The Pariah (28 page)

 I walked over to the edge of the water and stared down at it. Then I picked up a dead stick, and cautiously prodded beneath the scum. There was nothing there, only stinking weed, and the white fungussy body of a dead goldfish.

 Anne was standing in the front porch when I turned around, paler than ever. ‘I saw her,’ she said, and gave a sudden and slightly hysterical giggle. ‘I actually saw her.’

 ‘She’s becoming stronger,’ I said. ‘First of all, she only appeared as a flickering light, and only at night. But then she started to look more solid, more real if you like. Now she’s appearing just as frequently in the daylight.’

 The Fleshless One must be breaking free from his casket,’ said Anne. ‘Did Jane say anything to you? I thought I heard a voice, but I couldn’t make out what the words were.’

‘She said that if I - well, she said that I had to be careful.’

 ‘Was that all?’

 I felt guilty, not telling Anne that Mictantecutli had promised to return my wife and my child to me; but then it was something I wanted to think about. There was no question of my doing anything to prevent Edward and Forrest and Jimmy from taking charge of the living skeleton, and eventually delivering it to old man Evelith; but all the same, I
had
been made an extraordinary offer, and there was no harm in considering it, thinking it through. I thought of all those days and evenings when Jane and I had been driving the length and breadth of the North Shore, looking for likely antiques to put in the shop, and the remembered happiness of those times was almost too sweet to bear.

‘Let’s have that drink,’ said Anne, and led the way back into the cottage.

I lit a fire, switched on the television, and poured us each a sizeable whisky. Then I took my shoes off and warmed my toes by the crackling logs. Anne knelt on the floor beside me, the firelight reflected in her eyes and in her long shiny hair.

‘We first began to feel vibrations about you when your wife was killed,’ she said. ‘We were having a meeting at Mercy Lewis’ house; she’s our senior wonder-worker, if you like. It was Enid who sensed that something was in the air. She said that a Granitehead girl had died, she could feel it, and that her spirit had fled back to Granite-head and been ensnared by the Fleshless One. Not all spirits are caught; only those which the Fleshless One believes will bring him more hearts, and more blood, and more years of unlived life.

‘Because your wife’s spirit was caught, we immediately sought your name.’

‘By magic?’ I asked.

Anne smiled. ‘I’m afraid not. We looked in the obituary columns of the
Granitehead
Messenger.
And there she was, Jane Trenton. We started watching you straight away, or / did, mostly, since I don’t live too far away. I even went to the funeral.’

That’s where I’ve seen you before,’ I told her. ‘I thought your face was familiar.’

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘the more we watched you, the more limited we realized our abilities were going to be to help you. Our power, what we have of it, comes from the Fleshless One himself, the very one we are determined to keep in check. That is why it will be better for you and your friends from the Peabody to raise the
David Dark,
and extricate Mictantecutli, and then for we witches to pacify it with ritual sacrifices and prayer, before Duglass Evelith and Quamus finally destroy it. It is quite possible, and all of we witches are prepared for this, that when the Fleshless One is brought up from the ocean-bed, we shall be completely in his thrall. But Duglass Evelith and Quamus are satisfied that they can handle this eventuality, and that the only way in which they can bring the Fleshless One to total destruction is by using
us
to serve and exalt him.’

‘Where does Quamus come into this?’ I asked her. ‘I thought he was the butler.’

‘He helps Mr Evelith to run the house, yes. But he is also the last of the great Narragansett wonder-workers. He was trained from childhood in the higher arts of Indian magic; and I have seen him with my own eyes set fire to pieces of paper by simply looking at them, and making a whole row of chairs fall over backwards one by one.’

‘Quite a trickster.’

‘Not a trickster, John. Definitely
not
a trickster. Not Quamus. He’s been helping Duglass Evelith for years to invoke some ancient Indian spirit that was supposed to have taken the soul of one of his ancestors, way back in 1624, when the Puritans first came to Salem, and it was still called Naumkeag. It’s very secret. Neither of them will tell me what they’ve achieved. Even Enid isn’t allowed to know. But she says that they lock themselves in that library for days on end sometimes, and you can hear these terrible shouting and groaning noises, so loud and deep that they make the doors and the windows rattle, and that quite a few Tewksbury people got up a petition because of the strange lights that were appearing in the sky.’

