The Pariah

by Graham Masterton

  Forrest put in, ‘We’re relying on information supplied by a half-drowned sailor from 290 years ago. Maybe he got it all wrong; maybe the beacons he thought he saw weren’t beacons, but house-lights, or flares. I’m beginning to think this damned wreck isn’t down here at all.’

  ‘Hold it,’ said Jimmy, who had been sitting in front of the scanner print-cuts. He pointed to the smudgy trace from the side-scanner, which had suddenly shown a hiccup.

  There’s something right there, some kind of interruption in the natural ripple patterns.’

  He turned to the echo-sounder print-out, and, sure enough, there was a noticeable disturbance in the sub-stratum below the surface of the sea-bed.

  ‘Gentlemen, I think we may have something,’ said Jimmy. He waited until the trace had unrolled a few more inches, then he tore it out of the machine and laid it on our chart-table. ‘You see this? There’s something down there all right, under the mud. And look at the pattern from the side-scanner.’

  Edward said, ‘If that isn’t a scour-mark caused by a sunken wreck, then I’m a Chinaman.’

  'The amount of Chinese food you eat, I’m beginning to wonder,’ said Gilly.

  ‘Gilly, this could be the greatest discovery in modern marine archaeology,’ Edward told her. ‘Do you understand what this is? A disturbance under the sea-bed that could only have been caused by a buried ship; and a ship of some considerable size, too. What do you think, Dan? A 100 tonner?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ remarked Dan Bass. ‘I don’t even want to say that it’s a ship until I’ve dived down and taken a look.’

  We spent the next hour scanning and re-scanning the ocean floor, right over the spot where we had first discovered the disturbance. Each print-out seemed to confirm our suspicions that we had at last located the wreck of the David Dark, and gradually we grew more and more excited. I didn’t dare to think about the possible consequences of bringing her up to the surface, or what would happen when we found the copper vessel, so I did my best to push all thoughts of Mictantecutli to the back of my mind, and join in the bustle and self-congratulation with everybody else.

  Only Gilly noticed that my enthusiasm was forced. She suddenly looked across at me, and said, ‘Are you all right? John? Are you all right?’

  ‘Sure. Just a little tired, I guess.’

  ‘Something’s bothering you.’ ‘

  ‘You know me so well already?’ .

  ‘I know you better than anybody else on board.’ She came over and held my arm, and stared at me seriously.

  ‘You’re worried,’ she said. ‘I can always tell when somebody’s worried.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Is it the wreck that’s worrying you? Do you really , believe they’re going to find a demon in it? I mean, a demon”?’

  ‘There’s something down there,’ I told her. ‘Believe you me.’

  ‘Well ,’ she said. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  I kissed her forehead. ‘If only you could.’

  The tide was on the turn, and Dan Bass had estimated that there was time for one ten-minute dive over the spot where we had located the disturbance. We weighed anchor and raised the diving-flags, while Dan and Edward changed into their white wetsuits, and the rest of us stood around and chafed our hands in the rapidly-cooling wind. Dan and Edward went over the side without a word, and we leaned on the rail and watched their spectral white shapes swimming away under the murky water.

  ‘Are you going to dive again?’ Gilly asked me. ‘If this is actually the wreck of the David Dark, then < yes. But first of all I’ll get Dan to give me a few lessons in the pool at Forest River Park. It’s salt water there, so if you swallow it you have a really authentic taste of ocean.’

  We waited for almost 15 minutes for Edward and Dan to reappear. Each of them had 20 minutes of air, so we weren’t too worried about their safety, but all the same the tidal stream was beginning to flow more strongly now, ‘* and the waves were becoming choppier, and if they were tired they were going to find it hard work swimming back to the launch again.

  Jimmy brushed back his hair with his hand. ‘I hope they haven’t run into anything weird,’ he said; and he was expressing the fear that all of us felt. He checked his watch. ‘If they don’t come up in five minutes, I’m going in after them. Forrest, help me get into my suit, will you?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Forrest.

