The Pariah Read online

  ‘John - I’m freezing! - John - ‘

  There was a roaring, screeching, mind-shattering crack. Every window in the room imploded, and a devastating gale swept the drapes aside, so that the air was thick with glittering, tumbling, razor-sharp shards of glass. I hunched down over Gilly as much as I could, but even so the frigid gale brought a vicious scattering of glass all over my back, and into the flesh of my buttocks, and into the muscles of my thighs. The bedspread was sliced to shreds, and feathers rose from the glass-slashed pillows like snow.

  I kept my eyes closed until the last tinkle of falling glass had subsided. The cold March wind blew steadily in through the windows, and flapped at the cover of the magazine I had left on top of the television. I looked down at Gilly and she was just Gilly, nobody else, not Jane; although she was white-faced with fright and there was a cut on the side of her forehead.

  ‘I want you to slide out from under me,’ I whispered. ‘Watch out - there’s glass on the bed. There’s a whole lot of it sticking out of my back. I don’t think it’s too serious, but I can’t move until you’ve taken it out.’

  Tears began to pool in Gilly’s eyes; tears of shock and distress. ‘What happened!’ she trembled. ‘I don’t understand what happened. ‘

  ‘I think I overdid the climax,’ I told her, trying to be ridiculously nonchalant.

  ‘You’re shaking,’ she said. ‘Don’t move.’

  She managed to wriggle out naked from beneath me. Then she said, ‘Lie flat. You’ve got about twenty pieces in your back. They don’t look too deep, though.’

  She found her shoes, and went to the bathroom to fetch a facecloth and a towel. Then she sat down beside me and plucked the fragments of glass out of my back. There wasn’t much blood, but the wounds were sore, and I was glad when she had managed to take out the last piece, on the inside of my right thigh.

  There was a knock at the door. A voice said, ‘Sir? Are you there, sir? Assistant manager, sir.’

  ‘What is it?’ I called.

  ‘Someone reported a loud noise in your room, sir, and the sound of glass breaking. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. Gilly found my trousers for me, and I shook the glass out of them, pulled them on, and then tiptoed to the door. I opened it on the chain and peered out.

  The assistant manager was a tall man in a tuxedo with very shiny black hair and very shiny black shoes.

  ‘I bought my cousin a set of collins glasses today,’ I told him. ‘A souvenir of Salem.

  Unfortunately I caught my foot in my bathrobe when I was carrying them across the room. I fell over the table, too.’

  The assistant manager looked at me beadily. ‘I hope you’re not hurt in any way, sir.’

  ‘Hurt? No. No, no. Not hurt.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘You won’t mind if I just take a look?’

  ‘A look?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  I took a deep breath. There was no point in trying to bluff it out. If the assistant manager wanted to take a look, then there was nothing at all I could do to stop him.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘we had a little trouble with the windows. But, I’ll pay for them. As long as you understand that.’

  SIXTEEN

  We drove up to Gilly’s apartment on Witch Hill Road, overlooking Gallows Hill Park. The apartment was small but scrupulously neat, with framed fashion designs on white-painted walls, and yuccas in tasteful white Portuguese planters. I was still smarting from all those glass-cuts, but all of them had been clean, and only one of them, on my shoulder, was actually bleeding.

  ‘Would you like some wine?’ asked Gilly.

  I sat down stiffly on the beige corduroy sofa. ‘I’ll have a large Scotch if you’ve got it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, coming in from the kitchen with a large frosted bottle of Pinot Chardonnay. ‘Everybody I know is a wine-drinker.’

  ‘Don’t tell me they’re vegetarians, too.’

  ‘Some of them,’ she smiled. She set two tall-stemmed glasses down on the table, and sat down beside me. I took the bottle and poured us both brimful measures. At that moment I felt that if I had to drink wine, I might just as well drink a lot of it.

  ‘How much do you think the Hawthorne will charge you?’ Gilly asked.

  ‘Couple of thousand, at least. Those plate-glass windows must cost a fortune.’

  ‘I still don’t really understand what was going on.’

