The Pariah by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

fumbled for my keys. The rain pattered and whispered through the winter-dried creeper beside the porch, and behind me there was the first soft applause of the laurel bushes, as the wind got up.
    As I slid my key into the front-door lock, I heard a woman’s voice whisper, ‘John?’ and I froze all over, and turned around, although I was almost too scared to move.
    The front garden was deserted. Only the bushes, and the overgrown lawn, and the rain-circled pond.
    ‘Jane?’ I said, clearly.
    But there was nothing, and nobody; and plain sanity told me that it couldn’t be Jane.
    Nevertheless, there was something different about the house; whether it was just a feeling or whether somebody had actually been here. I stepped back into the garden, my eyes wincing against the falling rain, trying to see what it could possibly be.
    I had loved Quaker Lane Cottage from the first day I had set eyes on it. I adored its slightly neglected-looking 1860s Gothic appearance, its diamond-leaded windows, its dressed stone parapets, its creeper. It had been built on the site of a much earlier cottage, and the old stone hearth in what was now the library was engraved with the numerals 1666. Tonight, however, as the rain dripped from the carved green gables, and one of the upstairs shutters creaked backwards and forwards in the unsettling wind, I began to wish that I had chosen to live somewhere more cozy, without this dark sense of disturbed spirits, and restless memories.
    ‘John!’ somebody whispered; or maybe it was nothing but the wind. The black shaggy beasts of the clouds were right overhead now, and the rain grew heavier, and the drainpipes and gutters began to chuckle like goblins. I began to feel a sense of deep foreboding; a feeling that chilled the bones in my legs. A feeling that Quaker Lane Cottage was possessed with some spirit that had no earthly right to be there.
    I walked back down the garden path, and then around to the back of the house. The rain plastered down my hair and stung my face, but before I went inside, I wanted to make sure that the house was empty; that there were no vandals or housebreakers inside. Well, that’s what I told myself. I walked through the weedy garden to the leaded living-room window, and peered inside, shading my eyes with my hand so that I could see better.
    The room looked empty. The grate was still heaped with cold gray ash. My teacup stood on the floor where I had left it this morning. I walked back round to the front of the cottage again, and listened, while the rain truckled straight down the back of my neck. A glimmer of light showed through the clouds, and for a moment the surface of the ornamental pond looked as if it were sprinkled with nickels and dimes.
    I was still standing out there in the rain when one of our neighbours came churning up the lane in his Chevrolet flatbed. It was George Markham who lived at No. 7 Quaker Lane with his invalid wife Joan and more yipping and yapping Dalmatians than you could count. He wound down his window and peered out at me. He wore a plastic rain-cover over his hat, and his spectacles were speckled with droplets.
    ‘Anything wrong, neighbour?’ he called. ‘You look like you’re taking yourself a shower out there.’
    ‘I’m okay,’ I told him. ‘I thought I could hear one of the gutters leaking.’
    ‘Don’t catch your death.’
    He was just about to wind up his window again, when I stepped across the puddly lane towards him, and said, ‘George, did you hear anybody walking up the lane last night?
    Round about two or three o’clock in the morning?’
    George pouted thoughtfully, and then shook his head. ‘I heard the wind last night, for sure. But nothing else. Nobody walking up the lane. Any special reason?’
    ‘I’m not sure.’
    George looked at me for a moment or two, and then said, ‘You’d best get yourself inside, get yourself dry. You can’t go neglecting yourself, just because Jane isn’t here no more. You want to