I sat back, cupping my whisky-glass in my hands. Tell me I’m going to wake up in a minute,’ I told her. ‘Tell me I fell asleep last week and I’m still dreaming.’

‘You’re not dreaming, John,’ she insisted. ‘The spirits and the demons and the apparitions are all real. Within their own sphere, they’re all much more real than you and I appear to be. They have always been here, and they always will be.
They
are the ones who inherited the earth, not us. We’re just usurpers, shadowy little beings who have been meddling and interfering in whole realms of power and grandeur that we don’t even begin to understand. Mictantecutli is real. It’s really down there; and what it can do to us is real.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, tiredly. ‘I think I’ve seen enough death and enough pain and enough spiritual torture to last me a lifetime.’

‘You’re not thinking of quitting?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

Anne looked away. ‘I suppose I might,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t care about the lives of other people; if I didn’t care whether my own dead wife ever found any rest or not. Then I’d quit.’

Upstairs, a bedroom door banged shut. I looked up, and then at Anne. There was a creak right above our heads as
something
stepped on a floorboard. There was a lengthy silence, and then another creak, as if the same something were walking back across the room again. The living-room door suddenly opened by itself, and a cold draught blew in, stirring up the ashes of the fire.

‘Close,’ said Anne, and raised one hand, palm forwards, towards the door. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the door closed, apparently by itself.

‘I’m impressed,’ I said.

‘It’s a simple enough thing to do if you have the power,’ she said, but she wasn’t smiling.

‘But the spirits are in the house now, and they feel unsettled.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’

‘I can dismiss them for now; just for one night. That’s if the Fleshless One hasn’t increased his influence very much more than usual.’

‘In that case, please dismiss them. It’ll be a change to get a night’s sleep that isn’t disturbed by walking apparitions.’

Anne stood up. ‘Do you have any candles?’ she asked me. ‘I shall also want a bowl of water.’

‘Surely,’ I said, and went into the kitchen to fetch what she wanted. As I crossed the hallway, I was conscious of the coldness and the restlessness of unhallowed spirits, and even the clock seemed to be ticking differently, almost as if it were ticking
backwards.

There was a dim flickering light under the library door, but the last thing in the world I was going to do was open it.

 I brought Anne back two heavy brass candlesticks, complete with bright blue candles, and a copper mixing-bowl half-filled with water. She set them down in front of the fire, one candle on each side and the bowl in between. She made a sign over each of them, not the sign of the cross, but some other, more complicated sign, like a pentacle. She bent her head and whispered a lengthy chant, of which I could hear almost nothing except the repeated chorus.

‘Dream not, wake not, say not, hear not; Weep not, walk not, speak not, fear not.’

 After the chant was finished, she remained with her head bent for three or four minutes, praying or chanting in silence. Then she turned to me abruptly and said, ‘I shall have to be naked. You don’t mind that, do you?’

 ‘No, of course not. I mean, no, why not? Go ahead.’

 She tugged off her black sweater, revealing thin arms, a narrow chest, and small dark-nippled breasts. Then she unbuckled her belt and stepped out of her black corduroy jeans. She was very slim, very boyish; her dark hair swung right down to the middle of her back, and when she turned around and faced me I saw that her sex was shaved completely bare. A beautiful but very strange girl. There were silver bands around her ankles and silver rings on every toe. She raised her arms, completely composed and unembarrassed, and said, ‘Now we shall see who has the greater power. Those poor lost spirits, or me.’

She knelt down in front of the candles and the bowl of water, and lit the candles with a sputtering piece of kindling from the fire. ‘I can’t use matches: there mustn’t be any sulphur in the flame.’ I watched in fascination as she bent forward and stared at her own reflection in the bowl of water, holding her hair back with her hands.

‘All you who seek to penetrate the mirror here, turn back,’ she said, in a sing-song tone.

