The Pariah (31 page)

‘And it can really bring Constance back? And Jane?’

‘So it says. From what it’s done so far, I don’t have any reason to doubt it. Can you imagine how much psychic power it must have taken just to bring Constance’s image into your house? There’s nothing on earth that can do anything like that, nothing
human,
anyway.’

Walter sat there for a long time, thinking. Then he said, ‘What do your friends from the Peabody have to say about it? I don’t suppose they’re particularly happy.’

‘They don’t know. I haven’t told them.’

‘Do you think that’s wise?’

‘Not particularly. But we’re not discussing wisdom here, Walter. We’re discussing whether you and I want our dead wives back or not. I’m not saying there isn’t a price. It’s conceivable that other people may be put at risk, although I doubt if there’ll be any
less
risk if the demon is kept in captivity than if we set it free. Both of us have to face up to what we have here: an ancient and incomprehensible influence that controls the very process of death itself. The lord of the region of the dead, that’s what they call it. And one way or another, it’s going to re-establish its reign, whether we like it or not. If we leave it under the ocean, the copper vessel will eventually corrode to the point where Mictantecutli will be able to escape of its own accord; if we bring it up and keep it at the Peabody, or send it off to old man Evelith, who knows how long
they’ll
be able to keep it under control? Even David Dark couldn’t, and he was the man who first brought it here.

So, from every angle, it looks like a no-win situation - in which case I’m suggesting that at least we rescue Jane and Constance.’

I was glad I wasn’t somebody else, listening to myself presenting this argument. It was flawed in logic, flawed in fact, and most of all it was flawed in fundamental morality. I didn’t know anything about old man Evelith’s ability to control Mictantecutli: according to Anne, he already had some kind of plan worked out, a plan involving Quamus and Enid and the rest of the Salem witch-coven. Neither did I know for sure if Mictantecutli’s copper vessel was corroding or not. Worst of all, I didn’t know what hideous influence Mictantecutli would be able to exert over both the living and the dead once Walter and I had set it free.

I thought of David Dark, literally exploding as he walked towards his house. I thought of Charlie Manzi, and the crushing, grinding noise of those tombstones. I thought of Mrs Edgar Simons, screaming for help. I thought, too, of Jane: smiling and seductive, a solid form without any reality, a dead wife who walked. Al of these images tumbled over in my mind in a confusion of fear, disbelief, depression, nightmare, and unrealized terror.

But there was one hope to which I was clinging with fierce and illogical tenacity; one hope which enabled me to disregard the naked fear of Mictantecutli’s walking dead, the pariah’s children; and the extreme danger of releasing an ancient demon into a modern world. That hope was the hope of seeing Jane alive again, of being able to hold her again, against all the dictates of fate and human destiny, against all accepted logic. It was the one hope which Mictantecutli knew that I could never deny, no matter what the threatened consequences might be; and that was what made Mictantecutli a demon.

Walter said, ‘I’m not at all sure how I could present this as an investment portfolio.’

‘It won’t be all that difficult,’ I told him. ‘Show your clients pictures of the
Wasa,
and the
Mary Rose.
Tell them how much prestige is going to be involved. And then explain how the salvaged ship is going to be displayed to the public, possibly as the central attraction in a recreational theme park. Come on, Walter, five or six million dollars isn’t asking for the earth. A cheap movie costs five or six million dollars.’

‘My clients don’t invest in cheap movies,’ said Walter.

‘Listen,’ I said, earnestly, ‘do you want Constance back again or don’t you?’

The waitress brought him his steak-and-oyster pie. He prodded it with his fork like a man who has suddenly lost his appetite. ‘You can go back to the salad bar if you want to,’ the waitress told him. ‘There’s no extra charge.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and then looked across the table with a haunted, tired expression.

‘Supposing nothing comes of this?’ he asked me. ‘Supposing it’s all a dream, all an illusion? I’ll have lost my career, as well as Constance.’

‘Supposing you never try?’ I retorted. ‘What will you think then, for the rest of your life? “I could have had Constance back, but I was too frightened to make the effort.” ‘

Walter cut into his pie-crust, and a curl of fragrant steam rose out of it. He ate slowly, and without much obvious relish; but all the same he was still hungry enough to finish most of the pie, and his bread as well . He drained the last of his Guinness, and then drummed his fingers sharply on the deal tabletop.

