Swimmer (10 page)

‘I can see. Your nose is some kind of a mess, ain't it? What happened?'

‘I – ah – I slipped on the soap. Cracked my nose right on the edge of the tub.' Mervyn glanced at Jim as if to say, ‘Let's not make this any more complicated than it already is.' He didn't care for the Los Angeles police very much, and he certainly didn't want them trampling all over his apartment, looking for evidence of a woman whose material appearance had simply poured away down the drain.

The paramedic sat on the couch, pinched the end of Mervyn's nose between finger and thumb and wiggled it. ‘That hurt?'

‘Ow! What the hell do you think? I just broke it in fifty-eight places!'

‘Hit your head at all? Any black-out? Any concussion?'

‘I don't know … I may have been unconscious for a minute or two.'

‘Okay … whyn't you get yourself dressed and we'll wheel you round to the ER.'

Jim gave Mervyn a helping hand, and Mervyn rose unsteadily on to his feet. ‘Do you want me to come with you?' Jim asked.

‘No, no. I'll be fine. Really. This handsome young paramedic can take care of me, can't you?' He peered closer at the paramedic and said, ‘You were never in Village People, were you? No, maybe not. Before your time.'

Before he left, Mervyn laid a hand on Jim's arm and spoke confidentially into his ear. ‘You realize what the connection is, don't you, between what happened to me today, and that student of yours, and young Mikey?'

Jim knew what he was going to say. ‘It could be nothing more than a coincidence.'

‘Maybe you're right. But if I were you I'd go around to every single person I cared for, and tell them to start wearing life-jackets, even in the shower.'

He called round at Susan Silverstone's house on Franklin. Nobody answered when he rang the doorbell, but he heard voices around the back, so he pushed his way through the dense sub-tropical plants until he reached the courtyard where the fountain was splashing.

Susan was dressed in tight black satin jeans, a scoop-neck black-silk sweater and strappy black sandals. She was potting a row of ferns, and talking to them while she did so. ‘There, my frondy little friend … how does this nice little blue ceramic number suit you?'

A young man in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt was sitting on the garden swing with a can of beer held between his thighs. The canopy above the swing was overgrown with ivy so that Jim couldn't see his face. He was idly kicking himself backward and forward with one bare foot.

‘Susan?' said Jim. ‘Hope I'm not interrupting anything. I tried reaching you on your mobile phone but it was switched off.'

‘I do that,' said Susan, standing up. Her raven-black hair was tied with a white satin bow. ‘It's enough of a nuisance communicating with the dead, let alone the living.'

‘It's come back,' Jim told her. ‘The water spirit, whatever you like to call it.' He told her about Mervyn, and about Lieutenant Harris's suspicions that Dennis Pease had been deliberately drowned.

‘Did you know that ferns were hermaphrodites?' said Susan, in a matter-of-fact tone, easing another one out of its pot. ‘Whenever they want more ferns, they have sex with themselves. Don't you think that's far less messy than the way we do it? And cheaper. You don't have to take a fern to the movies.'

She paused, and then said very seriously, ‘It's looking for revenge.'

‘Revenge? What kind of revenge? Revenge for what?'

‘I'm sorry, Jim. I may be clairvoyant but I don't have any idea. The only way to find out what any spirit wants is to ask it – which could be very dangerous, considering how malevolent it is. But if it's drowning people, one after another, it's doing it for a reason. Spirits hardly ever commit random acts of destruction. Even poltergeists throw plates around for a reason … not that it's ever very easy to discover what it is.'

‘Will you help me? You see, the thing is that, even if I didn't know young Mikey, I knew Mikey's mother; and Dennis Pease was a student of mine; and Mervyn's been like a brother to me. Well – more like a sister, but very close.'

‘What are you saying?' asked Susan, turning around. In the shadows of the courtyard her face shone luminously pale.

From underneath the swing canopy the young man said, ‘He's saying that all three incidents involved somebody he knew; which is leading him to worry that the next time it happens, if there
is
a next time, somebody else he knows will come to a watery finish, which is something he is very anxious to avoid.'

