The Pariah (27 page)

Charlie stopped, and stared at me for a very long time, while he caught his breath. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, at last. ‘Is it true?’

‘As far as I know it. I’m working with several other people, including three custodians from the Peabody Museum. We’re doing what we can to raise that ship off the bottom, and get rid of the demon forever.’

 Charlie wiped his mouth with his hand, and narrowed his eyes towards Waterside Cemetery. ‘I don’t know what to say, Mr Trenton. I saw him, and he was real. Real and alive as I am.’

 ‘Charlie, I know. I’ve seen Jane the same way. But, believe me, it isn’t the Neil you used to know when he was alive. He’s different, and he’s dangerous.’

 ‘Dangerous? I used to take my belt to that boy, when he misbehaved himself.’

 ‘That was the Neil you knew when he was alive. This Neil is something else altogether.

'Charlie, he’s controlled by that demon, and he’s out to kill you.’

Charlie sniffed, and then cleared his throat. He looked at me and then looked down towards the cemetery.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to believe. You, or my own eyes.’

It was then that we both heard calling. A boy’s voice, carried on the wind. We both strained our eye’s to see where it was coming from, and at last Charlie said, There …look, over there!’ and when I followed his stubby pointing finger I saw Neil, young Neil Manzi, standing on a small grassy promontory, waving to us as freely and cheerfully as if he were alive.

‘Dad …’he was calling. ‘Come on, Dad …’

Charlie immediately started jogging again, down the hill.

‘Charlie, for God’s sake!’ I shouted at him, and ran after him, and tried to catch his arm.

‘Charlie, that isn’t Neil!’

‘Don’t give me that, look at the boy,’ Charlie puffed at me. ‘Look at him, the same as always. It’s a miracle, that’s all . A plain miracle, just like they used to happen in the Bible.’

‘Charlie! He’ll kill you!’

‘Well , maybe I deserve it!’ Charlie shouted. ‘Maybe I deserve it, for buying him that motorcycle. Get away, Mr Trenton, I warn you. Leave me alone.’

‘Charlie - ‘

‘Mr Trenton, I can’t be any unhappier than I am now, alive or dead.’

That last shouted remark stopped me in my tracks. I watched Charlie Manzi galloping fatly down that hill, waving as he ran to the slender boy in denims who stood just a little way away from him, waving back; and I knew that there was nothing I could do. I could have football-tackled Charlie, I suppose, or tried to knock him out. But what was the point of that? I’d never be able to watch over him night and day, to make sure that Neil didn’t come back to get him; and besides which, if I did knock him out, he wouldn’t even want to talk to me again.

I stood where I was, my hands down by my sides, as Charlie ran further and further away. Soon he was a tiny fat figure in the distance, his white apron blinking at me from almost a quarter of a mile away.

I decided to go back to the market, and pick up my car, and maybe drive around to the cemetery to see if there was anything I could do; but then I saw Neil run down from his promontory, and disappear, only to reappear much nearer the cemetery gates, almost the same distance away as Quaker Lane Cottage. Charlie kept after him, and I knew then that however hopeless it was, I was going to have to chase up behind and see if there was anything I could do to make him change his mind.

I ran down that hillside as fast as I used to run at High School, when I was swimming and running every day and generally considered myself to be a junior edition of Johnny Weissmuller. I was exhausted by the time I was within hailing distance of Charlie, and I could scarcely croak, let alone shout, but I kept on running at a slow, even pace, until there were only 20 yards between us.

‘Dad!’ came the cry on the south-west wind. ‘Come on, Dad!’ And the sound of it was all the more chilling because it was so young. I saw Charlie reach the cemetery gates, and open them, and disappear inside, somewhere behind the headstones.

I summoned up a last burst of effort, and reached the cemetery gates just in time to see Charlie making his way down the centre aisle of tombstones. He was walking now, holding his chest with both hands because he was so deeply out of breath, but not stopping to rest, not even for a moment, not while Neil was waiting for him at the end of the aisle, his arms outstretched, smiling, welcoming his father so warmly, and with such encouragement, that I knew I would never be able to persuade Charlie to turn around.

