pariah (12 page)

‘John,’
she said, somewhere inside my head.

I couldn’t speak. I was too frightened. For not only was Jane staring at me so closely, she was actually lying, or rather floating, on top of me, toe to toe, five or six inches above the bed. The coldness poured down from her like the vapour from dry ice, and I felt as if frost crystals were forming on my hair and on my eyelashes, but Jane kept floating above me, ethereal and freezing, suspended in some existence where gravity and substance seemed to have no meaning.

‘Make love to me …
‘ she whispered. Her voice echoed, as if she were speaking in a long empty corridor.
‘John … make love to me …
‘

The comforter slipped away from the bed as if it had a life of its own. Now I was lying naked, with this flickering manifestation of Jane hovering horizontally over me, whispering to me, chilling me, and yet begging me for love.

She didn’t move her arm, and yet I felt a sensation like a cold hand drawing itself across my forehead, and touching my cheeks, and then my lips. The coldness crept down my bare sides, tingling my nipples, outlining the muscles of my chest, touching the sides of my hips. Then it touched my testicles, making them harden and shrink; but arousing a curious tingling in my penis which in spite of my fear and in spite of my discomfort, made it rise.

‘Make love to me, John
… ‘ she whispered, voice upon voice, echo upon echo. And the coldness massaged me, up and down, until feelings began to stir inside me that I hadn’t felt for over a month now.

‘John …
‘ she said again.

‘This is a dream,’ I told her. ‘This cannot be happening. You cannot be real. You’re dead, Jane, I’ve seen you dead and you’re dead.’

The cold massage continued, on and on, until I began to feel that I was close to a climax. It was like having sex and yet totally unlike having sex: I could feel slipperiness and softness and the wiry stimulation of pubic hair. Yet it was utterly freezing. My penis felt white with cold, and my body was covered with goosebumps.

‘Jane,’ I told her, ‘this isn’t true.’ And as my body tightened into a climax, I
knew
it wasn’t true, I
knew
that it was completely impossible, I
knew
that I couldn’t be having sex with my month-dead wife; and as the semen spattered over my bare stomach there was a hideously loud screech and Jane seemed to come hurtling towards me with her face exploding in a welter of blood and shattered glass and for one instant of total terror her skull seemed to collide face-to-face with mine, the cheeks torn raw from the cheekbones, the eyes gouged out, the lips spread in a smash of strawberries to bare beneath them the grinning bloodstained teeth.

I rolled out of bed and across the floor so fast that I collided with the bureau and knocked over a clinking assembly of after-shave bottles, photograph-frames, and ornaments. A vase of porcelain flowers dropped to the floor and shattered.

I stared at the rumpled-up bed, shivering. There was nothing there at all, no blood, no body, nothing. I felt the stickiness of semen sliding down my stomach and I put my hand down there and touched it. A nightmare, it must have been. An erotic nightmare. A mixture of sexual frustration and fear, all tangled up with images of Jane.

I didn’t really want to get back into bed, and I was frightened to fall asleep, but it was two o’clock in the morning now, and I was so tired that I couldn’t think of anything but crawling under the comforter and closing my eyes. I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead and tried to calm myself down.

As I did so, gradually, I began to see brownish marks appearing on the bedsheet, like scorch marks. Some of them even smouldered slightly, as if they were being burned from beneath the sheet by someone with a red-hot poker, or a cigarette-end. I watched them in fearful fascination, as they formed themselves into curves and curls and straights.

They were blurry, difficult to read, but they were definitely letters. SA.V.GE.

SAVE ME? SAVAGE?

And then it occurred to me. It may only have been because I had been talking to Edward Wardwell this evening about that very thing. But it seemed to fit in so well that I could scarcely believe that the letters meant anything else. Not SAVE ME, not SAVAGE, but SALVAGE.

Through the spirit of my dead wife, whatever lay in the hold of the
David Dark
was pleading to be rescued.

   
THIRTEEN

For the rest of the night, I was undisturbed, and I slept until nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. I drove into Granitehead Village just before lunch, parked in the centre of the square, and walked across the brick-laid street to open up Trenton Marine Antiques.

Granitehead was a smaller version of Salem, a collection of 18th- and 19th-century houses and shops gathered around a picturesque marketplace. Three or four narrow streets ran steeply downhill from the square to the curved and picturesque harbour, which these days was always densely forested with yachts.

Right up until the mid-1950s, Granitehead had been a rundown and isolated fishing community. But with the rise of middle-class affluence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and with it the rise of yachting and deep-sea angling as widespread middle-class pursuits, Granitehead had quickly become a desirable place for anyone who wanted a waterfront cottage within driving distance of Boston. An aggressive planning committee had bullied out of state and federal funds enough money to remodel all of Granitehead’s most elegant and historic buildings; tear down street after street of slummy old fishermen’s cottages; and replace the shabby warehouses and dilapidated wharves with jewellers, menswear shops, art galleries, cookie cottages, English-style pubs, beef-and-oyster restaurants, and all those fashionable and slightly unreal shops that make up the modern American shopping mall.

