The Pariah

THE PARIAH

Graham Masterton

CONDO DEVELOPER’S WIFE MISSING

IN ‘NIGHTGOWN BOAT TRIP’ MYSTERY

- Granitehead, Tues.

Coastguard helicopters were scouring Massachusetts Bay between Manchester and Nahant early today for Mrs James Goult III, wife of the Granitehead condo developer, who went missing from her home late last night, apparently dressed only in her nightgown.

Mrs Goult, a 44-year-old brunette, drove to Granitehead Harbour at about 11.30 p.m. and disappeared out to sea in the family’s 40-foot yacht
Patricia.

Mr Goult said, ‘My wife is an experienced sailor and I don’t have any doubts that she is capable of handling the boat under normal circumstances. But obviously these are not normal circumstances, and I am deeply concerned for her safety.’

There had been no quarrel between himself and his wife, Mr Goult said, and her nightgown disappearance was ‘a complete mystery.’

Lt. George Rogers, of the Salem Coastguard, said, ‘We are carrying out a systematic search and if the
Patricia
is there to be found, we will find her.’

   
ONE

I opened my eyes, abruptly; unsure if I had been asleep or not. Was I still asleep now, and dreaming? It was so dark that I could hardly tell if my eyes had actually opened.

Gradually I was able to make out the luminous hands of my old-fashioned bedside clock; two dim green glows, like the eyes of an ailing but malevolent goblin. Ten after two, on a cold March night on the Massachusetts coast. But nothing at all to suggest what might have woken me.

I lay tensely where I was, snuggled up alone in that big old colonial bed, holding my breath, listening. There was the wind, of course, rattling and chattering at the window, but out here on the Granitehead peninsula, where your bedroom is separated from the shores of Nova Scotia by nothing but hundreds of miles of dark and ruminative sea, the wind is a fact of life. Persistent, fretful, and fussy, even in spring.

I listened with the acuteness of someone who was still desperately unused to being left alone at night; with the same hypersensitive ears as a wife left at home while her husband goes away on a business trip. And when the wind suddenly rose, and worried around the house, and then just as suddenly died away again, my heartbeats rose and pounded and died away with it.

The window rattled, fell silent, rattled.

Then I heard it, and even though it was almost inaudible, even though I probably perceived it more through my teeth and more through my nerve-endings than I did through my ears, I recognized it at once as the sound that had woken’me up, and my senses prickled like static electricity. Plaintive and monotonous,
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik,
the chains of my garden swing.

I stared into the darkness, eyes wide. The luminous goblin-eyes of my clock stared back at me, and the more I stared the more they looked like goblin-eyes and the less they looked like my bedroom clock. I defied them to move, defied them to wink at me. But outside in the garden, on and on, there was that
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik.
And the eyes refused to wink.

It’s only the wind, I thought to myself. It’s the wind, right? It must be. The same wind that’s been rattling my window all night. The same wind that’s been having such breathy conversations with itself down my bedroom chimney. But I had to admit to myself that I had never known the wind blow my
swing
before; not even on a gusty night like this, when I could clearly hear the seething, disturbed sleep of the North Atlantic Ocean as it eddied a mile-and-a-half away around the rocks of Granitehead Neck; and the garden gates of Granitehead Village banged as they always did in intermittent applause. The swing was too heavy, a high-backed chair carved out of solid American Hop Hornbeam, suspended by iron chains. The only way that it could possibly creak was if somebody were to swing in it, steady and high.

Creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik,
over and over; sometimes muffled by the wind, and the background roar of the sea, but continuing without a single break in rhythm while the clock hands moved through five whole minutes and the goblin appeared to incline his head.

This is madness, I told myself. There’s nobody out there, at twenty after two in the morning,
swinging.
It’s a kind of madness, anyway. More like a depressive neurosis, like Dr Rosen was trying to tell me about; a change in perception, a shift in mental balance.

It happens to almost everybody when they lose somebody close to them. Dr Rosen said that I would probably experience it quite often: the unnerving sensation that Jane was still with me; that she was still alive after all. He had gone through similar delusions himself, after his own wife died. He had glimpsed her in supermarkets, just turning around the end of an aisle, and out of sight. He had heard her mixing pastry in the kitchen, and hurried to open the kitchen door, only to find that the room was quite empty, that the bowls and the spoons remained spotless and unused. This must be the same, this creaking I thought I was hearing. Real enough, in its way, but actually a sympathetic hallucination caused by the emotional aftereffects of sudden bereavement.

