The Pariah (16 page)

I was nearly at the surface. I could see the cross-hatching of the choppy morning waves only a few feet above me. But then something
wrapped
itself around my left ankle, and as I tried to kick myself free I suddenly found myself turned right over, upside down, and a sharp flood of cold water poured into my ears. I lost my mouthpiece, too, in a blurt of bubbles, and the next thing I knew I was threshing and struggling and trying desperately to twist myself free. I thrust one hand up towards the surface, hoping that I was near enough to make a signal that the
Alexis
might see, but it was useless. I was at least 10 feet below the waves, and whatever had snared my leg was dragging me rapidly deeper.

It was then that I really panicked. I was overwhelmed by the pounding feeling of suffocation, and the realization that unless I struggled myself free, I was going to drown.

I’ve heard people say that drowning is the most peaceful way to die, far more genteel than burning or crushing or shooting; but whoever said that hasn’t been under the North Atlantic ocean on a cold March morning with a lost mouthpiece and some tenacious entanglement around their leg. I think I shouted out loud, in a rush of bubbles, and before I could stop myself, I was swallowing water. Freezing, salty, and harsh, pouring into my stomach like liquid fire. I puked some of it back up again, and I was lucky not to choke, because my lungs were almost empty of air.

All I could think of was: don’t breathe seawater. Don’t breathe seawater. Dan Bass had told me that once you’ve breathed in seawater, you’re dead. There’s hardly any chance of saving you.

Eyes popping, head thundering, I twisted myself around in a last desperate effort to see what had caught my ankle. To my horror, I saw it was the drowned woman’s nightdress, in which the body itself still bobbed and floated in its own hideous jig. When I had first swum past her, my finning movements must have dislodged her from the trawl net, and she must have risen after me, blown up with bacterial gases, like a buoy. Once her gown had entwined itself around my leg, however, and I had kicked and struggled against her, she must have turned around so that the gas in her ribcage had bubbled out, leaving her heavier, so that now she was dragging me down.

I bent myself double and tore at the nightgown with my hands, but the sodden fabric refused to rip, and it was wrapped around my foot and my ankle as tightly as wet rawhide. I reached down to my thigh, and wrestled out my diver’s knife, but the body kept rolling and sinking in the tide and it was almost impossible for me to cut the nightgown without cutting my own foot.

Two, three, four slashes, and I knew that I didn’t have enough oxygen left in my lungs to do anything but strike out for the surface. But I gave the nightgown one last slice, and like a miracle, the fabric parted. The woman’s body sank down again into the darkness, back through the clouds of mud and murky water.

I released my weight-belt, which I should have done earlier, and gave two or three kicks of my fins to get me to the surface. My rise to the top seemed to be agonizingly slow, but I was strangely calm now, my panic had dispersed, and I was quite sure that I was going to survive. At last my head broke through the waves, and there was wind and sunshine and fresh air, and almost a half-mile away, the
Alexis.

I heard the
Alexis
starting up her engine with a distant growl, and at last she came circling around toward me, and Dan Bass dived into the sea to hold me up. He towed me in to the side of the boat, and then he and Jimmy together managed to boost me up on to the deck. I lay flat against the planks like a landed shark, coughing and retching and spurting up water through my nose. My sinuses felt as if they had been meticulously scrubbed with a pan-scourer.

Gilly knelt beside me. ‘What
happened?’
she said. ‘We thought we’d lost you. Edward and Forrest came up and said that you’d disappeared.’

I coughed and coughed until I thought I was going to vomit. But at last I managed to control my breathing, and with Dan’s help, I sat up.

‘Let’s get you out of that suit,’ he said. ‘Gilly, there’s a flask of hot coffee in my rucksack, you want to go get it?’

‘I guess it’s my responsibility,’ said Dan, hunkering down beside me and looking at me closely to make sure that I was all right. ‘You should have practised in a pool first, before you dived in the open water. I just thought you looked like the kind of guy who could handle himself.’

I blew my nose loudly, and nodded. ‘I lost sight of them, that’s all . I don’t know how it happened.’

