The Pariah (25 page)

Walter said, ‘I’m sorry, John. It can’t be done. If any one of my clients gets to hear why I’ve asked him to invest $150,000 in a salvage operation, if any one of them suspects that I’ve done it to lay a ghost; well, there won’t be any doubt about it. My reputation will be finished and so will the reputation of my partnership. I’m sorry.’

‘Walter, I’m asking you this for the sake of your own daughter. Don’t you know what she’s going through, what she must be feeling?’

‘I can’t,’ said Walter. Then, ‘Let me think about it tomorrow. Right now I don’t know what the hell I’m doing or thinking.’

‘Okay,’ I said, more gently. ‘Do you want me to help you get to bed?’

‘I’ll just sit here for a while. But if you want to get some sleep, don’t let me stop you. You must be as tired as I am.’

Tired?’ I asked him. I didn’t know whether I was or not. ‘I think I’m more frightened than tired.’

‘Well ,’ said Walter. He reached out and gripped my hand; and for the first time since we had met, I felt that there was a bond between us, father and son-in-law, even though we had both lost everything that was supposed to keep us together. ‘I have to admit it,’ he said, ‘I’m frightened, too.’

TWENTY-THREE

I spent Monday in the shop, even though there was very little business around. I sold a set of etchings of compass roses designed by Theodore Lawrence in the 1830s, and a ship in a bottle, but I really needed to sell a few figureheads and a couple of cannon to keep my profits up to scratch. At lunchtime I went across to the Crumblin’ Cookie and talked to Laura.

‘You’re looking down today,’ she remarked. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘My mother-in-law died over the weekend.’

‘I didn’t think you liked her too much anyway.’

‘I’ve always admired you for your tact,’ I retorted, a little too caustically.

‘We don’t serve tact here,’ said Laura. ‘Only coffee and cookies and cold hard facts.

'Was she ill?’

‘Who?’

‘Your mother-in-law.’

‘She, um … had a kind of an accident.’

Laura stared at me, her head slightly cocked to one side. ‘You’re upset, aren’t you?’ she asked me. ‘You’re really upset. I’m sorry. The way you used to talk about your mother-in-law before … I didn’t realize. Look, I’m really sorry.’

I managed a smile. ‘You don’t have to be sorry. I’m tired, that’s all. A whole lot of bad things have been happening one after the other and on top of that I haven’t been getting much sleep.’

‘I know what to do,’ said Laura. ‘Come round to my place this evening and I’ll cook you my Italian specialty. You like Italian?’

‘Laura, you don’t have to. I’m fine, really.’

‘Do you want to come or don’t you? I expect you to bring some wine.’

I put up my hands. ‘Okay, thanks, I’d love to. I surrender. What time do you want me?’

‘Eight, sharp. I may not get too hungry for dinner at eight, but I
do
get too hungry for dinner at eight-oh-five.’

‘Even working here?’

‘Brother, when you’ve eaten one cookie you’ve eaten them all.’

The afternoon back at the shop went by with unimaginable slowness. The sunlight crawled around the walls, illuminating the marine chronometers, the sailing-ship paintings, the brass cleat-hooks. I tried to telephone Edward at the Peabody, but I was told that he was out at an auction. Then I called Gilly but she was busy in the store and said she would call me back. I even called my mother in St Louis but there was no reply.

I sat back at my desk reading a property magazine that had come through the door that morning and feeling as if I were totally alone on a strange planet.

At five o’clock after I had closed the shop, I went across to the Harbour Lights Bar and sat by myself in a corner booth and drank two glasses of Scotch. I don’t know why I bothered to drink, except out of habit. With all the problems that were pressing on my mind, I never seemed to get drunk, only irritable and blurry. I was just considering the possibility of another one before I hit the road when a girl walked past my booth, a girl in a brown cape, and just before she disappeared she turned and glanced at me and I felt myself jump with involuntary nervous spasm, the way you do when you’re about to fall asleep. I could have sworn that it was the same girl I had seen on the road to Quaker Lane, that night when I had been driving home with Mrs Edgar Simons; and the same girl who had been watching me in Red’s Sandwich Shop in Salem. I struggled out of my seat, banging my thighs on the fixed table, but by the time I had reached the door the girl had disappeared. ‘Did you see a girl walk past just then?’ I asked Ned Sanborn, behind the bar. ‘She was wearing a kind of a brown cape, very pale face, but pretty.’

Ned, shaking up a whisky sour, pulled a face that meant sorry. But Grace, one of the waitresses, said, ‘A tall girl, was she? Well , quite tall? Dark eyes and a pale face?’

