The Pariah (36 page)

‘Mr Walcott!’ he shouted. ‘John! What’s going on here? What are you up to?’

‘Just showing Quamus the
David Dark,
that’s all,’ I shouted back.

‘In a salvage boat? And what’s all that waterjet and airlift gear doing on deck?’

‘Mind your own business,’ I told him. ‘This wreck doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s unregistered. If we want to do a little excavation of our own, that’s up to us.’

‘The
David Dark
is registered now,’ Edward shouted. ‘I just registered her this morning.

Gilly called me up from Tewksbury and said that you’d gone off early with a whole lot of equipment.’

Thanks, Gilly, I thought to myself. Judas in linen and lace.

‘Well , registered or not, we still have a perfect right to be here,’ I told Edward.

‘You want me to prove you wrong?’ demanded Edward. ‘You want me to cal the coastguard and have you moved away? This wreck is private property now, and part-owned by the city of Salem. Any vessel suspected of carrying out diving or unauthorized salvage anywhere in the vicinity is liable to be impounded, and the owners fined. So move out.’

‘Edward,’ I said, ‘I thought you and I were friends.’

‘Apparently we made a mistake,’ said Edward. And without saying anything else, he turned away, and directed Dan Bass to turn the
Diogenes
about.

‘Quamus,’ I said, without moving. ‘Light the fuse. Mr Walcott, start your engines and get us the hell out of here.’

Quamus said, ‘You will not warn your colleagues?’

‘My ex-colleagues, you mean? Sure I’ll warn them. But get that fuse lit first.’

Quamus struck a match, cupped his hands over the end of the fuse, and held the flame against the fabric until the explosive core of the fuse ignited. It was a fast-burning fuse, 120 cm a minute, and it quickly sparkled over the side of the lugger and disappeared under the surface of the sea. There was a light cloud of smoke, and a rush of bubbles, and then it was gone.

Walcott gunned the lugger’s engines, and it was then that I yelled out to Edward:
‘Get
going! Move! Fast as you can! Explosives!’

 I saw Edward, Forrest and Jimmy stare across at me, startled. They looked at each other in amazement, and then they looked back at me. 

Edward shouted: ‘What did you say? Explosives?’

 There was a moment’s silence; then the
Diogenes’
engine blared into life, and the little boat began to move away, slowly at first, but quickly building up speed. It had only travelled about 50 yards, however, when there was a curious shaking in the ocean, a sensation quite unlike anything that I had ever felt before. It was like an earthquake, only more vertiginous, as if the world were falling into separate pieces, as if sky were becoming detached from ocean, and ocean were becoming detached from land. I felt as if we were all going to fly weightless into the air, boats, compressors, flags, diving-suits, and everything.

Then, the surface of the sea burst apart. With a thunderous roar, an immense cliff of solid water rose into the air, 50 or 100 feet, and hung there in the morning air. A shockwave pressed against my ears, suppressing the clatter of tons of brine as it collapsed back into the sea, but my ears cleared again in time to hear the echo coming back from the Granitehead Hills, as clear as a cannon-shot.

The deck of the lugger angled and bucked beneath our feet, and we had to cling to the rails to steady ourselves. But the
Diogenes,
which was much nearer the centre of the blast, was swamped first by falling water, and then by a miniature tidal-wave, which broke over her stern and must have gushed into her open hatches unchecked.

Edward didn’t seek our help. He must have been too shocked and angry. Instead, I could see him helping the others to bail out, while Dan Bass gently nursed the hiccupping engine, and steered the
Diogenes
back towards Salem Harbour. There weren’t even any shouts of recrimination, or threats of calling the coastguard; but I knew that Edward would immediately report our piratical behaviour both to the coastguard and to the Salem police, and that we would be lucky to get back to shore without being arrested.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Walcott. ‘The minute that busybody gets back into harbour, the cops are going to be swarming around us like bluefish.’

‘We must salvage the copper vessel,’ Quamus insisted.

‘Disregard the police. The copper vessel is more important.’

‘As long as your precious Mr Evelith guarantees to bail me out of jail,’ snapped Walcott.

