The Pariah Read Free Page A

in any of that occult thought-transference stuff, psychokinetics, moving ashtrays around just by thinking about them, any of that. I wasn’t saying that people weren’t entitled to believe in them if they wanted to, but I didn’t. Not really. I mean, I wasn’t prepared to reject occult phenomena out of hand. Maybe some people had actually witnessed that kind of thing. But I hadn’t, and more than anything else I prayed that I wasn’t going to.
    I very much didn’t want to think that Quaker Lane Cottage might possibly be haunted, especially by anyone I knew. Especially, God forbid, by Jane.
    I stayed in the living-room until the long-case clock in the hallway struck five, sleepless and unhappy and deeply disturbed. At last the North Atlantic dawn came austerely through the leaded windows, and dressed the living-room in gray. The wind had died down now, to a chilly breeze, and I went out through the back door and took a barefoot walk in the dewy garden, dressed in nothing but my bathrobe and my old sheepskin jacket, and stood by the garden swing.
    It must have been low-tide, because far out over the sands of Granitehead Neck, the terns were already swooping down for clams. Their cries were like the cries of children.
    Off to the north-west, I could see the Winter Island lighthouse, still winking. A cold photographic morning. A picture of the gone world.
    The swing was more than 70 or 80 years old, constructed like an armchair, with a wide carved splat. On the cresting-rail was chiseled the face of the sun, Old Sol, and the words ‘All, except their sun, is set,’ which Jane had discovered was a quotation from Byron. The chains of the swing were suspended from a kind of gallows; but this was hard to make out, because whoever had built the swing all those years ago had planted a small apple-tree beside it, and now the swing was completely umbrellaed with gnarled old fruit-branches, and in the summer the apple-blossom showered all around you when you were swinging, like snow.
    Swinging (Jane had said, as she swung and sang) was the pastime of fools and jesters, a kind of medieval madness not unlike the whirling of whirling Dervishes. It reminded her of motley and mummers and pig’s-bladders on sticks, and she said that it had once been a way to conjure up imps and devils and hobgoblins. I remembered laughing at her, as she swung; and as I stood there that early morning alone, I found my eyes following the arc in which she had once been swinging, although the swing-chair itself now hung still, beaded with dew, unmoved by the breeze, and quite unmoved by my memories.
    I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets. It looked as if it was going to be one of those clear, fresh Atlantic days, cold as hell , but bright. I pushed the swing a little so that the chains complained, but even when I pushed it harder, I couldn’t reproduce the noise I had heard last night. To set up that distinctive creakkk-squik, you had to sit right on the swing, right up on that high-backed seat, and push yourself back, and up, and back, and up, until your toes were almost brushing the lower branches of the apple-tree.
    I walked down through the orchard, right to the end of my garden, and looked down the twisting slope of Quaker Lane towards Granitehead Village. Two or three chimneys were already smoking, fishermen’s houses, and the smoke was leaning off westwards, towards Salem, whose skyline was already becoming clearer across the harbour.
    Slowly, I returned to the house, glancing from side to side as I went for any signs of crushed grass, or footprints, any sign that somebody had visited my garden in the night; but there was none. I went back into the kitchen, leaving the door open, and brewed myself another cup of Bohea, and ate three Pepperidge Farm coconut cookies, feeling unreasonably guilty that this was my entire breakfast. Jane had always insisted on cooking me bacon, or waffles, or shirred eggs. I took my cup of tea upstairs with me, and