The Pariah (7 page)

The log fire suddenly dropped, making my head jerk up in frightened reaction, and my heart pump blood as if it were trying to empty a sinking lifeboat. The wind had stilled, and I could hear the rain falling more steadily now, rustling through the orchard and through the trees. I knelt on the rug, with my books all around me, listening, listening, daring the house not to whisper, daring the doors not to open and close, daring the ghosts of 300 years not to flow through the corridors and down the stairs.

And in front of me, on its gray painted sea, the
David Dark
sailed on its unknown voyage, mysterious and indistinct against the Massachusetts treeline. I stared at it as I listened, and as I listened I heard myself whispering its name.

‘David Dark..:

Silence for a while, except for the ashy crackling of the fire, and the soft sound of the rain. Then, scarcely audible, a noise which I was so frightened to hear that I actually let out a peculiar grunt; the sort of mortally-despairing exclamation you sometimes hear from airplane passengers when their plane drops into an unexpected dive. I felt tingling cold, and I wasn’t even sure that I would be able to run if I had to.

It was the garden-swing. Regular and rhythmic, that same
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik,
creakkk-squik
that I had heard the night before. There was no mistaking it.

I stood up and made my way jerkily across to the hallway. I had closed the library door and now it was open.
The latch hadn’t caught!
No. I had closed it, and now it was open.

Someone, or something, had opened it.
The wind!
Impossible. Stop blaming the damned wind. The wind can rattle and shake and whisper and howl, but the wind can’t open a latched door, and the wind can’t change people’s places in photographs, and the wind can’t make that garden-swing go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, not on its own. There’s somebody out there, swinging. Face up to the damned fact that things are happening in this house and somebody’s making them happen, human or inhuman. There’s somebody out there swinging, for God’s sake, so go and look. Go and see for yourself what it is that’s making you so frightened. Face up to it.

I limped across the kitchen, limped as if I was injured, but it was only a combination of fright and pins-and-needles from kneeling on the living-room floor. I reached the back door. Locked. Key on top of the icebox. I fumbled for the key and dropped it on the floor.

Purposely? You dropped that purposely. The real point is you don’t want to go out there.

The real point is that you’re scared shitless, just because some mischievous kid has
trespassed into your orchard and swung on your stupid swing.

On hands and knees, I found the key. Stood up again, jostled it into the lock, unlocked it, turned the doorhandle.

Supposing it’s her’?

And freeze after freeze went through me; as if buckets of ice-water were being poured over me in slow-motion, one after the other.

I don’t remember actually opening the door. I remember feeling the rain prickling my face as I emerged from the kitchen porch. I remember walking, stumbling through the weeds and the long grass, hurrying faster and faster, afraid to miss whoever it was who was swinging on the swing, and yet even more afraid that I might get there before they ran away.

I came around the apple-tree, right next to the swing, and stopped dead. The rain-wet chair was swinging backwards and forwards, high and steady, all by itself. The chains went
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik,
but the chair was empty.

I stared at it, breathing harshly. Alarmed, but oddly relieved. It’s a natural phenomenon, I thought. Thank God for that. Science, not ghosts. Some kind of magnetic disturbance.

Maybe the moon pulls the chains at certain times of the year, the way it pulls the tide, and the momentum kind of builds up, you know about Newton’s Law; some kind of inertia or whatever. Maybe there’s a magnetic lode underneath the soil here, and certain weather conditions charge it up, like electricity from thunderclouds. Or maybe some sort of highly localized wind starts it off, a katabatic wind down the side of the house that -

Then I saw it. A brief, blueish flicker of light, in the seat of the swing. No more than a half-seen flash of distant lightning, but enough to make me stare even harder at the swing-seat as it squeaked backwards and forwards. Then another flicker, a little brighter than the first. I took a step away from the swing, two steps. The light flickered again and I thought I could make out something that I didn’t like.

For what seemed like minutes on end, the light didn’t flicker at all. Then suddenly it lit up again, four or five times, and what I saw on the seat of the swing was like an image illuminated by photographer’s flash-bulbs, an image that was dazzling one instant and nothing but a retinal after-image the next. Half-formed, blurry, as if it were a hologram transmitted from somewhere years ago and far away.

It was Jane, and whenever the light flickered and I could see her, she was looking back at me. Her face was unmarked but odd, thinner somehow, as if her skull were elongated. She wasn’t smiling. Her hair crackled as if it were blown by an electrical discharge rather than by the wind. She was wearing a white dress of some kind, a long white dress with wide sleeves and sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t, but the swing kept on swinging, and the light flickered,, and the chains went
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik.
And, God almighty, she was dead. She was dead and I could see her.

I opened my mouth. I couldn’t even speak at first. My face was wet with rain but my throat was dry and constricted. Jane stared at me, unsmiling, and the flickers began to fade. Soon I could scarcely see her; only the glimpse of a pale white hand on the chain of the swing, the blur of a shoulder, the outline of flying hair.

‘Jane,’ I whispered. God, I was frightened. The swing began to lose momentum. The chains suddenly stopped squeaking.

‘Jane!’
I shouted. And somehow, for a moment, the fright of losing her again overcame the fright of seeing her. If she was really there; if by some unholy miracle she was actually still there, trapped somewhere in purgatory, or the spirit world, if she hadn’t yet died forever, then perhaps -

I didn’t shout to Jane again. I was about to, but something stopped me. The swing swung three or four more times, then came to a standstill. I stood looking at it, and then slowly approached it, and laid my hand on the wet wooden arm of the chair. There was nothing there, no sign that anybody had been sitting here at all. The two carved depressions in the seat were filled with rainwater.

‘Jane,’ I said, under my breath, but I no longer felt as if she were close. And I was no longer sure that I really
wanted
to call her. If she came back, what could she possibly come back to? Her body was crushed beyond repair, and a month decayed. There was no way that she could occupy her earthly self again. And did I really want her to occupy the cottage, and the garden, and me? She had lived, but she was dead now; and there are few people more unwelcome in the world of the living than the dead.

There was another reason I didn’t call her. I remembered what Edward Wardwell had said to me today, in Salem.
‘Did you know that Granitehead was called Resurrection, up
until 1703? Did you know that Granitehead was called Resurrection?’

Drenched, and deeply disturbed, I walked back to the cottage. Before I went in, I looked up at the eyes of the bedroom windows. I thought I might have glimpsed a flicker of blue-white light there, but I was probably mistaken. Even nightmares have to end sometime.

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?’