‘You saw her too?’

‘Sure I saw her. She came out of the back room and I couldn’t work out how she got in there. I didn’t see her come in, and she hasn’t been drinking here.’

‘Probably a hippie,’ remarked Ned. According to Ned, any girl who didn’t dress in “a sensible skirt-and-blouse and wear flat-heeled court shoes and subscribe to
Red-book
was a hippie. ‘Summer must be coming. First hippie of the summer.’

Normally I would have teased Ned about his use of the word ‘hippie’, but this evening I was too disturbed and too worried. If the influence of the demon beneath Granitehead Neck was steadily growing, then who could tell who was one of its ghostly servants and who wasn’t? Maybe that girl was a manifestation, more solid than most. Maybe more people than I realized were actually manifestations; maybe Ned was, and Laura, and George Markham. How was I to tell who was a living human being and who wasn’t?

Supposing Mictantecutli had already claimed them all? I began to feel like the doctor in
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,
who couldn’t tell which of his friends and associates were aliens and which ones weren’t.

I left the Harbour Lights Bar and walked over to my car, which was parked in the middle of the square. There was a torn-off note under one of the windshield wipers, on which was scrawled in lipstick ‘Eight sharp, don’t forget, L.’ I climbed into the car and drove out of the village centre, heading towards Quaker Hill. I wanted to check that the cottage was al right, and pick up some wine at the Granitehead Market.

At the top of Quaker Lane, the cottage waited for me old and forbidding and now more neglected-looking than ever. I still hadn’t fixed that upstairs shutter, and as I got out of the car it gave a slow shuddering squeak. I walked up to the front door, and took out my key. I almost expected that familiar whisper to say
‘John?’
but there was no sound at all, just the frustrated seething of the ocean, and the soft rustle of the laurel hedges.

Inside, the cottage was very cold, and beginning to smell damp. The long-case clock in the hallway had stopped, because I hadn’t wound it. I went into the living-room and stood for a long time listening for scurries and whispers and footsteps, but again there was silence. Perhaps Jane had given up haunting the cottage now that she knew she was unable to claim me for the region of the dead. Perhaps I had actually seen the last of her. I went into the kitchen, and opened up the icebox to make sure there was nothing in there which was growing mould on it; no hot dogs with green fur or peach preserve with penicillin. I took out a bottle of Perrier water and drank four or five large swallows of it straight from the neck. Afterwards I stood there grimacing at the coldness on the roof of my mouth, and the uncompromising fizz of bubbles which seemed to be stuck in my throat for ever.

I was going back into the living-room to light the fire when I thought I heard a single footfall upstairs. I hesitated in the hallway, listening hard. It wasn’t repeated, but I was so sure that I had heard somebody in one of the bedrooms that I took my umbrella out of the umbrella-stand and began to climb the dark ornamented stairs to see who was up there. I paused halfway up, gripping the pointed umbrella tightly, breathing more tightly and tensely than I wanted to.

I thought to myself: don’t panic. You know that Jane has no hold over you now. You’ve faced up to hordes of apparitions from the Waterside Cemetery, and you’re still sane and still alive; so there can’t be anything up here that’s any worse, or any more likely to harm you.

Yet it was the silence that alarmed me, more than the squeaking of the swing had done; more than the whispering and the sudden coldness. This cottage was never silent. Old buildings rarely are; they’re always creaking or settling or shifting in their dreamless sleep. They’re never
silent,
utterly silent, as Quaker Lane Cottage was at that moment.

I reached the top of the stairs, and walked along the darkened landing until I reached the end bedroom. No sound, no breathing, no whispering, no footsteps. I carefully put my hand into the room and switched on the light, then I eased open the door with my foot. The bedroom was empty. Just a painted pine bureau, a narrow single bed covered with a plain woven coverlet. An embroidered sampler was hung on the far wall, with the legend LOVE THY LORD. I looked around, my umbrella half-raised, and then I switched off the light and closed the door behind me.

She was waiting on the landing, under the harsh light of an old marine lantern I had borrowed from the shop. Jane, in the flesh. Not flickering this time, like a half-seen movie; but in the flesh. Her brushed hair shone in the lantern-light, and her face, though white, looked as solid and as real as it had on the morning before she died. She was wearing a simple calico nightgown, off-white, which trailed on the floor, and her hands were clasped in front of her demurely. Only her eyes betrayed the fact that there was something supernatural about her: they were as black and as deep as pools of oil, pools in which a man and all his convictions could easily drown.

