The Pariah

by Graham Masterton

  ‘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?

  If you care to, you can stay with me, at Tewksbury. I have a spare suite of rooms which you are quite welcome to use for as long as you wish. It would be quite convenient, too, wouldn’t it, while you and your colleagues are raising the ship? You could keep me in touch on your progress from day to day, and in return you could use my library for any additional research you might need.’

  I glanced from Enid to Quamus to old man Evelith. It would probably be stuffy and oppressive, living at Billington mansion, but on the other hand it would give me access to all of old man Evelith’s papers and books; and I might even be able to discover how he proposed to deal with Mictantecutli once the demon was raised from the bottom of the sea. If I knew what he intended to do, and how he was going to keep the demon in bondage, then I might also be able to find out how to break the bonds, and set the demon free.

  Duglass Evelith had probably invited me because he wanted to keep an eye on what I was doing, just as much as I wanted to spy on him. But I didn’t mind that. The real test of wills would come when Mictantecutli was discovered, and salvaged.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ said old man Evelith. ‘When you’ve packed, Quamus will come down and help you to move. Won’t you, Quamus?’

  Quamus gave no indication that he would or he wouldn’t, or even that he had heard.

  Enid came closer to the wheelchair, and said, ‘We mustn’t be away too long, Mr Evelith.

  Let us go visit Anne, and then get back. Mr Trenton, I’m very glad that you’re making progress with the finance.’

  The three of them went off down the corridor, the wheels of Duglass Evelith’s wheelchair making a light purring noise on the tiles. I turned around and saw that the blonde receptionist Margot had been watching me.

  ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘Acquaintances,’ I said.

  ‘Kind of weird, aren’t they? If you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Weird? For sure. But then, you know, different people think different things are weird. I mean, they probably look at you and think you’re weird.’

  Margot blinked her long false eyelashes at me. ‘Me? Weird? How can / be weird?’

  I smiled at her, and walked back to Dr Rosen’s office to tell him goodbye. Later, as I left the clinic, Margot was still looking at herself in her pocketbook mirror, frowning and pouting and trying to work out how anybody could say that she was weird.

  Outside, a cold wind was rising, and I was beginning to feel that there was something in the air. Something chilly, something threatening, and something soon.

  TWENTY-NINE

  It took a week for Edward and Forrest and Dan Bass to prepare a reasonably accurate costing of how much it would take to raise the David Dark up from the mudbank to the west of Granitehead; and during that week we dived on the location of the wreck eleven times.

  We were lucky: on the fourth dive we found protruding from the mud a row of four decayed timbers, which later turned out to be fashion-pieces which outlined the stern transom. This was our first visual confirmation that the David Dark was actually there, buried in the ooze, and we celebrated that evening with a dozen bottles of California’s best.

  During the next few dives, we excavated scores of deck-timbers; and it rapidly became clear that the David Dark was lying at an angle of about 30deg, with one side of her hull preserved almost up to the spar deck. Edward telephoned a friend of his in Santa Barbara, California, a maritime artist called Peter Gorton; and Peter flew over to help with the preparation of sketch-plans and charts.

  Peter dived on the wreck three times himself, groping through the murk to feel the
stumpy remains of the stern-post and the black, eroded teeth of the fashion-pieces.

  Afterwards, silent, absorbed with what he had seen, he sat down in Edward’s living-room with a drawing-board and scores of sheets of paper, and created for us a conjectural sheer drawing of what he thought the David Dark actually looked like now, as well as dozens of conjectural body-sections.

  I went down myself on the twelfth dive. It was a bright, calm day, and visibility was unusually good. Edward swam along with me, a distorted white companion in a world without gravity or wind. We approached the wreck of the David Dark from the northeast, and when I first saw her it was hard to understand how Edward had missed her during all that year of diving and searching. Apart from the black timbers which had now been excavated from the sloping ooze, the bulk of the David Dark was represented on the sea-bed as a long, oval mound, like an underwater burial-place. During the three cold centuries she had lain here, the tidal streams had scoured around her, creating a natural depression on all sides, and heaping silt on to her upper decks as if they were trying to conceal the evidence of an ancient and unforgiven murder.