  But Jimmy had only managed to strip off his shirt when two fluorescent orange heads bobbed to the surface only 50 or 60 feet away, and Edward and Dan came swimming methodically back to the diving-lines which trailed all the way around the Diogenes’ hull.

  Edward, before we pulled him in, gave us the St Louis taxi-drivers’ signal, which meant that everything was okay.

  He tugged off his mask, rubbed the water out of his beard, and looked at us all triumphantly. ‘She’s there,’ he said, ‘I’m certain of it. There’s a scour-pit which looks as if it was caused by a buried wreck, about 130 feet in length. Tomorrow we’ll go down with air-hoses, and see if we can blow some of the sediment away.’

  Dan Bass was less sure of our find; but agreed that it was the most likely trace so far.

  ‘The visibility’s real bad down there at the moment; you can hardly see your hand in front of your mask. But there’s something there, you can make out the shape of the mound that it’s made. It’s worth taking another look.’

  We logged the point exactly with landmarks and compass bearings. We didn’t want to leave a marker-buoy, in case some nosey treasure-hunter decided to go down and take a look at what we’d been up to.

  Edward came up to me, half-dressed in a polo-neck sweater and an athletic supporter, and said, ‘Do you think you can have another go at your father-in-law? See if you can persuade him to rustle up some money. If this really is the David Dark, we’re going to need a proper diving-ship, and excavation facilities, and a way of bringing her up once we’ve dug her out of the mud. We’re going to need extra divers, too, professionals.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘He didn’t seem too enthusiastic about it the last time I spoke to him.’

  ‘You sure have a cute ass, Edward,’ said Jimmy, walking past. ‘What do you think, Gilly? Doesn’t Edward have a cute ass?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I was admiring the clouds,’ said Gilly.

  Edward said, ‘Come on, John. Give it another try, hunh? Ask him. He can only say no.’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘Let me take those sonar traces along. Perhaps I’ll convince him.’

  As the sky began to darken, we sailed back into Salem. The first lights began to sparkle in the streets, and there was a strong smell of salt on the wind.

  ‘You know that Salem was named for “Shalom”, the word for peace,’ said Edward reflectively.

  ‘Let’s hope we can bring it some,’ I replied, and Gilly, behind me, said, ‘Amen.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gilly and I had an early dinner at Le Chateau, an elegant pink-and-white decorated restaurant that had just opened on Front Street. Gilly had changed into one of her own dresses from Linen & Lace, a simple off-the-shoulder design with a lace bodice and silk-ribbon ties. We ate monies marinieres and pintadeau aux raisins. The candles nickered between us; and if the David Dark and all its attendant ghosts hadn’t been hanging over us like a black slate roof that was about to collapse, we would have had a happy, cheerful evening, and probably gone back to Gilly’s place and made love.

  As it was, we didn’t dare. Pragmatic and practical as Gilly was, she nonetheless knew that I was still carrying with me the unexorcized memory of my recently-dead wife; and that any intimacy between us would act as a catalyst for vicious psychokinetic forces.

  Gilly personally believed that the forces came from inside my own mind, that my own guilt was strong enough to make windows shatter and apparitions appear. She simply didn’t believe in ghosts, no matter what any of us told her. But however the forces were unleashed, she didn’t want to ri
sk a repetition of what had happened at the Hawthorne Inn. Next time, one of us might be seriously hurt, or even killed.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever remarry?’ she asked me, as we finished our brandies after dinner.

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied. ‘I can’t envisage it just yet.’

  ‘But you’re feeling lonely?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  She reached across the table and traced a line across the knuckles of my left hand with her fingertip. ‘Don’t you sometimes wish you were Superman, and that you could turn the world backwards, and rescue your wife just before the accident?’

  ‘It’s no use wishing for the impossible,’ I said. But at the same time, my mind said slyly, you’ve done it, John, you’ve already arranged it; when the David Dark comes up from the bottom of the ocean, you’ll have your wife back again, Jane, just as she was before the crash. Smiling, warm, and loving; pregnant, too, with your first-born child. Only Anne Putnam knew what I had done; what bargains I had made to have my family returned to me from the region of the dead, and to save Anne herself from Mictantecutli’s anger.

