The Pariah (19 page)

 ‘Jane, don’t you
know
me?’ Constance wailed. ‘Jane, it’s your mother! You’re all I have left, Jane, don’t leave me! Come back to me, Jane! I need you!’

Walter seized Constance’s shoulders, and cried, ‘Constance, don’t! This is madness! She’s dead, Constance, she
can’t
come back!’

Constance turned and struck out at Walter with a flailing arm. ‘You never cared about her the way I did, did you?’ she screamed. ‘You never cared anything about our children! You never cared about
me,
either! You don’t want her back because you’re guilty, that’s why; just as guilty as John; and because you’re afraid.’

‘Constance, this is a ghost!’ shouted Walter.

‘He’s right, Constance,’ I told her. ‘You’d be safer if you kept away.’

Jane’s blue-white electrical image hovered and flickered, and seemed to grow even taller, until it was taller than Walter. But it never once turned its eyes away from Constance, as she grovelled at its feet on the garden path. Walter stared up at it in abject dread, and took one or two paces back. He turned around to me, his face gray with fright, and mutely appealed to me to do something.
Anything.
He hadn’t understood what it was going to be like, either, and now he was scared out of his mind.

‘Jane!’ screamed Constance. ‘Jane!’

And it was then that Jane’s death-pale lips curled slowly back over her incandescent teeth, and her mouth stretched wider and wider until she was as hideous and as horrifying as a stone gargoyle. Her hair flew up behind her head, and she raised her other arm so that she was standing in a cruciform shape. Then she rose slowly into the air until she was floating over Constance horizontally, her bare feet close together, her white funeral vestments flapping silently in the midnight wind.

Constance stretched back and screamed and screamed, in utter hysteria. Walter cried,

‘Constance! For God’s sake!’ and tried to grab her again; but Jane’s stretched-apart mouth suddenly let out a hollow roar that made him stumble back towards the house, too frightened even to cry out. It was a roar like nothing I had ever heard before: the roar of coldly-blazing furnaces, the roar of enraged demons, the roar of the North Atlantic Ocean, in a catastrophic storm.

Out of Jane’s mouth gushed a fuming stream of freezing vapour, straight into Constance’s face. I could feel how cold it was, even from ten feet away, by the door.

Constance cried out in agony, and collapsed on the path, and as Walter hurried towards her again, Jane’s apparition tumbled slowly head-over-heels through the night air, over the garden hedge, and across Quaker Lane, uphill, in the direction of the shore. Arms stretched wide, a quivering crucifix of blue-white light, over and over, singing as she went.

‘O the men they sail’d from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores.

 I knelt down beside Walter and Constance. Constance had buried her face in her hands, and she was twitching and shuddering. ‘My eyes,’ she whimpered. ‘Oh God, Walter, my eyes!’

 I helped Walter to drag her inside the house, and lie her down on the sofa by the living-room fire. She kept her hands pressed against her eyes, and shook, and moaned, and I was worried that she might have been severely shocked. She wasn’t a young woman any more, and she had a history of heart trouble. ‘Call an ambulance,’ I told Walter. And whatever you do, try to keep her warm.’

 ‘Where are you going?’ Walter wanted to know.

 ‘I’m going after Jane. I’ve got to end this, Walter, once and for all .’

‘What the hell do you think you can possibly do? That’s a supernatural being there, John. That’s a
ghost,
for Christ’s sake. What can you possibly do against a ghost?’

‘I don’t know. But if I don’t go after her, I’ll never find out.’

‘Well , take care. Please. And don’t be too long.’

I ran back out into the windy night. All around me, the telephone wires were droning, and the trees were whistling, as if everything had come mysteriously alive, and was warning me in chorus. Upstairs, at the cottage window, the loose shutter clapped and clapped like a frantic slapstick.

Tugging up my collar, I began to run up Quaker Lane until I ran out of road and found myself jogging across tufted sea-grass. There was no sign of Jane, but the last time I had seen her she had been tumbling through the air in the direction of Waterside Cemetery, where she had been buried, and it seemed reasonable, if frightening, to assume that her ghost had actually come from there.

