The Pariah (15 page)

SIXTEEN

We drove up to Gilly’s apartment on Witch Hill Road, overlooking Gallows Hill Park. The apartment was small but scrupulously neat, with framed fashion designs on white-painted walls, and yuccas in tasteful white Portuguese planters. I was still smarting from all those glass-cuts, but all of them had been clean, and only one of them, on my shoulder, was actually bleeding.

‘Would you like some wine?’ asked Gilly.

I sat down stiffly on the beige corduroy sofa. ‘I’ll have a large Scotch if you’ve got it.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, coming in from the kitchen with a large frosted bottle of Pinot Chardonnay. ‘Everybody I know is a wine-drinker.’

‘Don’t tell me they’re vegetarians, too.’

‘Some of them,’ she smiled. She set two tall-stemmed glasses down on the table, and sat down beside me. I took the bottle and poured us both brimful measures. At that moment I felt that if I
had
to drink wine, I might just as well drink a lot of it.

‘How much do you think the Hawthorne will charge you?’ Gilly asked.

‘Couple of thousand, at least. Those plate-glass windows must cost a fortune.’

‘I still don’t really understand what was going on.’

I raised my glass in a silent toast and swallowed half of it almost straight away. ‘Jealous wife,’ I told her.

She stared at me uncertainly. ‘You told me your wife was - ‘

‘She is,’ I said, assertively. Then, more quietly, ‘She is.’

‘Then you mean to say that what happened tonight -that was
her!
Your wife? She did that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a possibility. It could have been nothing more than a freak gust of wind. You remember that high-rise in Boston, with the windows that kept falling out?

Maybe the same thing happened at the Hawthorne.’

Gilly frowned at me in complete non-comprehension. ‘But if your wife is dead, how could it have been even a possibility that it was her? You’re telling me that
she’s
a ghost, too? Your dead wife is a ghost?’

‘I’ve seen her, yes,’ I admitted.

‘You’ve seen her,’ said Gilly. ‘My God, I can’t believe it.’

‘You don’t have to. But it’s the truth. I’ve seen her two or three times now, and tonight, when we were making love, I saw her again. I looked at your face and instead it was
her
face.’

Gilly took a drink of wine and then looked at me levelly. ‘This is getting very hard to play along with, you know that?’

‘It isn’t any easier for me.’

‘Do you know how often I’ve been to bed with a man, almost the moment I’ve met him, the way I did with you?’

‘I wish you’d stop trying to justify yourself,’ I told her. ‘I went to bed with you just as quickly as you went to bed with me. Just because you’re the woman and I’m the man, does that make any difference?’

‘It’s not supposed to,’ said Gilly, a little defensively.

‘In that case, don’t let it.’

‘But now you’ve put me in a weird position.’

‘Weird?’ I asked her, picking up my wine again.

‘Well , weird, yes - because the first man I’ve ever picked to pounce on - the very first man ever - and he turns out to have some obsession with his dead wife. And the windows of his goddamned hotel room fall in.’

I stood up, and walked across to the patio doors which overlooked Gilly’s narrow third-storey balcony. Outside, geraniums trembled in the vibrant night wind. Beyond, I could see the smattering of lights that was Witchcraft Heights. It was past two o’clock in the morning now, and I was tired and shaken beyond argument, beyond reproaches. My ghostly reflection in the dark glass lifted his wine, and drank.

‘I wish I
could
say that I’m obsessed with my wife,’ I said quietly. ‘I wish I
could
say that I’m suffering from hysteria; that I’ve never seen her or heard her anywhere else except inside of my mind. But she’s real, Gilly. She’s haunting me. Not just the cottage where we used to live, but me, as a person. That’s another reason why I’m going to go diving tomorrow, even though I don’t want to. I want my wife to be put at rest.’

Gilly said nothing. I came back from the window and sat opposite her, although she wouldn’t look at me.

‘If you want to forget we ever met, that’s all right by me,’ I told her. ‘Well - it’s not exactly all right. It’ll upset me. But I can understand how you feel. Anybody else would feel the same. Even my doctor thinks it’s nothing but post-bereavement shock.’

I hesitated, and then I said, ‘You’re a very attractive person, Gilly. You do exciting things to me. And I still stand by what I said earlier on - how amazing it is that two people can work up a storm together only minutes after they’ve met. We could both have a good time; you know that. But I have to tell you that Jane’s spirit is still around me, and that there may be danger, the way there was tonight.’

Gilly looked at me, and her eyes were glistening. ‘It’s not the danger,’ she said, with a catch in her voice.

‘I know. It’s the image of the ex-wife.’

‘I had that before. I had an affair with a married man when I was seventeen. A bank executive. His wife wasn’t dead, of course, but she was always there. Either on the telephone, or in the back of his mind.’

‘And you definitely don’t want to go through it again.’

