The Pariah

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Maybe I ought to talk to Edward again,’ I said, when the lights were switched off, and we lay in the unfamiliar darkness. ‘Maybe he won’t be so pigheaded after all.’

  ‘You could try. Do you want me to mention it to him?’

  I was quiet for a moment, as if I was thinking about it. The truth was, I was trying to allay any possible fears that Edward might have that I would dive on the wreck before he registered it. If Gilly were to go back to him and suggest that he and I should have a friendly discussion about the raising of the copper vessel, say in a day or so, then he would hardly be likely to suspect that I would try to sneak down there while the David Dark was still unmarked and unprotected.

  Quamus woke me at 5:55, when Gilly was still asleep. She lay with her hair spread out on the pillow, one breast bare, and I discreetly covered her up before I tiptoed out. My clothes were already laid out for me in the drawing-room, and Quamus whispered,

  ‘Breakfast right away, Mr Trenton.’

  When I went downstairs to the oak-panelled dining-room, the sunlight was already penetrating the French doors at the far end, and sparkling on the silverware and the Spode plates. There were lightly-scrambled eggs, muffins, and coffee. Mr Evelith had ordered that I should not be served the full breakfast today because I was swimming.

  I ate on my own for five or ten minutes, until Duglass Evelith came into the room in a bronze quilted dressing-gown, smoking a small cigar. He sat down opposite me and watched as I buttered my muffin, and then he waved the blue cigar smoke away, and said, ‘I hope this doesn’t bother you. It’s a repulsive old habit of mine; six o’clock every morning. How do you feel?’

  ‘Nervous.’

  ‘Well , good. If you’re nervous, then you’ll be alert. I’ll tell you what we’ve managed to arrange during the night. Quamus has obtained two cases of dynamite, as well as all the necessary fuses; and all that has been loaded on to the station wagon ready to go.

  Mr Walcott will be ready for you by the time you reach Salem Harbour, and will sail you out to the David Dark. When you dive, you will take down with you an airlift, and you will use this to excavate a narrow crevice in the silt, right beside the David Dark’s hull. Into this crevice you will pack both cases of dynamite, and you will then swim back to the surface, paying out fuse as you go. The fuse is largely made of magnesium, so it will burn underwater. You will light it, and then retreat from the area as quickly as possible, while the dynamite detonates. According to the preparatory work I have done during the night, the explosion should completely shatter the hull of the David Dark, and blow most of the silt out of the area where the ship has been buried. Now comes the difficult part: you will have to search the sea-bed, almost blind, for a great deal of silt will be clouding the water, and you will have to locate the copper vessel within a matter of minutes.

  Fortunately, Mr Walcott has metal-detecting equipment, and that should help you find it reasonably speedily. We will be keeping the coastguard away from the area by putting out a false emergency call from further up the coast, off Singing Beach, and we will just have to hope that nobody else gets too inquisitive before we are able to winch the copper vessel up to the surface.’

  ‘What are we going to do with Mictantecutli; once we get him ashore?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘That is al arranged, too. A refrigerated truck will be waiting by the harbour, and the copper vessel will immediately be put into cold storage, and driven here. Enid will be preparing all the necessary rituals to keep Mictantecutli under our control; and she should be ready by the time we get back here.’

  I looked down at my unfinished eggs. They were stone cold now, and congealing on the plate. I pushed them away, and poured myself another cup of coffee.

  ‘If this doesn’t work,’ I asked old man Evelith, ‘what’s the worst that can happen? A $500 fine for setting off explosives? A couple of months in jail?’

  Duglass Evelith pursed his lips. Those will be nothing, compared with the fury of Mictantecutli. The worst that can happen, Mr Trenton, is that every grave in Salem and Granitehead will open, and that the dead will rise to massacre the living.’

  At that moment, Gilly came into the room, blinking at the sunlight. ‘I woke up and you were gone,’ she said. ‘Does everybody get up this early around here?’

  ‘I have to go to Boston to pick up some research material,’ I lied. ‘I thought I might as well make an early start.’

