The Pariah

by Graham Masterton

  The apparitions gathered around me, the fading electrical power that had once been their spirits crawling like glow-worms across their scaly and ulcerated faces. They made a noise, like soft old tissue-paper, crumpled and recrumpled over years of use; like the breathing you can hear in an old and deserted attic, when there’s no-one there. And there was a distinctive odour, too, not so much of fleshy decay, but .of burned electricity terminals, and rotting fish.

  They surrounded me, but they made no immediate move to touch me. I lay where I was, pinned down, panting for breath, scared out of my mind and yet still wondering what the hell I could do now. Even in the throes of a scarlet panic, the human mind still plots and schemes and programmes for its own survival.

  The apparitions stood back a little, and Jane appeared, very tall now, her face stretched out almost beyond recognition.

  ‘You are mi-i-i-ne,’ she said, blurrily. I felt as if time had slowed down, as if the atmosphere had turned to glycerine, and even my struggles against the unseen weight that was holding me down seemed to take endless minutes.

  Jane spread out her long-fingered hands, and electricity crackled from one fingertip to the other, like a Van der Graaf generator. She seemed to have built up more power now, because her body was flickering and flashing, and processions of sparks teemed off her shoulders and out of her hair as if she were infested with them. The smell of burning grew even stronger, and I felt a shudder go through the assembled apparitions, as if they were all sharing in Jane’s massive discharge of psychic energy.

  It had to be enough to kill me. It had to be enough to release my spirit, and leave my body electrocuted on the hillside, another strange and inexplicable fatality. Then I too would be haunting Granitehead, searching for Gilly perhaps, to bring her into the hosts of the dead.

  Jane touched me with her fingers, and I felt a numbing shock of current. My left leg involuntarily jerked, and my left eyelid fluttered uncontrollably.

  ‘You can join me now,’ whispered Jane. ‘It would have been better if you had done it by accident, or of your own free will … but I cannot wait for you any longer. I love you, John. I want to make love to you.’

  Her outstretched fingers came closer. I could see the electricity creeping along the lines on her palms, along the lifeline and the heartline and the head-line. There were even sparkling charges in her nails, and around her wrists. The human energy of a lifetime was being expended to bring me with her to the grave.

  I struggled and fought, but the pressure on my chest remained immovable. All round me, the apparitions began to sing and scream, a terrible high cacophony like a madhouse. Right next to my face stood the fleshless leg of a decaying woman, the bones of her toes glowing phosphorescently. A little further away, a hooded man stood with half of his face corroded away, one lidless eye glaring at me ferociously.

  ‘You can’t call this love!’ I shouted at Jane, my voice high with fear. This isn’t what we got married for! This isn’t why we wanted to have our baby! God, if you love me, Jane, let me go!’

  Jane stared at me with those impenetrable eyes. Electricity crept around her mouth, and outlined her teeth. ‘Baby? she said, in a resonant echo.

  ‘Yes,’ I told her, brokenly. I was so scared that I hardly knew what I was saying, or what I was trying to prove to her. ‘That baby you were carrying when you were killed. Our baby.’

  Jane’s apparition seemed to consider what I had said with burning deepness. Around us, the graveyard creatures whispered and sang; and above our heads, the midnight clouds raced past as if they were fleeing from the same kind of fate that now awaited me.

  ‘The baby…’ she said. She hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to back away from me; or rather, to shrink away, in both size and distance. ‘The baby…’ she repeated, in a whisper that was just as close as before. ‘But the baby was never born.’

  I looked around me. It appeared as if the other apparitions were shrinking away from me as well , and by twos and threes the crowd of them was beginning to disperse. I suddenly felt the pressure relieved from my chest, and I was able unsteadily to stand up, and brush my windblown hair. I watched in awe and indescribable relief as the apparitions floated and tumbled and hobbled away, descending the grassy hillside with their heads bowed; until they had vanished into the gates of the cemetery.

