Swimmer (12 page)

‘Hey, don't go blaming yourself, man,' said Tarquin. ‘You never let us down, never, specially when Dr Friendly told us we was all irreversible lame-brains. If you say there's a water spirit, then we believe you, there
is
a water spirit, and this vacation we're going to stay away from anything watery, believe me.'

‘Oh, come on now,' put in Washington. ‘You going to tell me you going to go through the whole summer vacation without taking one single shower?'

‘I didn't mean that. Showers is different. You never heard of nobody drowning in a shower, did you?'

‘Anybody can drown in less than a half-inch of water,' Jim interrupted them. ‘Talk to Nurse Andrews, she'll tell you. When you breathe in water, a froth of mucus bubbles up in your lungs, and that's what makes it so hard for you to breathe.'

‘No shit.'

‘No, Washington. Just froth. But as I say – be very careful, and if you're not sure if it's going to be safe to swim, then don't. I hope I don't spoil your summer, but it would be even more spoiled if you were drowned.'

He looked around the class. He would miss this room, and all the faces that he had seen in here, staring up at him expectantly. ‘There's one last thing I'd like you to do for me before we finish. I'd like each of you to write me a four-line poem. Subject: doesn't matter. Anything that interests you. Anything that sums you up … the kind of person you are. Then I'd like you to sign it for me. I'd like to walk away from here today with something a little more than memories.'

He walked down between the rows of desks. ‘Where's Dottie? Anybody seen Dottie?'

‘She went for her jog,' said Laura. ‘She always goes for a jog before class. Her dietician said it was the only way she was ever going to take control of her weight problem.'

‘Weight problem? I never knew Dottie had a weight problem.'

‘She
thinks
she has a weight problem. That's as bad as having a real weight problem.'

‘Well, she's cutting things close. The semester's officially over in an hour.'

‘Want me to go look for her? She's probably hit the showers by now.'

Jim shook his head. ‘Don't worry about it. If she doesn't have time to write me a poem, I'll ask her to send me a postcard.'

Silence fell over the room. There was a lot of frowning and a lot of lip-chewing and a lot of head-scratching. Only Nestor Fawkes seemed to be writing steadily, and he was one of the least gifted students in the class. Tarquin kept popping his fingers as if he were writing a rap (which he probably was), and Stella kept on sighing at her sheet of paper like a parent sighing at a disobedient child.

Jim sat at his desk and started writing a letter to Karen – a last-ditch effort to persuade her to change her mind.

You don't meet soulmates more than once in a lifetime, Karen. As Victor Hugo wrote, ‘When two souls, who have sought each other for however long in the throng, have finally found each other, there is then established for ever between them a union, fiery and pure as they themselves are, a union which begins on earth and continues for ever in heaven.' Or, hopefully, in our case, Washington, D.C.

Only five minutes had passed, however, before Jim heard feet loudly slapping along the corridor outside. The classroom door burst open and Clarence the janitor came in, his face sweaty and his eyes wide, holding a mop.

‘Clarence? What's wrong?'

‘You better come real quick, Mr Rook. Something's going on in the showers.'

‘The
showers
? What are you talking about?'

‘It's the female showers, Mr Rook. The whole place is full of steam and there's somebody screaming.'

Jim immediately tossed down his pen and crossed the room. ‘Stella, get on that mobile phone of yours and call for paramedics – now! Tell them to go to the girls' showers, fast as they can. Tarquin – Eugene – Laura – you come with me!'

They ran together along the corridor until they reached the showers outside the college gymnasium. Clarence was right. Steam was billowing out of the open outer door, and a girl was screaming inside at the top of her voice. A knot of terrified girls were gathered outside, some of them crying.

‘What's happening?' asked Jim. ‘Who's in there?'

There was another scream, which ended in a high-pitched, agonized wail. ‘Oh my God, it's Dottie,' said Laura.

Jim went through to the inner door. It was shut, and when he took hold of the metal doorhandle he burned his hand. Steam was hissing viciously out from underneath the door, and the window was totally fogged up.

