The Pariah Read online

  The trouble was, I began to feel that my nightmare was just starting.

  EIGHT

  George opened the door and looked at me in surprise. ‘You’re kind of late for a game of cards, John. We were just about to finish up for the evening. Still, if you’d care to join us for a nightcap …’

  I stepped into the hallway and stood there, wet and shaking, feeling like the victim of a road accident. George said, ‘Are you okay? You didn’t catch chill, did you, standing out there in the rain? And where’s your raincoat?’

  I turned and looked at him but I didn’t know what to say. How could I explain to him that I had run down Quaker Lane through the blinding darkness, skidding and stumbling on the wet unmade road, as if I were being hotly pursued by all the demons of hell? And that I had waited outside his house, trying to catch my breath, trying to convince myself that there was nothing after me, no ghosts, no apparitions, no flickering white pictures from beyond the grave?

  George took my arm and led me down the hallway to the living-room. The hall was decorated with trellis-patterned wallpaper, and proudly hung with George’s fishing certificates and photographs of George and Keith and a few of the other old Granitehead boys holding up cod and giant sunfish and flounder. In the living-room, Keith Reed was sitting by the open fire, finishing a last glass of beer, while Mrs Markham’s wheel-chair stood empty in a far corner, with her knitting on the seat.

  ‘Joan went off to bed,’ said George. ‘She tires easily when there’s company. Specially a live wire like Keith.’

  Keith, a white-haired retired boat-captain, gave a grunt of amusement. ‘Used to be a live wire, wunst upon a time,’ he grinned, showing a row of square tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Used to be a time, no lady within kissing distance was safe from Keith Reed. You ask Cap’n Ray, down at the Pier Transit Company, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘You want a drink, John?’ asked George. ‘Whisky, maybe? You’re sure looking white in the face.’

  “Too much clean living, that’s your trouble,’ said Keith.

  I reached out for the arm of the chintz-and-oak chair by the fire, and unsteadily sat down.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ I said. My voice sounded shaky, and congested by phlegm. Keith glanced across at George, but George shrugged to show that he didn’t know what the matter was.

  ‘I, um, I ran down the hill,’ I told them.

  ‘You ran down the hill?’ repeated Keith.

  I suddenly realized that I was close to tears. Tears brought on by fright, relief, the effects of seeing Jane, and the unexpected concern for my wellbeing that was being shown to me by two grizzled old Granitehead boys who normally treated strangers with grave contempt, and a spit on the sidewalk.

  ‘It’s okay now, John, you sup down some of this whisky and tell us what’s wrong,’ said George. He handed me a tumbler with a transfer-picture of a sailing-ship on it, and I took a large swallow. The liquor burned down my throat and into my stomach, and made me cough; but it steadied my nerves, and slowed down my heartbeats, and quelled some of the jangling hysteria that had suddenly gripped me.

  ‘I ran all the way from the cottage,’ I said.

  ‘Now, why did you do a thing like that?’ asked Keith. ‘Cottage isn’t on fire, is it?’ He pronounced it ‘fy-uh,’ with a marked Granitehead accent. ‘Isn’t burning down?’

  I looked from Keith to George and back again. The normality of the living-room almost made me feel that I had been imagining everything. The brass clock on the mantelpiece, the ship’s-wheel on the wall, the flowery-patterned furnishings. A tortoiseshell cat, with its paws tucked in, sleeping with its nose towards the fire. A pipe-rack, hung with burned-down briars. Upstairs, I could hear the sudden blur of laughter, as Mrs Markham sat in bed watching television.

  ‘I’ve seen Jane,’ I said, quietly.

  George sat down. Then he got up again, brought over his glass of beer, and sat down for a second time staring at me closely. Keith said nothing, but didn’t stop grinning, although his grin seemed to have been drained of some of its humour.

  ‘Where did you see her?’ asked George, as gently as he could manage. ‘Up there, at the cottage?’

  ‘In the garden. She was swinging on the garden-swing. This is the second night she’s done it. She did it yesterday only I didn’t see her then.’

  ‘But you saw her tonight?’

