Swimmer (24 page)

‘What are you going to do when you
do
identify the girl who drowned her? Are you going to report her to the police; or summon up Jane's spirit and have her confess to her, and apologize; or what?'

‘I don't know. I was hoping you were going to tell me that. I don't have a whole lot of experience when it comes to exorcizing urban legends.'

‘I don't either, I'm afraid. You think I wouldn't have gone back and exorcized Mad Frank Butler if I knew how to do it? Jane Tullett's spirit deserves some rest in heaven, but Mad Frank Butler deserves to go to hell.'

‘You still think about your brother, huh?'

David DuQuesne's face was momentarily illuminated by the light from his photocopier. ‘Every day, Jim. Every single day. It's what gives my life purpose.'

Laura Killmeyer was waiting for him when he got home, sitting on the steps outside his apartment building with Mervyn, who was entertaining her with his notorious alternative version of ‘Strawberry Fields'.

‘How's it going, Mr Rook?' she asked him, one eye screwed up tight against the sunshine. She was looking a little more like her old sorceress self this afternoon, in a purple T-shirt with gold stars sewn on it, a pair of black satin pedal pushers and gold-painted Nike shoes.

Jim tiredly rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I think I'm making some progress … but I had another run-in with the Swimmer.'

‘Hey – are you okay?' asked Mervyn. ‘I thought you were looking a little under the weather.'

‘Under the car-wash, more like,' Jim said, and told him what had happened.

Mervyn said, ‘It's unbelievable. You're not going to be safe anywhere at all until you get rid of this thing. You won't even be able to leave the faucet running while you wash your teeth.'

They went up to Jim's apartment. Tibbles Two was sleeping outside on the balcony, although he saw her ear prick up and swivel around to follow what they were saying. Jim laid out the photographs of the West Grove College swimming pool on the table and showed Laura and Mervyn how Jane Tullett had been drowned.

‘It shouldn't be too hard to find out who this girl is,' said Mervyn. ‘Her swimsuit's not particularly distinctive, but she does have some kind of dolphin motif on it, see?'

Laura said, ‘I can't believe that she managed to drown Jane in front of all of those people and nobody saw her do it.'

‘It's the old trick of doing something in plain sight,' said Jim. ‘If people don't expect to see you drowning somebody right in front of them, they won't. Anyhow – Laura, what did you manage to dig out of those old books of yours?'

‘I looked up water spirits in every single one of them, and there's a whole lot of stuff about kelpies and shellybacks and all kinds of horrible spirits that can drag you into the sea and drown you. And there's something about Swimmers, too. I don't think David DuQuesne was completely right … Swimmers appeared in the seventeenth century, so they're not just a modern phenomenon. The Puritans wrote about them as far back as 1659. But what you said Michael told you about polluted water,
that
was right. As far as I can make out, the only times when Swimmers appeared was when people were drowned in slimy stagnant ponds or wells tainted with sewage. So, like he said, the water itself was sick, so the spirits in the water were sick.'

‘Good work. But did any of your books suggest how to get rid of water spirits?'

‘Not really. In the seventeenth century people tried to have them exorcized by a priest, but that never seemed to do any good. The Swimmers only appeared to be satisfied once they had drowned everybody who had taken part in drowning
them
, and their friends, and their children, and sometimes their livestock too. Sixty-five head of cattle walked into the ocean off Providence in 1789, and all of them were pulled under, one by one, and drowned.'

‘Well, that's reassuring – not,' said Mervyn. ‘From now on I'm going to take an aqualung into the tub.'

‘There was only one mention of a Swimmer being completely exorcized,' said Laura. She rummaged in her bag and brought out a tatty old book with a broken spine. ‘It's in this book …
De La Demonomanie des Sorciers
, by Jean Bodin. Look, I've marked the page. It was in Newbury Old Town, Massachusetts, in 1659. A woman called Biddy Morley was ducked in the town pond for being a scold. They kept her under for too long and she drowned, but five years later, on the anniversary of her death, she came back, “the verrie image of her, but fashion'd from water”.