  Gilly sat down, and Quamus came in to pour her some fresh coffee. He looked across the table at me as he did so, and by the expression on his face he seemed to be asking me whether I was ready to go. I wiped my mouth, put down my napkin, and stood up.

  Gilly looked at me in surprise.

  ‘You’re not even going to have breakfast with me?’

  I leaned across and kissed her. ‘I’m sorry. I really have to go.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, glancing at old man Evelith as if she suspected him of kidnapping me, and injecting me with strange drugs.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I reassured her. ‘All you have to do is finish your breakfast and leave when you feel like it. I’ll call you later in the day. Maybe I’ll even drop in and see you. And don’t forget to tell Edward that I’d like to talk.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Gilly distractedly, as I left the dining-room, and followed Quamus across the hallway and out to the garage. In the gloom of the garage, Duglass Evelith’s LTD wagon was waiting, black and polished, with two large packing-cases stowed in the back, both of them unmarked. Quamus opened the passenger door for me, and I climbed in, turning around to stare at the crates in trepidation.

  ‘How much dynamite do we have there?’ I asked him.

  He pressed the remote button which opened the garage door. He looked across at me and almost smiled. ‘Enough to blow this car to Lynnfield, no driving necessary.’

  ‘Very reassuring,’ I told him.

  We were circling the shingle driveway when Enid came down the front steps of the house and waved to us. Quamus drew the wagon to a halt and put down the window.

  Enid looked pale and distraught, and her hair was flying loose.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her. ‘Did we forget something?’

  ‘It’s Anne,’ she said. ‘Your doctor just called, Dr Rosen?’

  That’s right, Dr Rosen. What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s terrible. I sensed that something was wrong during the night. A feeling, you know, of sudden loss. A feeling that part of us had suddenly vanished. A very cold feeling.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘She was found hanging in her room this morning. They had kept her in for one more day of observation. Then, when they went in this morning, they found her hanging. Her own belt, from the light.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said, and I felt my eggs begin to curdle in my stomach. Quamus touched his forehead in a sign which I assumed to be the Indian symbol for ‘bless me,’ or ‘rest in peace.’

  ‘She left a message,’ said Enid. ‘I can’t remember what it said exactly, but it was addressed to you, Mr Trenton. It said something like, “Don’t feel you have to keep your promise, just for me.” She didn’t say what promise, though, or why you didn’t have to keep it.’

  I closed my eyes, and then opened them again. The day looked very gray, like a harsh black-and-white photograph. ‘I know what promise,’ I said quietly.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The co-operative Mr Walcott of the Salem Salvage Company turned out to be a short, broad-shouldered, Slavic-looking man with shaggy gray eyebrows and a vocabulary that consisted chiefly of ‘C’d be’ and ‘Likely that’s so’, two forms of non-committal agreement that after only half an hour of sailing I began to find extremely irksome and frustrating.

  Mr Walcott said that his mother had been Polish and his father had been English, and that between the two of them they had brought up a family that had been part mad, part romantic, part frosty, and par
t inspirational, and that was al he was going to say in the matter. He helped Quamus to load the dynamite boxes on to the deck of his diving-boat, a greasy 90-foot lugger that I had noticed several times moored up at the less savoury end of Salem Terminal Wharf; then he started up the diesels, and we left the quayside without any delay.

  It was a chilly morning, but the sea was calm, and I was confident that I would be able to cope with the diving conditions. I wasn’t at all sure about the dynamite, but I kept telling myself that it was all for Jane; and that if I played my part in this carefully and wisely, I would soon have her restored to me. It was an extraordinary thought, but if Mictantecutli kept his promise, it was possible that I might even have her back by tonight.

  Quamus touched my shoulder, and beckoned me back to the lugger’s after-deck, where our diving-gear was all laid out. A young girl with short-cropped blonde hair and a smudge of oil on her nose was checking the regulator valves on the oxygen cylinders.

  She wore identical denim overalls to Mr Walcott, and her eyes were the same sharp blue, and from her stocky, busty build I took her at once to be Mr Walcott’s daughter.

