Swimmer Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Susan. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt your supper.’

  Jim looked down at the can of cat food. ‘Oh … that’s okay. I was almost finished anyhow. Come on in.’

  ‘We just caught the news,’ said Susan, and it was more of a question than a statement.

  Michael repeated, ‘Yes … we just caught the news.’

  ‘We saw you,’ Susan added, accusingly. ‘You and your two students. You held a seance, didn’t you?’

  ‘We held a seance, yes, and it ended very badly. We were lucky we didn’t all drown.’

  ‘Don’t you realize how irresponsible that was?’

  ‘I don’t think we had much choice. You didn’t want to contact the Swimmer, did you? In fact, Michael expressly told you not to, didn’t you?’

  ‘Come on, Jim,’ said Michael. ‘Didn’t I say that I’d do everything I could to find another medium?’

  ‘Sure you did. But have you found another medium?’

  Michael looked defensive. ‘No, I haven’t, not yet.’

  ‘No, you haven’t, and I don’t believe you were even going to try. What’s going on here, Michael? We have to hunt this Swimmer down. It’s critical. My whole class is in danger, not to mention anybody else who tries to help me. More than that, I don’t want Gabriel Dragonard to have drowned for nothing, just like Mikey and Dennis. And I don’t want Dottie to have suffered for nothing, either.’

  ‘Look, there’s a whole lot more to this than you can possibly know,’ said Michael.

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right. And that’s why I’m doing my damndest to discover what.’

  Michael was obviously agitated. He kept tugging at his earlobes and running his hands through his hair. ‘I told Susan that she shouldn’t try to contact the Swimmer because I really care about her, and I didn’t want to see her hurt. For God’s sake, Jim, we’re not just dealing with one or two vengeful spirits here, we’re interfering with the elemental forces of the millennial world.’

  ‘The which of the what?’

  ‘Listen, Jim, the last time Susan tried to do anything like this, it practically took her apart, physically as well as mentally. She almost died – even though she’s one of the strongest sensitives I’ve ever met. Like I told you, it’s taken over a year to get her back together again, and she’s still very vulnerable. I don’t want that to happen again.’

  ‘If you find another medium it won’t happen again.’

  ‘That’s my whole point. Any medium who tries to fight these forces is in just as much danger – no matter how good they are. Look what happened to Gabriel Dragonard. Jesus – if only I’d known what you were planning to do, I’d have stopped you.’

  ‘Gabriel knew that there were risks.’

  ‘He knew that he could be drowned in his own house? I don’t think so. Nobody really understands these forces yet. We don’t have the technical knowledge or the psychological strength to control them. Besides that, they’re constantly evolving from day to day, so we can never know what to be prepared for.’

  Jim said, ‘I see. So when you promised that you were going to look for another medium, you were just stalling me. You were just trying to stop me from persuading Susan to do it.’

  ‘All right, yes, I admit it. I might have let you do it before we talked to David DuQuesne. But when we went to meet him, I really began to understand what we’re up against. Let’s put it this way: Swimmers have only appeared in the past hundred and fifty years, haven’t they? And why?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Jim. ‘But you obviously have some kind of a theory.’

  Michael said, ‘Water has always had powerful spirits of its own … you only have to read Ancient Greek sea stories and Native American legends to know that. But a hundred and fifty years ago, the water was too pure for a stray spirit like Jane Tullett to use it as a way of getting her revenge.’

  ‘So what’s happened since?’

  ‘These days the water’s polluted. That means that the supernatural forces in the water are polluted, too. You give people contaminated water to drink, what happens to them? Cholera, dysentery, liver disease … freak pregnancies like they had in Japan. That’s exactly what’s happened to the spirits in the water. They’re sick, Jim. The spirits themselves are sick.’

  Michael lifted four fingers. ‘In the ancient world, okay, there were four basic elements … air, fire, water and earth. Out of those four basic elements we developed medicine, religion, astrology, spiritualism and magic ritual. The elements were true and they were pure. The air was unpolluted … fires came from the burning of natural combustibles like wood and coal … the waters were clean enough for fish to thrive in them … and the only fertilizers in the soil were organic composts and animal manure.

  ‘But now the air is full of lead and sulfur and carbon monoxide and God knows what else; fire comes from burning plastics and all kinds of disgusting trash; the rivers are full of industrial effluent; and the soil is full of chemical fertilizers and seepage from landfill sites. Every time you drink a glass of water in Los Angeles, you can guarantee that it’s passed through the bodies of eight other people before it’s reached your lips. If you poison your natural environment, don’t you think you’re going to poison your supernatural environment too?’

  Jim swallowed some more beer. ‘It’s an interesting theory. But what kind of proof do you have?’

  ‘Susan. What happened to Susan, that’s the proof. That’s why – when David DuQuesne started to explain about urban legends – I suddenly realized what we were really up against.’

  ‘So are you going to tell me exactly what it was that happened to Susan – or is Susan going to tell me what happened to Susan, or don’t either of you want to talk about it?’

  ‘She doesn’t want it all raked over again. It’s taken her so long to come to terms with it.’