‘Five or six million, is that it?’

‘That’s the estimate.’

‘Can you get me an accurate costing?’

‘Of course.’

He wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘I don’t know what I’m letting myself in for,’ he said.

‘But the least I can do is run it up the flag-pole and see if anybody salutes it.’

‘Think of Constance,’ I reminded him.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘That’s what worries me.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Dr Rosen was just parking his Mercedes 350 SL outside of the Derby Clinic when I drew up beside him in my rattling Toronado and gave him a wave of greeting. He stopped on the sidewalk, a neat, immaculately-dressed man with a goatee beard and large California-style spectacles with his initials engraved on the lower left-hand corner of the left lens. I often used to think that he would have been happier in Hollywood than he was in Salem: he had a naturally exhibitionistic nature and a love of medical jargon that ranged from ‘sibling shock’ to ‘acceptory neurosis’ and back again.

He was very professional, however: thorough and knowledgeable and careful in the finest tradition of New England’s country physicians, and his love affair with medical ritz couldn’t really be held against him.

‘Good morning, John,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Come on in and have some coffee.’

‘I just came to see Anne,’ I told him. We walked together up the sun-flecked pathway to the clinic’s glass-fronted reception area. Inside, it was calm and air-conditioned, with smooth background music and expensive potted plants, and a discreet waterfall which tinkled into a free-form goldfish pool. Seated at a desk at the far side of the reception area was a stunningly pretty blonde nurse with a white uniform and a white cap and spotless white medical shoes. She probably didn’t know the difference between a cyst and a cistern, but who cared. She was all part of Dr Rosen’s ‘convivial clinic’ theme.

‘Any calls, Margot?’ Dr Rosen asked her, as he passed her by.

‘Mr Willys, that’s all,’ said Margot, flashing sooty black eyelashes at me. ‘Oh, and Dr Kaufman from Beth Israel.’

‘Call Kaufman back for me in ten minutes, will you?’ asked Dr Rosen. ‘Leave Willys until he calls back himself. Was it his fibrositis?’

‘I guess.’

‘Come in, John,’ Dr Rosen beckoned me. ‘And, thanks, Margot.’

‘You’re welcome,’ purred Margot.

‘She’s
new,’ I commented to Dr Rosen, walking into his large cream-painted office, and looking around. He still had the large Andrew Stevovich oil painting on the wall, a moon-faced woman and two moon-faced men, a picture which I knew in every detail, every shade, every angle, because I had sat opposite it for hours on end, talking to Dr Rosen about my depression and my bereavement.

Dr Rosen sat down at his wide teak desk and sorted briefly through his mail. The desk was bare except for the morning’s post and a small bronze abstract sculpture in a twisted triangle, which Dr Rosen had once told me was meant to represent the self-curative strength inherent in every human. It always looked more like a serious case of indigestion to me, but I had never said so.

‘Anne,’ he said, as if he were continuing a sentence which he had left half-finished,

‘Anne is suffering from a broken wrist, severe bruising, muscular strain, swollen tendons, and shock. Well, I imagine the shock has probably subsided by now, but the physical damage will take a few days to right itself.’

He paused, frowned at a letter from Peter Bent Brigham, and then looked up at me with an expression that wasn’t very far away from surprise. ‘I don’t suppose you want to tell me how Anne
got
that way?’ he asked me.

‘Hasn’t Anne told you?’

‘Anne said she was jogging, and she fell, but I really find that very hard to believe.

Particularly since she must have fallen with her legs stretched wide apart, as if she were a ballerina doing the
splits;
and particularly since the external scratches and lesions on her skin all indicate that she was naked at the time.’

I shrugged, and made a face which was supposed to be interpreted as non-committal.

Dr Rosen watched me for a while, tugging his beard between finger and thumb. At last, he said, ‘I’m not suggesting for a moment that Anne’s injuries are anything to do with you, John. But I’m a physician, remember, and I have to wonder. I mean, wonder, that’s part of my profession. I don’t only have to deal with the effect, I have to do my best to find out what the cause was, in case the effect happens again. I mean, I’m more than a simple mechanic.’

‘I know that, Dr Rosen,’ I nodded. ‘But, believe me, there’s nothing going on here that’s - what would you call it? -
untoward,
or anything like that.’

