The Pariah Read Free

frightened me more than anything.
    Fear itself is frightening. To see yourself frightened is worse.
    I walked out of the kitchen, and back into the hallway, and called out again, ‘Who’s there? Is anybody there?’ and again there was silence. But I had a curiously unsettled feeling that something or somebody was passing through the air, as if atmospheric molecules were being disturbed by unseen movements. There was a sensation of coldness, too: a sensation of loss and painful unhappiness. The same coldness you feel after a road accident, or when you hear your own child crying in the night, an infant’s dread of what the dark might bring.
    I stood in the hallway, unsure of what to do or even of how to feel. It was quite plain that there was nobody here; that apart from me the house was empty. There was no physical evidence of any intrusion. No doors were forced, no windows were broken. And yet it was equally obvious that somehow the perspective of the house had been subtly altered. I felt as if I was now looking at the hallway from a new viewpoint, the right-hand picture of a stereoscopic photograph, instead of the left.
    I went into the kitchen, hesitated again, and then decided to make myself a cup of tea.
    Maybe a couple of aspirin would help, too. I went over to the worktop where the kettle was standing, and to my alarm there was already a thin curl of steam rising out of the spout.
    With the tips of my fingers, I touched the kettle’s lid. It was scalding hot. I stepped back from the kettle and frowned at it. My frowning reflection, ridiculously distorted, stared back at me from its stainless-steel sides. I knew that I had been thinking of making tea, but had I actually switched on the kettle myself? I couldn’t remember doing it. Yet the kettle had boiled, which usually took two or three minutes, and automatically switched itself off.
    I must have done it myself. I was tired, that was all. I reached up to the wall-cupboard to take myself down a cup and saucer. And as I did so I could hear it again, I was convinced that I could hear it again, that faintest of singing. I paused, straining my ears, but it was gone. I took out the cup and saucer, and the small Spode teapot, and switched on the kettle again to bring the water back to the boil.
    Maybe Jane’s sudden death had affected me more than I had realized. Maybe bereavement found ways of expressing itself in visions, tricks of the mind, and odd sensations. Hadn’t Jung talked about a collective unconscious, a pool of dreams in which we all shared? Maybe if one soul was lost to that pool, it set up ripples that everybody could feel, especially those who were closest.
    The kettle was almost boiling again when, slowly, its shiny surface began to mist over, as if the temperature in the kitchen had suddenly dropped. But it was a chilly night, and so it didn’t surprise me too much. I went across to the other side of the kitchen to fetch the old pewter tea-caddy. When I came back, however, for a few brief seconds, I was sure that I saw writing on the misted side of the kettle, as if somebody had quickly scrawled something there with their finger. At that instant, the kettle boiled, and the switch clicked out, and the mist faded away. But I peered at the kettle intently for a sign of what I had seen, and after I had filled up the teapot I boiled the kettle again to see if the writing reappeared. There was a smear which might have been an ‘S’ and another smear which might have been an ‘e’, but that was all. I was probably going quietly bananas. I took my tea into the living-room, and sat down by the still-warm fireplace, and sipped it, and tried to get my mind straight.
    That couldn’t have been writing. It couldn’t have been anything more than greasy marks on the side of the kettle, where the condensation wouldn’t cling. I didn’t believe in ouija boards or automatic writing, or ‘presences’. I didn’t believe in poltergeists and I didn’t believe