Free The Pariah by Graham Masterton Page A

that her dead son was still walking around the home. She hoped that if she moved away, he wouldn’t follow her.’
    ‘Does Charlie still hear Neil now?’ I asked.
    ‘As far as I know. He’s been much less forthcoming of late. I think he’s worried that if too many people start taking an interest in Neil’s reappearance, they might frighten him away. He loved Neil, you know, more than his own life.’
    I thought about all this for a little while, and then I said, ‘Mrs Simons, I very much hope that this isn’t a joke.’
    She peered at me with eyes like freshly-peeled green grapes. I pointed urgently forward, towards the front of the car, to remind her that both of us would be much better off if she looked where she was going, instead of at me.
    ‘A joke?’ she said, in a voice which started at middle-C and went all the way up to C-sharp, an octave above. She looked at me again, blinking, until I said sharply, ‘The highway, Mrs Simons. Look at the highway.’
    'Tiff,’ she said, disdainfully. ‘A joke, indeed. Do you really believe it of me that I could have such low taste as to make a joke about our poor dead loved ones?’
    ‘Then it’s true? Charlie really told you that?’
    ‘Charlie did indeed.’
    ‘Then why didn’t he tell me!’
     ‘I don’t know. He probably had his reasons. He only discussed it with me because he was so upset about Mrs Manzi leaving him. He hasn’t mentioned it very much since.
    Only obliquely.’
     ‘Mrs Simons,’ I said, ‘this is beginning to frighten me. Can I tell you that? I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m frightened.’
      Mrs Simons stared at me again, and narrowly missed colliding with the rear end of a parked and unlit truck.
     ‘I wish you’d please keep your eyes on the road,’ I told her.
     ‘Well , you listen,’ she said, ‘you don’t have any cause at all to be frightened, not the way I see it. Why should you be frightened? Jane loved you when she was alive, why shouldn’t she still love you now?’
     ‘But she’s haunting me. Just like Edgar is haunting you. And Neil is haunting Charlie.
    Mrs Simons, we’re talking about ghosts.’
     ‘Ghosts? You sound like a penny-dreadful.’
     ‘I don’t mean ghosts in the sense that - ‘
     ‘They’re lingering feelings, that’s all, pervasive memories,’ said Mrs Simons. ‘They’re not phantoms, or anything like that. As far as I can see, they’re nothing more at all than the stored-up joys of our past relationships -echoing, as it were, beyond the passing of the people we loved.’
     We had almost reached the foot of Quaker Lane. I pointed up ahead and said to Mrs Edgar Simons, ‘Do you think you could pull up here? Don’t bother to drive all the way up the lane. It’s too dark, and you’ll probably wreck your shocks.’
     Mrs Edgar Simons smiled, almost beatifically, and drew the Buick into the side of the road. I opened the door, and a gust of wet wind blew in.
     ‘Thanks for the ride,’ I told her. ‘Maybe we should talk some more. You know, about Edgar. And, I don’t know, Jane.’
     Her face was illuminated green in the light from the instruments on her dash. She looked very old and very prophetic: a little old witch.
     The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, you know,’ she told me, and nodded, and smiled. ‘The people we used to love are as benign to us in death as they were in life. I know. And you will find out, too.’
     I hesitated for a moment or two, and then I said, ‘Goodnight, Mrs Simons,’ and closed the door. I lifted my groceries out of the trunk, slammed it shut, and slapped the vinyl roof of the car to tell her that she could go. She drove off silently, her rear lights reflected on the wet tarmac in six wide scarlet tracks.
     The dead wish us nothing but sweetness, I thought. Jesus.
     The wind sighed in the wires. I turned my face towards the darkness of Quaker Lane, where the elm trees thrashed, and began the