‘Charlie!’ I shouted, in a strained voice. ‘Charlie, for one minute, wait!’

I wrestled with the wrought-iron cemetery gates, but somehow they refused to open.

They weren’t bolted; and they couldn’t be locked, because Charlie had walked through them so easily. But no matter how violently I shook them and kicked at them, I couldn’t get them to budge.

‘Charlie!’ I screeched at him. ‘For one second, Charlie, just listen! Don’t go near him, Charlie! Don’t go near! Charlie, it isn’t Neil! Don’t go near!’

I rammed against the gates with my shoulder, but they weren’t going to move. There was nothing I could do but stand there and shout, while Charlie plodded slowly between the gravestones towards the son he thought he had lost.

It was then that I heard a deep, gravelly, grating noise. It sounded like a ton of rock being dragged slowly across a cement floor; and I wasn’t sure if I was hearing it through my ears or through the soles of my feet. Then there was another noise, grittier than the first, and louder.

Maybe it was an earthquake. Maybe something was shifting, under the ground. I had heard there were caverns underneath parts of Granitehead, where the ocean had eroded the softer subsoil. I peered in to the cemetery through the bars of the gates, and tried to see if anything was happening there.

To my horror and astonishment, I saw that one of the tombs, a large white-marble catafalque with an engraved marble coffin on top of it, had somehow slid across the aisle in front of Charlie, and was now separating him from his son. Charlie turned around, bewildered, and I heard him shout, ‘Neil! Neil, what’s going on here? Neil, answer me!’

Before he could walk back towards the gates, another huge tomb began to slide across the aisle behind him, boxing him in. It moved with a slow, grinding sound, like shingle being crushed beneath the wheels of a road-roller; but it blocked the aisle completely, a wall of solid Barre granite.

‘Charlie!’ I yelled. ‘Charlie, get yourself out of there! For God’s sake, Charlie, get out!’

I heard Charlie calling for Neil again; but then I also heard another sound. The steady grating of more tombstones, as they shifted themselves in on both sides, narrowing the aisle in which Charlie was standing by slow but inexorable inches.

‘Charlie!’ I shouted. ‘Charlie!’

The tombstones pressed further and further into the space that was left, until I heard above the grinding noise they were making a sudden high-keyed shout for help.

‘Mr Trenton, my sleeve’s caught! Mr Trenton!’

I rattled furiously at the cemetery gates but there was nothing I could do to get in there. I could only watch in horror and disbelief as Charlie tried to claw his way up the polished side of the marble catafalque, desperate to escape two huge upright gravestones which ground their way in towards him on either side. They must have weighed nearly a ton each, those stones, decorated with stone lilies and sobbing cherubs; and they moved like giant funeral carriages,
des chars funebres,
gray and grotesque, faceless and unstoppable.

‘Oh, God!
shrieked Charlie.
‘Oh my God! Neil! Help me! Oh God, somebody help me!’

 By some unimaginable effort, Charlie managed to heave his bulky body halfway out of the relentlessly-closing space. His face was crimson with fear, his eyes starting out of his head. He raised one arm towards me, but then the massive tombstones closed in on him, trapping him between two upright faces of solid granite.

 Without hesitation, the tombstones crushed him. I heard the bones in his legs snapping like a fusillade of pistol-fire; and then he soundlessly stretched open his mouth, gagging for a moment in utter agony, before a gouting fountain of blood and raw flesh surged from between his lips and darkly splattered the gravestones all around him. He was pinned upright for a moment, jerking and writhing, and then he mercifully collapsed.

I closed my eyes, still clutching the bars of the wrought-iron gates. I was shivering all over, and I could hear the blood pumping through my veins like the rushing traffic to hell itself. Then, without looking towards Charlie any more, I turned around, and began to walk back up the hillside.

 Behind me, there was a shuddering, screeching, scraping sound, as the tombstones moved back into their proper positions. It was a sound that crawled into my bones, as Yiddish people sometimes say. I knew that I would wake up at night for years to come and think that I could hear that noise; the grating noise of an impossible and unavoidable death.