And yet:
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik,
on and on, and somehow the longer it went on the harder it became to believe that it was nothing more than my mind deceiving my ears.

You’re a rational adult man, I told myself. Why the hell should you climb out of a warm comfortable bed on a night like this, just to go to the window and watch your own garden-swing blowing backwards and forwards in a March gale?

Yet - what if there
is
somebody out there? What if there is somebody swinging, the way Jane used to, hands held high to clasp the chains, head leaning back against the seat, eyes closed? Well, what if there is? That’s nothing to be afraid of.

You really think there’s somebody out there? You really believe that somebody took the trouble to climb over your backyard palings and stumble their way through eighty feet of unkempt orchard, just to sit on your rusty old garden-swing? On a black windy night, cold as a witch’s nipple, with the thermometer down to zero?

It’s possible. Admit it, it’s possible. Somebody may have been walking back up Quaker Lane from the village, drunk maybe, or even just playful, or maybe pensive, or depressed? And maybe they just caught sight of the swing and maybe they just decided it would be fun to try it, and hang the wind, and the cold, and the chance of getting caught.

The trouble was, I thought to myself, who could that somebody be? There was only one more house on Quaker Lane before it narrowed and dwindled into a grassy horse-track, and then zigzagged downhill to the Salem Harbour shoreline. The track was stony and broken and almost impossible to follow in the daytime, let alone at night. And what was more, that last house was almost empty in the winter, or so we’d been told.

It could have been Thomas Essex, the old hermit in the wide-brimmed caballero hat who lived in that run-down sea-cottage close to Waterside Cemetery. Sometimes he passed this way, singing and hopping; and once he had confided in Jane that he could catch sea-bass just by whistling to them.
Lillibulero,
he said, that’s what they liked. He could juggle, too, with clasp knives.

But then I thought: he’s eccentric, sure. But he’s old, too. Sixty-eight if he’s a day. And what’s a 68-year-old man doing on my swing, at well past two o’clock in the morning, on a night like this?

I made up my mind to ignore the creaking and go back to sleep. I bundled the soft hand-stitched comforter around my ears, burrowed down into the bed, closed my eyes, and breathed with exaggerated deepness. If Jane had still been here, she probably would have teased me into going to take a look out of the window. But I was tired. You’re
tired,
right, you need your sleep. I hadn’t been able to get more than four or five hours a night since the accident, often less, and tomorrow I had to be up early for a breakfast-time meeting with Jane’s father; and then I had to go to Holyoke Square to Endicott’s, where they were putting up a collection of maritime prints and paintings, rare ones, worth bidding for.

I managed to keep my eyes closed for something like an entire minute. Then I opened them again and the goblin-eyes were still watching me. And from the garden, no matter how forcefully I muffled my ears, that continual
creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik.

And then … God, I could swear it, someone
singing.
Faintly, in a high-pitched voice, blown by the wind; so indistinct that it could have been nothing more than the draught blowing across the top of the chimney-stacks. But singing, all the same. A woman’s voice, clear and particularly mournful.

I scrambled out of bed so quickly that I barked my knee on the mahogany bedside table, and sent the goblin-clock tumbling and ringing across the floor. I was too scared to get up slowly: it had to be a
kamikaze
charge or nothing at all. I dragged the comforter along with me, wrapping it around my waist, and stumbled to the window breathless and blind.

It was so damned dark out there that I could hardly see anything at all. The very faintest distinction in tone between hills and sky. The shadowy thrashing of the trees as the wind relentlessly bowed them down, and bowed them down again. I stared and listened, listened and stared, feeling ridiculous and heroic at the same time. I pressed the palm of my hand against the window-pane, to stop it from rattling. But the creaking of the garden-swing seemed to have died away, and there was nobody singing, nobody that I could hear.

And yet that tune seemed to echo in my head, that peculiar mournful tune. It reminded me of the sea-chanty that old Thomas Essex had been singing the very first time we came across him, as he walked up Quaker Lane.

