Swimmer Read online

  Jim took hold of Jennie’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to see here,’ he told her. ‘But try not to be frightened, won’t you? Some of these manifestations can be pretty scary.’

  ‘I just want to know what happened to Mike,’ said Jennie.

  Medlar Tree had gone into a deep sulk and was sitting on his sunbed with his arms folded and his mouth puckered into a realistic simulation of a horse’s rear end. Susan took hold of the top of the crystal and spun it with a single sharp twist of her wrist. It revolved like a glittering gyroscope, still balanced on one of its points, and as it revolved it caught the sunshine and filled the yard with dancing diamonds of yellow, orange, green and blue light.

  Susan Silverstone knelt up straight-backed and lifted her arms wide. The diamonds of light flew across her face and made her look as if she were acting in a flickery old movie. ‘I’m bringing back together the spectrum of light that was split by the spirit who walked here,’ she said, although it sounded more like an incantation than an explanation. ‘I’m looking for the wake of sentience that was left behind it as it walked through the aura of your house and home. I’m looking for its senses, and its feelings. I’m trying to breathe its breath.’

  Instead of slowing down, the crystal appeared to spin faster and faster, until the yard was filled with a blizzard of light. Jim had the strangest feeling that they weren’t quite there, and not quite then, as if they were a split second behind time, and several miles distant. Jennie held Jim’s hand tighter, and whispered, ‘This is very peculiar … it’s almost like we’re not really here at all. It’s like this is last week, before all of this happened. I don’t know why, but I feel like Mikey’s still alive.’

  ‘I think you’ve hit it,’ said Jim. ‘This is your yard the way it was last Thursday. What we’re looking at … it’s kind of a living movie of what happened here.’

  Susan Silverstone leaned her head right back. The light from the crystal grew brighter and brighter, until it was dazzling. And it was then that Jim saw the faint, wavering outlines of two small children. One was dancing or skipping on the opposite side of the pool, while the other was splashing in the water. They were very indistinct, and sometimes it was impossible to say if they were children at all, or nothing more than sparkling fragments of light. But the surface of the pool was actually being churned up, as if there were a real child playing in it.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jennie breathlessly, clutching at Jim’s arm. ‘What is it? What’s happening? What can you see?’

  ‘Jennie – I think I can see Mikey.’

  ‘Where? Where is he? Why can’t I see him?’

  ‘He’s here, Jennie. He’s splashing in the pool, just like he was on the day that he drowned. Susan’s trying to recreate what happened … like an action replay.’

  ‘Oh God, show me where he is. Please, Jim! Maybe I can feel him, even if I can’t see him!’

  ‘No, Jennie … you’re better off staying here. This isn’t finished yet.’

  ‘But he’s my child, Jim, and I’ve lost him! If I could hold him in my arms just one last time!’

  ‘Wait,’ Jim cautioned her. Very faintly he could hear children’s voices, as if they were calling out from the end of a very long tunnel. Echoing and distorted, so that it was impossible to tell if they were laughing or screaming.

  ‘I can hear him,’ he told Jennie. ‘I can’t hear exactly what he’s saying, but I can definitely hear him.’

  ‘Oh, Mike!’ sobbed Jennie, and tried to pull her hand away. But Jim wouldn’t let her go. A thick tension was growing in the air, like the heavy static that builds up before a thunderstorm or an earth temblor. The light from the crystal suddenly grew even more brilliant, until it was sparkling as intensely as an oxyacetylene flashlight.

  The yard grew so bright that Jim had to shield his eyes with his hand, and he could barely see from one side of the pool to the other.

  Without warning, a figure climbed over the fence on the right-hand side of the yard. Actually, it almost poured over rather than climbed over, because it was watery and semi-transparent and Jim couldn’t even make out if it was a man or a woman.

  Susan Silverstone turned her head toward Jim and said, sharply, ‘It’s here. The spirit is walking among us! I can feel it!’

  ‘You can feel it?’ said Jim. ‘I can see it!’

  ‘What?’ She looked around her, the bells around her headscarf jingling. ‘You can see it? Where?’