  I swam right around the wreck, while Edward pointed out the exposed fashion-pieces, and the stern-post, and indicated with a sloping hand just how much the wreck had keeled over when she had sunk to the bottom. I watched Edward cross and re-cross the wreck, flying above the sea-bed at a height of no more than three or four feet, his fins stirring up cauliflower clouds of silt. It was then that I remembered what old Mercy Lewis had told me on Salem Common that day: ‘You must stay away from the place where no birds fly. ‘

  This was the place: deep beneath the surface of Salem Harbour. She had warned me, but now it was too late. I was committed to whatever fate was going to bring me; and I was committed to bringing up Mictantecutli, if it was really here.

  When we surfaced, Edward shouted across at me, ‘What do you think? Fantastic, isn’t it?’

  I waved, panting for breath. Then I swam back to the Diogenes, and climbed up the diving-ropes on to the deck. Gilly came over and said, ‘You’ve seen it?’

  I nodded. ‘It’s amazing that nobody’s come across it before.’

  Dan Bass said, ‘It isn’t really. Most of the time, the visibility is so poor that you could swim within a couple of feet of it and not notice anything unusual.’

  Edward came aboard and shook himself like a wet seal. ‘It’s really extraordinary,’ he said, handing his mask to Gilly, and wrestling his head out of his orange Neoprene hood. ‘You get this creepy sense that you’re trespassing on history … that men were never supposed to discover this wreck. You know what it reminds me of? Those ancient Celtic barrows, which you can only detect from the air.’

  ‘Well ,’ I said, ‘now that we’ve found it, how long is it going to take us to bring it up?’

  Edward blew water out of his nose. ‘Dan and I have been talking about this, from a logistical point of view. How many divers and marine archaeologists we’re going to need, how many diving-boats, how much excavation equipment. We’re going to require warehouse space on shore, too, so that we can store equipment and lay out all the loose timbers we find. Everything we find is going to have to be annotated, numbered, sketched, and filed away for later restoration. Every timber, every spar, every knife, fork, and spoon; every bone; every shred of fabric. Then we’re going to require refrigeration storage to keep the main timbers from eroding, and of course somewhere to store the main hull itself, when we eventually bring it up.’

  ‘How eventually is eventually?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘It depends on our budget, and the weather. If we have a short diving season this year, and if we can’t immediately lay our hands on all the specialized equipment we’re going to need, then three or four years.’

  Three or four years?’

  ‘Well , sure,’ said Edward. He unwrapped a piece of cough-candy, and popped it into his mouth. ‘And even that’s less than a third of the time it took them to bring up the Mary Rose. Of course we’re benefiting from all of their experience; and there’s even a chance that we can borrow some of the lifting equipment they developed. Once we’ve got the budgeting settled, Forrest and I will probably fly over to England and have some detailed meetings with them on the best way to bring up the David Dark with the minimum of damage.’

  ‘But, for Christ’s sake, Edward, three or four years’? What about Mictantecutli? What about al those people who are going to be haunted, and possibly killed? What about all those spirits that can’t rest?’

  ‘John, I’m sorry, but three or four years is pushing it right to the very limit. If there wasn’t this unusual urgency, I’d normally expect to take eight or nine years over an historical salvage job of this magnitude. Do you realize what we’ve got here? An historic wreck of absolutely incalculable value; the only known surviving wreck from the late 17th century which hasn’t even been touched since it first went down. What’s more, it was engaged on a secret and extraordinary mission; as far as we know it’s still bearing its original cargo.’

  I roughly towelled my face and then tossed the towel down on the deck. ‘You specifically told me that you were going to bring this wreck up quickly. You specifically said that.’

  ‘Sure I did,’ Edward agreed, ‘and I will. Three or four years is almost indecently quick.’