‘It happens easily,’ said Dan. ‘When you’re wearing a facemask, you’re like a blinkered horse, you can only see forwards. And in water like that, your buddies can disappear in a couple of seconds. It’s
their
fault, too, they should have kept an eye on you. Maybe we should have used a buddy-line. I don’t particularly like them, they can sometimes be more of a problem than they’re worth, but maybe we’ll consider it the next time down.’

‘Don’t talk to me about the next time.’

There has to be a next time. If you don’t go down again soon, you never will.’

‘It’s not the diving I’m worried about,’ I said. ‘I think I can handle the diving. I panicked down there, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, but I think anybody would have lost their nerve if they’d discovered what I discovered.’

‘You found something?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Something to do with the
David Dark?’

 ‘Unh-hunh. I found a drowned woman. Not too badly decomposed. Her foot was caught in a fishing-net down there, and she was spinning around in the tide, standing up, like she was alive. Her gown got itself caught around my leg, and nearly drowned me.’

 ‘A drowned woman? Where is she now?’

 ‘She sank again, right after I’d managed to cut her loose. But I guess the tide should bring her into the shore, now she’s free of the fishing-net.’

 Dan Bass shaded his eyes against the sunlight, and looked around the boat, but there was nothing to be seen. He said, ‘I guess we’d better get Edward and Forrest back up here. They’re still searching for you.’ He went to the stern of the boat, where there was an aluminium diving-ladder, and banged it five times with a wrench. That was the signal for Edward and Forrest to surface, a signal that would have carried well over a half-mile underwater.

 ‘Let me take a fix on this position,’ said Dan Bass. ‘Just in case the police ask you exactly where the body was located when you found it.’ He went into the wheelhouse and took a compass bearing, and jotted it down in Gilly’s notepad.

 Gilly said to me, ‘What was she like, this woman? God, it must have been awful.’

 ‘It’s difficult to say what she looked like. Everybody’s hair looks the same colour underwater, especially in water as thick as that. The fish had been at her, too. Fish aren’t particularly fastidious. She still had a face, but I don’t suppose even her best friend would have recognized it.’

 Gilly put her arm around my shoulders, and kissed my forehead. ‘You don’t have any idea how glad I am that you’re safe.’

 ‘The feeling, my love, is mutual.’

 She helped me down into the cabin just below the wheelhouse, where there were two narrow bunks, a table, and a tiny galley. She laid me down on one of the bunks, peeled off my wetsuit, and towelled me dry. Then she tucked me into the blankets, kissed me again, and said, ‘Get warm. Doctor McCormick’s orders.’

‘I hear and I obey,’ I told her.

A few minutes later, the
Alexis
came about, and Dan Bass shut down the engine. I felt the boat rock and sway as Edward and Forrest clambered aboard, and I heard their wet flippers on the deck. Once he had stripped off his wetsuit, Edward came down into the cabin, and perched himself on the opposite bunk.

‘Jesus,’ he said, breathing on his spectacles, and putting them on. He blinked at me with water-reddened eyes. ‘I can tell you something, I really thought for a moment there that you were gone and lost forever.’

Forrest peered into the cabin and called, ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘I forgot to keep my eyes on you, that was all.’

‘Well , I’m sorry, we made the same mistake,’ said Forrest. ‘It was unforgivable, and I’m real sorry. You know what they say about diving; the smallest error can escalate in seconds into total disaster, and I’m just glad that it didn’t happen this time.’

‘It was damned close,’ I replied.

‘Yes - Dan said something about a body. You found a body down there.’

‘That’s right. A woman in a nightgown. Floating around like a mermaid. I must have set up some kind of a wave when I finned past her, because she came up after me as if she was alive.’

‘A woman in a
nightgown!’
asked Edward.

‘That’s right. She was too badly bloated for me to tell what she looked like; but she couldn’t have been in the water all that long.’

‘Mrs Goult,’ said Edward.

‘Mrs who?’

‘I read about it in the
Granitehead Messenger,
round about the middle of last week. Mrs James Goult disappeared from her home in Granitehead in the middle of the night, taking none of her clothes, but driving off in one of the family cars to Granitehead Harbour, and taking off in her husband’s $200,000 yacht. Neither the yacht nor Mrs Goult has been seen since.’