‘According to this, she dragged her husband into the pond and drowned him. And anybody in Newbury Old Town who had witnessed her drowning, or given evidence against her for being a scold, they were drowned, too – either in the pond or in a water-butt – and one man drowned while walking on the seashore.'

‘So what did they do to get rid of her?' asked Jim.

‘They could never catch her, because she was made of nothing but water. But one day they persuaded one of the local wives to act as bait. She was bathing in a wooden tub in front of the fire when the Swimmer appeared right out of the water in front of her and tried to drown her … just the way Mervyn was almost drowned. But her husband and two other men had been hiding in the next room. As soon as the woman screamed, they pulled her out of the tub and threw bucketfuls of blazing pitch over the Swimmer. Her spirit had no time to escape, and her physical form was evaporated,
pfff
, into a cloud of steam. Bodin says here, “There was such screaming and exhalation of steam that they thought they had conjur'd up all the demons from hell.”'

‘So that's it,' said Mervyn. ‘You have to fry the bastards.'

‘I don't know whether we can be sure of that,' Jim told him. ‘I mean, how old is this
De La Demonomanie des Sorciers
? You wouldn't trust a road map published in 1778, would you?'

Laura said, ‘I'm not making any recommendations, Mr Rook. I'm just saying that the only authority on vengeful water spirits that I could find was Jean Bodin; and he says that using another element is the only answer. Fire to fight water, just like water fights fire. He calls it “the evaporation and the sterilization of the evil spirit”.'

Jim went to the icebox and came back with his last two beers, which he popped open and shared between the three of them. ‘The problem is – even if setting fire to this spirit is going to work – how are we going to trap it and put it into a position where we
can
set fire to it? Jesus, I tried to boil a live lobster once. Getting that monster into the pot was like going three rounds with Jesse Ventura.'

‘I had a dream about Jesse Ventura once,' mused Mervyn. ‘He was rubbing maple syrup all over my back.'

‘Mervyn … if this fire thing is the only way to get rid of Jane Tullett's spirit, then we're going to need somebody to act as bait. A Judas goat, that's what they call it, isn't it, when you tie up a goat as bait for a lion.'

‘Well, don't look at me. I was almost drowned the last time.'

‘I don't even know if using fire against the Swimmer is going to work,' said Laura. ‘Like you said, these are very old books. I know that the kids in all of these television shows like
Buffy
and
Charmed
find old magic books and they discover the secret spell and everything's okay, but this isn't television, is it? This is real life, and the Swimmer today could be something way different from what it was in 1659.'

‘That's true. But so far we don't have any alternative, do we?'

‘I might remind you of something else,' put in Mervyn. ‘According to that necklace you bought at the psychic fair, you only have six more days to live. So if I were you, Jim, I'd try to torch this Swimmer as soon as you possibly can.'

‘You don't believe in that, do you?' asked Laura. ‘I mean, spirits are one thing … but telling the future? I do tea-leaf readings and I look in mirrors to tell people who they're going to marry. But that's just fun, most of it. I wouldn't ever dare to predict when somebody's going to
die
.'

‘Who knows?' said Jim. ‘After the Swimmer, I'm beginning to think that anything's possible.'

He took a taxi back down to the Black Velvet Alligator. It was six o'clock before he managed to get there, and Piper was just finishing her shift, wiping the tabletops and emptying the ashtrays. ‘Give you a ride home?' he suggested.

‘No, sorry. Ray always comes by to pick me up. He's the possessive type.'

‘I'm your teacher, Piper. I'm nearly old enough to be your father. Well, I could have been, if I'd have had a willing girlfriend when I was eleven.'

‘I know. But you're still a man, and Ray wouldn't see it that way.'

‘Okay … no problem. But how about taking a quick look at these photographs for me? They were taken by a freelance news photographer the day that Jane drowned. There's somebody I need to identify.'

Piper folded a stick of chewing-gum into her mouth. ‘It's so weird to see all of these people again … Look, there's
me
! Wasn't I
frumpy
! I'm amazed I ever had any boyfriends at all!'

‘You weren't frumpy – you were gorgeous.'