 I could have reported Charlie’s death to the police, I suppose. I could have knelt beside him until somebody came. But I was already involved in enough mysterious fatalities; already tangled up in enough fear and enough complications. How could I possibly explain Charlie’s crushing to anybody who hadn’t seen it for themselves? I couldn’t even believe it myself, the way those massive tombs had moved of their own terrifying volition. I kept on walking up the hill, past the end of Quaker Lane, and back at last to the Granitehead Market.

 It seemed to take me three times as long to get back to the store as it had to run down to the cemetery, and I was bushed when I walked back in there to collect my liquor.

‘Did you find him?’ asked Cy.

‘Not a sign,’ I lied.

‘You’re worried about him?’ Cy wanted to know.

'There was something I wanted to tell him, that’s all. But I guess it can wait.’

'The way you ran out of here, like a bat out of hell, I thought that…’

‘Forget it, okay?’ I said, more sharply than I meant to. I picked up my wine and my whisky. ‘I’m sorry. Thanks for taking care of the booze.’

‘Any time,’ said Cy, looking puzzled.

I drove into Granitehead. Somebody had taken my favourite parking spot and so I had to go all the way down to the municipal lot by the harbour. By the time I had trudged back uphill to the square, I wasn’t in the best of tempers: shocked, tired, and edgy. I walked into the Crumblin’ Cookie with a scowl on my face like Quasimodo with a hunch-ache.

‘Well ,’ said Laura, ‘you’ve actually dared to show yourself.’

By the simple fact that she was speaking to me I knew that I was halfway forgiven. I set the flowers and the bottle of wine on the counter, and said, The flowers are to say sorry. The wine we should have shared last night. If you want to throw the flowers away and drink the wine on your own, I’ll understand.’

‘You could have
called
me,’ she said, resentfully.

‘Laura, I don’t know what else to say. I feel like a total Pig-‘ She took the bottle of wine and examined the label.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘since you have such excellent taste, I forgive you. But only just. And if it happens again, I may un-forgive you very fast.’

‘Whatever you say, Laura.’

‘Well , you could
look
as if you’re sorry.’

‘I’m just upset, that’s all.’

‘You don’t think
I’m
upset?’

‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’

‘At least when you’re saying “forgive me” you might look as if you want to be forgiven.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ I demanded. ‘Sing
I’m Sorry
and pour ashes all over my head?’

‘Oh, get out of here. You’re about as sorry as I don’t know what.’

‘You don’t even know what it is I’m as sorry as, and you’re telling me to get out?’

‘John, for God’s sake.’

‘All right,’ I told her, ‘I’m going.’

Take your wine and your flowers with you,’ she said.

‘Keep them. Just because you don’t know what it is I’m as sorry as, that doesn’t mean to say that I’m
not
sorry.’

‘You’re about as sorry as Gary Gilmore,’ she snapped at me.

‘Well , you know what his famous last words were, don’t you? “Let’s do it.” ‘

I walked out of the Crumblin’ Cookie and left Laura to her justified anger. I liked her, I didn’t want to upset her. Maybe I’d call her later this evening and see whether she’d cooled down. I knew that, sure as hell,
I
wouldn’t have been very happy if I’d spent all evening preparing an Italian meal for somebody who couldn’t be bothered to turn up.

I was crossing the cobblestones of Granitehead Square when I thought I glimpsed the girl in the hooded brown cape on the other side of the street just turning into Village Place. I changed direction, and followed after her, determined this time to catch up with her and find out who she was. Maybe she was nobody special at all: maybe her frequent appearances had been coincidence. But after Charlie’s death and Constance’s death, I was determined that I was going to lay the ghost of the
David Dark,
and that meant I was going to track down anything and everything that could help me.

I turned the corner into Village Place: a little narrow cul-de-sac lined with fashionably chintzy shops. The girl was standing in front of the Granitehead Bookmart, staring into the window, either at the books that were displayed inside, or at her own reflection.