‘You think
that
was Mrs Goult?’ I asked him. That body?’

‘It might have been. From what you say, she couldn’t have been down there more than a few days; and if she’s wearing a nightgown …’

‘It sure
sounds
like her,’ put in Forrest.

‘There’s something else,’ said Edward. ‘Mrs Goult’s husband said in the newspaper report that his wife had been upset for quite a while recently. She’d lost her mother from cancer, and apparently she and her mother were very close.’

‘How come you read all of this?’ asked Forrest. He sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

‘I used to work for the Goults when I was about fifteen, cleaning Mr Goult’s car. They were friends of my folks. My dad and Mr Goult were both in real-estate, although Mr Goult’s into waterside condos these days. My dad thinks that waterside condos are immoral, prostituting the character of Salem and Granitehead. That’s why they don’t see too much of each other any more.’

‘Your dad thinks that waterside condos are
immoral!’
asked Gilly.

Edward took off his spectacles, and gave them another polish. He looked at Gilly seriously. ‘My dad lives in the past. He can’t understand why they stopped building Federal-style houses, with cellars and shutters and wrought-iron railings.’

‘Edward,’ I said, ‘are you hypothesizing what I think you’re hypothesizing?’

‘Good grief,’ put in Forrest, ‘I can’t even say “hyposethizing” once, let alone twice.’

Edward glanced at Gilly, and then back at me. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being tendentious again.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Gilly.

I nodded towards Edward. ‘What I think Edward’s thinking is that Mrs Goult may not have drowned in this particular location by accident. She may have sailed here on purpose, and drowned herself here either by accident or design, in order to be close to the wreck of the
David Dark.’

 That was roughly what was passing through my mind,’ Edward agreed.

 ‘But why would she do that?’ asked Gilly, perplexed.

 ‘She’d lost her mother, remember. Maybe she’d been haunted by her mother, the same way - ‘ Edward paused.

 ‘It’s all right, Edward,’ I told him. ‘Gilly knows all about Jane.’

 ‘Well , the same way you’ve been haunted by your late wife, and the same way Mrs Simons was haunted by her late husband. And maybe, just maybe, she felt like I do that if she could get to the
source
of the hauntings, the catalyst that’s been setting all these apparitions off, she could lay her mother’s spirit to rest.’

‘You think she’d drown herself to do that?’ asked Forrest, with obvious incredulity.

‘I don’t know,’ Edward admitted. ‘But the motivation to put dead people to rest is extraordinarily powerful in almost every society in the world. The Chinese burn paper money at funerals, so that the dead will be rich when they get to heaven. In New Guinea, they smear their corpses with mud and ashes to make it easier for the body to return to the soil out of which it originally came. And what do we carve on Christian headstones? “Rest In Peace.” It’s important, Forrest, for reasons we may not even begin to understand. It’s
Instinctive.
We know that once our loved ones are dead, they’re going to be facing an experience totally unlike their life when they were alive, physically and conceptually, and somehow we have this urgent drive to protect them, to see them through it, to make sure that they’re safe. Now, why do we feel this way?

Logically, it’s absurd. But maybe there was once a time when dead people were threatened more openly, when the burial rites were an important and well-understood safeguard against the dangers that dead people were going to have to come up against before they were able to rest forever.’

Forrest grimaced, and rubbed the back of his neck in something that was very close to exasperation, but as an ethnologist he couldn’t deny the fundamental truth of what Edward was saying.

Edward went on, ‘It’s my belief that there’s something in the wreck of the
David Dark
that’s been unsettling the usual natural process whereby dead souls are laid naturally to rest. I know you think I’m a fruitcake, but I can’t help that. I’ve been over it again and again, and it’s one feasible explanation. I’m not saying it’s a
rational
explanation, but then what’s been happening in Granitehead isn’t rational anyway. In the case of Mrs Goult, maybe she’d been visited by her dead mother; and maybe she felt that if she could somehow get close to the
David Dark,
she could release her mother’s spirit.’

‘Do you think it’s likely that she even knew about the
David Dark!’
asked Jimmy.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Edward. ‘It’s more likely that she just felt drawn here by whatever influences this wreck has been giving out.’