‘John,’
she said, somewhere inside of my head, without moving her lips. 7
came back
for you, John.’

She had frightened me enough when she had looked like a distant holographic image; but now she stood here in the flesh, I felt as if I were actually going mad. How could this possibly be an illusion? How could a woman look so alive, and yet be dead? Jane had been crushed and destroyed, and yet here she was, my saddest memory brought to life.

The most horrifying thought of all, though, was that the power of Mictantecutli must be increasing every day, if he could bring Jane back to me in such a solid form.

What kind of influence and energy it must have taken to conjure her up as she was now, I could only guess. Sometimes I thought I detected her image waver, as if I were seeing her through water, but she remained as solid as ever, smiling slightly, as if she were thinking of all of those times we had spent together when she was alive, times which we could never spend together again.

She had come back for me. But what she was offering now was not fun and laughter and companionship. What she was offering now was death, in the most grisly form imaginable.

‘Jane,’ I said, in a quavery voice, ‘Jane, I want you to go away. You mustn’t come back here, not ever.’

‘But this is my home. I shall always be here.
‘

‘You’re dead, Jane. I want you to go away. Don’t come around here any longer. You’re not the Jane I once knew.’

‘But this is my home.’

 This is a home for living people, not travesties of living people from the graveyard.’

 ‘I can speak to you like that because you’re not Jane and because I want you to go. Get out of here, leave me alone. I loved you when you were alive but I don’t love you now.’

 Gradually, subtly, Jane’s features began to change. I saw the face of Mrs Edgar Simons, contorted with incomprehensible agony, melt and change and then disappear again. I saw other women’s faces, and men’s faces, too, rippling across her features as if she couldn’t make up her mind which character she wanted to be. I saw Constance, and Mrs Goult, freshly-dead faces whose expressions were still blank and tortured with the trauma of dying.

 ‘Who are you?’ I demanded. Then, stepping closer, I shouted at the creature,
‘Who are
you?’

 The creature laughed, a whole assembly of laughs, and then that soft, familiar voice said,
‘It’s me, it’s Jane. Don’t you recognize me?’

 ‘You’re not Jane.’

 ‘Keep away,’ I warned her. ‘You’re dead, so keep away.’

 ‘I know enough to want you out of this house.’

At that moment, I was close to snapping. I could feel my mind expanding and expanding as if it refused to believe any of the information which was being fed to it by my eyes and my ears. Your wife and baby son are dead, it insisted. This can’t be real. What you’re seeing and hearing is a delusion. This can’t be real.

 ‘What do you want?’ I asked her. ‘Just tell me what you want, and then go away and leave me alone.’

 Jane smiled at me, almost lovingly, except for the terrible blankness in her eyes. And when she spoke, her voice was grating and rough, more like the voice of an elderly man than a girl who hadn’t even turned 30.

 ‘You mean down
there.
..in the
David Dark!’
I asked her.

She nodded, and when she did so, I thought I caught the faintest glimpse of smouldering blue fire within her eyes. 7
thought you would understand…’
she told me.
‘I
knew from the beginning that I would find an ally in you…’

 ‘I intend to salvage the
David Dark,
if that’s what you mean.’

‘The ship? The ship is unimportant. It is what the hold contains that you must seek…the
vessel in which those accursed people imprisoned me…’

 ‘I intend to bring your vessel up, too. But I warn you that I also intend to destroy you.’

Jane let out a burst of hissing laughter.
‘Destroy me? You cannot destroy me! I am part
of the order of the universe, just as the sun is; just as life itself is. The region of the dead
stretches
forever
under dark skies, and I am its chosen lord. You cannot destroy me.’

 ‘I’m going to try.’

 ‘You can’t do that,’ I asserted.

 At that moment, a small naked boy of about four or five appeared from my bedroom, and stared up at me. Shyly, slowly, he reached out for Jane’s hand, and then clung close to her, staring at me all the time as if he knew me, but was frightened of me. Jane ruffled his dark hair with her hand, and then looked at me with an expression that was like a mask of complete contempt.

 ‘
This boy is your son, as he would have been if he had lived. I have taken his whole life;
for if anybody dies before their time, I am rewarded with all the years that are left. All the
energy, all the emotion, all the youthfulness; and all the blood. I feed off unused life,
John, and believe me if you attempt to cross me in any way, then I will feed off yours.’

 Jane passed her hand over the boy’s head, and he vanished as suddenly as he had appeared; but not before he had left me with a heartrending image of the child I had helped Jane to conceive, and then lost. I had tears in my eyes as Jane said to me,