He tried kicking the door, but it opened outward, and it was made of solid varnished oak. ‘Give me a towel!' he shouted, as Dottie started screaming again. One of the girls passed him a towel, and he made himself a thick glove out of it. He took hold of the doorhandle again and pulled it as hard as he could.

At first he couldn't budge it, but he tugged it again and again, and at last he managed to open it an inch. The steam that came blasting out of the shower room was scalding, and he was already dripping with sweat. The noise, too: it was like standing next to a locomotive.

‘Here, Mr Rook!' said Washington, jostling his way through the frightened crowd of students with an aluminum baseball bat. He forced it into the gap that Jim had already managed to open, and between them, grunting, they gradually levered the door wide enough to get in.

‘Be careful!' Jim shouted. ‘Steam is like boiling water, it can take your skin right off!'

At that moment, Dr Ehrlichman arrived outside. ‘Jim? What's going on? What the hell is all of this steam?'

Dottie let out another agonized scream, and Jim said, ‘Make sure those paramedics are on the way! Give me another towel! Does anybody have another towel?'

‘I'm going in with you, man,' said Washington.

‘Don't. This is my responsibility, not yours.'

‘What did the Three Musketeers say? “All for all and everyone for everybody else.”'

‘All right, then,' said Jim, wrapping another towel around his head, like a hood. ‘But stay well behind me and watch out for that steam.'

‘Jim! Wait for the fire department!' ordered Dr Ehrlichman.

But Jim had already squeezed his way through the gap in the door and entered the showers, with Washington hunched up close behind him.

The steam was so dense that he could hardly see where he was going. It was blasting out of all the shower-heads, and the noise it made was deafening. There was a row of cubicles all along the right-hand wall, each with a reinforced-glass door. Jim went quickly along from shower to shower, checking each one, his towel pulled down to protect his forehead and eyes from the heat.

Dottie screamed again, and this time it sounded as if she was suffering unbearable pain. Jim hurried along to the very last cubicle, and through the steamed-up glass door he could make out a reddish shape, arms flailing, head waving wildly from side to side.

‘Dottie!' he yelled. He tried to pull open the door but it was jammed tight. ‘Dottie, it's Jim Rook! Push the door open! Try to push the door open!'

But all Dottie did was to thrash her arms even more furiously, as if she were trying to beat something off. The pressurized hissing of the steam was so loud that he couldn't even be sure that she had heard him. He pulled the door again, but it wouldn't budge. Either the heat-expanded frame had clamped it tight, or else somebody had deliberately wedged it.

‘Oh God!
Aaaahhhhh!
No! No, don't do that!
Aaaaaaahhhhhh
, don't do that!'

Jim turned to Washington and said, ‘Give me that bat.' Washington handed it over, and Jim lifted it high behind his head.

‘Dottie! I'm going to break the door! Turn your face away! You hear me, Dottie?'

Dottie gave another wail, but Jim wasn't sure what it meant. All the same he swung the bat around and cracked it right into the middle of the door. He made barely any impression – only a small, crystallized crater. He swung again, and again, and again, and only succeeded in pitting the door with even more craters.

‘
Aaaaahhhhh!
Please! Oh God, no!
Aaaahhhhhh!
'

Without a word, Washington took the bat from Jim's hands. He stepped back, hefted it up once, twice, and then swung it around and smashed the door into thousands of glittering, tumbling fragments.

So much steam billowed out of the cubicle that in the first few seconds Jim couldn't understand what he was looking at. Then, as it cleared, he saw Dottie right in front of him, jerking in agony like a badly handled marionette. Her face was scalded bright red, and her eyes were so swollen that she couldn't even see. All over her body, her skin was burned and scarlet-blotched and hanging off her in thick, tattered ribbons.

Yet it wasn't poor agonized Dottie who made Jim's hair prickle with fright. It was the figure who was standing in the shower behind her, almost invisible, and thickly clouded with steam. A figure made of nothing more than boiling water, with a surface that rippled and rolled. It was a girl's figure, not much taller than Dottie, but much more slender. It was running its boiling hands over Dottie's shoulders and down her back and forcefully caressing her stomach and her upper thighs, and every time it did so, Dottie screamed and shivered and flinched. She must have felt as if she were having kettlefuls of boiling water poured slowly over her, over and over, until her skin shriveled and her nerve-ends shrank. And all the time Jim could hear a low, underlying bubbling sound – just like the sound of a saucepan of water when it boils.