It was a good three-quarters of a mile to the cemetery gates, and I had to stop jogging after the first few hundred yards, and walk, trying to catch my breath back. On my right, in the darkness, I could just distinguish the white breakers of the Salem Harbour shoreline. Somewhere out there, beneath the black and chilly waters, buried in the mud of three hundred years, lay the wreck of the
David Dark.
The sound of the sea was infinitely lonely and alien. Jane had said that it always made her think of the moon, cold and uncompromising. The sea, after al , is the moon’s mistress.

Through the night, I glimpsed the white arch of the cemetery gates. Beyond it, as I started to jog again, the headstones appeared, spires and crosses and plaques; frozen cherubs and saddened seraphim. A small city of Granitehead’s dead, isolated out on this shoreline. I reached the black-painted wrought-iron gates, and clutched them, peering as hard as I could into the rows of graves, looking slightly to the left, to the place where Jane was buried.

‘
I
saw pale kings and princes too; pale warriors, death-pale were they all.’

 There was no flickering light, no sign of Jane’s manifestation. I turned the knob of the gates, and opened them up, and stepped inside.

Whatever clichés are written about cemeteries at night, there was no question that Granitehead’s graveyard that gusty night in March had an unsettling atmosphere all of its own. Every headstone seemed to possess an unearthly gleam, and as I walked towards Jane’s grave between the silent ranks of tombs, I was frighteningly conscious that I was walking amongst scores of people; people who were dead, and would now be quiet forever, eyes closed or eyeless, robed or in tatters, all lying in their numerous company beneath the blackness of the soil. This was not ordinary ground: this was an enclave of buried memories, a noiseless community of lived-out lives, an acre of human beings who would never speak again.

I approached Jane’s headstone, and stood beside it, shivering and uncertain. Jane Elizabeth Trenton, Beloved Wife of John Paul Trenton, Daughter of Mr and Mrs Walter K. Bedford. ‘Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.’

Now I had come here, I didn’t know what to do. Should I talk to her? Call her? Should I wait for her to appear? I looked around, and saw the pale marble sentinels of all the other headstones standing close, and felt hemmed-in, and breathless, in spite of the wind. A marble angel watched me from two rows away, staring with sightless eyeballs.

I swallowed, and then I said unsteadily, ‘Jane? Can you hear me, Jane?’

It was ridiculous, of course, and I found myself seriously hoping that there wasn’t anybody else in the cemetery who could hear me. I know people
do
talk to their lost relatives, but they don’t often do it in the middle of the night; and they very rarely expect an answer, like I did.

‘Jane?’ I said again. ‘Jane, can you hear me?’

There was no response. Nothing at all but the wind, rustling in the long grass outside the cemetery fence. I stayed where I was for a minute or so, shivering with cold, half-hoping that Jane would appear to me and half-hoping that she wouldn’t; and then I turned to leave.

Out loud, I said, ‘Oh, Christ.’

She was standing behind me, no more than two or three feet away, a few inches above the ground. She was back to her normal height, but she seemed to have become desperately thin and emaciated, as if there were nothing beneath that wind-flapped gown but skin and bones. She wasn’t smiling or frowning or anything. Her expression was empty and remote, her eyes too dark to read. I couldn’t actually see through her, she wasn’t spectral in that sense, but she was somehow melting and moving and
insubstantial.
I felt that if I should try to snatch at her, I would end up with nothing more than a handful of cobwebs.

‘You came,’
she said, in a voice which sounded like four Janes speaking at once. ‘
I 
knew, in the end, you would come.’

 ‘What do you want?’ I asked her. I couldn’t stop myself from stuttering.

 ‘Jane, you’re dead.’

 ‘
N
o,
John, not dead.
‘

‘Then
what,
if you’re not dead? And what do you
want!’

 ‘
I belong to the others. Join me, John. Come with me. Don’t leave me here alone.’

 I held out my hands towards her, very gingerly. ‘Jane, it’s impossible. You’re dead, you should rest. I can’t stand any more of this, Jane; it frightens me.’

‘Of course not. I miss you. I miss you like hell.’

‘But I’m here, John. You can have me. We can be lovers again.’

 ‘Jane, you’re dead, you’re not real. Don’t you understand that?’

 And as she spoke, she turned, and raised her right arm.

