The Pariah Read online

  ‘John!’ somebody whispered; or maybe it was nothing but the wind. The black shaggy beasts of the clouds were right overhead now, and the rain grew heavier, and the drainpipes and gutters began to chuckle like goblins. I began to feel a sense of deep foreboding; a feeling that chilled the bones in my legs. A feeling that Quaker Lane Cottage was possessed with some spirit that had no earthly right to be there.

  I walked back down the garden path, and then around to the back of the house. The rain plastered down my hair and stung my face, but before I went inside, I wanted to make sure that the house was empty; that there were no vandals or housebreakers inside. Well, that’s what I told myself. I walked through the weedy garden to the leaded living-room window, and peered inside, shading my eyes with my hand so that I could see better.

  The room looked empty. The grate was still heaped with cold gray ash. My teacup stood on the floor where I had left it this morning. I walked back round to the front of the cottage again, and listened, while the rain truckled straight down the back of my neck. A glimmer of light showed through the clouds, and for a moment the surface of the ornamental pond looked as if it were sprinkled with nickels and dimes.

  I was still standing out there in the rain when one of our neighbours came churning up the lane in his Chevrolet flatbed. It was George Markham who lived at No. 7 Quaker Lane with his invalid wife Joan and more yipping and yapping Dalmatians than you could count. He wound down his window and peered out at me. He wore a plastic rain-cover over his hat, and his spectacles were speckled with droplets.

  ‘Anything wrong, neighbour?’ he called. ‘You look like you’re taking yourself a shower out there.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I told him. ‘I thought I could hear one of the gutters leaking.’

  ‘Don’t catch your death.’

  He was just about to wind up his window again, when I stepped across the puddly lane towards him, and said, ‘George, did you hear anybody walking up the lane last night?

  Round about two or three o’clock in the morning?’

  George pouted thoughtfully, and then shook his head. ‘I heard the wind last night, for sure. But nothing else. Nobody walking up the lane. Any special reason?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  George looked at me for a moment or two, and then said, ‘You’d best get yourself inside, get yourself dry. You can’t go neglecting yourself, just because Jane isn’t here no more. You want to come down later, play some cards? Old Keith Reed might be coming over, if he can get that truck of his started.’

  ‘I might do that. Thanks, George.’

  George drove away, and I was left alone in the rain again. I walked back across the lane, and up the garden path. Well, I thought, I can’t stand out here all night. I opened the door, and gave it a push, and it swung back with its usual dour groan. I was greeted by shadows, and the familiar smell of old timber and woodsmoke.

  ‘Anybody home?’ I asked. The stupidest question of all time. The only person home was me. Jane was a month dead and I just wished I could stop imagining her accident over and over again, I just wished I could stop replaying the last blurry seconds of her life like one of those auto crashes they show on TV, with helpless dummies being flung through windshields. Except that Jane hadn’t been a dummy; and neither had our crushed and curled-up child.

  I stepped inside the house. There was no question about it: there was something different in the air, as if things had been moved around while I had been away. At first I thought: damn it, I was right, I’ve been burgled. But the long-case clock was still ticking away with weary sedateness in the hallway, the 18th-century painting of foxhounds still hung over the old oak linen-chest. Jane had given me that painting for Christmas, as a kind of affectionate joke about the day we had first met. I had tried to blow the hunting-horn that day, to impress her, and produced nothing more than a loud ripping noise, like a hippopotamus with gas. I could still hear her laughing now.

  I closed the door and went upstairs to the bedroom to change out of my wet clothes. I still had this disturbing sensation that somebody had been here apart from me; that things had been touched, picked up and put down again. I was sure that I had left my comb on the bureau, instead of the bedside table. And my bedside clock had stopped.