  I raised my glass in a silent toast and swallowed half of it almost straight away. ‘Jealous wife,’ I told her.

  She stared at me uncertainly. ‘You told me your wife was - ‘

  ‘She is,’ I said, assertively. Then, more quietly, ‘She is.’

  ‘Then you mean to say that what happened tonight -that was her! Your wife? She did that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a possibility. It could have been nothing more than a freak gust of wind. You remember that high-rise in Boston, with the windows that kept falling out?

  Maybe the same thing happened at the Hawthorne.’

  Gilly frowned at me in complete non-comprehension. ‘But if your wife is dead, how could it have been even a possibility that it was her? You’re telling me that she’s a ghost, too? Your dead wife is a ghost?’

  ‘I’ve seen her, yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘You’ve seen her,’ said Gilly. ‘My God, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You don’t have to. But it’s the truth. I’ve seen her two or three times now, and tonight, when we were making love, I saw her again. I looked at your face and instead it was her face.’

  Gilly took a drink of wine and then looked at me levelly. ‘This is getting very hard to play along with, you know that?’

  ‘It isn’t any easier for me.’

  ‘Do you know how often I’ve been to bed with a man, almost the moment I’ve met him, the way I did with you?’

  ‘I wish you’d stop trying to justify yourself,’ I told her. ‘I went to bed with you just as quickly as you went to bed with me. Just because you’re the woman and I’m the man, does that make any difference?’

  ‘It’s not supposed to,’ said Gilly, a little defensively.

  ‘In that case, don’t let it.’

  ‘But now you’ve put me in a weird position.’

  ‘Weird?’ I asked her, picking up my wine again.

  ‘Well , weird, yes - because the first man I’ve ever picked to pounce on - the very first man ever - and he turns out to have some obsession with his dead wife. And the windows of his goddamned hotel room fall in.’

  I stood up, and walked across to the patio doors which overlooked Gilly’s narrow third-storey balcony. Outside, geraniums trembled in the vibrant night wind. Beyond, I could see the smattering of lights that was Witchcraft Heights. It was past two o’clock in the morning now, and I was tired and shaken beyond argument, beyond reproaches. My ghostly reflection in the dark glass lifted his wine, and drank.

  ‘I wish I could say that I’m obsessed with my wife,’ I said quietly. ‘I wish I could say that I’m suffering from hysteria; that I’ve never seen her or heard her anywhere else except inside of my mind. But she’s real, Gilly. She’s haunting me. Not just the cottage where we used to live, but me, as a person. That’s another reason why I’m going to go diving tomorrow, even though I don’t want to. I want my wife to be put at rest.’

  Gilly said nothing. I came back from the window and sat opposite her, although she wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘If you want to forget we ever met, that’s all right by me,’ I told her. ‘Well - it’s not exactly all right. It’ll upset me. But I can understand how you feel. Anybody else would feel the same. Even my doctor thinks it’s nothing but post-bereavement shock.’

  I hesitated, and then I said, ‘You’re a very attractive person, Gilly. You do exciting things to me. And I still stand by what I said earlier on - how amazing it is that two people can work up a storm together only minutes after they’ve met. W
e could both have a good time; you know that. But I have to tell you that Jane’s spirit is still around me, and that there may be danger, the way there was tonight.’

  Gilly looked at me, and her eyes were glistening. ‘It’s not the danger,’ she said, with a catch in her voice.

  ‘I know. It’s the image of the ex-wife.’

  ‘I had that before. I had an affair with a married man when I was seventeen. A bank executive. His wife wasn’t dead, of course, but she was always there. Either on the telephone, or in the back of his mind.’

  ‘And you definitely don’t want to go through it again.’

  She held out her hand to me, ‘John,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing against you. It’s just that I’m feeling threatened. And there’s one thing that I’ve always promised myself, ever since I started working on my own. Never let anyone threaten you, no matter how.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. She was right, of course. She may have thrown herself at me like a sexually-deprived tigress, and I may have thrown myself back at her like an equally sexually-deprived tiger. But she was under no obligation to accept me as a lover with all of the problems I was carrying with me. All the phantoms, and the fears, and the might-have-beens. Not to mention the unhealed wound of my recently-lost wife and our unborn baby.