‘Mr Evelith will guarantee your complete immunity from prosecution,’ said Quamus, and the way he looked at Walcott, there wasn’t any way that Walcott was going to argue.

Walcott was tough, but Quamus was imperious, his expression as stony as the side of a building.

Walcott and his daughter began to unpack the salvage floats which were stowed around the sides of the after-deck. There were twenty of these, and the idea was to attach them to the copper vessel, once we had located it, and then inflate them with compressed air, so that the copper vessel would rise to the surface and could then be towed into harbour like a raft.

By now, the ocean all around us was bubbling and boiling with rising silt and surfacing debris. There were scores of dead fish, floating white-belly upwards, flounder and dabs, mostly, and a few bluefish. There were blackened elm timbers, carlings and deck supports and broken staves, presumably from the ship’s supply-barrels, and fragments of masts and rigging-blocks.

‘You’re not going to dive into the middle of
that,’
said Walcott, looking down into the disturbed surface of the sea. ‘Give it a half-hour to clear up, first. Otherwise you’ll never find each other, let alone a copper trunk.’

‘Half an hour may be too long,’ said Quamus, narrowing his eyes towards the shore.

‘The coastguard could be here by then.’

‘Look,’ said Walcott, ‘I don’t mind taking risks. I don’t even mind a run-in with the coastguard. I’m used to it. But I’m not taking any responsibility for you and your pal diving into an ocean that’s thick with dangerous debris. Just forget it.’

‘We can take our own responsibility,’ said Quamus.

‘Maybe you can,’ Walcott retorted, ‘but you can’t dive without oxygen, and you’re not diving with any of
mine.’

 Quamus stared at Walcott with such intense disapproval that Walcott had to chew on his pipe, and look away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But if you dive into that little lot, anything could happen.’

We watched for another five minutes as more and more pieces of broken wood rose to the surface. Soon the whole area around Walcott’s lugger was littered with thousands of pieces of dark timber, the remains of one of the most historic archaeological finds in recent history. It looked as if the dynamite had completely shattered the fragile wreck of the
David Dark
into flinders. To piece it all together again out of this floating collection of firewood would be impossible. But I didn’t feel guilty. I knew that I had done what was necessary; and that sometimes human life has to come before human culture.

From Salem Harbour, we suddenly heard the distant whoop of a police-boat siren, and saw its flashing red-and-white lights. Quamus seized Walcott’s arm, and said, ‘Now we must dive.’

‘I’m sorry,’ protested Walcott, ‘it’s still too risky down there.’

Quamus stared at Walcott with wide-open eyes. Walcott tried to look somewhere else, but Quamus somehow dragged his attention back again. I watched, puzzled, while Quamus stared and stared, the muscles flinching in his cheeks, and Walcott stared back at him, with an expression on his face of growing horror, like a man who realizes that his car is out of control and that he’s inevitably going to crash.

‘I - ‘ gasped Walcott, but then his nose suddenly sprang with blood, and he collapsed to his knees on the deck. Laurie knelt down beside him, and gave him an oily cloth to mop up the blood, but even though she gave Quamus a frown of disapproval, she didn’t attempt to say anything to him. I don’t think / would have done, either, after a hypnotic performance like that.

‘Now we must dive,’ Quamus repeated.

But he was wrong. For, even while the police-boat siren grew clearer across the water, something rose to the surface amongst the bobbing raft of broken timbers. Laurie saw it first, and stood up, and said, ‘Look - look, Mr Quamus. Look at that.’

We all approached the stern, and stared out at the waters of the bay. Not thirty yards away, wallowing in the waves, was a huge green casket, as long and as broad as a railroad car, but coffin-shaped, with a crucifix marked on the top of it in corroded relief.

Quamus regarded it with a face like ivory. I felt my own blood draining through me; and my heart beating in slow, irregular bumps.

Walcott said, ‘Is that it? Is that what you’ve been trying to find?’

And Quamus nodded, and made a sign which I didn’t understand, an Indian sign which looked like a blessing, or a sign to ward off evil spirits.

‘It is Mictantecutli, the Fleshless One, the Man of Bones,’ he said. And I watched in growing apprehension as the casket dipped and yawed in the waves, silent and strange, a vessel from a long-dead century, a relic of an antique malevolence which none of us knew if we could even begin to control.