  I tugged on a navy-blue rollneck sweater and a pair of jeans. Then I went downstairs and poured myself my last half-mouthful of Chivas Regal. I had meant to buy more liquor while I was in Salem, but what with all that business with Edward Wardwell about the painting, I had completely forgotten to stop by the Liquor Mart. I swallowed the whisky straight down, and wished I had another. Maybe when the rain eased off I would walk down to the Granitehead Market, and pick up a couple of bottles of wine, and a Gourmet TV dinner, lasagne maybe. I couldn’t have looked another Salisbury steak in the face if you’d threatened to break my fingers. Salisbury steak must be the loneliest food in America.

  It was then that I heard the whispering again, as if there were two other people in the house who were discussing me under their breath. I stayed where I was for a little while, listening; but every time I listened too hard the whispering seemed to turn into the wind, gusting under the door, or the gurgle of rain down the waterpipes. I stood up, and walked out into the hallway, with my empty glass in my hand, and said, ‘Hello?’

  No answer. Just the steady shudder of loose window-casements. Just the sighing of the wind, and the distant thundering of the sea. ‘It keeps eternal whispering around desolate shores.’ Keats again. I almost damned Jane for her Keats.

  I went into the library. It was cold in there, and damp. The desk was strewn with letters and bills and last month’s auction catalogues, under a huge suspended brass lamp that had once hung in the cabin of Captain Henry Prince, in the Astrea II. On the windowsill there were five or six framed photographs: Jane when she was graduating from Wellesley; Jane and I standing outside a roadside diner in New Hampshire; Jane in the front garden of Quaker Lane Cottage; Jane with her mother and father, eyes squeezed up against the winter sunshine. I picked them up, one by one, and looked at them sadly.

  Yet, there was something odd about them. None of them seemed to be quite the same as I remembered them. That day that I had photographed Jane standing outside the cottage, I was sure that she had been standing on the path, and not in the front garden itself - especially since she had only just bought herself a new pair of mulberry-coloured suede boots, which she wouldn’t have wanted to muddy. There was something else, too. In the dark glass of the criss-cross leaded window only four or five feet behind her, I could make out a curious pale blur. It could have been a lamp, or a passing reflection; and yet it looked disturbingly like a woman’s face, hollow-eyed and distressed, but moving too quickly to have been sharply caught by the camera.

  I knew that, apart from Jane and myself, the cottage had been empty that day. I examined the picture as closely as I could, but it was impossible to tell exactly what that pale blur might have been.

  I looked through all of the photographs again. In all of them, although it was impossible to be exact about it, I had the extraordinary feeling that people and things had been moved. Subtly, but noticeably. For instance, there was a picture of Jane beside the statue of Jonathan Pope, the founder of Granitehead Harbour, and the ‘father of the tea-trade’. I was sure that when I had looked at the photograph last, Jane had been standing on the right side of the statue; and yet here she was on the left. The picture hadn’t been reprinted in reverse, either, because the inscription on the statue clearly read ‘Jonathan Pope’ the right way around. I held the photograph close, and then far away, but there was nothing to suggest that anybody had tampered with it. All that disturbed me, apart from Jane’s altered position, was a quick, unfocused shape in the background, as if someone had been running past when the photograph was taken, and had suddenly turned around. It looked like a woman in a long brown dress, or a long brown coat. Her face was unclear, but I could make out the dark sockets of her eyes, and the indistinct smudge of
her mouth.

  I suddenly began to feel very chilled, and peculiarly frightened. Either I was reacting to the stress of Jane’s death by hallucinating, by going more than quietly mad; or else something unnatural was happening in Quaker Lane Cottage, something powerful and cold and strange.

  A door closed, somewhere in the house. Quietly, the way that a door might be closed by a nurse as she leaves the bedside of a sick or dying child.

  I thought for a terrible moment that I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and I barged my way clumsily into the hall. But there was nobody there. Nobody there but me, and my haunted memories.

  I looked back into the library. On the desk, where I had left it, lay the picture of Jane in the front garden. I walked into the room and picked it up again, frowning at it. There was something grotesquely wrong about it, but I couldn’t decide what. Jane was smiling at me quite normally; and apart from the pale reflection in the window behind her, the house seemed unchanged. But the photograph was different, wrong. It looked as if Jane were propped-up, rather than standing by herself; like one of those terrible police pictures of murder victims. Holding the photograph in my hand, I went to the library window and looked out into the front garden.