  ‘Only for a very short while. She wasn’t very clear. She was like a television picture that’s on the fritz. But it was her all right. I know it. And the swing - the swing was going backwards and forwards by itself. Well, with her on it. But if she was a ghost, she was making that swing go backwards and forwards just as hard as if she was real.’

  George puckered up his lips thoughtfully, and frowned at me. Keith raised his eyebrows, and rubbed his chin.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ I told them.

  ‘Didn’t say that,’ returned Keith. ‘Didn’t say that at all.’

  ‘It’s just that, well , it’s something of a shock, isn’t it?’ put in George. ‘Seeing a real genuine ghost? You don’t think it could have been some trick of the light? Sometimes the light plays strange old tricks at night, especially on the ocean.’

  ‘She was sitting on the swing, George. Lit up, like a blue flickering light. Blue-and-white, like flashbulbs.’

  Keith took a long drink of beer and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Then he stood up, and pressed his hands to the small of his back, rubbing it to ease the stiffness, and walked slowly across to the window. He parted the drapes and stood there for a long time with his back to us, staring out at the weather.

  ‘You know what you’ve just been a witness to, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve seen my wife, that’s all I know. She’s a month dead, and I’ve seen her.’

  Keith turned around, slowly shaking his head. ‘You didn’t see your wife, John. Maybe your imagination painted a picture for you, turned what you actually saw into something you thought was Jane. But no sir. I’ve seen what you saw tonight a hundred times. Used to frighten sailors to death back in the old days. St Elmo’s Fire, they call it.’

  ‘St Elmo’s Fire? What the hell is St Elmo’s Fire?’

  ‘It’s a discharge of natural electricity. You see it mostly on the masts of ships, or radio antennae, or the wings of airplanes. Corposant, they usually call it, in Salem. Flickers, like a burning brush. That’s what you saw, wasn’t it? Kind of a flickering light?’

  I glanced at George. ‘Keith’s right,’ said George. ‘I’ve seen it myself, out on fishing trips. Looks real eerie, the first time you see it.’

  ‘I saw her face, George,’ I told him. There wasn’t any mistake about it. I saw her face.’

  George leaned forward and laid his hand on my knee. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I believe you saw what you said you saw. I truly believe you saw Jane, in your mind’s eye. But you know and I know that there isn’t any such a thing as a ghost. You know and I know that people don’t come back from the dead. We may believe in the immortal soul, the life everlasting, amen, but we don’t believe that it takes place here on earth, because if it did, this world would be pretty damned crowded with wandering spirits, don’t you think?’

  He reached behind him for the bottle of Four Roses and poured me another large glassful. Then he said, ‘You’ve been bearing up to this pretty well, all things considered. I was saying that very thing to Keith only this evening, that you were bearing up well. But it’s bound to break out, now and again, that grief you’re feeling deep inside of you. Nobody blames you for it. It’s just one of those things. I lost my brother Wilf, drowned off the Neck one night, what, eighteen years ago now; and believe you me it took me many a long month to get over that feeling of sadness, and loss.’

  ‘Mrs Edgar Simons told me tonight that she’d seen her late husband, too.’

  George smiled, and turned to smile back at Keith. Keith, who was pouring himself another
Michelob, smiled in return, and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t you go taking no notice of what the Simons widow tells you. Everybody knows what her problem is.’ He tapped his forehead to suggest that she was 78 cents to the dollar.

  ‘She didn’t give old man Simons too much of a life when he was alive,’ put in Keith. ‘He told me wunst that she locked him out of the house all night in his long-Johns, because he felt like exercising his conjugal rights and she sure as hell didn’t. Now, a man wouldn’t go back to a widow like that, even if he was a ghost, now would he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. I was feeling confused now. I was even beginning to doubt what I had actually seen in the garden of Quaker Lane Cottage. Had it really been Jane? It seemed difficult to believe: and even more difficult to recall exactly what her face had looked like. Elongated, like a saint by El Greco, with crackling hair. But couldn’t that crackling hair have been nothing more than the electrical discharge that Keith called corposant, St Elmo’s Fire? It flickers, he had said, like a burning brush.

  I finished my second drink, and declined a third. ‘I won’t be able to crawl back up that hill, let alone walk up it.’