‘All you who try to cross again the borders of the region of the dead, go back. Tonight you must rest. Tonight you must sleep. There will be other times, other places; but tonight you must think on what you are, and turn away from the mirror which leads to the life you knew.’

The cottage became quiet, as quiet as it had last night. All I could hear was that odd backward-sounding ticking of the long-case clock, and the fizzing sound of the candles as they burned into their bright blue wax.

Anne stayed where she was, bent over, her breasts pressed against her thighs, staring into the copper bowl. She wasn’t saying anything, but she gave no indication that the working of this particular wonder was over yet; nor that it was going to be successful.

To my amazement, the water in the bowl began to bubble a little, and steam, and then to boil. Anne sat up straight, her arms crossed over her chest, and closed her eyes. ‘Go back,’ she whispered. ‘Do not try to penetrate the mirror tonight. Go back, and rest.’

The water in the bowl boiled even more noisily, and I stared at it in disbelief. Anne knelt where she was, her eyes tight closed, and I could see tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead, and on her upper lip. Whatever she was doing, it obviously needed enormous effort and intense concentration.

‘Go … back,’ she whispered, as if it was a struggle to get the words out. ‘Do not cross

… do not cross …’

It was then that I began to get the feeling that she was involved in a struggle with something or someone, and that she was losing. I watched her anxiously as she began to quiver and shake, and the sweat ran down her cheeks and runnelled between her breasts. Her thighs quaked as if she was being prodded with an electric goad, and she started to give little involuntary spasms and jumps.

The living-room door opened again, just a fraction; and again that coldness began to course through the room. The fire cowered down amongst its ashes, and the candles guttered and blew. In the bowl, the water went off the boil, and as suddenly as it had bubbled, began to form on its surface a thin skin of ice.

‘Anne,’ I said, urgently. ‘Anne, what’s happening? Anne!’

But Anne could not reply. She had lost control of whatever mental wrestling-match she was involved in; yet obviously she didn’t dare to break her concentration or release her hold, in case she would suddenly free the beast with which she was struggling. She was still sweating and shivering, and every now and then she let out a little gasp of strain.

The living-room door opened wider. There, in her funeral robes, stood Jane. Her face was different now, ghastlier, as if decay had begun to set in. Her eyes were wide and staring, and her teeth were drawn back in a grisly grin.

‘Jane!’ I shouted. ‘Jane, leave her alone, for God’s sake! I’ll do what you want! You know that I’ll do what you want! But leave her alone!’

Jane didn’t seem to hear me. She came gliding into the room, her white funeral robes swayed by the chilly wind, and stood only a few feet away from us, her eyes still staring, her grin just as skeletal and horrifying. I prayed to God that she wouldn’t do to Anne Putnam what she had done to Constance, her own mother.

‘Jane, listen,’ I said, trying to sound reasonable. ‘Please, Jane. Just leave her alone and I’ll get her out of here. She was only trying to help me. You know that I’ll do what you want. I promise you, Jane. But leave her alone, please.’

Jane lifted both her arms. As she did so, Anne was lifted up, so that she was standing, her knees slightly bent, her eyes still closed, shaking and trembling as she tried to break free of the influence that gripped her. She looked as if she were being held up by two invisible helpers.

‘Leave her, Jane,’ I begged. ‘Jane, for God’s sake, don’t hurt her.’

Jane made a circling motion with her hand. Without a sound, Anne rotated in the air until she was upside-down, her feet nearly touching the ceiling, her dark hair spread out on the carpet beneath. I watched in frightened silence. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop whatever was going to happen now. Jane was proving to be a fatally jealous bride; a bride who would take her revenge on any woman who came near me.

The cold wind blew up more ashes from the fire. Jane stretched out her arms, and, in response, Anne’s legs were opened wide, so wide that I heard the tendons crack, and her naked sex was exposed. She was suspended there in front of me, in inverted splits, her body slippery with sweat, her eyes tight closed, her teeth grimly clamped together.

Jane stretched out her arms again, and Anne’s arms stretched out, too. There were two inches of clear space between the top of Anne’s head and the floor, although because of the length of the hair, it looked as if she were somehow balancing supernaturally on her braids.