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

I had later found it written down in
Sea Songs of Old Salem,
by George Blyth; but unlike almost all the other chanties in the book, there was no explanation of what it meant, or whether it had any foundation in genuine local history. It was simply subtitled ‘A Curiositie.’ And yet who had been singing ‘a curiositie’ outside my cottage, so late at night; and why? There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people in Granitehead who knew that song by heart, or its air.

Jane had always said the song sounded ‘deliciously sad.’

I waited by the window until my shoulders began to feel cold. My eyes became slowly accustomed to the darkness, and I could indistinctly make out the black rocky reaches of Granitehead Neck, limned by the Atlantic surf. I took my hand away from the window-pane, and it was chilled and clammy. My handprint stayed on the glass for a moment, a ghostly greeting, and then faded away.

Groping my way back across the bedroom, I found the lightswitch and turned on the light. The room was the same as always. The big wooden early-American bed, with its puffy duck-down pillows; the carved double-fronted wardrobe; the wooden wedding-chest. On top of the bureau on the other side of the room was a small oval mirror in which I could just see the pale blur of my own face.

I wondered if it would be an admission that I was going to pieces if I went downstairs and poured myself a drink. I picked up the royal blue bathrobe I had dropped on the floor when I went to bed last night, and tugged it on.

The house had been so silent since Jane had gone. I had never realized how much noise, how much
aura,
a living person actually gives off; even when they’re asleep.

When Jane had been alive, she had filled the house with her warmth and her character and her actual breathing. Now, no matter which room I looked into, there was nothing but oldness and silence. Rocking-chairs which never rocked. Drapes which were never drawn unless I drew them myself. An oven which was never lit unless I went into the kitchen and lit it myself for one of my own solitary meals.

Nobody to talk to: nobody even to smile at when I didn’t feel like talking. And the enormous incomprehensible thought that I would never see her again, ever.

It had been a month. A month and two days, and a handful of hours. I was over the self-pity. I
think
I was over the self-pity. I was certainly over the crying, although you can’t lose someone like Jane without being susceptible for the rest of your life to unexpected tears. Dr Rosen had warned me that it would happen from time to time, and it did: I would be sitting at an auction, ready to bid for some special piece of marine memorabilia which I particularly wanted to acquire for the shop; and I would suddenly find that tears were sliding down my cheeks, and I would have to excuse myself and retreat to the men’s room and blow my nose a lot.

‘Damn spring colds,’ I would say to the attendant.

And he would look at me and know exactly what was wrong because there is an unadmitted kinship between all the closely-bereaved, a feeling which they can never share with anybody else because it would sound too much as if they were being morbidly sorry for themselves. And yet, damn it, I was.

I went into the low-beamed living-room, opened up the sideboard, and took stock of what liquor I had left. Half a mouthful of Chivas Regal; a teacupful of gin. A bottle of sweet sherry to which Jane had taken a fancy when she was first pregnant. I decided on tea instead. I almost always drank tea when I woke up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Bohea, without milk or sugar. A taste I had acquired from the people of Salem.

I was turning the key in the sideboard when I heard the kitchen door close. Not slam, as if it had been blown by the wind, but
close,
on its old-fashioned latch. I froze where I was, breath caught, heart banging, and listened. There was no other sound, only the wind blowing; but I was sure that I could sense a
presence,
a feeling that there was somebody else in the house. After a month on my own, a month of complete quiet, I had become alert to every little fidget, every little squeak, every little scurry of mice; and the larger vibrations of human beings. Human beings
resonate,
like cellos.

I was sure there was somebody there, in the kitchen. There was somebody there, but strangely there was no warmth, and none of the usual friendly noises of humanity. I crossed the brown shagpile carpet as silently as I could, and went to the fireplace, still ashy and glowing from yesterday evening’s logs. I picked up the long brass grate-poker, with its heavy seahorse head, and hefted it in my hand.

In the hallway, my bare feet made a squeaking sound on the waxed pottery tiles. The long-case Tompion clock which Jane’s parents had given us for a wedding-present ticked deeply and thoughtfully inside its crotch-mahogany torso. I reached the kitchen door, and listened and listened for the slightest creak, the slightest breath, the slightest
frisson
of material against wood.

Nothing. Just the clock, measuring out the rest of my life the same way it had measured out Jane’s. Just the wind, which would blow across Granitehead Neck long after I had left there. Even the sea seemed to have been stilled.