  ‘You want me to come up there with you?’ asked Keith. But I shook my head.

  ‘If there’s anything up there, Keith, I think I’d better face it alone. If there is a ghost, then it’s my ghost, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘You should take yourself a vacation,’ said George.

  ‘Jane’s father told me that.’

  ‘Well , he was right. There’s no use in sitting alone in an old cottage like that, brooding about what might have been, and what’s past. Now, you’re sure you’re going to be okay?’

  ‘You bet. And thank you for listening. You really calmed me down.’

  George nodded towards the whisky bottle. ‘Nothing better for jingling nerves than the old Four Roses.’

  I shook hands with both men and went towards the door. But as I reached the hallway, I turned and said, ‘One thing more. Do either of you know why Granitehead used to be called Resurrection?’

  Keith looked at George and George looked at Keith. Then George said, ‘Nobody knows why for sure. Some folks say that it was named for the new life that folks here were going to lead, when they first landed from Europe. Others say that it was just a name.

  But I personally prefer the story that it was named on the third day after Easter, when Christ rose out of the tomb.’

  ‘You don’t think it was named for anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’ asked George.

  ‘Well … the kind of thing that I think I saw tonight. The kind of thing that Mrs Edgar Simons says she’s been hearing. And Charlie Manzi, too, down at the market.’

  ‘Charlie Manzi? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Mrs Edgar Simons says that Charlie Manzi keeps seeing his son.’

  ‘You mean Neil!’

  ‘He only had one son, didn’t he?’

  George blew out his cheeks in exaggerated astonishment, and Keith Reed let out a long whistle. ‘That woman,’ said Keith, ‘she sure has a whole bunch of bearings loose. You shouldn’t take any mind of her, John; not any mind at all. No wonder you thought you saw something, if you’d been talking to her. Wheweee, Charlie Manzi, that’s something.

  Seeing Neil, you say?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I nodded. I felt embarrassed now, for believing everything that Mrs Edgar Simons had told me. I couldn’t even think why I had listened to her, the way she had babbled on, and the way she had driven. I must have been overtired, or half-drunk, or just plain stupid.

  ‘Listen,’ I told George and Keith, ‘I have to go now. But if you don’t mind, I’ll stop by when I come past here on my way to the shop tomorrow. You don’t mind that, do you?’

  ‘You’re welcome, John. You can stay for breakfast, if you want. Mrs Markham and I whip up some fair old buckwheat cakes between us. She does the mixing and I do the baking. You stop by.’

  ‘Thanks, George. Thanks, Keith.’

  ‘You mind how you go, you hear?’

  NINE

  I left No.7 and walked out into the drizzling night again. I turned right, to make my way back up Quaker Lane; but then I stopped, and hesitated, and looked downhill, towards the main highway, and the house where Mrs Edgar Simons lived. It was only a little before 10 o’clock, and I doubted if she would mind if I paid her a visit. She couldn’t have too many friends these days; and there were few neighbours on the main Granitehead-Salem highway. Most of the big old houses had been sold now, and demolished, to make way for gas stations and food markets and shops selling live bait and tricksy souvenirs. The old Granitehead people had gone with them, too old and too tired and not nearly wealthy enough to be able to relocate themselves to one of the fashionable waterfront houses that bordered Salem Bay.

  It was a good ten minutes’ walk, but I reached the house at last - a large Federal mansion, foursquare but graceful, with rows of shuttered windows and a curved porch with Doric pillars. The gardens which surrounded it had once been formal and well-kept, but now they were wild and hideously overgrown. The trees which surrounded the mansion itself had remained unpruned for nearly five years, and they clung around the house like spidery creatures hanging onto the ankles of a brave and exquisite princess.

  This princess, however, had long ago faded: as I walked up the weedy shingle path, I saw that the decorative balconies had corroded, the brickwork had cracked in long diagonal zigzags, and even the decorative basket of fruit over the front porch, a design especially favoured by Samuel McIntire, was chipped and stained with bird droppings.

  The Atlantic wind whined across the gardens, and around the corners of the house, and chilled my already-soaking back.