THIRTY-THREE

‘Make it fast,’ ordered Quamus, and Walcott backed up the boat, engines beating slow astern, while Laurie and I leaned over with billhooks and drew the copper vessel closer.

The surface of the vessel was heavily corroded, and time had turned it a dark, poisonous green, but all the same it was remarkable how long it had lasted underneath the silt of Salem Harbour.

There were copper rings along either side of the casket, which presumably had been used for fastening the ropes with which the casket had first been hoisted on board the
David Dark.
Some of these rings had been eaten right through, but I managed to hook one that was intact, and then Laurie actually swung herself off the stern-rail, and stood on the floating casket while she ran a rope through it.

‘There’s no point in heading straight for Salem,’ I said. The police will catch us before we’ve gone half a mile. How about making for the wharf at Granitehead?’

Walcott revved up his diesels. ‘They’ll probably catch us anyway,’ he said, ‘but it may be worth a shot. What do we do when we get there? That damn coffin-thing is far too big for anybody to lift.’

‘There’s a ramp there, and a boat-winch. Maybe we can drag it ashore with that.’

‘And then what? The police will be all over us by then.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe we can borrow a truck. Just give it a try, will you?’

‘Sure I’ll give it a try. I’ll give anything a try. I’m just asking if you had a plan in mind, that’s al .’

‘I’ll think of something, all right?’

‘You’re the boss.’

Even before we had covered quarter of a mile, however, it was clear that the police boat was going to head us off long before we could reach the Granitehead shoreline. Walcott was pressing his lugger to go as fast as it possibly could, but he wasn’t keen on burning out his bearings, and the huge green casket that we were towing behind us was nothing but sheer dead weight.

‘You must go faster,’ insisted Quamus, but Walcott shook his head.

Now the police boat was within earshot, and they killed their siren and began to curve around in front of our bows, neat and fast and unavoidable. One of the officers was already balancing his way along the deck with a loud-hailer, and another stood behind him with a carbine.

‘Okay, slow down,’ I told Walcott. ‘There’s no point in getting shot at.’

Walcott eased off his engines, and the lugger began to dip and drift towards a slow rendezvous with the waiting police-boat. The copper vessel caught up with us, still propelled by its own inertia, and bumped noisily against our stern.

‘Come out on deck with your hands on your heads,’ ordered the police officer. ‘I want all of you right where I can see you.’

He started to walk back along the deck, but he had scarcely gone three paces when he suddenly gripped his stomach, and collapsed out of sight.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Walcott, standing up on the foredeck to get a better view.

‘Did you see that? He just kind of fell over.’

The second officer, the one who had been carrying the carbine, suddenly ran to the police-boat’s cabin. Then their pilot appeared, carrying a towel and a first-aid kit.

‘What’s happened?’ I shouted. ‘Is everything all right?’

The second officer glanced up at us, and then waved us away. I turned to Walcott and said, ‘Pull up alongside. Come on, quick!’

‘Are you kidding?’ said Walcott. ‘This is our chance to get away.’

‘Pull up alongside!’ I ordered him. He shrugged, spat, and turned over the engines so that we nudged up against the trim hull of the police-boat.

It was only when we actually touched their boat that I saw the blood. It was sprayed all over the deck as if someone had been painting the boat crimson with a firehose. The second officer appeared again, his shirt splashed with gore, his hands so bloody that he looked as if he were wearing gloves.

‘What happened?’ I asked him, in horrified awe.

‘I don’t know,’ the policeman said, in a shocked voice. ‘It was Kelly. His stomach just blew open. I mean it just
blew open,
and everything came out, all through his shirt.’

He stared at me. ‘You didn’t do it, did you? You didn’t shoot him or anything?’

‘You know damn well we didn’t.’

‘Well … go back to Salem … you got me? Go back to Salem and report to police headquarters. I have to get Kelly to hospital.’

The pilot came past, his shirt flecked with blood. He was very pale and he didn’t say anything; but went straight to the wheelhouse and started up the police-boat’s engine.