  She said, ‘Hi,’ and looked at us skeptically, a gray-haired Indian of anything between 60 and 300 years old; and a nervous antique dealer in a dark blue business coat.

  ‘You guys want to get ready?’ she asked. ‘I’m Laurie, Laurie Walcott. Either of you guys ever dive before?’

  ‘Of course,’ I told her, trying to be sharp.

  ‘I just asked,’ she said, and threw me a Neoprene wet suit. It wasn’t like the pristine white wet suit that Edward and Forrest had lent me: it was gray and smelly, like a discarded walrus-skin, and its wrinkles were clogged with damp talcum powder. The oxygen cylinders, too, were battered and well-worn, as if they had been used to beat off marauding sharks. I guess I had to remember that Walcott was a professional salvage diver, not one of your weekend tyros. Walcott called them ‘floating faggots.’

  Quamus said, ‘If you wish, you can change your mind. It is not good to dive if you are full of fear. Mr Evelith will understand.’

  ‘Do I look that frightened?’ I asked him.

  ‘I would choose the word “apprehensive”,’ said Quamus, with the hint of an ironic smile.

  ‘You’ve been reading “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power,” ‘ I retorted.

  ‘No, Mr Trenton. I have simply been reading your face.’

  When Dan Bass had piloted us out to the David Dark, he fiddled around for almost five minutes, positioning the Diogenes over the site of the wreck. But Mr Walcott, with his deeply-bitten pipe clenched between his teeth, and his oily cap pulled well down over his eyes, swung his lugger around as if it were a Harley-Davidson, right on the datum point, and lowered his anchor so accurately that when we dived we found it caught between the David Dark’s upright fashion-pieces.

  Now Walcott came back to the after-deck, and started up the one-ton Atlas-Copco compressor. This huge machine rattled and coughed and sent up blurts of black smoke, but Walcott assured it was the best in the business. It would release a jet of compressed air down a 100-foot hose, and this would hopefully excavate a hole alongside the sunken hull of the David Dark large enough and deep enough for our dynamite.

  I was surprised that Walcott asked no questions about what we were doing, or why, but presumably Quamus had paid him to keep his curiosity to himself. Laurie sat on the lugger’s rail, chewing a huge mouthful of Bazooka Joe, and staring at the distant horizon as if the whole business were too boring for words.

  At a few minutes after nine o’clock, Quamus and I rolled backwards off the lugger’s side, and began our dive. Luckily, the water in the harbour was unusually clear, and it only took a few minutes for us to descend to the bottom. We quickly located the wreck, and Quamus tugged on the shot-line to tell Walcott to feed us with compressed air.

  I looked at Quamus through my blinkered face-mask. Physically, he was remarkably muscular, and in his wetsuit he looked as if he had been hewn out of solid granite. It was his eyes that interested me the most, though. Framed in his oval face-mask, they looked serious and reflective, as if life had passed him by so many times that no crisis could surprise him any longer; as if he were quite ready for death, whenever it eventually came. I wondered whether old man Evelith had been pulling my leg when he had told me that Quamus had been at Billington over a hundred years ago; I knew that some families gave their servants ‘below-stairs’ names, so that butler after butler was always called James, no matter what they had actually been christened. The Quamus who had given piggybacks to Duglass Evelith’s father had probably been this Quamus’ father.

  The compressed air spurted out of the six-inch hose with a sudden wall op, and for a moment I almost lost my grip on it. There was a compensator on the hose which prevented any diver who was using it from being jet-propelled all around the sea-bed; but all the same it felt as if it had a life of its own, and after two or three minutes of blasting away at the silt on the bottom of the sea, my arms were aching and my back felt as if I had deputized for Lon Chancy in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  We worked almost blind, because of the dense clouds of silt which the airhose blew up all around us. On our second dive, we would use an airlift, which would clear most of the silt away, but on this dive Quamus had to break through the consolidated layer of grit and shell which lay beneath the first thin coating of silt and mud and ‘anchorage gash’ - that assorted refuse which you always find on the bottom of the sea wherever boats are moored. To break through, Quamus used a long metal rod with a sharpened end, and once I had blown away the initial mud, he began to hack at the grit with relentless energy.