  Only Jane’s apparition remained, quite a long way away, duller and dimmer now that she was no longer trying to electrocute me. Her hair flew around her, and her white gown rippled around her ankles, but I could scarcely make her out in the darkness.

  ‘You are lost to me, John… I can never have you now.. .’

  ‘Why?’ I asked her, not out loud, but inside my mind.

  ‘Entry into the region of the dead is by succession.. .you are always called by the relative who died immediately before you…that is the power which enables the dead to summon the living. Our baby died in hospital, long after I was already dead, and therefore he and he alone can call you to join us… But he was never born, and therefore his spirit is still in the higher realm, and still at peace, and he cannot appear here to guide you into the region of the dead..:

  I didn’t know what to say to her. I thought of the way she had once been, and the joy she had felt when she knew that she was pregnant. If only I had known that day that Dr Rosen had called me up and said that I was going to be a father that my baby would one night save my life.

  ‘What will happen to you now?’ I asked Jane, out loud this time.

  She diminished even further. ‘Now, I will have to stay in the region of the dead for ever…now, I will never be able to rest…’

  ‘Jane, what can I do?’ I shouted. ‘What can I do to help you?’

  There was a lengthy silence. Jane’s apparition flickered even more dimly than before, and then disappeared, except for a flapping darkness against the darkness of the hillside.

  Then, blurry and deep, a parody of Jane’s voice said, ‘Salllvagge. ..’

  ‘Salvage? Salvage what? The David Dark, or what? Tel me! I have to know what it is!’

  ‘Sallvagge..: the voice repeated, growing slower and deeper until it was almost incomprehensible.

  I waited by myself for any more voices, any more apparitions, but it appeared now that they had left me in peace. I walked back towards Quaker Lane Cottage, feeling as weary and as beaten as I had ever felt in my whole life.

  As I reached the top of Quaker Lane, I saw an ambulance parked outside the cottage, with its red-and-blue lights flashing. I broke into a tired jog, and reached the front gate just as two paramedics were bringing out Constance Bedford on a stretcher. Walter Bedford was following close behind, looking distraught.

  ‘Walter,’ I asked him, breathlessly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Walter watched the paramedics lift his wife into the back of the ambulance, and then he took my arm and led me around to the front of the vehicle, out of earshot. The blood-red light flashed on and off against his face, as if he were Dr Jekyll one second and Mr Hyde the next.

  ‘She’s not seriously hurt, is she?’ I asked. ‘Jane just sort of breathed on her, that was all.’

  Walter lowered his head. ‘I don’t know what she breathed, or how she breathed it, but whatever it was, it was colder than liquid nitrogen, they said, minus 200 degrees Centigrade.’

  ‘And?’ I asked him, frightened even to speculate what might have happened to Constance.

  ‘Her eyes were frozen solid,’ said Walter, in an unsteady voice. ‘Absolutely solid; and of course they became brittle. When she clapped her hands against them, to try to stop the pain, they shattered, like china. She’s lost both of them, John. She’s blind.’

  I put my arm around his shoulders and held him close. He was trembling all over, and he clutched at me as if he didn’t have the strength or the ability to be able to stand up any more. One of the paramedics came over and told me, ‘It’s okay now, sir. We’ll take care of him. He’s had a pretty bad shock.’

  ‘His wi
fe? Is she - ?’

  The paramedic shrugged. ‘We’ve done what we can. But it looks like the septum of the nose and part of the forehead have been frozen as well. It’s possible that parts of the brain are affected as well; the doctors won’t be able to tell until they’ve run some tests.’

  Walter quaked in my arms. The paramedic said, ‘You don’t have any idea how this happened, sir? I mean, nobody around here has any reason to store liquid gases, do they? Nitrogen, or oxygen? Something like that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nobody that I know of. Nothing as cold as that.’

  Walter said, ‘She was always so loving … she always loved her mother so dearly.

  Cold, never. Never, ever cold.’

  ‘He’ll be okay,’ the paramedic repeated, and helped Walter into the back of the ambulance. He closed the doors, and then came up to me and said, ‘She’s your mother-in-law, right?’