She held out her hand to me, ‘John,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing against you. It’s just that I’m feeling threatened. And there’s one thing that I’ve always promised myself, ever since I started working on my own. Never let anyone threaten you, no matter how.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. She was right, of course. She may have thrown herself at me like a sexually-deprived tigress, and I may have thrown myself back at her like an equally sexually-deprived tiger. But she was under no obligation to accept me as a lover with all of the problems I was carrying with me. All the phantoms, and the fears, and the might-have-beens. Not to mention the unhealed wound of my recently-lost wife and our unborn baby.

‘All right,’ I told her. I let go of her hand. ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, but I can understand why you’re saying it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she told me. ‘I don’t think you have any idea how much you attract me. You’re just my type.’

‘Nobody with a ghost on their back can possibly be your type. They can’t be
anybody’s
type. Not until they’ve been exorcized.’

Gilly sat and looked at me for a while in silence, and then got up and went into the kitchen. I followed her, and stood in the doorway, while she took out eggs and muffins and coffee.

‘You don’t have to cook me anything,’ I said.

‘Breakfast, that’s all,’ she smiled. She broke the eggs into a basin and began to whip them up.

‘Have you thought about exorcism?’ she asked me. ‘Getting a priest around to lay your wife to rest?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think it would work. I don’t know, maybe it might. But I think the only way that any of these apparitions in Granitehead are going to get any peace is if we find out
why
they’re so restless, what it is that makes them appear.’

‘You mean like raising the
David Dark!’
 

‘Maybe. Edward seems to think that’s the answer.’

 ‘And what do
you
think?’ asked Gilly, taking out a pan and cutting a little sunflower shortening into it.

I rubbed my eyes. ‘I’m trying to keep an open mind. I don’t know. I’m just trying to keep
sane.’

 She looked at me kindly. ‘You’re very sane,’ she said. ‘You’re also a beautiful lover. I hope to God you can give your wife some peace.’

 There was no need to answer that remark. I watched her scramble eggs and toast muffins and perk coffee, and thought about nothing but sleep, and tomorrow’s dive. The cold waters of Granitehead Neck were out there now, restless as the spirits of Granitehead itself, waiting for the dawn.

SEVENTEEN

By nine o’clock, we were out in Salem Sound, on a gray and choppy ocean, balancing on the after-deck of a 35-foot fishing boat,
Alexis,
which Edward and Dan Bass and two of Edward’s colleagues from the Peabody Museum had pooled together to rent for the morning.

The day was bright and sharp, and I was surprised how cold it was, but Edward told me that the temperature over the ocean was often as much as 30 degrees lower than the temperature over land. There was a heavy cloud-bank off to the north-west, thick as clotted cream, but Dan Bass had estimated that there would be two or three hours’

diving time before the weather began to roughen up.

I liked Dan Bass immediately. He was a wry, self-confident 40-year-old with eyes that looked as if they had been bleached by brine to a very pale blue. He spoke with a clipped accent that sounded very Bostonian to me, and there was a Boston-Irish squareness about his face, but as he piloted the boat into position he told me that he had first dived for wrecks off the shores of his native North Carolina, Pamlico Sound and Onslow Bay.

‘I dived once on a World War Two torpedo boat, which was sunk in a storm in ‘44. I shone my flashlight in through the windows, and guess what was staring back at me, this human skull, still wearing a rusty steel helmet. I got the fright of my whole darned life.’

Edward was in a very high humour, and so were his colleagues; a serious young student called Jimmy Carlsen, and a freckly, carroty-haired graduate from the Peabody’s ethnology department, Forrest Brough. Both were practised divers: Jimmy wore a sweatshirt with ‘See Massachusetts and Dive’ lettered on the back. Forrest, three years before, had helped to salvage 18th-century cannon and cooking utensils from a wreck off Mount Hope Point, Rhode Island. Both took time out to explain to me everything they were doing, and why, so that even if I wasn’t going to be much help to them, at least I wouldn’t be a disastrous liability.

Gilly, bundled up in a thick quilted parka with a fur-lined hood, sat in the boat’s wheelhouse with her notepad and her stopwatch, and hardly talked to me at all. But she caught me looking at her once, and gave me a smile that told me that everything between us was as good as either of us could expect it to be. Her eyes were filled with tears but it was probably the cold wind.

Edward said, ‘We’re going to search a little further along the shoreline than we have done up until now. Dan’s going to position the boat according to transit bearings we’ve already worked out - that means we take one fix on the Winter Island lighthouse, and a second fix on the Quaker Hill Episcopalian Church, and where the two transit lines meet, that’s where we’re going to drop anchor.’

Dan Bass brought the
Alexis
a little closer into shore, while Forrest took the bearings. It took a few minutes to nudge the boat into position, but at last we put down our anchor, and cut the engine.