  ‘All right,’ I told her. I let go of her hand. ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, but I can understand why you’re saying it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told me. ‘I don’t think you have any idea how much you attract me. You’re just my type.’

  ‘Nobody with a ghost on their back can possibly be your type. They can’t be anybody’s type. Not until they’ve been exorcized.’

  Gilly sat and looked at me for a while in silence, and then got up and went into the kitchen. I followed her, and stood in the doorway, while she took out eggs and muffins and coffee.

  ‘You don’t have to cook me anything,’ I said.

  ‘Breakfast, that’s all,’ she smiled. She broke the eggs into a basin and began to whip them up.

  ‘Have you thought about exorcism?’ she asked me. ‘Getting a priest around to lay your wife to rest?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think it would work. I don’t know, maybe it might. But I think the only way that any of these apparitions in Granitehead are going to get any peace is if we find out why they’re so restless, what it is that makes them appear.’

  ‘You mean like raising the David Dark!’

  ‘Maybe. Edward seems to think that’s the answer.’

  ‘And what do you think?’ asked Gilly, taking out a pan and cutting a little sunflower shortening into it.

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘I’m trying to keep an open mind. I don’t know. I’m just trying to keep sane.’

  She looked at me kindly. ‘You’re very sane,’ she said. ‘You’re also a beautiful lover. I hope to God you can give your wife some peace.’

  There was no need to answer that remark. I watched her scramble eggs and toast muffins and perk coffee, and thought about nothing but sleep, and tomorrow’s dive. The cold waters of Granitehead Neck were out there now, restless as the spirits of Granitehead itself, waiting for the dawn.

  SEVENTEEN

  By nine o’clock, we were out in Salem Sound, on a gray and choppy ocean, balancing on the after-deck of a 35-foot fishing boat, Alexis, which Edward and Dan Bass and two of Edward’s colleagues from the Peabody Museum had pooled together to rent for the morning.

  The day was bright and sharp, and I was surprised how cold it was, but Edward told me that the temperature over the ocean was often as much as 30 degrees lower than the temperature over land. There was a heavy cloud-bank off to the north-west, thick as clotted cream, but Dan Bass had estimated that there would be two or three hours’

  diving time before the weather began to roughen up.

  I liked Dan Bass immediately. He was a wry, self-confident 40-year-old with eyes that looked as if they had been bleached by brine to a very pale blue. He spoke with a clipped accent that sounded very Bostonian to me, and there was a Boston-Irish squareness about his face, but as he piloted the boat into position he told me that he had first dived for wrecks off the shores of his native North Carolina, Pamlico Sound and Onslow Bay.

  ‘I dived once on a World War Two torpedo boat, which was sunk in a storm in ‘44. I shone my flashlight in through the windows, and guess what was staring back at me, this human skull, still wearing a rusty steel helmet. I got the fright of my whole darned life.’

  Edward was in a very high humour, and so were his colleagues; a serious young student called Jimmy Carlsen, and a freckly, carroty-haired graduate from the Peabody’s ethnology department, Forrest Brough. Both were practised divers: Jimmy wore a sweatshirt with ‘See Massachusetts and Dive’ lettered on the back. Forrest, three years before, had helped to salvage 18th-century cannon and cooking utensils from a wreck off Mount Hope Point, Rhode Island. Both took time out to explain to me everything they were doing, and why, so that even if I wasn’t going to be much help to them, at least I wouldn’t be a disastrous liability.

  Gilly, bundled up in a thick quilted parka with a fur-lined hood, sat in the boat’s wheelhouse with her notepad and her stopwatch, and hardly talked to me at all. But she caught me looking at her once, and gave me a smile that told me that everything between us was as good as either of us could expect it to be. Her eyes were filled with tears but it was probably the cold wind.