  'That’s right.’

  ‘Well , keep an eye on the old man. He’s going to need your help.’

  ‘You don’t think that she’s going to die?’

  The paramedic raised a hand. ‘I’m not saying she will and I’m not saying she won’t. But it always helps if the patient has some kind of a will to keep on living, and right at the moment this lady doesn’t seem to have that will. Something about her daughter, I don’t know. Your wife, I suppose.’

  ‘My late wife. She died about a month ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the paramedic. ‘It hasn’t been your year, has it?’

  TWENTY

  It was raining in torrents when we drove out to Dracut County to talk to old man Duglass Evelith. The sky was an unrelenting gray, like layers of sodden flannel, and the rain just kept on pouring and pouring until I thought it would never end, all year; that Massachusetts would never be dry again.

  The three of us went in my car - myself, Edward, and Forrest Brough. Jimmy Carlsen had wanted to come, but at the last moment his mother had insisted that he go over to Cambridge for Sunday lunch to meet his cousins from Arizona. ‘Jimmy’s mother is one of those ladies who won’t take no for an answer,’ explained Forrest, as we drove through the rain.

  ‘Show me a mother who will,’ replied Edward; and I thought, with sadness and regret, of Constance Bedford. Walter had called me this morning and told me that she was still in intensive care, and that the doctors at Granite-head Clinic were extremely reticent about her chances of survival. ‘Overwhelming psychological and physiological trauma,’ they had diagnosed.

  So far, I hadn’t yet told Edward or Forrest about the grisly events of the previous night. I needed to think them all out for myself before I discussed them with anybody, particularly with anybody as opinionated as Edward. I would tell them, later today or early tomorrow, but right at the moment my mind was still a clamour of rushing apparitions, opening graves, and shattered eyeballs. I couldn’t make any sense of what had happened, and I didn’t want to confuse myself any further by attempting to rationalize it. This had all gone way beyond Dr Rosen’s ‘post-bereavement hysteria.’

  This was another world, another existence, more mystical and more powerful than anything that doctors or psychiatrists could handle; and if I was going to be able to do anything at all for Jane or Neil Manzi or any of those hundreds of restless spirits who had pursued me last night, then I was going to have to understand it clearly, without prejudice or easy assumptions.

  ‘Entry into the region of the dead is by succession…’ The way Jane had said that, it was almost as if she had been reading from a book. ‘You are always called by the relative who died immediately before you.’ Those words reinforced my earlier opinion that the deaths that had been taking place in Granitehead were a summoning, the dead beckoning the living, a kind of séance in reverse, with tragic and often gruesome consequences.

  At least I knew one thing now: that I myself was charmed and protected by my unborn son. Perhaps not against the full strength of the force which lay within the David Dark, but certainly against Jane.

  I felt bitter, as I drove; bitter and tired. I also had a terrible sense of impotence and defeat, as if nothing that I was able to do would help to put Jane to rest. Knowing that her spirit was trapped in that hideous limbo with all those rotting and skeletal apparitions was far worse than knowing that she was dead. The pain was greater, the feeling of loss which I was already suffering was heightened by a feeling of helplessness and despair.

  I played Brahms on the car’s tape deck to calm me down, and talked with Edward and Forrest about Gilly McCormick, and music, and the David Dark, and Gilly McCormick.

  ‘Is she stuck on you?’ asked Edward, as we drove into the outskirts of Burlington.

  ‘Gilly, you mean?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I suppose we do share a certain vague rapport. ‘

  ‘You hear that?’ said Forrest. ‘A certain vague rapport. That’s educated talk for “we’re just good friends”.’

  Edward took off his spectacles and polished them with a scrumpled-up Kleenex. ‘I have to admire your speed, John. When you want something, you certainly go straight in there and get it.’

  ‘She’s an attractive girl,’ I replied.

  ‘Well , sure she is,’ said Edward, and I thought I detected a hint of jealousy in his voice.

