The Pariah (30 page)

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 risk 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.’

‘What are you saying?’ asked Walter.

‘Simply this: that the demon offered me three lives in exchange for its own freedom. If I help to raise it up off the ocean floor, and then make sure that it isn’t handed over to Mr Evelith, or anybody at the Peabody Museum, I get Jane restored to me; and our unborn son; and Constance, too.’

‘Constance? Are you serious?’

‘Do you think I’d joke about it? Come on, Walter, you know me better than that. The demon is offering me Jane, and the baby, and Constance; back to life just as they were before any of this ever happened. No blindness, no injuries, nothing. Perfect and whole.’

‘I just can’t believe it,’ said Walter.

‘Well , what the hell
can
you believe? You’ve seen Jane, flying through the air like a cartwheel. You’ve seen your own wife frozen blind right on my front path. You believed before, when I first told you about Jane. Why can’t you believe now?’

Walter put down his piece of bread, and chewed his mouthful unhappily. ‘Because it’s too good to be true,’ he said. ‘Miracles like that, they just don’t happen. Well, not to me, anyway.’

‘Think about it,’ I insisted. ‘You don’t have to come to any decisions tonight. There may be some risk in letting the demon go, judging from how it behaved in the 17th century; but on the other hand, people aren’t so superstitious these days, the way they were then, and it’s unlikely that the demon is going to be able to exert the same powerful influence that it did then, in 1690. According to Mr Evelith, it actually made the sky turn dark, so that for days on end it was permanently night. I can’t see that happening today.’

Walter slowly finished his soup. Then he said, ‘It actually offered to give Constance back to me? Not blinded? Not hurt in any way?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘To have her back …’he said, slowly shaking his head. ‘It would seem like none of this nightmare ever happened.’

'That’s right.’

‘But how can it
do
that? How can the demon actually
do
that?’

I shrugged. ‘As far as I can tell , Mictantecutli is the final arbiter of all human death, in the Americas at least. On other continents he probably appears in different forms.’

‘So what’s been happening to the dead while he’s been lying beneath the sea?’

‘How should I know? I presume they’ve been going to their ultimate destinations without having to worry about Mictantecutli using them to recruit more blood, more hearts, more restless spirits. According to old man Evelith, Mictantecutli is shunned by every other supernatural creature, good or evil. It is a complete outcast; diseased and utterly malevolent, disregarding any of the protocol of Heaven or of Hel . But its power is such that it can afford to; or at least it
was,
before it was sealed in that copper vessel and sunk to the bottom of Salem Harbour.’