  Edward said, ‘We’re going to search a little further along the shoreline than we have done up until now. Dan’s going to position the boat according to transit bearings we’ve already worked out - that means we take one fix on the Winter Island lighthouse, and a second fix on the Quaker Hill Episcopalian Church, and where the two transit lines meet, that’s where we’re going to drop anchor.’

  Dan Bass brought the Alexis a little closer into shore, while Forrest took the bearings. It took a few minutes to nudge the boat into position, but at last we put down our anchor, and cut the engine.

  'The tide’s ebbing at the moment,’ Edward explained. ‘In a little while, though, it’ll be slack, and that’s the safest time for diving. Now, since this is your first time, I don’t want you to stay down for longer than five minutes. It’s cold down there, and the visibility is pretty shitty, and you’ll have quite enough to occupy your time just breathing and finning and getting yourself accustomed to diving.’

  I felt a tightness in my stomach, and at that moment I would have been quite happy to suggest that I should postpone my aqualung initiation until tomorrow, perhaps, or next week, or even next year. The wind whipped across the deck of the Alexis and snapped our diving flag, but I didn’t know whether I was shivering from cold or nervous anticipation.

  Dan put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, John. If you can swim you can aqualung, just provided you keep your head, and follow procedure. Edward’s a first-rate diver, in any case. He’ll help you.’

  We changed into snug-fitting Neoprene wetsuits, tugging on tight Neoprene vests underneath to give us extra protection from the cold. The suits were white, with orange hoods, which Edward said would give us maximum visibility in the cloudy water. Dan Bass strapped on my air-cylinder, and showed me how to blow hard into my mouthpiece before breathing in, to dislodge any dust or water; and how to check that the demand valve was functioning correctly. Then I fitted on my weight belt, and Dan adjusted the weights for me so that they were comfortable.

  ‘Check your diving buddy’s equipment, too,’ Dan instructed me. ‘Make sure you remember how his valve works, how to release his weight-belt, if you need to. And try to remember as much as you can about those emergency procedures.’

  For my first dive, both Edward and Forrest were going down with me. As we sat on the side of the boat, preparing ourselves, one or the other of them would keep thinking of some piece of advice that he’d forgotten to tell me; and by the time we were ready to drop, my mind was a jumble of signals an
d procedures and hints on what to do if my facemask fogged, or my air wasn’t coming through, or (the most likely emergency, as far as I was concerned) I started to panic.

  Gilly came over, clutching her notepad, and stood beside me, the wind ruffling the fur of her parka.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘Stay safe.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I told her, with a dry mouth. ‘I think I’m more scared now than I was when those windows fell in.’

  ‘Windows?’ asked Edward. He looked at me, and then at Gilly; but when he saw that neither of us was going to tell him what we were talking about, he shrugged, and said,

  ‘Are you ready? Let’s drop.’

  I fitted in my mouthpiece, said a silent prayer inside of my head, and then dropped backwards into the sea.

  It was cold and chaotic down there: nothing but foggy water and rushing bubbles. But as I started to sink, I glimpsed the whiteness of Edward’s suit next to me, and then another white blur as Forrest came dropping in after us, and I began to feel that aqualung diving might not be as terrifying as I had thought it was going to be.

  All three of us finned into the tidal stream; Edward and Forrest with balance and grace, me with plenty of enthusiasm but not much in the way of style. The ocean wasn’t too deep here, especially at low tide, no more than 20 or 30 feet; but it was quite deep enough for me, and it was murky enough too for me to stay as close to my buddies as I could.

  As we descended towards the bottom, I felt myself becoming progressively less buoyant, until, as we skimmed a few feet over the sloping surface of the Granitehead mud bank, I was in a state of neutral buoyancy, although I tended to rise and sink a little as I breathed in and out. I was a good swimmer. I had made the swimming team at school, a bronze for backstroke. But this chilly underwater exploration of the black ooze on the west shore of Granitehead Neck was something different altogether. I felt like a clumsy, over-excited child, inexperienced and only just in control of my body and my movements.