  I went up the stone steps into the porch. The marble flooring was crazed and broken, and the paint was flaking from the front door as if the woodwork were suffering from a leprous disease. I pulled the bell-handle, and I heard a muffled jangling somewhere within the house. I rubbed my hands briskly together to try to keep myself warm, but with that wind whipping around the corner it wasn’t easy.

  There was no answer, so I rang again, and knocked, too. The knocker was fashioned in the shape of a gargoyle’s head, with curved horns and a glaring face. It was enough to scare off anybody, even in daylight. What was more, it made a dead, flat, sepulchral sound, like nails being driven into the lids of solid mahogany caskets.

  ‘Come on, Mrs Simons,’ I urged her, under my breath. I’m not standing out here all night.’

  I decided to give it one last try. I slammed the knocker and jangled the bell, and even shouted out, ‘Mrs Simons? Mrs Edgar Simons? You there, Mrs Simons?’

  There was no reply. I stepped away from the door, and back down the porch steps.

  Maybe she had gone out visiting, although I couldn’t think who she would want to visit at this time of night, in the middle of a furious gale. Still, there didn’t appear to be any lights in the house, and although it was hard to tell in the darkness, the upstairs drapes didn’t appear to be drawn. So she wasn’t downstairs, watching television or anything; and it didn’t look as if she were upstairs, asleep.

  I walked around the side of the house just to make sure there were no lights on at the back. It was then that I saw Mrs Edgar Simons’ Buick, parked just outside her open garage doors. The garage doors were trembling and rattling in the wind, but there was nobody around, no lights, no sounds, nothing but the rain sprinkling against the car’s hood.

  Well, I thought, uncertainly - maybe somebody’s called by and taken her out. It’s none of my business anyway. I turned to retrace my steps around the house, but suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a white light flash in one of the upstairs rooms.

  I stopped, and squinted up against the rain. There was nothing for a while, then the light flashed again, so briefly that it could have been anything at all - the reflected headlamps from some faraway car, a distant flash of lightning,
mirrored in the glass. Then it flashed again, and again, and for a moment there was a long sustained flicker, and I could have sworn that I caught sight of a man’s face, looking down at me as I stood in the garden.

  My first inclination was to run like hell. I had tried to be calm and collected after I had seen that flickering hallucination of Jane, but after I had got back to the cottage, I had immediately been seized by a terrified panic, and I had wrenched open the front door and cantered down Quaker Lane as fast as I could humanly go.

  Now, however, I was a little braver. Maybe Keith and George had been right, and all that I had been witnessing around Quaker Hill tonight was St Elmo’s Fire, or some other kind of scientific phenomenon. Keith had said that he had witnessed it hundreds of times, so what was so unusual about my seeing it twice?

  There was another reason why I didn’t run away, a deeper reason, a reason tied up with the sad and complicated feelings I had about Jane. If Jane had really appeared to me as an electrical ghost, then I wanted to know as much about these manifestations as I possibly could. Even if she couldn’t be brought back physically, maybe there was a way of communicating with her, even talking to her. Maybe all this seance stuff was true after all; maybe people’s souls were nothing more extraordinary than all the electrical impulses which had made up their brain-pattern in life, released from their fleshly body but still integrated, still functioning as a human spirit. And since the brain contained the sensory matrix for the body as well, wouldn’t it make sense if occasionally the body was able to appear as a flickering illusion of electrical discharges?

  All these kind of thoughts had been teeming around in my brain during my walk down to Mrs Edgar Simons’ place, and that was why I didn’t run off when I saw the face at the upstairs window. If ghosts were nothing more than formations of electricity, then how could they hurt me? The worst I could suffer would be a mild shock.

  I went back to the front door to see if I could force it open. I even tried wangling my Bank AmeriCard into the latch, the way that thieves do in the movies, but I couldn’t make it budge. Early 19th-century locks were probably impervious to late 20th-century plastic. I walked around to the other side of the house, skirting the twisted and briar-infested trunks of the trees which clung around the brickwork, until I found a small cellar window. It had once been screened by mesh, but the salt ocean air had corroded the wire, and it took only two or three hard tugs to pull the meshing loose.