The Pariah Read online

  Edward swam into view and made the ‘okay, all is well,’ hand signal, which was the same hand signal that St Louis cab drivers usually make when they see a tasty-looking girl prancing down the sidewalk. I gave him the same signal back, thinking how drowned and bulgy Edward’s eyes looked behind his facemask. I had been told not to make a thumb’s-up signal because that meant something different altogether. Forrest, ten or fifteen feet away, beckoned us to start searching. If I was only going to be down here for five minutes, I might just as well help the hunt for the David Dark.

  We were planning to make a systematic circular search of the area around the Alexis, swimming in an anti-clockwise spiral and leaving numbered white markers on the bottom to show where we had been. We started off where the boat’s anchor was buried in the ooze, and began to find ourselves around and around, until I had totally lost all sense of direction. As we went, however, Forrest pushed the markers into the mud, one at each completed half-circle, so that we could be sure we weren’t covering the same ground twice, or straying way off our search area altogether.

  I checked my watch. I had been down for three minutes and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Not only cold, and awkward, but claustrophobic as well. Although I had started off by breathing easily, I was finding it difficult to keep up the regular rhythm, and I recognized that even if my mind wasn’t panicking, my lungs were beginning to act catchy and nervous.

  I tried to remember the signal for ‘something wrong -not an emergency.’ A kind of hand-flapping, I think Dan Bass had said, coupled with an indication of what was wrong. How did I explain claustrophobia with a hand-signal? Put my hand around my throat and pretend to be strangling? Squeeze my head in my hands?

  Remember not to panic, I told myself. You’re perfectly all right. You’re swimming without any difficulty; you’re still breathing. What’s more, you only have a couple of minutes to go and then you’ll be back on the surface again. Edward and Forrest will take care of you.

  But when I raised my head again, I couldn’t see either Edward or Forrest anywhere. All I could see was cloudy water, almost as thick as barley-broth, whirling with mud and debris.

  I finned around and looked behind me, to see if they were there: but again, all that I could see was water. A stray flounder darted through the murk like a Dickensian character making his way through a London fog, quick and confident. But where were the white wetsuits and orange head-pieces that were supposed to make my diving buddies visible through ten feet of submarine darkness?

  Don’t panic, I repeated. They must be around here someplace. If they’re not, then all you have to do is follow the markers back to the anchorline, and find your way up to the surface again. The problem was, there wasn’t a marker in sight, and in turning around to look for my companions, I had completely lost my sense of direction. I could feel the chilly tidal stream flowing gently against me, but when we had started diving the tide had been on the turn, and I couldn’t work out which direction it was flowing in, or how far it might have carried me while I was just flapping around here thinking about what to do.

  My breath came in short, tense gasps. I tried not to think about all the things that Edward and Dan Bass had warned me to watch out for. If you have to surface, even in an emergency, don’t come up too fast. You could end up with an air embolism in your bloodstream that could conceivably kill you. Don’t come up any faster than your smallest bubbles, that was what Dan Bass had advised; and, if you can, take a decompression stop on the way.

  Burst lung was another danger: overinflating the lungs at depth, and coming to the surface with too much pressure inside them, causing them to rupture.

  I dog-paddled where I was for a moment or two, calming myself down. There was still no sign of Edward or Forrest, and I couldn’t locate any of the search markers, so I guessed that the only thing I could do was to surface. In spite of the tidal stream, I couldn’t be too far away from the Alexis.

  I was about to start finning my way upwards when I caught a glimpse of something white through the tumbling murk of the water. My facemask was slightly misted, and it was difficult for me to make out exactly how far away it was, but I remembered that, seen through a facemask, al objects underwater appear to be three-quarters nearer than they actually are. It could only be Edward or Forrest. There weren’t any other divers in the area, and it looked far too large to be a fish. I thought momentarily of Jaws, but Dan Bass had wryly assured me that the only Great Whites that had ever been seen off the coast of New England had belonged to Universal Pictures.

  Swimming steadily, trying to control my breathing so that it was regular and even, I made my way over the ocean floor towards the white shape. It was turning in the water, turning and rolling, as if it were being wafted by the tidal stream; and, as I swam nearer, I realized that it couldn’t be Edward or Forrest, it looked more like a piece of yacht-sail that had gotten tangled up in a piece of heavy fishing-equipment, and sunk to the bottom.

  It was only when I came very close, no more than two or three feet away, when I realized with a chilling feeling of abject horror and disgust that it was a drowned woman.

  She pivoted around, just as I approached, and I saw a face that was bloated and eyeless, a mouth that had been half-eaten by fish, hair that rose straight up from the top of her head like seaweed. She was wearing a white nightgown, which billowed and waved as the tide came in and out. Her ankle was loosely wound in a sunken trawl-net - which had prevented her from rising to the surface or drifting away - but her decomposed body was now so inflated with gas that she was standing upright, and dancing a grotesque underwater ballet, all on her own, drowned, beneath the waves of Granitehead Neck.

  I backed off, trying to suppress my horror and my half-regurgitated Wheaties. For Christ’s sake, I told myself, you can’t be sick. If you’re sick, you’ll choke, and if you choke, you’ll end up like Ophelia here, with your eyeballs eaten out by bluefish. So calm down. Look the other way, forget about Ophelia, there’s nothing you can do for her anyway. Calm down. And slowly find your way up to the surface, and call for help.

  I began swimming upwards, watching my bubbles carefully to make sure that I didn’t come up too fast. I was only about 30 feet under the water, but it felt like 100. I slowed myself down when I thought I was about halfway up, and exhaled, making sure that my lungs wouldn’t burst or anything disastrous like that. The water became lighter, and clearer, and I began to feel the pull of the tide more strongly, and the disturbance of the waves.

  ‘John,’ whispered a woman’s voice. I felt a chill go through me that was far more intense than the chill of the seawater. The voice seemed close, and very clear, as if she were speaking right in my ear.

  I finned up more quickly, keeping down the first surges of real panic. ‘John,’ whispered the voice, more loudly now, more urgently, as if she were pleading. ‘Don’t leave me, John. Don’t leave me. Please, John.’

  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 thei
r 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 car
s 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.’