TWENTY-FIVE

I approached the girl cautiously, circling around behind her so that I could see her pale face mirrored in the bookstore window. She must have known I was there, but she stayed where she was, quite still, one hand clasping her hood around her head, the other hanging with almost unnatural stillness by her side.

We both stood there in silence for quite a long time. A man in a woolly ski-hat came out of the store with a package under his arm, saw us, stopped for a moment in surprise, and then went hurrying off.

The girl said, ‘Why did you follow me?’

‘I think I should be asking you that question. Everywhere I’ve been in the past few days, I’ve seen you.’

She turned around and looked at me. There was something strangely familiar about her, although I couldn’t think what it was. She was very pale, but quite pretty, with the darkest of eyes; yet her eyes were liquid and animated, not like the dead and lightless eyes of Jane, or Edgar Simons, or Neil Manzi.

‘You’re not one of them,’ I said.

'Them?’

‘The manifestations; the ghosts.’

‘No,’ she smiled. ‘I’m not one of them.’

‘But you do know who I mean?’

‘Yes.’

I took out my handkerchief and dabbed at my forehead. I felt hot and uncomfortable and I wasn’t quite sure what to say. The girl watched me placidly, still smiling; although it was a quiet and friendly smile, not supercilious, or sly, or marked with that coaxing twist of the lip that had characterized Jane’s smiles, whenever she had appeared.

‘I was only watching you,’ she said. ‘Just to make sure that no harm befell you. Just to make sure that you were safe. Of course, you have always been fairly safe, because of your unborn son; but you might have unwittingly put yourself into a dangerous situation without knowing it.’

‘You were watching me?’ I asked her. ‘Who are you? And what were you watching me for? You don’t have any right to watch people.’

‘These days,’ said the girl, not at all upset by my aggressiveness, ‘everybody has a right to watch everybody else. You never know, after all, who your very best friend might be.’

‘I want to know who you are,’ I insisted.

‘You have already met some of us,’ she said. ‘Mercy Lewis you met on Salem Common; Enid Lynch you met at Mr Evelith’s house. My name is Anne Putnam.’

‘Mercy Lewis? Anne Putnam?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t those the names of - ‘

The girl smiled even more broadly, and held out her hand. Hesitantly, I took it, I’m not sure why. It just seemed impolite to refuse. Her fingers were long and cool, and there was a silver ring on every one of them, including her thumb.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘They are the names of witches. Not our real names, of course; but names we have adopted. They have power, those names; and besides, they remind us of the days when Salem was in the grip of the Fleshless One.’

‘You mean Mictantecutli? From what I’ve seen, Salem is
still
in his grip, and Granitehead, too. But you’re not seriously telling me that you’re a
witch!’

 ‘You can call us what you like,’ said Anne. ‘Listen -take me back with you to your cottage, and then I can explain everything to you. Now that you have found me out, I think it is better that you know.’

 I looked down at our joined hands. ‘All right,’ I said, at last. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet a witch. In actual fact, I always wanted to marry one. When I was twelve, I was in love with Elizabeth Montgomery.’

 We walked out of Village Place and into Granitehead Square, hand-in-hand; and, just my luck, Laura was stepping out of the Crumblin’ Cookie on the far side of the square, and she stopped and stared at us with her hands planted firmly on her hips to indicate to me that she had seen us, and that she thought I was more than a pig. In fact, she thought I was a don’t know what.

 As we descended the winding hill to Granitehead Harbour, Anne said, ‘You are troubled today. I can feel it. Why are you so troubled?’

 ‘You know about Mrs Edgar Simons? The way she died?’

 ‘I saw you with her that night, when I was out on the road.’

 ‘Well , I just witnessed another death; Charlie Manzi, the guy who owns the Granitehead Market.’

‘Where did it happen?’

‘Where? Down at the Waterside Cemetery. He was crushed, somehow - I can’t even describe it. But it seemed like the tombstones came together and crushed the life out of him.’

Anne gave my hand a conciliatory squeeze. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But there is great power here. The Fleshless One is about to be free; and all the energy he has been storing for 300 years is about to strike us.’