  Forrest, leaning forward in the back seat, gripped Edward affably on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry about Edward,’ he said. ‘Edward’s been in love with Gilly McCormick ever since he first set eyes on her.’

  We took a right at Burlington, turning off 95 and heading north-west on 93. The car splashed through sheets of puddles, and sloughed through roadside floods. The windshield wipers kept up a steady, rubbery protest and raindrops hovered on the side windows like persistent memories that refused to let go.

  Edward said, ‘Do you know that Brahms used to play piano in dancehalls and dockside saloons?’

  Forrest said, ‘That’s nothing. Prokofiev used to cook sukiyaki.’

  ‘What the hell does that have to do with Brahms playing in dance-halls?’ Edward demanded.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you two,’ I put in. ‘I don’t think I’m quite in the mood for arcane academic arguments.’

  They both fell silent as we drove through the rain towards Dracut County. Then Edward said, ‘Is that true? About the sukiyaki I mean?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Forrest. ‘He learned how to cook it when he went to Japan. He never liked sushi, though. It made him compose in key.’

  We reached Tewksbury five or ten minutes after noon. It was only a small community, and Edward was quite sure that he could remember where the Evelith house was, but all the same we spent another ten minutes driving around and around the green, looking for the front gates. An elderly man was standing by the side of the green in a full-length waterproof cape and a fisherman’s sou’wester, and he watched us gravely as we passed him for the third time.

  I pulled in to the side of the road. ‘Pardon me, sir. Can you direct me to a house called Billington?’

  The elderly man came forward, and stared into the car like a country policeman who suspected us of being beatniks, or radicals, or big-city insurance salesmen.

  'The Evelith place? That what you want?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. We have an appointment to see Mr Duglass Evelith at twelve o’clock.’

  The elderly man reached under his raincape and produced a pocket-watch. He opened the case and peered at it through the lower half of his bifocals. ‘In that case, you’re going to be late. It’s thirteen minutes after.’

  ‘Could you just direct us, please?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Well , it’s easy enough,’ said the elderly man. ‘Follow this road around to the other side of the green, then take a left by that maple.’

  'Thank you,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ the elderly man said. ‘I wouldn’t go in there if you paid me.’

  ‘The Evelith place? Why not?’

&n
bsp; ‘That place is bad fortune, that’s what that place is. Bad fortune, and ill luck; and if I had my way I’d see it burned down to the cellars.’

  ‘Oh, come on, now,’ said Edward. He was obviously trying to coax the old man to tell us more. ‘Mr Evelith’s a recluse, that’s all. That doesn’t mean to say that there’s anything spooky about his house.’

  ‘Spooky, you call it? Well, let me tell you something, son, if you want to see anything spooky, you ought to go past the Evelith place one summer night, that’s what you ought to do. And if you don’t hear the weirdest noises you ever heard, groanings and roarings and suchlike, and if you don’t see the most peculiar lights dancing around on the rooftops, then you can come back to me and I’ll give you dinner, free of charge, and your fare back to wherever it is that you come from.’

  ‘Salem,’ said Forrest.

  ‘Salem, hey?’ asked the elderly man. ‘Well , if you’re Salem folks, you’ll know what kind of thing it is that I’m talking about.’

  ‘Groanings and roarings?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Groanings and roarings,’ the elderly man affirmed, without explaining any more.

  Edward looked at me and I looked back at Edward. ‘Everybody still game, I hope?’ I asked. Edward said, ‘Sure. Forrest?’ And Forrest replied, ‘I’m game. What’s a little groaning and roaring?’ Edward said, ‘You forgot the peculiar lights.’

  We thanked the elderly man, put up the car windows again, and drove around the green. Past the spreading maple tree, almost hidden by creepers and unkempt bushes, we found the high wrought-iron gates of Billing-ton, the house in which the Evelith family had lived since 1763. Edward said, There it is. I don’t know how I could have forgotten where it was. I could have sworn it was further along the green the last time I came here.’