Within a minute, the police-boat had angled away towards the harbour, its siren wailing, leaving the lugger and its attendant casket alone on the incoming tide. I looked at Quamus, and Quamus looked back at me.

‘We will continue to make for Granitehead,’ he decided. ‘Once they have recovered from their shock, those officers will alert the police at Salem that we are coming, and we will be arrested if we go back there. Let us tow this burden of ours on to the wharf, and I will rent or borrow a car and go back to Salem Harbour to bring the refrigerated truck.’

‘Do you think Mictantecutli will be safe for all that time, without refrigeration?’ I asked him.

Quamus looked astern, at the floating casket. ‘I do not know,’ he said solemnly. ‘For all I am aware, that officer on the police-boat… Mictantecutli could well have been responsible for that.’

Laurie glanced at her father. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘let’s get this thing to shore, hunh?’

Walcott nodded. ‘It doesn’t carry anything catching, does it?’ he wanted to know. ‘It isn’t
diseased?’

 ‘Not in the way you mean it,’ I told him. ‘But let’s get a move on, shall we? The longer we stay out here, the more dangerous it’s going to be.’

We passed the Waterside Cemetery and then turned in towards the boat ramp at Brown’s Jetty. It had once been a fashionable place to launch your pleasure-boats, back in the 1930s. There had been a restaurant there, and a cocktail verandah, and lights strung out along the pier. But these days the buildings were sagging and deserted, and all that remained of the cocktail verandah was a rotting deck on which dozens of skeletal beach-chairs lay heaped as if they had been consigned to a mass grave.

Walcott brought the lugger in as close as he could, and then
we
untied the casket and let it drift up to the weed-slimy boat-ramp on the persistent flow of the tide. With a little prodding from our billhooks, it lodged itself listlessly against the lower reaches of the ramp, and then Quamus and I jumped off the lugger into the sea, and swam and waded ourselves ashore.

I climbed dripping wet to the top of the ramp, and tried out the winch. Fortunately someone had kept it greased and in good working order, and it didn’t take long to unwind enough cable to reach down to the casket’s rings. As soon as he was sure that we had the casket secure, Walcott gave us a toot on his whistle and began to steer his lugger out into the harbour again. I can’t say I blamed him, even though he probably faced immediate arrest. Even a couple of months in jail is preferable to having your intestines blown out.

Quamus and I said nothing as we worked the handles of the winch, gradually edging the huge copper vessel up the concrete ramp. It made a shifting, grating sound as we inched it upwards, and there was a terrible
hollowness
about it, a slight rumbling, like very distant thunder. I sweated and gasped at the winch-handle, and tried not to think what the creature inside this ponderous vessel was actually like, and what it might conceivably do to me.

It took us almost half an hour, but at last the casket had been dragged right up to the top of the ramp, where we covered it with two tarpaulin sheets which were usually used for protecting boats during the winter. Quamus looked out across the harbour, but there was no sign of the police or the coastguard, or even of Edward and Forrest and the rest of the
David Dark
fellowship.

‘Now,’ said Quamus, ‘I will go back to Salem and collect the refrigerated truck. You must stay here and guard Mictantecutli.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if / collected the truck? You can’t say that you’re exactly unnoticeable. A six-foot Narragansett in a wet quilted jacket.’

‘They will not notice me,’ said Quamus, with quiet confidence. ‘I have a technique which the Narragansett developed centuries ago to hunt wild animals. We call it “No Hunter.” ‘

‘ “No Hunter”?’

‘It is a way of making oneself invisible to other people, even though one is there. A strange technique, but it can be taught.’

‘All right, then,’ I said. I didn’t really like the idea of waiting beside this monstrous burial-casket too much, but I guess I really didn’t have any choice. ‘Just don’t be too long, that’s all ; and if you
do
get arrested, tell the police where I am. I don’t intend spending all night out here, with nobody but Mictantecutli for company, not while you’re eating steak-and-eggs in the Salem City jail.’

‘Now
you are afraid,’ smiled Quamus.