We reached my car, and I opened the door for Anne and then climbed in myself. ‘I’m amazed you know so much about this,’ I told her, as I started the engine. I twisted around in my seat as I backed out into the roadway. ‘Edward and I and the rest of us, we were all in the dark until we went to talk to Mr Evelith.’

‘You forget that all of Salem’s witches can trace their ancestry directly back to David Dark,’ she said. ‘It was David Dark who brought the power of the Fleshless One to Salem, in his attempts to impose some kind of hellfire morality on the people of Essex County; and the first witches were girls and women whom the Fleshless One had killed and then reincarnated as its handmaidens, to entice their own relatives and friends to one grisly death after another, in order that the Fleshless One could have their hearts.’

That’s what old man Evelith told us,’ I said, turning left on West Shore Drive.

‘Not all of the witches were named and caught, though,’ said Anne. ‘And many of those who
were
caught were released from jail when Esau Hasket disposed of the Fleshless One. They were very much weakened, because the Fleshless One was trapped in its copper vessel underneath the sea; but they survived for long enough to be able to educate their daughters in the ways of witchcraft, and to pass on the knowledge of what had happened, if not the power.’

‘And you’re one of those to whom the knowledge was passed down?’

Anne nodded. ‘Seven Salem families were witch families - the Putnams, the Lewises, the Lynches, the Billing-tons, the Eveliths, the Coreys, and the Proctors. During the 18th and 19th centuries, their descendants met at various times and performed the rituals of homage to Mictantecutli, the Fleshless One, and sacrificed pigs and sheep to him; and, once, they killed a girl who was found wandering at Swampscott suffering from loss of memory. The witch-groups were illegal, and so was the banner of David Dark under which they met; but there is no question that they kept the Fleshless One somnolent for 300 years, and protected Salem from terrors which you can only imagine.’

‘So the witches - who started off as Mictantecutli’s minions - have actually become our protectors against it?’

That’s right. As much as we are able. We still meet from time to time, but there are only five of us left now; and many of the older rituals have been lost to us. That is why Enid lives and works with Duglass Evelith, not only to serve him and to look after him, but to research as much as she can into the ancient magic, in order that the Salem witches can be strong again.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I thought Enid was old man Evelith’s grand-daughter.’

‘Well , she is, after a fashion.’

‘After a fashion? What does that mean?’

That means that they are related, in a curious way; but nobody quite knows how. You mustn’t say that I mentioned it, but I believe there was rather a lot of incest in the Evelith family, back in the early part of the century, when the roads were bad.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t quite.

We drove past Granitehead Market, and I saw that there were two police cars parked outside, with their lights flashing.

‘That’s Charlie Manzi’s place,’ I told Anne. ‘Somebody must have found him.’

‘Aren’t you going to stop?’

‘Are you kidding? Do you think they’d believe me about the tombstones? I’m already under suspicion for two other deaths. This time, they’d be sure to lock me up. I won’t be any good to anybody if I’m shut up in a cell.’

Anne looked across at me carefully. She was very attractive, in a thin, poetic kind of way, with long dark hair that had been gathered on each side of her face into three or four narrow braids. Not actually my type: too ethereal and well-educated and inclined to speak as if she were reading from an encyclopedia, but nice to have around, all the same. It was hard to believe that she was actually a witch.

‘What does a witch find to do these days?’ I asked her. ‘Can you work spells, stuff like that?’

‘I hope you’re not laughing at me.’

‘I’m not, actually. I’ve seen too much that’s unreal in the past few days to laugh at a witch. Do you
call
yourselves witches?’

‘No. We call ourselves by the old name, wonderworkers.’

‘And what wonders can you work?’

‘Do you want me to show you?’

‘I’d be delighted.’

I drove back up Quaker Lane, and parked outside the cottage. Anne got out of the car and stood staring at the cottage in silence. When I walked towards the front door she made no immediate move to follow me.

‘Something wrong?’ I asked her.

‘There is a very strong and evil influence here.’