‘I know that voice,' said Jim. He walked over to the garden swing and lifted the canopy. Underneath it was sitting a good-looking young man with a spiky blond haircut and mischievous blue eyes. ‘Michael Tosca, class of '95. Mr Verbal Diarrhoea himself. Do you know something, Susan, this guy used to sit in the front of my class and never stop talking from nine o'clock in the morning till four thirty in the afternoon. What are you doing here, Michael?'

‘I work for Miss Silverstone these days, Mr Rook. Secretary, personal assistant, driver, bodyguard, diary planner, tofu gofer, cook, cleaner of Oriental rugs and burnisher of crystal balls.'

‘I thought you were going to go into politics.'

‘I was. But I couldn't stand the chiseling and the bribery and the pork-barreling and the general hypocrisy. It didn't pay, either. No money in it. Then I met Susan at a party one weekend and … well—'

‘And well what? I'm waiting with bated breath.'

‘It's another story, that's all,' Susan put in. ‘Besides, Michael has found a way to control his talking these days, haven't you, Michael?'

‘That's right. Once in a while I spend a whole day saying nothing at all. It's very refreshing for the spirit, and it allows you to express yourself in ways you wouldn't normally dare to.'

Jim pointed his finger at him. ‘Don't tell me.
You're
that obnoxious mime artist – whatever your name is, Medlar Tree.'

Michael lifted his beer can in salute. ‘Right first time, Mr Rook. Nobody could ever pull the wool over your eyes, could they?'

‘I hate mimes. Why do you think humans have the power of speech? If we don't speak to each other, we might as well be monkeys.'

‘Monkeys are cool.'

‘Sure they're cool. But you wouldn't want to spend the evening talking to a roomful of orang-utans, would you?'

‘I don't know. You should meet some of my friends.'

Susan came up to Jim and linked arms with him. ‘I'll tell you something, Jim. Michael helped to save my life when nobody else around me cared anything at all. I don't know what you taught him when he was in college, but he's always been so considerate. And gentle, too.'

‘Well, you amaze me,' said Jim. ‘I always had him down as a grade-A smartass.'

‘He even wrote that on my report,' said Michael, with a grin.

Susan said, ‘You know, we should try another spirit-trace on the beach where this other boy drowned. What was his name? Dennis? If we do that, at least we'll know what happened for sure.'

‘Well … it's up to you. But I don't want to put you in any danger.'

‘I think I can handle a water spirit,' said Susan. ‘We were all sent into this world to help each other, weren't we? And to protect each other from the next world, too.'

Jim checked his watch. ‘It's still light; maybe we should start off by the beach.'

Jim drove them down to Will Rogers State Beach, and they parked and walked across the sand. The sun was shining in their eyes, and the afternoon was windy and warm. ‘He drowned right out there,' said Jim. ‘According to his friends, he was fit and raring to go and he hadn't had anything more to drink than a couple of beers.'

Susan stood still for a moment with her eyes closed. Then she took off her sandals, handed them to Michael, and walked right down to the edge of the surf. Jim followed her, and stood beside her while she stared out over the glittering ocean.

‘There's still something here … some redolence. I can feel it.'

‘I can't feel anything.'

‘Yes you can. You're a sensitive, just like me. Look at the light. Listen to the seagulls. They're calling out to you, telling you that something happened here, something tragic.'

The way the seagulls were wheeling and keening, it was easy to believe that Susan was right. Although children were still running along the shoreline and laughing, and dogs were still barking, there was a sense of loss in the air, a sense of tragedy. Maybe it was nothing more than the end of another day. But Dennis Pease had drowned here, late last night, and he was never coming back.

Michael opened the bag that he was carrying on his back, and Susan took out her crystal. She knelt down, set it on its stand and started to spin it. It caught the sunlight, and multi-colored diamonds danced across the sand. A small girl stopped in her tracks and stared at it, entranced, and a dachshund that had been yipping and snapping and chasing its tail stopped right beside her, and stared at it too with black beady eyes.

Jim couldn't be sure. Maybe it was nothing more than the sun going down. But the afternoon seemed to darken, and the color of the sky grew more intense. The sound of the surf rasped ever more sharply in his ears, like sandpaper. Above his head the gulls continued to circle and cry, around and around, as if they couldn't leave the flickering light around the crystal, no matter what.

