The Pariah (29 page)

‘Jane, please,’ I said, but Jane didn’t even turn and look at me.

Slowly, Jane described a curve in the air with her hands; and equally slowly, Anne’s body was bent back in midair. Anne grunted with effort and pain, struggling as hard as she could to resist the force that was attempting to snap her spine, but I could tell that it was no use. The power of the Fleshless One was comparatively weak, but it was strong enough to overwhelm one of its own witches.

I heard another crack, as a cartilage broke in Anne’s left knee. She said,
‘Aaahf
and grimaced, but she was reserving all her energy for fighting against her demonic master.

‘Jane!’ I shouted. I got to my feet, but instantly I was hurled back by a force as powerful as a truck. I hit my head against the side of the chair, and stumbled over the clashing fire-irons; but then I scrambled up to my feet again and yelled, ‘Jane!’

Jane ignored me. In utter helplessness, I saw Anne’s back being bent over as if she were being forced over a barrel, or the back of a chair. The veins stood out on her narrow hips, and her neck tendons were swollen with effort.

‘God, you’re going to kill her!’ I screamed. ‘Mictantecutli! Stop it! Mictantecutli!

There was a strange shimmering sound, like the blade of a saw being wobbled. Jane raised her eyes and stared at me; and her face wasn’t Jane’s face at all, it was the skeletal face of an ancient demon, the fleshless creature which David Dark had stolen from the Aztec magicians. Mictantecutli, the lord of Mictlampa, the prince of the region of the dead.

‘Don’t kill her,’ I said. I could feel the sweat chilling under my armpits. ‘She was only trying to protect me, that’s all .’

‘She is my servant. I shall do whatever I wish with her.’

 ‘I’m asking you not to kill her.’

 There was a long pause. Jane looked at Anne’s naked suspended body, and then reached out with her palm facing downwards. Anne slowly sank to the floor, and lay on the carpet shaking and panting, and holding her hand to her back in an attempt to ease the pain.

 I started to kneel down beside her, but Jane said,
‘Stay where you are. I offer you no
guarantees of my handmaiden’s life. First, you must promise that you will serve me; and
that you will accept the bargain which I proposed to you. Help your friends to raise me
from the waters, and then set me free. Your wife and son will be returned to you, and
your wife’s mother, too; and you shall remain invulnerable from harm.
‘

‘How can I be sure that I can trust you?’

‘You can never be sure. It is a risk that you will have to accept.
‘

‘Supposing I say no?’

‘Then I will break this girl’s back.’

 I glanced down at Anne. She was lying flat on her back now, her hands held over her face as she tried to contain the agony she was feeling in her back and her thighs.

The point was, I had already been considering the possibility of letting Mictantecutli free; I had already been tempted by the offer of having Jane restored to me, so what difference would it make if I actually said yes? It would save Anne; it would bring back all the people I loved; and who knew, the consequences might not really be so bad. If Mictantecutli had reigned unchecked before the days of David Dark and Esau Hasket, what difference would it make if it reigned again now? As Mictantecutli itself had told me yesterday, it was part of the order of the universe, just as the sun was, and the planets, and God Himself.

 Anne whispered, ‘John … don’t agree to anything. Please.’

 Instantly, her arm was twisted right around behind her back, so violently that her wrist was snapped. She screamed out in pain, but the demonic force wouldn’t release her, and deliberately pressed her body down so that her own shoulder-blade rubbed against her fractured bones. She screamed and screamed, writhing and thrashing, but Mictantecutli wouldn’t let her go.

 ‘Stop!’ I yelled at Jane. ‘Stop, I’ll do it!’

 Gradually, the pressure on Anne’s body was relieved. I knelt down and helped her to ease her arm out from under her back, and rest it gently on her stomach. Her wrist was swollen and misshapen, and I could hear the broken bones grating against each other under the skin. Jane watched over us, smiling malevolently.

‘You have made a binding promise,’
she told me, in her own voice.
‘You must keep your
promise faithfully, or believe me, you will be cursed
forever; and all your heirs will be
cursed
forever; and anyone who ever knew you will regret the day they first saw you.

You will be blighted for all time; you will never know peace. I have my mark on you now;
you have freely bargained with me; and whatever rewards and punishments are due,
you will surely receive them in the fullest measure.’

 I got to my feet. I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. ‘Mictantecutli, I want you to go now. Leave us in peace. I’ve agreed to do what you want, now just get out of here.’

 Jane smiled, and began to fade. I looked down to make sure that Anne was all right, and when I looked back, Jane had disappeared altogether. The door, however, remained open; and the draught that blew through it was as cold and unrelenting as ever.

 Anne said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It would have been better for me to die.’

 ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Here, I’ll help you up on to the sofa, then I’ll call the doctor.’