  But Susan said, ‘No … I think Jim has the right to know.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ said Michael. ‘You know what could happen if you do.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Susan walked over to the window and looked out over the sparkling lights of Venice. Her silvery-white face was reflected in the glass, suspended there like the moon. ‘It happened just over a year ago. A seventeen-year-old girl called Mary came for a consultation because she’d been having persistent nightmares about somebody coming into her bedroom at night – a young boy, as far as she could tell. He would sit on the end of her bed with his back turned and cry, very quietly. She said the nightmares were so vivid that it was hard for her to believe it wasn’t really happening.’

  She paused for a while, and in the kitchen Jim could hear TT rattling her dish against the floor as she lapped up the last of her food. ‘Is that all?’ he asked. ‘He just sat on the end of the bed crying?’

  ‘At first that was all. But after three or four nightmares, she was sure she could smell burning, like scorching wool; and one night, when the boy was sitting on the end of her bed, she saw smoke pouring out of his sweater. Night after night the boy came back, and each time the smell of burning grew stronger and the smoke grew thicker.’

  ‘Didn’t she tell anybody about these nightmares?’

  ‘Her father was away on a six-month business trip and her mother was a very nervous type, so she didn’t like to. But one night the boy came into her room, and the smoke grew so thick that she felt as if she was being choked. Smoke was even coming out of his hair.

  ‘It was then that he turned around to look at her, and she saw his face for the first time. And it was then that he burst into flames. All of his clothes were on fire, his hands were on fire, his legs were on fire. He was screaming and screaming at her, kicking and struggling as if he was trapped, and couldn’t move.

  ‘She got out of bed and tried to beat out the fire with a blanket, but the boy was charred black and there was nothing she could do to save him. She woke up sweating and struggling and badly shocked. And when she switched on the light, the room was still filled with smoke and there was a
faint scorch mark on her bedcover.

  ‘It happened again the next night, and the next night, and the night after that. Each time the boy came into her room, sat on her bed and caught fire. And each night the heat was more intense, and the smoke thicker, and her bedcovers more badly burned. She hid the scorches from her mother, in case she thought she had done it herself, but on the third night the cover actually caught fire. She managed to escape but the nightmares went on, and even when she was locked alone in her bedroom with no access to matches the fires continued, until one night her hands were badly burned.

  ‘That’s when her mother first brought Mary to see me. She was desperate, like most of my clients. Ordinary people don’t find it easy to ask a sensitive for help, believe me.’

  ‘So did you manage to help her?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Yes, I did. I held a seance and talked to the boy’s spirit and asked him what had happened to him and why he kept appearing in Mary’s bedroom. It took five or six confrontations before I managed to get some kind of sensible answer out of him. His spirit was very distressed, as well as vengeful. He was very angry and very bewildered and he was hurting.

  ‘He told me his name was Peter. It turned out that he had been a passenger in his mother’s car. She had been taking him to a football game when an oil-tanker overturned in front of them on the San Diego Freeway and his mother hadn’t been able to stop in time. There was a multiple collision and his mother was killed instantly. He was trapped in the car with his seat-belt jammed.

  ‘There was a fire … and even though there were several other drivers standing around, none of them was brave enough to rescue him. He was burned alive, screaming.

  ‘One of the drivers who left him to burn was Mary’s father. So when he kept appearing in Mary’s bedroom he was punishing her father for allowing him to die. If his appearances had carried on, he probably would have set fire to Mary’s bed and burned her alive, too.’

  Michael said, ‘Usually, when somebody burns to death, their spirit finds perfect peace. That’s why we cremate people. But the fire that burned this boy was poisonous with plastics and diesel … an impure fire. A sick fire. Your spirit can never find any rest if you’ve been burned in a fire like that.’

  ‘So how did you stop him?’ asked Jim.

  ‘She did a very stupid thing,’ said Michael.

  Susan turned away from the window. ‘There was no other way. He would have gone on visiting her every night for the rest of her life if I hadn’t … and her life would have been very short indeed.

  ‘I did what we call a spirit-transference. That means that I obliged Peter’s spirit to enter me. I was older than him, mentally stronger than him, and so he had no choice. It’s a very difficult thing to do, spirit-transference. It was originally devised in the 1920s by the Irish medium Kate Goligher. She took the spirits of young children who had been killed in accidents, and transferred them into her own mind so that she could calm them down and help them to accept the fact that they had died. She called it “spirit-cradling”, and she said it was the most rewarding thing she ever did – but also the most exhausting. Sometimes it made her very ill. Once she cradled the spirit of a ten-year-old boy who had been crushed by a farm cart and it almost killed her. She used to wake up in the morning with her chest all bruised, hardly able to breathe.’

  ‘Peter almost killed her,’ said Michael. ‘She used to feel unbelievable pain, as if she was burning from the inside. She suffered it in silence. What choice did she have? If she let his spirit go free, it would go after Mary and burn her alive. Her moods changed, she lost weight, but none of her friends seemed to care. When I first met her she was suffering so much pain she was seriously thinking of taking an overdose and ending it all.’

