Free The Pariah by Graham Masterton

Granitehead Square, wearing a peculiar brown coat. I stopped the car and tried to go after him, but he disappeared into the crowds.’
     ‘So - after six years - you still have these feelings? Have you told anybody?’
     ‘I talked to my doctor, of course, but he wasn’t very helpful at all. He gave me pills and told me to stop being hysterical. The funny thing is, the feelings vary in strength, and they also vary in frequency. I don’t know why. Sometimes I can hear Edgar clearly; at other times he sounds so faint it’s like a radio station you can’t quite pick up. And the feelings seem to be seasonal, too. I hear less of Edgar in the winter than I do in the summer. Sometimes, on summer nights, when it’s very mild, I can hear him sitting outside on the garden-wall, humming or talking to himself.’
    ‘Mrs Simons,’ I said, ‘do you really believe that it’s Edgar?’
    ‘I used not to. I used to try to persuade myself that it was all my silly imagination. Oh - look at that stupid girl, walking in the road with her back to the traffic. She’ll end up dead if she’s not careful.’
    I looked up, and glimpsed in the light from our headlamps a brown-haired girl in a long windblown cloak, walking by the side of the highway. We were approaching the bend that took us around the western side of Quaker Hill, and so we passed the girl comparatively slowly; and as we passed I twisted around in my seat to look at her. It was beginning to rain again, and it was very dark, and I suppose I could easily have been mistaken. But in the fractions of a second in which I could see her through the tinted rear window of Mrs Simons’ car, I was sure that I saw a face that I recognized.
    White, white as a lantern, with dark eye sockets. A face like the blurry face at the cottage window; a face like the girl who had unexpectedly turned around when I was photographing Jane by the statue of Jonathan Pope. A face like the staring secretary in the Salem sandwich shop.
    I felt a prickle of shock, and incomprehension. Could it be her? But if it was, how? And why?
    ‘No consideration, these pedestrians,’ complained Mrs Simons. ‘They stroll around as if the roads were theirs. And who do they blame if they get struck by a car? Even if they’re almost invisible, it’s the driver who gets the blame.’
    I kept on staring back at the girl until she had disappeared from sight around the curve.
    Then I turned around in my seat, and said, ‘What? I’m sorry? I didn’t catch what you said.’
    ‘I’m just grumbling, that’s all,’ said Mrs Edgar Simons. ‘Edgar always said that I was a terrible fussbudget.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Edgar.’
    ‘Well , that’s the strange thing,’ Mrs Edgar Simons told me, abruptly resuming our conversation about hauntings and visitations. ‘You see, I’ve heard Edgar, and I even believe that I’ve seen him; and now you seem to think that your Jane may be trying to come back to you. Well, you do, don’t you? And yet all Charlie could say was that you must be imagining things.’
    ‘You don’t blame him, do you?’ I asked her. ‘It must be pretty hard for anyone to swallow, anyone who hasn’t actually felt anything like it.’
    ‘But for Charlie to dismiss it, of all people,’ she said.
    ‘What do you mean?’ I asked her, frowning.
    ‘I mean nothing less than that Charlie has had the same feelings about Neil, ever since the poor boy died. He’s been hearing him walking about his bedroom; he’s even heard his motorcycle starting up. And seen him, too, from what I gather. I was quite surprised when he didn’t tell you about it. After all, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. How can it be?’
    ‘Charlie’s seen Neil?’ I said, in disbelief.
    ‘Quite so. Over and over again. That was the principal reason why Mrs Manzi left Granitehead. Charlie always says that it was something to do with her not being able to give him any more children, but the truth was that she couldn’t bear to feel