  And when I had driven her to Dr Rosen’s clinic late last night, Anne had promised me solemnly that she would tell nobody what I had pledged to the Fleshless One; and that my bargain with the demon would always remain a secret. After all, her life depended on it, as much as Jane’s.

  I felt guilty, of course. I felt that I had betrayed Edward and Forrest, and Gilly, too, in a way. But there are times in your life when you have to make a decision in favour of your own happiness, at the possible expense of other people, and I believed that this was one of them. At least, I had managed to convince myself that this was one of them; and that with Anne’s life so dangerously at risk, I was powerless to do anything else.

  There are always a hundred good excuses for cowardice and selfishness; whereas courage is its own justification.

  After dinner, I drove Gilly home to Witch Hill Road, kissed her, and promised to drop into Linen & Lace in the morning. Then I took routes 128 and 1 southwards to Boston, and to Dedham. I thought I would probably be wasting my time, going to talk to Walter Bedford, but Edward had been so insistent that I could scarcely have shirked it. I played Grieg on my car stereo and tried to relax, while the lights of Melrose and Maiden and Somerville went gliding by me.

  When I drew up outside the Bedford house, it was in darkness. Even the coach lamps outside the front door were switched off. Shit, I thought, a 20-mile drive for nothing. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Walter wouldn’t be home. He always went home, every night; or at least he had done when Constance was still alive. I should have called him first; he was probably spending a few days with neighbours, to get over the shock.

  All the same, I walked up to the front door and rang the bell . I heard it ringing in the hallway; and I stood there for a while, rubbing my hands and shuffling my feet to keep myself warm. A whip-poor-will called somewhere in the tall trees at the back of the house; and then again. I was reminded of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, in which the appearance of grisly primeval monsters like Yog-Sothoth was always preceded by the crying of thousands of whip-poor-wills.

  I was about to walk around the back of the house, to see if Walter was in his television room, when the front door suddenly opened, and Walter stood there staring out at me.

  ‘Walter?’ I said. I stepped closer, and saw that he looked unusually pale, and that his eyes were circled and puffy, as if he hadn’t slept. He was wearing blue pyjamas and a herringbone sport coat, with the collar turned up.

  ‘Walter,’ I said, ‘are you all right? You look terrible.’

  ‘John?’ he replied. He pronounced my name as if it were a dry pebble on a dry tongue.

  ‘What happened, Walter? Have you been to the office? You look as if you haven’t slept since I last saw you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t. I guess you’d better come in.’

  I followed him into the house. It was chilly and dark in there; and I saw from the thermostat on the wall that he had turned the heating right down. As I passed, I turned it up again; and by the time we reached the sitting-room, the radiators were beginning to click and clonk as they warmed up. Walter watched me with a curiously stunned expression on his face as I went around switching on the lamps and drawing the drapes.

  ‘Now then,’ I asked him. ‘How about a drink?’

  He nodded. Then, rather suddenly, he sat down. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I guess I will.’

  I poured us two whiskies and handed him one. ‘How long have you been wandering around in the dark?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. Ever since - ‘

  I sat down next to him. He looked even worse than I had first thought. He hadn’t shaved since the weekend, and his chin was covered in white prickly stubble. His skin was unwashed and greasy. When he lifted the whisky glass to his lips, his hands trembled almost uncontrollably, probably from hunger and fatigue as much as anything else.

  ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘get yourself cleaned up and then I’ll take you down the road to the Pizza Hut. It’s not the Four Seasons but you need some hot food inside you.’

  Walter swallowed his whisky, coughed, and then looked anxiously all around him. ‘She’s not still here, is she?’ he asked. His eyes were blood-shot and starey.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve seen her,’ he told me, clutching hold of my wrist. Close up, he smelled of stale sweat and urine, and his breath was foul. I could hardly believe that this was the same fastidious Walter who had once raised an eyebrow at me because the backs of my shoes weren’t polished.