I often used to wonder where I could go in Granitehead just to buy ordinary food and ordinary household necessities. You don’t
always
want to eat Bavarian strudel and buy hand-crafted pottery mobiles for your designer kitchen.

Mind you, Trenton Marine Antiques was just as guilty of shopping-mall
kitsch,
with its green-painted frontage and mock-Georgian windows. Inside, there was an expensive clutter of ships-in-bottles, shiny brass telescopes, sextants, demi-culverins, grappling hooks, navigational dividers, paintings, and prints. The favourite, of course, was always the figurehead, and the more bosomy the better. A genuine figurehead from the early 19th-century, especially if it were a bare-breasted mermaid, would fetch anything up to $35,000, occasionally more. But the demand was so insistent that I employed an old man up at Singing Beach to carve me ‘authenticated reproductions’ of old-time figureheads, using the centrespread from the May, 1982, issue of
Playboy
as his model.

There was a clutch of bills and letters on the doormat, including a note from the post office that they were holding all the prints that I had bought earlier in the week at Endicott’s auction. Later on, I would have to go over and collect them.

Although I had managed to catch some sleep, I was feeling depressed and irritable. I didn’t really want to leave Granitehead, and yet I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to face another night at Quaker Lane Cottage. I was torn by a unique combination of fear and emotional pain. Fear because of the coldness, and the whispering, and the stark fact that I had seen one of these apparitions kill Mrs Edgar Simons by means of something which I could only describe as black magic; and emotional pain because I loved Jane, and to see her and hear her and feel her, while all the time I knew she was dead - well, that was more than my mind could stand.

A squat middle-aged couple came into the store, in matching maroon quilted jackets.

They blinked through matching Coke-bottle spectacles at ships-in-bottles, and whispered between themselves. ‘Aren’t they cute?’ asked the wife.

‘You know how they
do
that, don’t you?’ the husband suddenly asked me, in a loud New Jersey accent.

‘I have a vague idea,’ I nodded.

They cut through the masts, see, so that they fold flat, and they tie them all with thread, and when the ship’s inside the bottle, they tug the thread and all the masts stand up.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You learn something every day,’ the husband added. ‘How much for this one? The whaler?’

‘That was made in 1871 by a midshipman on the
Venture,’
I said. Two thousand, seven hundred dollars.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Two thousand seven hundred. I might go down to two-five.’

The husband stared down at the bottle in his hand speechlessly. Eventually he said,

‘Two thousand seven hundred dollars for a model boat in a bottle? I could build it myself for a buck-and-a-half.’

‘Then you should,’ I advised him. There’s quite a market for ships-in-bottles. Even new ones.’

‘Jesus,’ the husband said, putting down the bottle as if it were the Holy Grail, and already starting his retreat from the shop. He kept on looking around, so that he wouldn’t completely lose face, and I knew that he would ask the price of just one more item before he went, and say ‘I’ll think it over, and call back later,’ before disappearing forever.

‘How much for that hook thing?’ he said, right on cue.

'That grappling-hook? That came from one of John Paul Jones’ vessels. Eight hundred and fifty. A bargain, as a matter of fact.’

‘Hmm,’ said the husband. ‘Let me think about it. Maybe we’ll call by after lunch.’

'Thank you,’ I said, and watched them leave.

They had only just gone, however, when Walter Bedford came into the shop, wearing a broad smile and a black London Fog raincoat that was a size too large for him.

‘John, I just had to call by. I had a call from the district attorney this morning. They’ve decided to be reasonable, under the circumstances, and drop the homicide charges. Insufficient evidence. They’ve told the newspapers that they’re looking for a maniac of considerable strength, just to make it look kosher; but the main thing is that you’re free. Right in the clear.’

‘No money passed hands, I hope,’ I said, a little sarcastically.

Walter Bedford was in too good a mood to take offence, and clapped me on the back.

The truth is, John, the
modus operandi
was giving the chief of police something of a headache. He had the coroner’s report late last night, and the coroner said that the only way in which Mrs Edgar Simons could
possibly
have been impaled on that chandelier chain was for the chain to have been forced through her body
before
the chandelier was fixed to the ceiling, and then for the whole caboodle, chandelier and body and all, to be hoisted up, wired, screwed in, and left to dangle. Now - even given that the murderer had a block-and-tackle to lift the chandelier and the body, it would have taken him at least an hour-and-a-half to complete the job, not to mention the time it would have taken to remove the hoisting equipment, of which there was no trace in the house. An hour-and-a-half places you well away from the Simons house, according to Mr Mark-ham and Mr Reed, and so your alibi is absolutely solid. Case dismissed.’

‘Well ,’ I said, ‘thank you very much. You’d better send me a bill.’

‘Oh, no, no bill. Not for you. Not when you’ve managed to bring back Jane.’