  The photograph must have been taken about mid-afternoon, because the sun was low to the west, and all the shadows in it lay exactly horizontal, from one side of the picture to the other. Jane’s shadow lay half-way along the path, so that even though she was nine or ten feet off to the left of it, and her legs were concealed by the low hedge of laurel bushes between us, I could work out exactly where in the garden she was standing.

  I lifted the photograph again and again, comparing it with the front garden. I felt a desperation rise up inside me that almost made me bang my head against the window.

  This was impossible. This was totally and utterly impossible. And yet the evidence was here; in this blandly-smiling photograph. It was impossible and yet it was indisputable.

  Jane, in this photograph, was standing in the one place in the garden where it was humanly out of the question for anyone to stand, on the surface of the ornamental pond.

  SIX

  I left the house and walked down the lane between the wind-whipped yew trees to the main Granitehead highway, and then north-east towards Granitehead Market, on the outskirts of the village itself. It was a good three miles’ walk, there and back, but I usually walked because it was the only real exercise I ever managed to get, and tonight I wanted the rain in my face and the wind in my eyes and anything that would reassure me that I was sane and that I was real.

  A dog barked somewhere off to my right, as persistent as a child with a chesty cough.

  Then a sudden burst of dried-up leaves scurried out of the hedgerow and whirled around in front of me. It was one of those nights when slates are blown off rooftops, and television antennae are brought down, and trees collapse across roadways. It was one of those nights when ships go down, and sailors are drowned. Rain and wind.

  Granitehead people call them ‘Satan’s nights’.

  I passed my neighbours’ cottages: the austere gambrelled rooftops of Mrs Haraden’s house; the picturesque huddle of Breadboard Cottages, all shiplap and trellised porches; the Stick Style Gothic of No. 7, where George Markham lived. There were warm lights inside, televisions flickering, people eating supper; each window like a happy memory, brought to mind in the rainy wildness of the night.

  I felt loneliness as well as fright, and as I neared the highway I began to have the unnerving sensation that somebody had been following me down the lane. It took all the determination I could muster not to turn around and take a look. Yet - weren’t those footsteps? Wasn’t that breathing? Wasn’t that a stone, chipped up by somebody’s hurrying feet?

  It was a long, wet and blowy walk all the way along the main road to Granitehead Market. A couple of cars passed by, but they didn’t stop to offer me a ride, and I didn’t attempt to canvass one. The only other people I saw, apart from car-drivers, were three young men from the Walsh place, all dressed up in oil-skins, lifting a fallen tree from their front fencing. One of them remarked, ‘Just glad I ain’t out at sea, not tonight.’

  And I thought of that song, that curiosity from Old Salem:

  ‘But the fish they caught were naught but bones With hearts crush’d in their jaws.’

  After a while I saw the floodlights shining across the market’s parking-lot, and the red illuminated sign saying Market Open 8 -11. The store window was all misted up, but inside I could see the bright colours of modern reality, and people shopping. I opened the door, stepped inside and stamped my feet on the mat.

  ‘Been for a swim, Mr Trenton?’ called Charlie Manzi, from behind the counter. Charlie was fat and cheerful, with a thick rug of black curly hair, but he could also talk surprisingly sharply.

  I briskly brushed the rain off my coat, and shook my head like a wet dog. ‘I’m seriously thinking of trading in my car for a birch-bark canoe,’ I told him. ‘This must be the wettest place on God’s good earth.’

  ‘You think so?’ said Charlie, slicing salami. ‘Well, on Waileale Mountain in Hawaii, it rains 460 inches every year, which is about ten times more than it does here, so don’t go knocking it.’