He walked off between the derelict restaurant buildings towards West Shore Drive. I sat down on the jetty and looked cautiously at the corroded copper vessel in which David Dark’s Aztec demon had been incarcerated for over 290 years. I turned around to tell Quamus to bring me a half-bottle of whisky while he was away, but he was already gone. The ‘No Hunter’ had disappeared. I tried to make myself comfortable, and propped one leg up on the tarpaulins which covered the casket, as if it were simply a rather odd-looking boat that I happened to own.

It was only noon, but the sky was strangely gloomy, as if I were looking at it through dark glasses. A wind was getting up, too: a wind that hadn’t been forecast. It ruffled the gray waves of Salem Harbour, and whipped the dead leaves and collected rubbish on the sagging cocktail verandah. A salt-faded sign above the restaurant still said Harbourside Restaurant, Lobster, Clams, Steaks, Cocktails. I could imagine summer nights out there, with Dixieland bands and men in straw hats and girls in shimmering shimmy dresses.

I tugged up the collar of my jacket. The wind was really cold now, and the sky was so dark that some of the cars on the opposite shoreline were driving with their headlights on. There was probably a storm brewing up, one of those heavy North Atlantic numbers that made you feel as if you were caught in a mackerel-boat at sea, even though you were sitting right there in your own living-room.

Then, I heard that singing. High, faint, and eerie. It came from somewhere inside the derelict restaurant, a thin controlled voice that made the hair crawl up the back of my neck as if it were electrified.

‘O the men they sail’d from Granitehead To fish the foreign shores… But the fish they
caught were naught but bones With hearts crush’d in their jaws.’

 I stood up, and walked across the decayed cocktail-deck, looking up at the restaurant to see where the singing might be coming from. I had to jump once or twice across missing planks; and beneath the deck I could see dripping darkness, where crabs scuttled. I approached the restaurant and went right up to the front door. It was locked, and the glass was so thick with years of salt and grime that I could scarcely see inside.

 The song was repeated, louder this time; in the same cold, clear voice. It was definitely coming from inside the restaurant. I looked around to make sure there was nobody watching me, and then I kicked in the door with three or four hefty kicks. The door was held only by a cheap rimlock, which splintered away from the frame; and then it juddered open and stayed open, almost as if it were inviting me inside. Come in, Mr Trenton, destiny is served.

 I walked carefully inside. The floor was laid with bare splintered boards, dusty and littered with old newspapers and odd fragments of green linoleum. A revolving fan hung from the ceiling, in between two frosted glass lampshades. On the far wall was a wide mirror, spotted and blighted with dirt. I could see myself standing in the restaurant like a long-dead man in a stained old photograph. I took two or three steps forward.

 ‘How can I do that?’ I asked. I watched her as she glided around the room, her funeral robes silently flowing. ‘I’ve brought you up from the bottom of the sea. What else do I have to do?’

 ‘I still have no guarantee that I will get Jane back alive, and in one piece.’

 ‘I’m not sure whether I can.’

 I said, hesitantly, ‘I just want to
know,
that’s all … I mean, what you’re asking me to do . ..’

Jane glided towards the mirror. Like a vampire out of a Dracula story, just as Gilly had jokingly warned me, she made no reflection. But she walked straight
through
the mirror until she was standing in the reflected room, watching me, and there was no image of her on my side of the mirror at all.

‘You must believe,’
she said, and then she faded.

I stood in that deserted restaurant for a long time. Now was the moment when I had to make my decision. I had already seen how cruelly and how callously Mictantecutli could destroy people; and how he could raise the dead and send them to slaughter the living.

Yet I knew all this time that I wanted Jane back with me with a desperation that had somehow gone beyond love. It had become a matter of proving to myself that miracles could actually happen, that the dead could be restored, that everything that I had ever believed about the world could be turned upside-down.

Since Jane had died, I had witnessed some extraordinary and frightening things. But somehow they seemed to me then to have been nothing more than terrifying tricks. It was only when I could hold Jane in my arms again that I would actually
believe
in powers that were far greater than human experience could testify to, or human imagination encompass.

It didn’t occur to me, of course, that more than at any other time since Jane had died, I was now very close to a complete emotional collapse. When I think today of the way in which I persuaded myself that Mictantecutli should be released, I still go physically cold.