The Pariah by Graham Masterton

wife, that’s all I know. She’s a month dead, and I’ve seen her.’
    Keith turned around, slowly shaking his head. ‘You didn’t see your wife, John. Maybe your imagination painted a picture for you, turned what you actually saw into something you thought was Jane. But no sir. I’ve seen what you saw tonight a hundred times. Used to frighten sailors to death back in the old days. St Elmo’s Fire, they call it.’
    ‘St Elmo’s Fire? What the hell is St Elmo’s Fire?’
    ‘It’s a discharge of natural electricity. You see it mostly on the masts of ships, or radio antennae, or the wings of airplanes. Corposant, they usually call it, in Salem. Flickers, like a burning brush. That’s what you saw, wasn’t it? Kind of a flickering light?’
    I glanced at George. ‘Keith’s right,’ said George. ‘I’ve seen it myself, out on fishing trips. Looks real eerie, the first time you see it.’
    ‘I saw her face, George,’ I told him. There wasn’t any mistake about it. I saw her face.’
    George leaned forward and laid his hand on my knee. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I believe you saw what you said you saw. I truly believe you saw Jane, in your mind’s eye. But you know and I know that there isn’t any such a thing as a ghost. You know and I know that people don’t come back from the dead. We may believe in the immortal soul, the life everlasting, amen, but we don’t believe that it takes place here on earth, because if it did, this world would be pretty damned crowded with wandering spirits, don’t you think?’
    He reached behind him for the bottle of Four Roses and poured me another large glassful. Then he said, ‘You’ve been bearing up to this pretty well, all things considered. I was saying that very thing to Keith only this evening, that you were bearing up well. But it’s bound to break out, now and again, that grief you’re feeling deep inside of you. Nobody blames you for it. It’s just one of those things. I lost my brother Wilf, drowned off the Neck one night, what, eighteen years ago now; and believe you me it took me many a long month to get over that feeling of sadness, and loss.’
    ‘Mrs Edgar Simons told me tonight that she’d seen her late husband, too.’
    George smiled, and turned to smile back at Keith. Keith, who was pouring himself another Michelob, smiled in return, and shook his head.
    ‘Don’t you go taking no notice of what the Simons widow tells you. Everybody knows what her problem is.’ He tapped his forehead to suggest that she was 78 cents to the dollar.
    ‘She didn’t give old man Simons too much of a life when he was alive,’ put in Keith. ‘He told me wunst that she locked him out of the house all night in his long-Johns, because he felt like exercising his conjugal rights and she sure as hell didn’t. Now, a man wouldn’t go back to a widow like that, even if he was a ghost, now would he?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. I was feeling confused now. I was even beginning to doubt what I had actually seen in the garden of Quaker Lane Cottage. Had it really been Jane? It seemed difficult to believe: and even more difficult to recall exactly what her face had looked like. Elongated, like a saint by El Greco, with crackling hair. But couldn’t that crackling hair have been nothing more than the electrical discharge that Keith called corposant, St Elmo’s Fire? It flickers, he had said, like a burning brush.
    I finished my second drink, and declined a third. ‘I won’t be able to crawl back up that hill, let alone walk up it.’
    ‘You want me to come up there with you?’ asked Keith. But I shook my head.
    ‘If there’s anything up there, Keith, I think I’d better face it alone. If there is a ghost, then it’s my ghost, and that’s all there is to it.’
    ‘You should take yourself a vacation,’ said George.
    ‘Jane’s father told me that.’
    ‘Well , he was right. There’s no use in sitting alone in an old cottage like that, brooding about