  ‘After you left, she came; and she spoke to me. I thought I was dreaming. Then I thought that perhaps it hadn’t happened after all, that she wasn’t dead, and that I must have been dreaming before. But she was here, right here, right in this room, and she spoke to me.’

  ‘Who was here? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Constance,’ he insisted. ‘Constance was here. I was sitting by the fire and she spoke to me. She was standing right there, just behind that chair. She was smiling at me.’

  I felt a deep chill of fear. There was no question now that the power of Mictantecutli was spreading, and flourishing. If it could raise Constance’s ghost as far away as Dedham, then it wouldn’t be long before it could wreak havoc over half the commonwealth of Massachusetts; and that was while it was still lying on the sea-bed.

  ‘Walter,’ I said, as comfortingly as I could, ‘Walter, you don’t have any cause to worry.’

  ‘But she said she wanted me. She said I should come to join her. She begged me to kill myself, so that we could be together again. She begged me, John. Cut your throat, Walter, she told me. There’s a sharp knife in the kitchen, you won’t even feel it. Cut your throat as deep as you can, and join me.’

  Walter was shaking so much that I had to grasp his arms to make him settle down.

  ‘Walter,’ I said, ‘that wasn’t Constance who was speaking to you. Not the real Constance; any more than it was the real Jane who killed her. You may have seen something that looked like Constance, but it was the spirit that lies inside of the David Dark that was controlling it, and making it say things like that. That spirit feeds on human life and human hearts, Walter. It’s taken Jane’s, and Constance’s; now it wants yours.’

  Walter didn’t seem to understand. He stared at me, his eyes darting from side to side in high anxiety. ‘Not Constance?’ he asked me. ‘What do you mean? She had Constance’s face, appearance, voice … How could it not have been Constance?’

  ‘Well , if you like, it was a kind of projected image. I mean, when you see Faye Dunaway on the movie screen, the image has Faye Dunaway’s face, and voice, and everything, but you know very well that what you’re seeing isn’t actually Faye Dunaway.’

  ‘Faye Dunaway?’ asked Walter, perplexed. He was obviously in a mild state of shock; and what he needed right now was food, reassurance, and rest,
not a complex argument about psychic images.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you out for something to eat. But you ought to get yourself changed first, and showered. Do you think you can manage to do that? It’ll make you feel a whole lot better.’

  Upstairs, in his large blue-and-white bedroom, I laid out some fresh underwear and slacks for him, as well as a warm sweater and a tweed coat. He looked very thin and frail when he came into the bedroom from the shower, but at least he seemed to have calmed down, and a wash and a shave seemed to have refreshed him. To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t much care for pizzas. There’s a little restaurant out on the Milton road where they make excellent steak-and-oyster pies; Dickens, it’s called. It’s like a British pub.’

  ‘If you’re feeling like steak-and-oyster pies, you’re feeling better,’ I told him. He towelled his hair, and nodded.

  Dickens restaurant was just the right place for an intimate dinner: it had small enclosed booths, lit by mock-gas-lamps, and scrubbed deal tables. We ordered the London Particular green-pea soup, and one Tower Bridge steak-and-oyster pie, with Guinness to wash it down. Walter ate in silence for almost ten minutes before he put down his soup spoon and looked at me in relief.

  ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that you came,’ he said. ‘I think you just about saved my life.’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons I drove over,’ I told him. ‘I wanted to talk to you about saving lives.’

  Walter tore off some wholemeal bread, and buttered it. ‘You’re still talking about raising money for this salvage operation of yours?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well , I’m sorry, John, I did give it some more thought, but I still can’t see my way clear to raising that much money out of people who trust me to keep their capital locked up as safely as possible. They’re not looking for large dividends, these people; they’re cautious, careful, long-term family investors.’

  ‘Hear me out, Walter,’ I said. ‘Jane came to visit me a couple of nights ago, and this time she wasn’t like a ghost at all. She could have been solid, she could have been real. She said that the influence that’s down in this shipwreck, this demon, or whatever it is, is capable of bringing back to life people who have recently died, people who are still wandering in what she called the region of the dead. A kind of Purgatory, I guess.’