He hesitated for a split second and took a deep, steadying breath. Then he threw himself forward and tried to snatch Dottie out of the shower. But the figure instantly swung its arm out, and lashed his face with boiling water. He staggered back against the wall, feeling as if his cheeks were on fire.

Washington yelled out, ‘Let her go, you mother!' and tried to grab Dottie too – but this time the figure retaliated with a huge, scalding splash, and Washington screamed out, ‘Shit! You burned me, you bitch!'

As if to enrage them even more, the figure took hold of Dottie in a tight embrace, and slid its steaming, watery arms all the way down her, so that she let out a high, penetrating shriek of pain.

Coughing, wincing, Jim looked down and saw that the shower tray was filled ankle-deep with steaming hot water, because the drain was blocked with a sodden blue towel. He suddenly remembered what had happened to Mervyn, and how Mervyn had escaped drowning – by pulling out the plug. He dropped to his knees in front of the shower, covering his face with his hands.

‘Mr Rook!' said Washington, in panic. ‘You all right, Mr Rook?'

Dottie screamed yet again – but as she did so, Jim lunged forward and plunged his hand into the nearly boiling water in the bottom of the shower. He seized the sodden towel that was blocking the drain and heaved it out, tossing it across the room. It landed with a thick slap against the opposite wall and then dropped to the floor.

With a sharp, enthusiastic gurgle, the water in the shower tray began to drain away. As it did so, the figure began to drain away too. It stood still for a moment, its surface still. Then it shuddered a deep and appalling shudder. Its ankles were drawn down the drain, faster and faster, and then its lower legs, and then its knees, and in seconds it had been sucked away completely, bubbling and boiling, leaving nothing but a glutinous froth. The last that Jim saw of it was a curl of transparent hair, as liquid as a memory, and a waft of steam; and then they too slipped into the drain and disappeared.

For a fraction of a second, he saw the spirit standing in the shower cubicle, staring at him hollow-eyed. Then she turned and vanished straight into the tiled wall.

Dottie collapsed in the shower, amid the broken glass. She had stopped screaming now, but she was shivering violently with pain and shock. Jim didn't want to touch her, in case he made her burns even worse, but he tugged the towel off his head, went over to the washbasins and soaked it in cold water. Then he carefully draped it over her.

Laura came into the shower room, white with distress. ‘Dottie … oh my God, is she going to be all right?'

Washington leaned close to Jim and said, ‘Was that the thing you was warning us about? The water spirit? Jesus! You didn't tell us it was a
hot
-water spirit!'

‘Paramedics coming through!' somebody shouted, and three paramedics came bustling into the shower room, one of them wheeling a trolley.

‘What happened here?' one of them asked Jim as his partners knelt down beside Dottie and examined her.

‘I don't know. Some kind of failure in the plumbing system. Maybe the thermostat jammed.'

‘I want a drip set up right away and I want morphine,
now
!' said another paramedic. ‘She's losing fluid fast!'

Jim laid his hand on Laura's shoulder. ‘Come on, Laura. There's nothing more we can do for her, except pray. Washington – you don't know how glad I am that you were here. If Dottie makes it then, believe me, all of the credit for saving her life goes to you.'

‘I wouldn't have thought of pulling that towel out, Mr Rook. I wouldn't have believed that something like that could even
exist
.'

Laura was in tears. Jim led her away and Washington followed. Dr Ehrlichman was waiting for them outside in the corridor, twisting his handkerchief in agitation.

‘What happened in there, Jim? Is Dottie going to be all right?'

‘I don't know. She was pretty badly scalded.'

‘God, this is terrible. On her very last day of college, too.'

Jim walked slowly back along the corridor. The college was milling with excited students, all of whom had come pouring out of their home rooms as soon as they heard the ambulance sirens. Some of them jostled against him, but Jim ignored them. He was too upset by what had happened to Dottie, especially since he believed that the water spirit – for whatever reason – was trying to take its revenge on
him
.