Down by the shoreline Jim saw six or seven boys, their images jumping and fading like a worn-out movie. They were laughing and tumbling, and kicking water at each other. Then two of them picked up surfboards and rushed into the waves. One of them had lanky hair, tied back with a bandanna, and a large, triangular nose. Even though he was only intermittently visible, Jim recognized him at once as Dennis Pease.

‘
Don't do it, Dennis
,' he said, under his breath, although he knew how futile it was. If there was only a way to turn the clock back to yesterday night. But Dennis's carefree image went on bounding into the water, and Jim could even hear the faintest echoes of his voice, whooping and laughing. He had always been such a bright, wild, enthusiastic boy, ready for anything.

Michael said, ‘I can never get used to these spirit-traces, they're so weird. Look at it: that happened last night, that really happened, and there they are, doing it all over. Makes you wonder if you ever get any rest, even when you're dead, or whether you spend the rest of eternity acting your life out again and again, like some kind of never-ending loop.'

‘I don't know,' said Jim, peering out across the ocean. The waves seemed to be almost black, like a glistening, restless sea of Indian ink. He could see Dennis rising up on one foamy crest after another as he paddled further and further away from the shore.
Don't do it, Dennis
. But Dennis had already done it, and his drowned body was already lying in the West Grove Mortuary.

Susan arched her head back so that she was staring up at the sky. ‘Show yourself!' she demanded. ‘I know you're here! Why don't you show yourself?'

The wind began to rise; flecks of spume began to fly off the tops of the waves. But Dennis and his friends kept on plowing out into the ocean, and Jim could hear them calling and whistling to each other as they went.

‘Maybe it was just an accident,' he said. ‘Anybody could drown in a surf like that.'

But Susan turned to him, her white face lit up in harlequin colors by her rapidly spinning crystal. ‘Wait,' she said. ‘There's a presence here. I can feel it. It's coming toward us, from the north-east, and it's coming very quickly.'

‘You can
feel
it?'

‘It's just like the wind. Hold my hand, Jim, it's almost here. I want you to tell me everything you see.'

When the apparition appeared, however, Jim was speechless. It came running over the sand, so light and fast that he could barely see it. A young woman, almost completely transparent, running toward the ocean with her hair streaming behind her.

‘She's there!' he told Susan, tugging at her sleeve. ‘For Christ's sake, can't we stop her?'

Susan unexpectedly gripped his hand, and very tightly. Michael glanced at them; and there was an odd, possessive look in his eyes. But when he saw Jim looking at him he immediately turned his head away and stared out over the surf.

Dennis had paddled so far out that Jim could see only the tip of his red metallic-flake surfboard; and occasionally his head, with the red bandanna tied around it. But he could clearly see the water-woman, swimming toward him. She left a trail in the sea, she lit up the tops of the waves, leaving a ghostly arrow-shaped wake behind her, phosphorescent green and glittering sapphire-blue. She swam as straight as a torpedo, and almost as fast; so that even when she was only a few feet away from Dennis he still hadn't seen her. Why should he? Who expects an invisible woman to come swimming toward them at eighteen knots?

Dennis must have sensed
something
, however, because he turned his head around, gripped his surfboard a little tighter, and shouted out, ‘Guys? Is everything okay? What's the matter?'

It was then that the young woman's luminous trail disappeared deep under the water, so that Jim could see only the faintest greeny-blue glow of her. There was a long moment's pause, and then an arm suddenly rose up, an arm made completely out of water, and clamped its hand over Dennis's face. ‘Help me!' he screamed out. ‘
Vinnie, help me, I'm drowning! Help me, Vinnie! Something's pulling me down!
'

His friend turned his head around wildly; but the troughs were so deep and the white spume was blowing as thick as blossom; and he couldn't see anything at all. Jim, on the shoreline, saw only a rapidly dimming radiance, which died away as the spirit dragged Dennis deeper into the ocean. There was a moment's pause, and then Dennis's metallic-red surfboard came flying out of the ocean, almost vertically, like a Polaris missile. Jim kicked off his shoes and started to pull open the buttons on his shirt.