The Pariah Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman said, as we emerged on to the sidewalk of Washington Square West. Across the square stood the Witch Museum, which commemorates the hanging of Salem’s twenty witches in 1692, one of the fiercest witchhunts in all human history. In front of the museum was the statue of Salem’s founder Roger Conant, in his heavy Puritan cloak, his shoulders glittering with dew.
    This is an old city, you know,’ the woman told me. ‘Old cities have their own ways of doing things, their own mysteries. Didn’t you begin to sense it, just a little, back there on the common? The feeling that life in Salem is a puzzle of kinds, a witch-puzzle? Full of meanings, but no explanations?’
    I looked away from her, across the square. On the opposite sidewalk, among the crowds of tourists and pedestrians, I glimpsed a pretty dark-haired girl in a sheepskin jacket and tight denim jeans, a stack of college-books held against her chest. In a moment, she was jumbled up in the crowd, but I felt a funny catch at my heart because the girl had looked so much like Jane. I guess lots of girls did, and always would. I was definitely suffering from Rosen’s Syndrome.
    The woman said, ‘I have to go this way. It’s been an unusual pleasure to talk to you. It’s not often that men will listen, not the way you do.’
    I gave her a half-hearted smile, and raised my hand.
    ‘You’ll want to know my name, of course,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement, but I gave her a nod which could have meant yes and could just as easily have meant that I didn’t particularly care.
    ‘Mercy Lewis,’ she said. ‘Named after Mercy Lewis.’
    ‘Well , Mercy,’ I told her. ‘Just make sure you take care of yourself.’
    ‘You too,’ she said, and then she walked off at a surprisingly fast pace until she was lost from sight.
    For some reason, I found myself thinking of the words that Jane used to read to me from the Ode to Melancholy. ‘She dwells in Beauty - Beauty that must die; and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu …’
    I turned up my collar against the cold, pushed my hands deep into my pockets, and went to find myself some lunch.

    FOUR

    I ate a lone corned-beef and mustard sandwich at Red’s Sandwich Shop in the old London Coffee House building on Central Street. Next to me, a black man wearing a brand-new Burberry kept whistling She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes, over and over, between his teeth. A young dark-haired secretary watched me without blinking in one of the mirrors. She had a strange, pale, pre-Raphaelite face. I felt tired now, and very alone.
    About two o’clock, under a clouded sky, I walked to Holyoke Square, to Endicott’s Auction Rooms, where they were holding one of their six-monthly sales of antique maritime prints and paintings. The catalogue listed three important oils, including Shaw’s painting of the Derby ship John but I didn’t expect to be able to afford any of them. What I was looking for was antique-shop fodder: engravings and etchings and maps and maybe a water-colour or two, the kind of picture I could have re framed in gilt or walnut and sell at ten times its actual cost. There was one painting listed by Unknown Artist: A View of Granitehead’s Western Shore Late 17th Century which I was quite interested in buying, simply because it showed the promontory on which I lived.
    Inside, the auction-rooms were cold, high-ceilinged, and Victorian, and the winter sunlight slanted down on us from high clerestory windows. Most of the buyers kept on their overcoats, and there was a chorus of coughing and nose-blowing and shuffling of feet before the auction began. There were only about a dozen buyers there, which was unusual for one of Endicott’s sales: I couldn’t even see anybody I recognized from the Peabody collection. The bidding was low, too: the Shaw went for only $18,500, and a rare drawing in a scrimshaw frame fetched only $725. I hoped this