'The tide’s ebbing at the moment,’ Edward explained. ‘In a little while, though, it’ll be slack, and that’s the safest time for diving. Now, since this is your first time, I don’t want you to stay down for longer than five minutes. It’s cold down there, and the visibility is pretty shitty, and you’ll have quite enough to occupy your time just breathing and finning and getting yourself accustomed to diving.’

I felt a tightness in my stomach, and at that moment I would have been quite happy to suggest that I should postpone my aqualung initiation until tomorrow, perhaps, or next week, or even next year. The wind whipped across the deck of the
Alexis
and snapped our diving flag, but I didn’t know whether I was shivering from cold or nervous anticipation.

Dan put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, John. If you can swim you can aqualung, just provided you keep your head, and follow procedure. Edward’s a first-rate diver, in any case. He’ll help you.’

We changed into snug-fitting Neoprene wetsuits, tugging on tight Neoprene vests underneath to give us extra protection from the cold. The suits were white, with orange hoods, which Edward said would give us maximum visibility in the cloudy water. Dan Bass strapped on my air-cylinder, and showed me how to blow hard into my mouthpiece before breathing in, to dislodge any dust or water; and how to check that the demand valve was functioning correctly. Then I fitted on my weight belt, and Dan adjusted the weights for me so that they were comfortable.

‘Check your diving buddy’s equipment, too,’ Dan instructed me. ‘Make sure you remember how his valve works, how to release his weight-belt, if you need to. And try to remember as much as you can about those emergency procedures.’

For my first dive, both Edward and Forrest were going down with me. As we sat on the side of the boat, preparing ourselves, one or the other of them would keep thinking of some piece of advice that he’d forgotten to tell me; and by the time we were ready to drop, my mind was a jumble of signals and procedures and hints on what to do if my facemask fogged, or my air wasn’t coming through, or (the most likely emergency, as far as I was concerned) I started to panic.

Gilly came over, clutching her notepad, and stood beside me, the wind ruffling the fur of her parka.

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘Stay safe.’

‘I’ll try,’ I told her, with a dry mouth. ‘I think I’m more scared now than I was when those windows fell in.’

‘Windows?’ asked Edward. He looked at me, and then at Gilly; but when he saw that neither of us was going to tell him what we were talking about, he shrugged, and said,

‘Are you ready? Let’s drop.’

I fitted in my mouthpiece, said a silent prayer inside of my head, and then dropped backwards into the sea.

It was cold and chaotic down there: nothing but foggy water and rushing bubbles. But as I started to sink, I glimpsed the whiteness of Edward’s suit next to me, and then another white blur as Forrest came dropping in after us, and I began to feel that aqualung diving might not be as terrifying as I had thought it was going to be.

All three of us finned into the tidal stream; Edward and Forrest with balance and grace, me with plenty of enthusiasm but not much in the way of style. The ocean wasn’t too deep here, especially at low tide, no more than 20 or 30 feet; but it was quite deep enough for me, and it was murky enough too for me to stay as close to my buddies as I could.

As we descended towards the bottom, I felt myself becoming progressively less buoyant, until, as we skimmed a few feet over the sloping surface of the Granitehead mud bank, I was in a state of neutral buoyancy, although I tended to rise and sink a little as I breathed in and out. I was a good swimmer. I had made the swimming team at school, a bronze for backstroke. But this chilly underwater exploration of the black ooze on the west shore of Granitehead Neck was something different altogether. I felt like a clumsy, over-excited child, inexperienced and only just in control of my body and my movements.

Edward swam into view and made the ‘okay, all is well,’ hand signal, which was the same hand signal that St Louis cab drivers usually make when they see a tasty-looking girl prancing down the sidewalk. I gave him the same signal back, thinking how drowned and bulgy Edward’s eyes looked behind his facemask. I had been told not to make a thumb’s-up signal because that meant something different altogether. Forrest, ten or fifteen feet away, beckoned us to start searching. If I was only going to be down here for five minutes, I might just as well help the hunt for the
David Dark.

We were planning to make a systematic circular search of the area around the
Alexis,
swimming in an anti-clockwise spiral and leaving numbered white markers on the bottom to show where we had been. We started off where the boat’s anchor was buried in the ooze, and began to find ourselves around and around, until I had totally lost all sense of direction. As we went, however, Forrest pushed the markers into the mud, one at each completed half-circle, so that we could be sure we weren’t covering the same ground twice, or straying way off our search area altogether.

I checked my watch. I had been down for three minutes and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Not only cold, and awkward, but claustrophobic as well. Although I had started off by breathing easily, I was finding it difficult to keep up the regular rhythm, and I recognized that even if my mind wasn’t panicking, my lungs were beginning to act catchy and nervous.