Dr Rosen pursed his lips, obviously dissatisfied.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I haven’t been beating her up. I hardly know her.’

‘She was with you the night she got hurt, and at some time during that night she was naked.’

‘It happens, doctor. People do get naked at night. But, believe me, her nakedness was nothing to do with me. Neither were her injuries. Al I did was drive her down here so that you could take care of her.’

Dr Rosen stood up, and walked around his desk with his hands thrust into his pants pockets. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have no way of proving you wrong.’

‘Do you
want
to prove me wrong?’

‘I just want to find out what happened, that’s all. Listen, John, that girl wasn’t injured in any athletics accident. You know it, I know it. I’m not trying to pry. I’m not trying to act like a one-man watch committee. But it would help me medically to know how she got herself bruised and sprained and roughed up so badly. I mean, her injuries aren’t consistent with anything but … well, if you want to have it straight, s-and-m.’

I stared at him. ‘Are you kidding? S-and-m? You really think that Anne Putnam and I were - ‘

Dr Rosen raised his hand, and blushed. ‘John, please, you don’t have to explain yourself.’

‘I obviously
do
have to explain myself if you think that I was tying Anne Putnam to the bedpost and beating her up.’

‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ said Dr Rosen. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest for a moment that - ‘ He paused, leaving his sentence unfinished. ‘Well, I’m sorry. It was just that I couldn’t think how else she could have come by injuries of this particular nature. Please. It was very tactless of me.’

‘It would have been even
more
tactless if I actually had been beating her up,’ I remarked.

‘I’ve said I’m sorry. Now, do you want to see her? She should have finished her medication programme by now.’

Dr Rosen led me out of his office and along the corridor, his soft-soled shoes squeaking on the highly-waxed floor tiles. He was still embarrassed; I could tell that by the colour of his ears. But what else could I do, except deny that Anne and I had been playing torture chambers? He wasn’t going to believe that Jane’s ghost had turned Anne upside down and brutalized her by psychokinesis.

Anne was sitting in a white bamboo chair in a corner of her room, watching the
$20,000

Pyramid.
She looked pale and tired, her arm was strapped up, and both her eyes were bruised. She clutched her robe around her as if she were cold.

‘Anne, you’ve got a visitor,’ said Dr Rosen.

‘Hi,’ I told her. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better, thank you,’ she said, and switched off the television by remote. ‘I had a few nightmares last night, but they gave me something to help me sleep.’

Dr Rosen left us and I sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I feel really guilty about what happened to you,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have let you come up to the cottage.’

‘It was my fault for tampering,’ said Anne. ‘I should have realized that Mictantecutli was far too strong for me.’

‘You’re safe, that’s all that matters.’

Anne looked up at me. Her left eye was badly bloodshot. ‘At what price, though? That’s the frightening thing.’

‘No price at all. I was considering that option already.’

‘You were really considering letting Mictantecutli go free?’

‘Of course I was. It was offering me my wife and my child back. What would
you
have done?’

Anne looked away. On the lawn outside, in the sunshine, a meadowlark tentatively hopped, and then flew off. ‘I suppose I would have done exactly the same thing,’ she said. ‘But now I feel that you
had
to make that decision because of me. It’s as if my life is being exchanged for all those others.’

‘All what others?’

‘All those others who will die when Mictantecutli gets loose.’

‘Who says anybody’s going to die, just because a 300-hundred-year-old demon is set free?’

‘Mictantecutli is
far
more than 300 years old,’ Anne corrected me. ‘It was already centuries old when David Dark brought it to Salem. It had been known in Aztec culture since the beginning of recorded time. And always, it has demanded its sacrifices.

Human hearts to feed its stomach, unfinished lives to feed its spirit, human affection to keep it warm. It is a parasite without any purpose except to exist; and it was only because the Aztecs used it to threaten any of their people who refused to pay homage to Tonacatecutli the sun-god, and because David Dark tried to use it to frighten the people of Salem into coming to chapel more regularly that it had any useful function at all. I promise you, John, when Mictantecutli is set free, it will immediately seek more souls.’

‘Anne,’ I protested gently, ‘these are modern times. People don’t
believe
in this stuff anymore. How can Mictantecutli possibly have any influence if people don’t believe in it?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether they believe in it or not. You didn’t believe that Jane could return from the grave until you saw her; but that didn’t diminish the power of her manifestation, did it?’