  We were surrounded by whirling debris: shell, mud, startled hermit-crabs, slipper limpets, clams, and grotesque sponges. I felt as if our underwater world had gone mad, an Alice-in-Wonderland turmoil of shellfish, silt, and bobbing Coca-Cola bottles. But after ten minutes’ work, Quamus gripped my arm and squeezed it twice, which was our pre-arranged signal that the first dive was over. Quamus thrust his iron rod into the hole he had made, and marked it with a bright orange flag. Then he finned slowly up to the surface, and I followed him.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Walcott, helping us onboard.

  ‘You’re kicking up enough mud down there.’ He pointed to the surface of the bay, where a wide muddy stain was already spreading above the wreck.

  ‘We’re through to the lower layer of silt,’ said Quamus, impassively, as Laurie helped him out of his oxygen-cylinders. ‘We should be able to start work with the airlift now.’

  ‘Anybody asked you what we’re up to?’ I said.

  Walcott shrugged. ‘A couple of fishermen came past and asked if I knew where they could sink their lines for the best flounder. So I sent them out to Woodbury Point.’

  ‘They won’t catch much flounder there,’ said Quamus.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Walcott.

  We rested for fifteen minutes or so, and then Laurie kitted us up with fresh oxygen cylinders and we prepared to go down again. It was almost twenty before ten now, and I was anxious that we should complete this dive as soon as possible. I didn’t want the coastguard prowling around; nor did I want Edward or Forrest or Dan Bass to notice that Walcott’s lugger was anchored right over the wreck of the David Dark. For all I knew, they might be planning to dive on the wreck themselves this morning, to put down markers before they registered it.

  For a further half-hour, Quamus and I toiled away on the bottom of the sea, blowing away the silt from the side of the David Dark’s hull. At last, we saw dark encrusted timbers, and Quamus made the ‘okay’ sign to indicate that we were making good progress. With only three or four minutes of oxygen left, we completed a 20-foot deep scour-pit into the soft silt down beside the hull , which Quamus marked with his flag.

  Then he made the thumb’s-up sign for ‘surface’.

  I turned around, giving a first strong kick of my fins, and to my horror I became entangled in something like wet w
hite sheeting. I struggled and kicked against it, and as I did so I felt the soft bumping of swollen flesh inside it. It was the floating corpse of Mrs James Goult, which had somehow been drawn towards the wreck of the David Dark, either by the tidal stream, or by the air-suction work we had been doing on it, or by some other inexplicable magnetism.

  Don’t panic: I told myself. And I tried to remember what Dan Bass had told me, in my three lessons at Forest River Park. I reached for my knife, tugged it out, and tried to cut the floating wet shroud away from me. My blood thundered in my ears, and my breathing sounded like a railroad locomotive. I ripped through linen, cut through seams, but the fabric seemed to billow all around me and entangle me even more.

  In total fright, I felt the corpse bump against me again, and its arms somehow wrap themselves around my legs, making it impossible for me to kick myself to the surface. At that same moment, with a squeaky sigh, my oxygen ran out, and I realized I had less than two minutes to make it up to the surface before I suffocated.

  Thrashing, panicking, I began to sink slowly to the seabed, the corpse embracing me like a long-lost lover. Is that what Mictantecutli wanted after all? I thought to myself. Did he really want me, and me alone, because my unborn son had cheated him of the chance to feast on my heart? I sucked desperately at my mouthpiece, but my oxygen was completely exhausted, and my lungs began to feel as if they were going to collapse from lack of air.

  It was then that the corpse shuddered, and suddenly whirled away. The shroud was dragged off me, and my arms and legs were disentangled. My face-mask clear, I saw Quamus rolling away from me in the murky water, brandishing his iron shaft. On the end of it, deeply impaled, was the blue-skinned, half-decayed body of Mrs Goult, chunks of flesh flaking off her like rotting tuna. Quamus gave her one last twist, and then sent her sinking slowly down to the bottom, the shaft still sticking out of her bare-ribbed chest.