The Pariah by Graham Masterton Page B

utterly impossible. And yet the evidence was here; in this blandly-smiling photograph. It was impossible and yet it was indisputable.
    Jane, in this photograph, was standing in the one place in the garden where it was humanly out of the question for anyone to stand, on the surface of the ornamental pond.

    SIX

    I left the house and walked down the lane between the wind-whipped yew trees to the main Granitehead highway, and then north-east towards Granitehead Market, on the outskirts of the village itself. It was a good three miles’ walk, there and back, but I usually walked because it was the only real exercise I ever managed to get, and tonight I wanted the rain in my face and the wind in my eyes and anything that would reassure me that I was sane and that I was real.
    A dog barked somewhere off to my right, as persistent as a child with a chesty cough.
    Then a sudden burst of dried-up leaves scurried out of the hedgerow and whirled around in front of me. It was one of those nights when slates are blown off rooftops, and television antennae are brought down, and trees collapse across roadways. It was one of those nights when ships go down, and sailors are drowned. Rain and wind.
    Granitehead people call them ‘Satan’s nights’.
    I passed my neighbours’ cottages: the austere gambrelled rooftops of Mrs Haraden’s house; the picturesque huddle of Breadboard Cottages, all shiplap and trellised porches; the Stick Style Gothic of No. 7, where George Markham lived. There were warm lights inside, televisions flickering, people eating supper; each window like a happy memory, brought to mind in the rainy wildness of the night.
    I felt loneliness as well as fright, and as I neared the highway I began to have the unnerving sensation that somebody had been following me down the lane. It took all the determination I could muster not to turn around and take a look. Yet - weren’t those footsteps? Wasn’t that breathing? Wasn’t that a stone, chipped up by somebody’s hurrying feet?
    It was a long, wet and blowy walk all the way along the main road to Granitehead Market. A couple of cars passed by, but they didn’t stop to offer me a ride, and I didn’t attempt to canvass one. The only other people I saw, apart from car-drivers, were three young men from the Walsh place, all dressed up in oil-skins, lifting a fallen tree from their front fencing. One of them remarked, ‘Just glad I ain’t out at sea, not tonight.’
    And I thought of that song, that curiosity from Old Salem:
    ‘But the fish they caught were naught but bones With hearts crush’d in their jaws.’

    After a while I saw the floodlights shining across the market’s parking-lot, and the red illuminated sign saying Market Open 8 -11. The store window was all misted up, but inside I could see the bright colours of modern reality, and people shopping. I opened the door, stepped inside and stamped my feet on the mat.
    ‘Been for a swim, Mr Trenton?’ called Charlie Manzi, from behind the counter. Charlie was fat and cheerful, with a thick rug of black curly hair, but he could also talk surprisingly sharply.
    I briskly brushed the rain off my coat, and shook my head like a wet dog. ‘I’m seriously thinking of trading in my car for a birch-bark canoe,’ I told him. ‘This must be the wettest place on God’s good earth.’
    ‘You think so?’ said Charlie, slicing salami. ‘Well, on Waileale Mountain in Hawaii, it rains 460 inches every year, which is about ten times more than it does here, so don’t go knocking it.’
    I’d forgotten that Charlie’s hobby was records. Weather records, baseball records, altitude records, speed records, fattest-man records, eating canteloupes upside-down records. There was a standing advisory among the residents of Quaker Hill that you didn’t mention anything that was either the best or the worst of anything whenever Charlie Manzi was within earshot; Charlie would always prove that you were wrong. The lowest