  Jim nodded his head toward the figure as it crossed the patio. He didn’t want to make it obvious to the spirit that he was pointing it out. Some spirits became frightened or angry if they realized that they could be seen – and he didn’t yet know what this figure was or what it was capable of doing.

  It crossed the sunbaked patio very quickly, as if it were barefooted. Occasionally the brilliant white light from the crystal caught its face or its arms or its shoulders, and split into its component colors, and Jim glimpsed an iridescent detail of what it looked like.

  Jennie was clutching him so tightly that her fingernails were digging into the palm of his hand. ‘Where is it?’ she whispered. ‘What’s it doing now?’

  ‘I think it’s a woman,’ Jim told her. ‘A woman or a teenage girl. I can’t see it very clearly. It’s almost like it’s made out of water.’

  The apparition made its way to the side of the pool, where Mikey’s image was still splashing in the water. It hesitated for a split second, and then it dived in, as fluidly as if it had been emptied out of a jug.

  ‘You won’t let it hurt him?’ Jennie begged. ‘Please, Jim, don’t let it hurt him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jennie; if it’s going to do him any harm, I can’t do anything about it. What I can see here today, it’s already happened. It’s only an image, that’s all.’

  ‘Why can’t I see Mike? I’m his mother! Why can’t I see him?’

  But Jim didn’t answer. The surface of the pool was being churned up in a strong circular motion, around and around the place where the image of Mike was splashing, almost as if a huge shark were circling around him. Susan Silverstone rose to her feet and approached the edge of the pool, her hands raised in rigid horror. Even Medlar Tree stood up, clutching at his ears in distress and shaking his head from side to side.

  The feeling of sheer dread was overwhelming. It was obvious that even Jennie could sense it: her eyes widened and she clamped her hand over her mouth. The pool was filled with furious thrashing and splashing, and Jim could hear a small girl’s voice screaming, ‘Mike! Mike! Mommy, come quick!’

  ‘What’s happening?’ said Jennie. ‘Tell me what’s happening!’

  Jim didn’t know what to answer. All he knew was that he had to hold on to Jennie’s hand as tight as he could and not let her go.

  ‘Can you see it now?’ asked Susan. ‘Jim – can you see it now?’ In the pool, the water was frothing and splashing, and right in the center of this turmoil Jim could see the flickering outline of little Mike, struggling and screaming. Out of the water rose a pair of arms – a pair of arms that were formed out of the water itself. They seized Mike in a tight, almost loving embrace, and dragged him under the surface.

  The surface of the pool slopped and slapped and gradually settled. Susan stood over it and took off her little red-lensed sunglasses. ‘I saw something,’ she said. ‘I swear to God that I saw arms.’

  ‘I did too,’ said Jennie, and she was trembling like a frightened deer. ‘Just for a second … a pair of arms.’

  But Jim wasn’t listening to her. His attention was fixed on the far end of the pool, the deep end. A watery figure was climbing up the ladder, gradually disintegrating as it did so. It turned its head and looked toward him, and for a split second he thought he recognized its face. A girl’s face, beautiful but haunted. And he knew that she had seen him, and recognized that he could see her.

  Then her face simply dropped away, and her arms and her shoulders dropped too, and scattered lightly across the s
urface of the pool, because she was made only of water, like the pool was. Wet footprints crossed the bricks at the side of the pool, the bushes shuddered, and then she was gone.

  Jennie said, ‘You saw it, Jim? You really saw it?’

  Jim nodded. ‘I don’t have any idea what it was. A girl. I could see right through her. It was like she was made out of water.’

  Susan came over. She was looking serious. ‘It used the water to take on physical shape … to give it the strength to pull your son under the water. I’ve heard of spirits using all kinds of things to give themselves leverage in the real world: dust, mud, hair, even trash. Six years ago they found an old man strangled in his cellar in Encino … the door was locked from the inside and there was no other access. In one corner of the cellar, though, there was a heap of old sacking and newspapers and rope and other garbage.