‘Don't tell Ray that. Please. He'll go ape.'

Jim pointed to the girl in the plain swimsuit with the dolphin motif. ‘Her – do you recognize her?'

Piper squinted closely at the photograph, chewing noisily with her mouth open. ‘Yeah … I think I know who that is. There's only one person it could be, judging from the way we're all standing and all. That's Jennie Bauer. Like I told you, she was the first person to find out that Jane was drowned.'

‘You're sure about that?'

‘One hundred and ten per cent. Look at this picture here, that's her … she always wore these love-bracelets around her wrist. One for every boyfriend, she said. Well, that's what she
said
.'

Jim collected up the photographs and shuffled them straight. ‘Thanks, Piper. You'll get your reward in heaven for this.'

‘What did I do?'

‘I can't tell you yet. But you've been a fantastic help.'

‘Hey – you're not saying that it was Jennie Bauer who drowned Jane, are you?'

‘I'm not saying anything yet. But I have to know exactly what happened that morning, and this is a very good start.'

At that moment the bar door opened and a bull-necked young man in a tight white T-shirt and jeans pushed his way in, his hair cropped to less than a millimeter. He waded across the room as if he were up to his hips in water. As soon as he reached Piper, he threw one arm around her and squeezed her in close, and looked Jim up and down with eyes like steel nailheads.

‘Hi,' he said, aggressively.

‘You must be Ray,' said Jim, extending his hand. ‘I'm … Jim.'

Ray ignored his hand and turned to Piper. ‘What did I tell you about coming on to these dorks? What did I say?'

Jim said, ‘I hope you said, “My fairest, my espoused, my latest found, Heaven's last best gift, my ever new delight”.'

Ray turned to him and his mouth was nothing more than a narrow slit. ‘What are you, some faggot? Leave my wife alone. She's mine.'

Jim couldn't help smiling. He remembered Piper in class, dreamy and inattentive but always imagining things: castles and princes, wars and coronations.

‘Let me give you a word of advice, Ray,' he said as he tucked away his photographs and stood up. ‘Piper will never be yours, not in the way you mean it, ever, for as long as she lives. And you won't be doing yourself any favors if you think that she will.'

‘Hey, you!' Ray yelled at him, as he walked toward the door. ‘Who do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you're talking to? Hey – you come back here, man, nobody talks about my wife like that!'

Jim walked out of the bar and back on to San Vicente, wishing he had kept his mouth shut. But as he turned back, the door swung open for a moment and he glimpsed Piper sitting at the table in the corner. The look on her face reminded him so much of the days when she had sat fiddling and daydreaming in class. She half raised her hand, a kind of weak goodbye. He was really pleased that she had remembered fragments of Milton, even if they were sentimental, and even if they were only fragments. But when things go bad, and you're married to Ray, and you work behind the bar in the Black Velvet Alligator, who wants to be reminded of
Paradise Lost
?

T
hat evening thunder began to grumble over the Santa Monica Mountains, and lightning flashed behind the clouds. Jim picked up his Eldorado from Mr Muffler, under the San Diego Freeway on National, and he was delighted by the understated burble that came out of the engine. Mr Muffler wiped his greasy hands on a rag that was even greasier, and told him that his entire exhaust assembly had been rusting away for months, and that he had been forced to replace the whole length of it, from manifold back to tailpipe, $565 plus tax.

‘I've just had to pay $250 for a seance,' Jim protested.

‘There you go,' said Mr Muffler, licking his thumb to count out the cash. ‘Personally, I never trusted those foreign cars.'

Jim drove to Washington Freeman III's house, pleased by the soft, luxurious whistling of a properly silenced engine, but still irritated by the cost of it. At this rate he wouldn't be able to afford to pay for his air fare to D.C., let alone furnish his apartment, and stock up on groceries, and buy himself the three-piece charcoal-gray suit that he thought his new position in the Department of Education demanded.

Washington was wearing a black T-shirt and baggy khaki combat pants with dozens of pockets all the way down the legs. ‘What do you keep in those?' Jim asked him as they pulled away from the curb.