  ‘Not if your dead wife is haunting you every night. Not if half the people in Granitehead are being terrorized by their deceased relations. Not if one single life is put at risk; that’s not quick.’

  ‘John,’ put in Forrest, ‘we can’t lift that wreck any faster. It’s not physically possible. It has to be thoroughly excavated, all the silt and the mud sucked out of it; then it has to be strengthened so that it won’t break its back when we winch it out. We have to make endless calculations to determine what kind of stress it’s going to stand up to; then we have to construct a custom-built frame to enclose the hull while it’s actually raised. You’re talking about three years’ work there already.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but can’t we raise the copper vessel first? Excavate the hold, and lift it out separately? How long will that take? A week or two?’

  ‘John, we can’t work it that way. If we go charging into that wreck like John Wayne and the Green Berets, we’re going to do a great deal of unwarranted damage to the decks, and maybe destroy the value of the entire excavation.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Edward, what the hell’s going on here? You said it would take some time to lift the ship up off the sea-bed; all right, that’s admitted. But you never said years. I always got the impression that we were talking about weeks, or maybe a couple of months at the outside.’

  Edward laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘There was never any possibility that we could raise the David Dark in a matter of weeks, and I never gave you the impression for one moment that we could. John, this wreck is a fragile historical monument. We can’t treat it like it’s a sunken speedboat.’

  ‘But we can get that damned Mictantecutli out of there,’ I insisted. ‘Edward, we have to. Come on, Edward, they brought up all of the cannon from the Mary Rose way before they brought up the hull.’

  ‘Of course they did; and of course we’ll bring up Mictantecutli ahead of the main structure. We may be able to lift the copper vessel out of there by the beginning of next season, if we’re lucky. But we can’t afford to go crashing in there with crowbars and winches before we know how much of the wreck is actually there, and how she’s lying, and how we can best preserve her.’

  ‘Edward!’ I shouted at him. ‘That Goddamned wreck doesn’t matter! Not by comparison! It’s Mictantecutli we have to go for, regardless of the wreck!’

  ‘Well , I’m sorry, John,’ said Edward, polishing his spectacles, and lifting them up so that he could squint through them and make sure that they were clean. ‘Nobody else here feels the same way as you do, and that means that you’re outvoted.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that we were a committee. I tho
ught we were just a bunch of people with the same interest at heart.’

  ‘We are. Well, we are, at least. I don’t know whether you are.’

  Gilly said, ‘Isn’t there some kind of compromise we can reach? Isn’t there some way we can make it a top priority, getting that copper vessel out of the hold?’

  ‘It is a top priority,’ Edward insisted. ‘God knows, I’d rather excavate it logically, so that we don’t have to lift it before we’ve annotated and earmarked everything around it, and the deck on which it’s lying. But I’ve already compromised to the point where I’m prepared to winch it up as soon as we’ve removed the deck immediately above it, as soon as it’s accessible, and you can’t ask any more of me than that.’

  ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘I’m asking you to get down there with as many air-lifts as you can lay your hands on, as well as picks and crowbars and whatever else it takes to pull that decking up, and to get in there and find that copper vessel as an absolute Number One.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ said Edward.

  ‘In that case, you can forget your financing and you can forget me. You’ve been stringing me along the whole Goddamned time.’

  ‘I never strung you along. I never once promised that I would smash my way into that wreck like King Kong and drag that demon out of there at the expense of the entire integrity of everything we’re trying to do here. John - John, listen. Listen to me, John.

  We’re historians, do you understand me? Not scrap merchants, or salvage engineers, or even antique dealers. I know the pressures. I understand the personal anxiety you’ve been feeling - ‘

  ‘You don’t understand shit!’ I yelled at him. ‘You and Forrest and Jimmy and all the rest of you down at that museum, you spend all your time up to your ears in dust. Dust, and relics, and crumbling old books. Well, let me tell you something, there’s a real world out here, believe it or not, a world where human values count for a whole lot more than history.’