  ‘The cops called in David DuQuesne. He’s an expert in all kinds of urban legends. It was his belief that the sacking and the newspapers took on some kind of physical form. The old man didn’t have any living enemies that anybody knew of, but it was David’s theory that he had a dead one. A spirit who wanted his revenge.’

  ‘What do you think, Jim?’ asked Jennie. ‘You saw it, after all.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve seen some pretty weird things, believe me.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why this spirit should want to hurt Mike.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jim, ‘I think we’re going to have to do some more research on this. Do you want to tell me where Mike went to school? He didn’t have any problems with classmates, did he?’

  ‘What are you asking me that for? He was lively, for sure. Well, he was more than lively. He could be real trouble sometimes. But I don’t think that he was having any problems with any of his schoolfriends. Or any other friends, for that matter.’

  ‘I’m just wondering if he was bullying anybody, that’s all. Maybe some dead relative decided to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘That sounds pretty far-fetched,’ said Susan; and behind her Medlar Tree spun his finger around the top of his head as if to suggest that Jim was stupid.

  ‘Maybe it is, but being pulled under the water by a girl made out of nothing but water … being strangled by your own garbage … you don’t think that’s far-fetched?’

  Jim drove Susan back to her house on Franklin Avenue. Medlar Tree sat in the back, grinning and waving at the passengers of other cars whenever they stopped for a red signal.

  ‘I don’t know how you tolerate that guy,’ said Jim. ‘It must be like living with Marcel Marceau.’

  ‘Medlar Tree isn’t what he seems to be,’ Susan replied. ‘He saved my life once, and it cost him a higher price than most people pay for anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But that doesn’t make him any less of a pain in the rear end.’

  They reached Franklin Avenue and Jim pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I don’t really know what to do next,’ he said. ‘I can hardly go to the police and tell them that young Mike was drowned by a water spirit. They already think I’m nine-tenths crazy as it is.’

  ‘It doesn’t really make any difference, does it?’ Susan replied. ‘The coroner’s going to say that it was an accident; but at least Jennie will know what happened, and that it wasn’t her fault that Mike died.’

  ‘The trouble is, her husband’s not going to believe that, is he?’

  ‘Jim – when you’re a sensitive, all you can do is tell people what you feel. You can’t change their lives for them too. You can see things as well as feel them, and that’s a strange and wonderful gift. But it doesn’t mean that you have to be a detective and a marriage guidance counselor and a psychiatrist and a teacher, all rolled into one.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like Karen.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what she’s been telling you, it doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Okay … I guess I’ll just have to be happy with what we’ve managed to do today.’

  ‘Come inside for a drink,’ Susan suggested. ‘I can show you my collection of spiders.’

  Susan lived on the top floor of a narrow Spanish-style house, heavily shaded by trees. There was a small damp yard in the back, with a mossy wall all around it, and statues of naked Greek athletes, and a small circular fountain. Susan’s two-bedroom apartment was richly decorated with arts-and-crafts wallpaper, and hung with dark velvet drapes. All of the furniture was old and eccentric, especially a huge armchair with two grotesque faces on the arms, their eyes bulging and their tongues lolling out; and there was a smell of stale incense everywhere.

  ‘This is pretty much for show,’ said Susan, kicking off her silver sandals and lying back on a gilt chaise-longue. ‘Personally I prefer the minimalist look. Walls painted cream, no chairs, and futons in the bedroom. But when people come to talk to a sensitive … well, they expect gothic.’

  Medlar Tree went to the kitchen and came back with a large chilled bottle of Chilean Sauvignon. He poured them each an enormous glassful and then lifted his own glass in a silent toast.

  ‘What are we supposed to be drinking to, Medlar Tree?’ asked Jim.

  Medlar Tree put down his glass. He mimed that he was swimming. Then he mimed that he was thrashing around and drowning. He stood still, with his eyes closed, as if he were dead. He stood like that for almost thirty seconds and Jim said, ‘What—’ but Susan shushed him.