 ‘
I
will show you what is real,’
she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

I heard a sound like singing, only it wasn’t singing. It was more like the keenings of mourners at a funeral, or the high unearthly ululation of native women in the Soudan; one of those weird intense ultra-violet sounds which can make your skin crawl around on you as if it had a life of its own. It was coming from everywhere: out of the sky, out of the ground, sometimes setting up an almost unbearable vibration.

I looked around the cemetery, and to my complete horror, other apparitions were rising out of the graves. Their heads appeared first, blind-eyed, growing out of the ground like grotesque pumpkins. Then their shoulders, and the rest of their bodies, rising up and up until they were hovering like Jane above the windblown grass.

There were hundreds of them, one from each grave; men and women and children, each of them flickering dully in the darkness of the night, the faint electrical charge of lives gone by. And as more of them appeared, so the keening they were making grew louder, until the cemetery was echoing with it.

Jane whispered, somewhere inside of my head,
‘This is real. This is real, John, come
and see.’

I walked stiffly along one of the aisles of gravestones. The apparitions remained motionless, hovering, staring back at me out of eyes that were like holes in a ragged curtain. Some of the apparitions were badly-decayed. A woman stood with no flesh on her skull at all, just bare shining bone and a few scraggy tufts of hair. One man’s ribcage was revealed, and inside it wriggled heaps of glowing maggots, struggling and jerking as they devoured his bowels. There was a teenage boy with no lower jaw, just a puffy and ulcerous tongue hanging down from his open throat like a scarf. Hundreds of them, the dead of Granitehead, some almost perfect, untouched, scarcely looking as if they had died at all. Others in ruins, smashed and rotted and barely recognizable as human beings.

I walked all around the perimeter of the cemetery until I reached the gates again. I had an almost irrepressible urge to break out of there, and run, but I also had the fearful suspicion that if I did so, the apparitions would pursue me, in one ghostly rush, and hunt me down.

I stood by the gate, looking out across the city of restless dead; shimmering and decayed. Jane stood a little way off, watching me.

‘I cannot come back to you,’
Jane told me, in that soft, distant voice.
‘But you could
come to me.’

 I turned away from her. I could remember how she had looked, the day we were married. I could remember her sitting on the side of that bed, still wearing her bridal veil, her skirts drawn up to her thighs, unfastening her white stockings from her white garter-belt. There had been flowers everywhere, the whole room had been heady with sweet-peas and carnations. And her face had seemed to me magical, outlined as it was with morning sunlight, the face of the girl that I loved.

 This apparition wasn’t Jane. Or at least, it wasn’t the Jane I had loved. It was like all of these grisly manifestations in the Waterside Cemetery, dead and decaying, an erratic electrical impulse from a lost life. There was no point in staying here. Ugly and frightening as they were, these spirits were unable to help me in my search for a way to put them to rest. If they were anything like Jane, or Edgar Simons, all they desired was that their living loved ones should join them in whatever half-world they now inhabited.

And I didn’t really believe that they wanted even this: they were too emotionless, too concerned with their own unseen agonies. Rather, it was the influence of some greater force that was using them to recruit the living to the realms of the dead, a force that may be lying beneath the mud of Salem Harbour, in the wreck of the
David Dark.

I was only about a third of the way back to the top of Quaker Lane when I caught sight of two or three of the apparitions from the cemetery, keeping abreast of me on the brow of the hill, about twenty yards away. I looked back, and there were more behind me, twelve or thirteen of them at least. And off to my left, about a half-dozen more were following me along the shoreline.

As they came, they kept up that high keening sound. Sometimes it was shrill and distinct, at other times it was blown away by the wind. But it was all around me, an eerie supernatural warcry, as if the dead of Waterside Cemetery were after my blood.

I began to jog, not too fast at first, to see whether the apparitions could keep up with me. They flickered and flew just as quickly, in a strange pell-mell motion, some of them running, some of them tumbling over in the way that Jane’s ghost had done, some of them soaring arms-stretched with their burial robes fluttering in the ocean wind, like charnel-house kites. I felt a deep and historical terror within me, the kind of terror that people must have felt in the 17th century when leprous beggars came to town, hopping and skipping and horrendously diseased. And all the time there was that whistling and keening, almost joyous now, as if they knew that they could catch me.