I tried to remember the signal for ‘something wrong -not an emergency.’ A kind of hand-flapping, I think Dan Bass had said, coupled with an indication of what was wrong. How did I explain claustrophobia with a hand-signal? Put my hand around my throat and pretend to be strangling? Squeeze my head in my hands?

Remember not to panic, I told myself. You’re perfectly all right. You’re swimming without any difficulty; you’re still breathing. What’s more, you only have a couple of minutes to go and then you’ll be back on the surface again. Edward and Forrest will take care of you.

But when I raised my head again, I couldn’t see either Edward or Forrest anywhere. All I could see was cloudy water, almost as thick as barley-broth, whirling with mud and debris.

I finned around and looked behind me, to see if they were there: but again, all that I could see was water. A stray flounder darted through the murk like a Dickensian character making his way through a London fog, quick and confident. But where were the white wetsuits and orange head-pieces that were supposed to make my diving buddies visible through ten feet of submarine darkness?

Don’t panic, I repeated. They must be around here someplace. If they’re not, then all you have to do is follow the markers back to the anchorline, and find your way up to the surface again. The problem was, there wasn’t a marker in sight, and in turning around to look for my companions, I had completely lost my sense of direction. I could feel the chilly tidal stream flowing gently against me, but when we had started diving the tide had been on the turn, and I couldn’t work out which direction it was flowing in, or how far it might have carried me while I was just flapping around here thinking about what to do.

My breath came in short, tense gasps. I tried not to think about all the things that Edward and Dan Bass had warned me to watch out for. If you have to surface, even in an emergency, don’t come up too fast. You could end up with an air embolism in your bloodstream that could conceivably kill you. Don’t come up any faster than your smallest bubbles, that was what Dan Bass had advised; and, if you can, take a decompression stop on the way.

Burst lung was another danger: overinflating the lungs at depth, and coming to the surface with too much pressure inside them, causing them to rupture.

I dog-paddled where I was for a moment or two, calming myself down. There was still no sign of Edward or Forrest, and I couldn’t locate any of the search markers, so I guessed that the only thing I could do was to surface. In spite of the tidal stream, I couldn’t be too far away from the
Alexis.

I was about to start finning my way upwards when I caught a glimpse of something white through the tumbling murk of the water. My facemask was slightly misted, and it was difficult for me to make out exactly how far away it was, but I remembered that, seen through a facemask, al objects underwater appear to be three-quarters nearer than they actually are. It could only be Edward or Forrest. There weren’t any other divers in the area, and it looked far too large to be a fish. I thought momentarily of
Jaws,
but Dan Bass had wryly assured me that the only Great Whites that had ever been seen off the coast of New England had belonged to Universal Pictures.

Swimming steadily, trying to control my breathing so that it was regular and even, I made my way over the ocean floor towards the white shape. It was turning in the water, turning and rolling, as if it were being wafted by the tidal stream; and, as I swam nearer, I realized that it couldn’t be Edward or Forrest, it looked more like a piece of yacht-sail that had gotten tangled up in a piece of heavy fishing-equipment, and sunk to the bottom.

It was only when I came very close, no more than two or three feet away, when I realized with a chilling feeling of abject horror and disgust that it was a drowned woman.

She pivoted around, just as I approached, and I saw a face that was bloated and eyeless, a mouth that had been half-eaten by fish, hair that rose straight up from the top of her head like seaweed. She was wearing a white nightgown, which billowed and waved as the tide came in and out. Her ankle was loosely wound in a sunken trawl-net - which had prevented her from rising to the surface or drifting away - but her decomposed body was now so inflated with gas that she was standing upright, and dancing a grotesque underwater ballet, all on her own, drowned, beneath the waves of Granitehead Neck.

I backed off, trying to suppress my horror and my half-regurgitated Wheaties. For Christ’s sake, I told myself, you can’t be sick. If you’re sick, you’ll choke, and if you choke, you’ll end up like Ophelia here, with your eyeballs eaten out by bluefish. So calm down. Look the other way, forget about Ophelia, there’s nothing you can do for her anyway. Calm down. And slowly find your way up to the surface, and call for help.

I began swimming upwards, watching my bubbles carefully to make sure that I didn’t come up too fast. I was only about 30 feet under the water, but it felt like 100. I slowed myself down when I thought I was about halfway up, and exhaled, making sure that my lungs wouldn’t burst or anything disastrous like that. The water became lighter, and clearer, and I began to feel the pull of the tide more strongly, and the disturbance of the waves.

‘John,’
whispered a woman’s voice. I felt a chill go through me that was far more intense than the chill of the seawater. The voice seemed close, and very clear, as if she were speaking right in my ear.

I finned up more quickly, keeping down the first surges of real panic.
‘John,’
whispered the voice, more loudly now, more urgently, as if she were pleading.
‘Don’t leave me,
John. Don’t leave me. Please, John.’