  Eventually, Medlar Tree lifted up both hands so that they covered his face. Jim thought: Where have I seen this before? Then, very slowly, Medlar Tree opened his face, like a book opening. For one moment, so brief that Jim couldn’t be sure if he had really seen it or not, Medlar Tree’s face looked exactly like that of the spirit-girl that he had seen climbing out of the pool. The hairs on the back of Jim’s neck fizzed with shock.

  ‘Clever, isn’t it?’ laughed Susan. ‘But it’s only a party trick. Hypnotic suggestion. He’s very good at it, aren’t you, my dearest Medlar Tree?’

  Jim raised his glass. ‘Okay … I’ll drink to that particular trick. And I’ll drink to you, Susan. At least you showed Jennie that she wasn’t imagining things.’

  They spent over an hour together, before Susan had to go off for her orchard-therapy session. They talked and drank wine and laughed. Medlar Tree still brought him close to committing mimicide, but Susan seemed to think so much of him that it was hard for Jim to be openly hostile. It took strength, though, especially when Medlar Tree scowled at him from behind Susan’s back, and pushed his fingers up his nostrils to make himself look like Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera.

  ‘When did you first realize you were sensitive?’ he asked Susan.

  ‘When I was six. I was walking with my mom along Hollywood Boulevard when I heard this woman screaming. I looked around, and there she was, a middle-aged woman in a beige flowery dress, standing by the side of the road, screaming. Except that her face looked completely calm and her mouth was closed.

  ‘About two seconds later, she stepped out into the road, right in front of a bus. It hit her and she went flying through the air like she was showing everybody how good she was at cartwheels. She was dead, of course.

  ‘At first I couldn’t understand why nobody had heard her screaming. It was only two or three years later that I had a similar experience and I realized that nobody had heard her because she hadn’t made a sound. The only person who had heard her was me.’

  She hesitated for a moment, and then she looked at him with narrowed eyes. In this light she was really quite beautiful, in a strangely dated way. Black hair, white face, like a publicity photograph for a 1940s movie star.

  ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ she said. ‘And you’re relieved, too, that somebody else has to carry a burden like yours. You’re not alone, Jim; and now you never will be.’

  Medlar Tree looked daggers at him, the kind of daggers with decorated handles that come out of people’s eyes in cartoons. Jim sniffed, and smiled, and said
, ‘How about another glass of that Sauvignon, Mr Tree?’

  Four

  That night, after his shower, Jim hung the psychic necklace around his neck, along with the silver St Christopher medal that his mother had given him only two hours before she died. He didn’t really know why he wanted to wear it. Maybe he wanted to step just a little nearer to the edge. Maybe he wanted to look into the darkness, face to face.

  ‘I hope you realize this isn’t going to work,’ he told his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His reflection looked oddly unimpressed. ‘I hope you also realize that you don’t want it to work. Supposing it tells you you’re going to meet your maker at lunchtime tomorrow, choking on a cheese and alfalfa sandwich?’

  In truth, he didn’t seriously believe that the necklace would reveal the exact date he was going to die. But ever since he had discovered that he could see almost every kind of spirit that walked through the world of the living, he had become fascinated by occult paraphernalia such as crystal balls and Ouija boards and Tarot cards, as well as voodoo fetishes and Native American sundolls. After all, they were all attempts by mystics of varying cultures to see through to the other side – and, if he could ever find one that actually worked, he would be able to share his visions with other people. He could show them that spirits are everywhere, close beside us. He could show them that their dead relatives are still close at hand. More than that, he wouldn’t feel so different, so alone.

  Before he went to bed, he sat on the couch with his scraped-clean spaghetti plate still on the coffee table in front of him, and called up Karen.

  ‘Karen – it’s Jim. I want you to know that I’m deeply, deeply sorry about today. Deeper than deeply. Bathyscaphically.’

  ‘That’s okay, Jim. You’re forgiven. And it was all in a good cause, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes it was. The spirit-trace worked, believe it or not. It worked! We saw the spirit! Well, I saw the spirit. And at least Jennie doesn’t blame herself for Mikey’s death any more.’