 ‘God, my wrist,’ she winced.

 ‘God?’ I said, wearily. ‘God doesn’t seem to be helping us much.’

TWENTY-SIX

Next day, the wind dropped and the sun came out, and I changed my mind about accompanying Edward and Forrest and Jimmy on their search for the wreck of the
David Dark.
We left Pickering Wharf Marina a little after eight-thirty in the morning, on a rather smarter launch than the
Alexis
which Forrest had persuaded a lawyer friend of his to lend us for the day. Her name was
Diogenes,
which considering she belonged to a lawyer was pretty ironic.

It was cold but calm out in the harbour. I wore a quilted anorak and a peaked denim cap and a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses. Gilly wore a thick red knitted jacket and matching ski-hat, with tight stretch designer jeans, and I think she looked sexier then than at any time since I had met her; and I told her so.

She kissed me on the tip of my cold nose. ‘Just for that, you can take me out for dinner tonight,’ she told me. Edward watched us balefully from the other side of the launch.

‘You’re not scared of ghostly retribution?’ I asked her.

‘I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I let my emotions run away with me. Anyway, a ghost is hardly likely to attack us for
eating
together, is it?’

‘That’s all you’ve got in mind?’

‘Sure,’ she grinned. ‘What have
you
got in mind?’

The advantage of borrowing the
Diogenes
was that she was fitted with a Decca navigation system; and so Dan Bass was able to steer us right on to the spot that Duglass Evelith had pinpointed as the place where the
David Dark’s
sole survivor had found himself swimming in the ocean.

Dan said, ‘It’s more than likely that there was quite a time-lapse in between the moment when the ship sank and the moment when the sailor was able to assess his position; so let’s assume that the wreck is probably upwind of here; or upwind in relation to the wind that must have been blowing at the time. We’ll drop a buoy here, to use as a datum point, but I think we should search in a box towards the north-east, maybe a half-mile square.’

So we began the long and tedious business of a parallel search. Dan and Edward had put together an impressive partnership of sonar scanners, similar to the equipment that had been used to locate the wreck of the
Mary Rose.
There was a side-scanner, housed in a torpedo-shaped drogue, which could simultaneously search the surface of the sea-bed for 500 feet both to port and to starboard; and a very powerful and high-quality echo-sounder which not only mapped the ocean floor but the underlying layers of sediment beneath it.

Once you knew roughly where to look, this combination of scanners was remarkably effective. In 1967, a namesake of Dan’s, Dr George Bass, had found in two mornings a visible Roman wreck which nobody had been able to locate before, not even after a whole month of searching with underwater television cameras. Even when they were searching for the
Mary Rose
in the muddy depths of the Solent, Alexander McKee and his companions had located the wreck after only four days of scanning.

Edward came up and stood beside me as the drogue was trailed overboard. ‘Any luck with your father-in-law?’ he asked me.

‘I haven’t spoken to him since the weekend,’ I said.

‘We’re going to need some money urgently once we locate this wreck.’

‘Can’t we just bring up the copper vessel?’ I asked him. ‘Surely that wouldn’t be too expensive.’

‘The copper vessel is only part of it,’ said Edward. ‘Do you realize what’s down there? A late 17th-century ship, most of it intact, if the
Mary Rose
experience is anything to go by. It’s not just the copper vessel we want, it’s the whole thing, the whole environment.

There could be all kinds of artifacts down there that will tell us how they intended to dispose of Mictantecutli, and who was on board the ship, and how they managed to keep the demon incarcerated. If we bring up the copper vessel and nothing else, we’ll only get a quarter of the story; and, besides, I’m afraid that once the location of the wreck becomes public knowledge, there’s a high risk of it being pillaged by souvenir-hunters. But, we’ll get Mictantecutli up just as quickly as we possibly can.’

He was right about the souvenir-hunters, of course. Even while we were doing nothing more than burbling gently up and down, two or three boats approached us and asked us what we were looking for. ‘Any treasure down there?’ one of the boat-men shouted; and he wasn’t joking. Amateur divers would risk their lives to bring up a piece of carving from a sunken schooner; or a rusty fowling-piece; or a few roughly-minted coins. Dan Bass cal ed back that we were looking for a friend’s powerboat, which had accidentally flooded and sunk. The boat waited around for a while, until the owners decided that we weren’t doing anything particularly interesting, and roared off.

We ate a picnic lunch of spiced chicken and fish enchiladas out on deck, washed down with a couple of bottles of California wine. Then we resumed the search, cruising up and down in 100-foot swathes; up to the line of the datum buoy, and then back again. The wind began to rise a little, and the
Diogenes
began to dip and rise in a way which played unsettling games with my lunch. Gilly-said, ‘This could take days. The bottom of the sea is flat as a pancake around here.’

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.’