The Pariah by Graham Masterton Page A

seemed to be quite the same as I remembered them. That day that I had photographed Jane standing outside the cottage, I was sure that she had been standing on the path, and not in the front garden itself - especially since she had only just bought herself a new pair of mulberry-coloured suede boots, which she wouldn’t have wanted to muddy. There was something else, too. In the dark glass of the criss-cross leaded window only four or five feet behind her, I could make out a curious pale blur. It could have been a lamp, or a passing reflection; and yet it looked disturbingly like a woman’s face, hollow-eyed and distressed, but moving too quickly to have been sharply caught by the camera.
    I knew that, apart from Jane and myself, the cottage had been empty that day. I examined the picture as closely as I could, but it was impossible to tell exactly what that pale blur might have been.
    I looked through all of the photographs again. In all of them, although it was impossible to be exact about it, I had the extraordinary feeling that people and things had been moved. Subtly, but noticeably. For instance, there was a picture of Jane beside the statue of Jonathan Pope, the founder of Granitehead Harbour, and the ‘father of the tea-trade’. I was sure that when I had looked at the photograph last, Jane had been standing on the right side of the statue; and yet here she was on the left. The picture hadn’t been reprinted in reverse, either, because the inscription on the statue clearly read ‘Jonathan Pope’ the right way around. I held the photograph close, and then far away, but there was nothing to suggest that anybody had tampered with it. All that disturbed me, apart from Jane’s altered position, was a quick, unfocused shape in the background, as if someone had been running past when the photograph was taken, and had suddenly turned around. It looked like a woman in a long brown dress, or a long brown coat. Her face was unclear, but I could make out the dark sockets of her eyes, and the indistinct smudge of her mouth.
    I suddenly began to feel very chilled, and peculiarly frightened. Either I was reacting to the stress of Jane’s death by hallucinating, by going more than quietly mad; or else something unnatural was happening in Quaker Lane Cottage, something powerful and cold and strange.
    A door closed, somewhere in the house. Quietly, the way that a door might be closed by a nurse as she leaves the bedside of a sick or dying child.
    I thought for a terrible moment that I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and I barged my way clumsily into the hall. But there was nobody there. Nobody there but me, and my haunted memories.
    I looked back into the library. On the desk, where I had left it, lay the picture of Jane in the front garden. I walked into the room and picked it up again, frowning at it. There was something grotesquely wrong about it, but I couldn’t decide what. Jane was smiling at me quite normally; and apart from the pale reflection in the window behind her, the house seemed unchanged. But the photograph was different, wrong. It looked as if Jane were propped-up, rather than standing by herself; like one of those terrible police pictures of murder victims. Holding the photograph in my hand, I went to the library window and looked out into the front garden.
    The photograph must have been taken about mid-afternoon, because the sun was low to the west, and all the shadows in it lay exactly horizontal, from one side of the picture to the other. Jane’s shadow lay half-way along the path, so that even though she was nine or ten feet off to the left of it, and her legs were concealed by the low hedge of laurel bushes between us, I could work out exactly where in the garden she was standing.
    I lifted the photograph again and again, comparing it with the front garden. I felt a desperation rise up inside me that almost made me bang my head against the window.
    This was impossible. This was totally and