I stayed where I was, halfway down the garden path, jingling my keys in my hand. I looked up at the bedroom windows, shuttered and blind; at the dead fingers of creeper which tapped so persistently against the weatherboard; and at the dank, distressed garden. There was green scum all over the surface of the ornamental pool, unnaturally bright in the leaden afternoon light.

‘My wife comes back to me almost every night,’ I said. That’s what you can feel.’

Anne approached the cottage with obvious trepidation. The loose upstairs shutter suddenly banged, and she reached for my hand in fright. I unlocked the front door, and we stepped inside, still holding hands; Anne raising her head slightly as if she were sniffing the darkness for evil and mischievous spirits.

I switched on the light. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that a witch would be afraid.’

‘On the contrary,’ she said. ‘When you’re a witch, you’re far more sensitive to occult manifestations, and you can sense how malevolent they are, far more acutely than an ordinary person.’

‘What do you feel in here? Is it bad?’

She shivered. ‘It’s like a cold draught from hell itself,’ she told me. ‘Because your wife used to live here, this cottage has become one of the portals through which the dead have been returning to the world of the living. Can you feel how cold it is? Especially here, where your library is. Do you mind if I go in?’

‘Help yourself.’

Anne pushed the library door open a little wider, and stepped inside. As she did so, I felt a chilly wind run through the room, and the papers on my desk began to shift and stir, and one or two of them floated to the floor. Anne stood in the very centre of the room, and looked around, and I could see her breath fuming from her mouth, as if she were standing outside in five degrees of frost. There was a smell, too: a sour, cold smell, as if something had gone rotten in the icebox. I must have unconsciously noticed it yesterday, and that was why I had checked in the icebox to see if anything had gone bad. But it wasn’t that at al : it was freezing and sickly, like chilled vomit, and I felt my stomach tighten into knots with nausea.

Anne whispered, ‘It knows that I am here. Have you ever felt it as strongly as this before? It knows that I am here, and it’s restless.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her.

‘For the moment, nothing. There’s nothing I can do. There isn’t any point in closing this portal, because the Fleshless One will only find another. There are probably several more around here in any case. Every time someone dies, their home becomes susceptible to visitations not just from them, but from any apparition whom the Fleshless One chooses to send. Have you heard whispering, talking, anything like that?’

I nodded. The way Anne was going on, I was beginning to feel more than a little terrified. I felt that I could cope with Jane’s spirit; and even the spirit of my unborn son.

But if the cottage was an entrance to the region of the dead, through which any number of apparitions might be rustling and shuffling, then it was time to move, as far as I was concerned. It was like living on the brink of a gaping mass grave, in the bottom of which all the corpses were sightlessly waving and calling.

‘I think I need a drink,’ I said, unsteadily. ‘Hold on a minute, I left a bottle of Chivas Regal in the car.’

I went outside, leaving the front door open, and walked down the garden path to the car.

Unlocking it, I took out the bottle of whisky, and then turned to go back to the house.

I stopped where I was, and almost dropped the bottle on the ground. Standing behind the laurel hedge, smiling at me, was Jane. Just as real, just as solid as she had been yesterday night. Except that she was standing exactly where she had been standing in that photograph which I had believed to have changed, on the surface of the ornamental pool. And in the library window, just behind her, I could see Anne’s face looking out in horror, just the same as she had done in the photograph.

I took two stiff steps towards the garden path, then another. Jane rotated exactly where she was, without moving her feet. She was smiling at me, coaxing, encouraging. But my own face was set into anoxolyte mask, nerveless and expressionless. As soon as I had passed the laurel hedge I saw that Jane’s bare feet were resting on the weedy surface of the water without even breaking the water’s green meniscus.

‘John,’
she said.
‘Remember that you can have me back. Don’t forget, John, you can
have me back. And Constance. And our son. You can have us back alive, John, if you
set me free.’

 Slowly, still smiling, Jane began to sink into the pool. She didn’t even disturb the surface as first her legs disappeared beneath it, then her body, then her face. The green water passed over her wide-open eyes and she didn’t close them, or even blink. Then she was gone. And the most disturbing thing was that the pool was only two feet deep.