I was silent for a while. Then I looked at her and shrugged. ‘It’s too late now, anyway.

I’ve made Mictantecutli a promise. I’ll just have to stick to it and see what happens. I still don’t believe that it’s going to be
that
much of a danger.’

‘It will be worse than you can possibly imagine. Why do you think I begged you to let me die? My life is nothing compared with what Mictantecutli will do.’

‘But I promised,’ I reminded her.

‘Yes, you promised. But what is a promise to a demon worth? If you had once made a promise to Hitler, and broken it, would anybody have held you guilty? Would anybody have said that you were untrustworthy or disloyal?’

‘Hitler might have done. Just as Mictantecutli might do, if I break my promise to set it free.’

‘John, I want you to break your promise. I want you openly to say to Mictantecutli that you refuse to set it free.’

‘Anne, I can’t. It’ll kill you.’

‘My life doesn’t matter. Besides, if you’re really so skeptical about Mictantecutli’s powers, you shouldn’t worry.’

‘I’m not skeptical about its powers. I just don’t think that it’s got the strength to survive in a society that doesn’t believe in demons anymore.’

 Anne reached up and touched the back of my hand. ‘And there’s Jane, too, isn’t there?

And your unborn son?’

 I looked at her for a moment, and then lowered my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said. There’s Jane.’

 We sat for a very long time without saying anything to each other. In the end, I got up from the bed, bent forward, and kissed Anne on the forehead. She squeezed my hand for an instant, but didn’t speak, not even to say goodbye. I closed the door behind me as silently as if I were closing the door in a house of death.

 On the way out, I came around the corner into the reception area and bumped straight into Mr Duglass Evelith, in a wheelchair. He was being pushed along by Quamus, and Enid Lynch was walking just a little way behind. They looked dressed for an outing: old man Evelith was wearing a black derby and an opera cape, a silver-topped cane held between his knees; Quamus wore an overcoat in gray Prince-of-Wales check; and Enid was dressed in a clinging dress of gray wool, through which her chill-tightened nipples showed with considerable prominence.

 ‘Well met, Mr Trenton,’ said Duglass Evelith. He reached out his hand, and I shook it.

‘Or rather, ill met, under the circumstances. Anne told me on the telephone what had happened.’

‘She called you?’

‘Of course. I am like an uncle to all my witches.’ He smiled, although there was very little humour in his eyes. His expression instead was suspicious, searching, and critical.

What had happened at Quaker Lane Cottage that had led Anne to be injured? I felt there was a magical circle surrounding these people; a psychic bond into which I had unwittingly blundered, setting off alarms within all of their collective minds. If I had hurt Anne in any way, if I had compromised the understanding we had between us to raise the
David Dark
from the sea-bed and deliver Mictantecutli to Duglass Evelith’s house without delay, then I felt uneasily sure that all of these people would know about it without even having to ask.

‘Anne is … very much better,’ I said. ‘Dr Rosen says that she should be able to go home later today, or early tomorrow. He just wants to make sure that she’s out of shock.’

Duglass Evelith said, ‘It was your dead wife, she told me. A manifestation of your dead wife.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked up at Quamus. His face gave nothing away. Slabby, high-cheekboned, impassive. But he didn’t blink once, or deflect for even a moment that cold, penetrating stare. ‘Yes, there was some sort of a conflict between them. Anne was trying to give me some temporary peace from ghostly visitations; and I think my wife objected.’

‘You mean that Mictantecutli objected. For it is the demon, you know, which causes your wife to appear in this way.’

‘I meant - Mictantecutli,’ I said. I felt ridiculously guilty. All three of them were looking at me as if I had just sold my mother to a white slave-trader. It was obvious that they sensed
something;
although quite what it was they couldn’t be sure.

Enid said, ‘It would probably be better if you were to stay away from your house for the next few weeks. Have you anywhere you can go?’

‘I could stay with my father-in-law, I guess, down at Dedham; and, incidentally, talking about my father-in-law, it seems that he may be able to raise enough finance to bring up the
David Dark.
‘

‘Well , that
is
good news,’ said old man Evelith. ‘But why stay all the way out at Dedham?