  I’d forgotten that Charlie’s hobby was records. Weather records, baseball records, altitude records, speed records, fattest-man records, eating canteloupes upside-down records. There was a standing advisory among the residents of Quaker Hill that you didn’t mention anything that was either the best or the worst of anything whenever Charlie Manzi was within earshot; Charlie would always prove that you were wrong. The lowest temperature ever recorded on the North American continent was minus 81F, at Snag, in the Yukon, in 1947, so don’t try to tell Charlie that ‘this has got to be the coldest night that America has ever known.’

  For a general-store owner, Charlie was friendly, loquacious, and enjoyed ribbing his customers. In fact, swapping smart remarks with Charlie was one of the major attractions of the Granitehead Market, apart from the fact that it was the nearest general store to Quaker Lane. Some customers actually rehearsed what they were going to say to Charlie before they went shopping, to see if they could get the better of him; but they rarely did. Charlie had learned his bantering the hard way, from being a fat and unpopular child.

  Because of his unhappy childhood and his lonely growing-up years, Charlie’s personal tragedy was in many ways more poignant than most. By one of those Godsent miracles of circumstance and fate, Charlie had met and married at the age of 31 a handsome and hardworking lady schoolteacher from Beverly; and although she had suffered two anguished years of gynecological complications, she had at last given him a son, Neil.

  However, the doctors had warned the Manzis that any more pregnancies would kill Mrs Manzi, and so Neil would have to remain their only child.

  They had brought Neil up with a care and a love that, according to Jane, had been the talk of Granitehead. ‘If they spoil that boy any more, they’ll ruin him for good,’ old Thomas Essex had remarked. And, sure enough, on the brand-new 500 cc motorcycle which his doting parents had bought him for his eighteenth birthday, Neil had skidded one wet afternoon on Bridge Street, in Salem, and hurtled headfirst into the side of a passing panel van. Massive cranial injuries, dead in fifteen minutes.

  Charlie’s hard-won paradise had collapsed after that. His wife had left him, unable to cope with his obsessive preoccupation with Neil’s death; or with her own inability to give him another child. He had been left with nothing but his store, his customers, and his memories.

  Charlie and I often talked about our bereavement. Sometimes, when he thought I was looking particularly down, he would invite me into the small office at the back of the store, hung with lists of wholesale orders and sexy Japanese calendars, and he would pour me a couple of shots of whisky and give me a lecture on what he had felt like when he had heard that Neil had been killed, telling me how to manage, how to come to terms with it, and how to le
arn to live my life again. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you that it ain’t hard, or miserable, because it is. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easier to forget about someone who’s dead rather than someone who’s simply left you, because that ain’t so, either.’ And I had those very words in mind as I stood wet and chilled in his store that stormy March evening.

  ‘What are you looking for, Mr Trenton?’ he asked me, as he measured out coffee beans for Jack Williams, from the Granitehead Gas Station.

  ‘Liquor, mainly. My outside’s drowned, I thought I might as well drown my inside as well.’

  ‘Well ,’ said Charlie, pointing down the aisle with his coffee scoop, ‘you know where it is.’

  I bought a bottle of Chivas, two bottles of Stonegate Pinot Noir, the very best, and some Perrier. At the freezer, I collected a lasagne dinner, a frozen lobster-tail, and a couple of packs of mixed vegetables. By the counter, I picked up half a pecan pie.

  'That it?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘That’s it,’ I nodded.

  He began to punch out the prices on the cash register. ‘You know something,’ he said, ‘you should eat better. You’re losing weight and it doesn’t suit you. You look like Gene Kelly’s walking-stick after he’d been singing in the rain.’

  ‘How much did you lose?’ I asked him. I didn’t have to say when.

  He smiled. ‘I didn’t lose nothing. Not a single pound. In fact, I put twelve pounds on.

  Whenever I felt low, I cooked myself up a big plate of fettucine and clam sauce.’

  He shook out two brown-paper sacks, and began to pack away my liquor and groceries.

  'Fat?’ he said. ‘You should have seen me. Charlie the Great.’