  Susan laid her hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘Michael nursed me through it. He sat with me every night and he helped me to deal with the pain. He looked through every book and every research paper on spirit-transference that he could find. In the end he found a way in which he could put Peter’s spirit into a kind of hypnotic coma, so that he wouldn’t feel the burning any more.’ She touched her forehead with her silver-ringed fingers. ‘Peter’s still inside me, he’s still inside my mind. But it’s like he’s asleep.’

  ‘That’s why I wouldn’t allow her to hold a seance to confront the Swimmer,’ said Michael. ‘From what David DuQuesne told us, it looks like the Swimmer is to water what Peter’s spirit is to fire – a spirit which uses one of the basic elements to give itself a physical form, and take its revenge on the people who allowed it to die. If Susan gets spiritually weakened, even a little, there’s a serious danger that Peter’s spirit is going to come out of his coma and burn her alive from the inside out.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’ said Jim.

  ‘I didn’t make the connection until we talked to David DuQuesne. Even now I’m only guessing. But the way I see it, the risk is far too great. Susan doesn’t like to talk about Peter, or even think about him, in case she disturbs him and wakes him up. You should have seen her, Jim, when she was going through the worst of it. She used to cry for hours because of the pain.’

  Jim took hold of Susan’s hands. ‘I’m glad you told me why you didn’t want to hold a seance, I really am. But we still have to find a way of stopping the Swimmer.’

  ‘I could try to find another medium,’ Michael suggested. ‘But after what happened to Gabriel Dragonard, I don’t know if I could persuade anybody else to hold a seance.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even dare to ask them,’ said Jim. ‘Besides, it seems to me that when we try to raise up the Swimmer’s spirit all we’re doing is giving her an opportunity to drown even more people. It was sheer luck that she didn’t drown me and Laura and Washington, too.’

  ‘We’ll have to look for another way,’ said Susan. ‘But let’s remember that we have one critical advantage … you can see her, Jim, even when she’s not in physical form.’

  ‘I’m going to have to find her first.’

  Next morning he was woken up by his doorbell repeatedly chiming. He lifted his head off the pillow and stared at the digital clock beside his bed. When he got it into focus he saw that it was 9.17. God, it must be Mervyn, making his daily call to collect the trash. He squinted down to the end of the bed where TT was still asleep, and threw a box of tissues at her.

  ‘What’s your problem? Some alarm cat you are … I told you to wake me up at eight!’

  The doorbell rang again and he called out, ‘Keep your hair on, Mervyn, I’m coming!’

  He swung his legs out of bed and picked the T-shirt up from the back of the chair. Then, yawning and scratching himself, he went to answer the front door. He opened it without looking through the spyhole, and turned back toward the bedroom.

  ‘Mervyn – there’s a whole lot of boxes and bubble-wrap in the kitchen closet … if you can take those, too.’

  But then a girl’s voice said, ‘Good-morning, Mr Rook!’ And a whole chorus of voices said, ‘Happy Thursday morning, sir!’

  He looked around and there was every member of Special Class II, standing in the corridor outside his apartment, all twenty of them, including Laura and Washington and Christophe and Nestor and the Karakatsanis twins and Jack Hubbard and Katie Untermeyer and Stella Kopalski.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ he said. He was overwhelmed. ‘I never thought I was going to see you guys again. Come on in, find yourselves someplace to sit. I think I’d better find myself some pants.’

  The class crowded into his apartment, jostling and giggling and ‘sshh’ing. Jim went back to the bedroom and hopped into his jeans. Then he splashed his face with cold water and tugged a comb through his hair. His face still had wrinkle marks on it from his pillow, but there was nothing he could do about those.

  When he came back into the living-room, the class were all sprawled on chairs and packing cases and sitting on the floor.

  ‘Everybody comfortable?’

  ‘Saw you on the news last night, Mr
Rook,’ Christophe volunteered. ‘You and Washington and Laura. That was unreal, that old guy drowning in his own house. Laura said that you guys nearly drowned, too.’

  Jim said, ‘You remember I warned you about staying away from water. We were trying to track down the spirit that drowned Dennis and scalded Dottie. Well, we found out last night just how dangerous it can be. We were lucky … but we haven’t beaten it yet, and you could still be in danger.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Mr Rook. After what Washington said, we take the point. With a capital P.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ said Jim. ‘To what do I owe the honor of your all coming here today?’

  Arlene Carollo stood up. She was a very tall, thin brunette, with freckles and a wide smile crowded with shining white teeth. ‘We couldn’t let you leave without a leaving party, sir. We couldn’t have it on Tuesday because of what happened to Dottie, but when we heard that you were still in LA … Well, the e-mails started flying and we decided to hold it today.’

  David Baliga stood up, too – a stocky boy with a handsome, square-jawed face, but a slow, monotonous way of talking. ‘The whole class owes you, Mr Rook. What you did for us nobody else could have done and nobody else was ever bothered. So that’s why we came. And also to hand in our assignment.’

  ‘Your assignment?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jewel Karakatsanis. ‘You asked us to write a four-line poem, remember, about the way we felt?’

  ‘You wrote it? You didn’t have to write it.’

  ‘Sure we did. We know what kind of a blue fit you get into if we don’t turn in our work on time.’