‘Walter, I really don’t think - ‘

Mr Bedford gripped my upper arm, and looked me steadily in the eye. He smelled of Jacomo aftershave, $135 a bottle. ‘John,’ he said, in his best courtroom voice, ‘I know how you feel about this. It’s scary, and it’s also deeply moving. I can understand, too, that you may want to keep these visitations to yourself, particularly after the way in which Constance and I have blamed you so much for what happened. But both of us understand now that it
couldn’t
have been your fault. If it had have been, Jane wouldn’t have wanted to come back to you, and comfort you from the spirit world. Constance, I can tell you, is deeply, deeply, apologetic for the way she’s felt about you. She’s filled with remorse. And she begs you, John, even though she’s not a begging woman - she
begs
you to let her see her only daughter again, even for the briefest moment. I guess I do, too. You don’t know what this means to us, John. We lost everything we ever had when we lost Jane. Just to be able to talk to her again, just to see that she’s happy in the world to come. Just once, John. That’s all I’m asking.’

I lowered my eyes. ‘Walter,’ I said, huskily, ‘I can appreciate your eagerness to see Jane again. But I have to warn you that she isn’t exactly the Jane you knew. Nor the Jane
I
knew, either. She’s - well, she’s very different. For Christ’s sake, Walter, she’s a ghost.’

Walter stiffened his lower lip, and gave a little shake of his head. ‘Don’t use that word “ghost”, John. I like “visitation” so much better.’

‘We’re arguing about what to
call
her? Walter, she’s a ghost; a phantom; a restless spirit.’

‘I know that, John. I’m not trying to hide myself away from the truth. But the point is - do you think she’s
happy!
Do you think she likes it, where she is?’

‘Walter, I don’t
know
where she is.’

‘But is she happy? That’s all we want to ask her. And Constance wants to ask if she’s managed to locate Philip. You know, Jane’s young brother, who died when he was five.’

I simply couldn’t answer that question. I tiredly rubbed the back of my neck and tried to think what I could possibly say to put Walter Bedford off. Something that wouldn’t antagonize him again, and lose me my most munificent benefactor; not that ‘munificent’ was quite the word that anybody would use in connection with Walter Bedford.

‘Prudently generous’ was probably more accurate.

‘I don’t really think, Walter, that any of us are going to be able to determine whether she’s happy or not. I have to tell you that she appeared again last night, and, well - ‘

‘You’ve seen her again? You’ve actually seen her again?’

‘Walter, please. She appeared last night, in my room. The whole experience was very upsetting. She spoke my name a few times, and then - well, she asked me to make love to her.’

Walter frowned, and stood suddenly rigid. ‘John,’ he said, ‘my daughter is
dead.’

 ‘I know that, Walter, God preserve me.’

 ‘Well , you didn’t actually - ‘

‘Didn’t actually
what,
Walter? Didn’t actually fuck my dead wife? What are you trying to say, that I’m a necrophiliac? There was no corpse there, Walter, only a face, and a feeling, and a voice. It was like freezing electricity, that’s all.’

Walter Bedford appeared to be shaken. He walked across the shop and stood with his back to me for a while. Then he picked up a brass telescope, and began opening it and closing it, opening and closing it, in nervous distress.

‘I think, John, that
we
will be able to discover whether she’s happy or not. We are her parents, after all. We’ve known her all her life. So it’s possible that some of the little nuances of expression that you may have missed, not knowing her so well; some of the little give-away words that you may not have recognized … it’s possible that these may mean something to us that wasn’t immediately apparent to you.’

‘Walter, God damn it,’ I said, ‘we’re not dealing with a cozy transparent version of Jane here. This isn’t a warm and friendly ghost that you can have conversations with. This is a chilly, hostile, frightening manifestation with eyes that look like death itself and hair that crackles like fifty thousand volts. Do you really want to face up to that? Do you really want Constance to face up to it?’

Walter Bedford closed up the telescope and put it back on the table. When he looked at me, his eyes were very sorrowful, and he was near to tears.

‘John,’ he said, ‘I’m prepared for the very worst. I know it won’t be easy. But it can’t be as bad as that day when they called us up and told us that Jane had been killed. That day was the blackest of all.’

‘I can’t put you off?’ I said, quietly.

He shook his head. ‘I’ll have to come anyway, invited or uninvited.’

I bit my lip. ‘All right then. Come tomorrow night, if you want to. I’m not staying at Quaker Lane Cottage tonight, I can’t face it. But please do me one favour.’

‘Anything.’

‘Warn Constance, over and over, that what she may see may be horrifying, and cold, and even malevolent. Don’t let her come to Quaker Lane Cottage thinking that she’s going to be meeting the Jane she knew.’

‘She is her mother, you know, John. The visitation may behave differently when her mother’s there.’

‘Well ,’ I said, not wanting to prolong the argument any further, ‘I guess that’s possible.’

Walter Bedford held out his hand, and I didn’t have any option but to shake it. He gripped my elbow at the same time, and said, ‘Thank you, John. You don’t know what this means to us, you really don’t.’

‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night. Make it late, will you? Eleven o’clock, something like that. And please, don’t forget to warn Constance.’

‘Oh, I’ll warn her,’ said Mr Bedford, and left the shop like a man who’s just learned that he’s come into money.