Swimmer Page 7

  Lieutenant Harris looked around the sunlit campus, with its flags flying and its students playing basketball and sitting out on the grass, and let out a sigh. ‘The age of no responsibility, huh?’

  ‘Oh, they all have their problems. Are my grades going to be good enough? What am I going to do when I leave college? Why doesn’t the captain of football ever notice me?’

  ‘I wonder what Dennis’s problem was? And with who?’

  ‘With whom? I don’t know. But it seems like a pretty difficult way to kill somebody, doesn’t it – pulling them under the ocean by their ankles? How do you do that, without drowning yourself?’

  ‘I guess you could do it if you catch your intended victim unawares, so that he instantly breathes in a whole lungful of water. Or if you’re capable of holding your breath for very long periods of time. Or if you have an aqualung.’

  ‘So what kind of a person are you looking for, lieutenant?’

  ‘No doubt about it. I think we’re looking for a swimmer.’

  ‘Oh, come on, lieutenant. That must include eighty per cent of the population of greater Los Angeles.’

  ‘This swimmer was a very strong swimmer. And, judging by the bruises on Dennis Pease’s ankles, this swimmer was a woman.’

  Mervyn was running himself a bath. After his morning chores around the apartment building, and shopping for the elderly residents at Ralph’s, he was more than ready for a good long soak while he listened to Cole Porter’s Greatest Hits on his CD player and ate a whole family-size raspberry Danish.

  In the evenings he sang satirical songs at the Slant Club, under the stage name of Chet Sideways. But in the afternoons he liked to be serious, and alone with himself. Very few people realized that his outrageous clothes and camp behavior were nothing more than a way of protecting his vulnerability, of keeping the real Mervyn safe. He had been orphaned at the age of three and spent a miserable childhood in the care of foster-parents.

  He wasn’t even sure that he was gay; but the only people who had ever accepted him and shown him any affection were homosexual men, while his early experiences with women had been with cold and overbearing foster-mothers who ignored him when he wept and hadn’t even kissed him good-night.

  While the tub gradually filled up, he went to the bathroom mirror and tidied up his eyebrows with tweezers – he favored the Joan Crawford arch. He blew himself a kiss and said, ‘You gorgeous devil, you!’ although he was worried that lines had started to appear at the sides of his eyes, and that the stubble on his chin was turning gray.

  He was still plucking his eyebrows when he heard a strange wallowing sound in the bath behind him. He turned around, frowning. The surface of the water was slopping from end to end, as if somebody had been stirring it with their hand, but that was all. Maybe it had been disturbed by a minor earthquake that he hadn’t even noticed. Or an air bubble. He finished off his eyebrows, humming along with ‘Night and Day’.

  Eventually he unwound his bright satin bathrobe and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. He noticed that the door was slightly ajar, which it hadn’t been before. He didn’t bother to close it. He wasn’t expecting anybody.

  Before he climbed into the bath, he weighed himself. Two hundred eighty-four pounds, three pounds lighter than last week. He was quite pleased with himself, and he gave his stomach a brisk wobbly slap of approval. Only another sixty-four pounds to go, and he would have reached his target weight. Watch out, Rupert Everett!

  He placed his raspberry Danish on a plate beside his bottles of bath oil and skin exfoliants. Then he eased himself into the water, grunting in satisfaction and relief. This was the only hour of the day in which he could lie back and dream. He didn’t have to worry about his job, or his errands, or wiping up the turkey-flavored sick that Mrs Laksa’s Pekinese had left in the hallway.

  ‘Night and day …’ he breathed, ‘You are a part of me …’

  He splashed his face with water, and used a washcloth to scrub his neck and behind his ears. His foster-mother had sent him to school without any lunch if he didn’t wash behind his ears, and so he never failed to do it, twice a day. Even now, he remembered the misery of going through a whole school day without anything to eat.

  Now he could twist himself around and break off a large chunk of raspberry Danish. But as he took the first bite, he felt something stirring in the water, down below the foam. It was something slippery, and muscular, and his first horrified thought was that it was a snake. Jesus – a huge snake had slid into the tub when he wasn’t looking! He let out a shriek of terror, and pastry exploded from his mouth. He gripped the handrail and tried to heave himself out of the water, but he slipped and fell back again, with a splash that sent water all across the bathroom floor.

  It wasn’t a snake. It was more than a snake, it was two snakes! It was something even bigger than two snakes! Frantically he groped under the water, trying to find it, trying to get a grip on it so that he could throw it out of the bath.

  At the same time, he saw that all of the water that he had splashed across the room was sliding back across the tiles, back toward the tub, almost as if it were magnetized. He gripped the handrail again, but before he could pull himself upward, the bathwater churned right in front of him, and a figure rose out of it, a figure that seemed to be made out of nothing but hot, transparent water, with steam rising from it.

  Mervyn dropped back into the tub, his heart clutched by a seizure of complete terror. The figure rose above him, and he could see that it was a young woman, although he could see right through her, he could see the pink-tiled wall behind her, and the sun shining through the slatted blinds.

  ‘Holy shit,’ he said, with Danish crumbs all around his mouth. ‘Tell me I’m dreaming.’

  But the figure rose even higher, and leaned toward him, and he knew that he wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t even having a nightmare. Through the steam that curled around it, Mervyn could see its face. Its glassy eyes were staring at him and its mouth was dragged downward in absolute hatred.

  Again he tried to clamber to his feet, but the figure pushed him back. The impact was so strong that Mervyn felt as if he had been hit by a giant wave. He rolled around and attempted to get on to his knees, but the figure knocked him down again, and then again. Then it gripped hold of his neck and forced his face right under the water.

  ‘No!’ Mervyn bubbled, and reared his head up, gasping for air. But the figure pushed him down again, so hard that his nose was pressed against the bottom of the bath. He struggled and kicked and tried to roll round on to his back again, but the figure was sitting astride him now, clenching his body between its thighs, and he was so fat that he was wedged.

  His eyes were open. He could see the bubbles blurting out of his mouth. He saw his nailbrush slowly sinking past him, and then tumbling away. He made one last supreme effort to lift himself up on his hands and knees, and for a few straining seconds he thought he was going to make it. He grunted and spluttered as his face came out of the water. But then the figure gripped his throat like a lock-wrench, and smashed his head back down under the foam, breaking his nose. The bath grew cloudy with blood.

  Mervyn’s lungs couldn’t take any more. He knew that he was going to have to breathe in camellia-scented bathwater. He couldn’t believe that he was going to die like this. His ears were aching and his nose felt as if it had been crushed into a hundred grating fragments of bone.

  ‘Abbggbblllrrhhhh!’ he shouted in panic and desperation, and the last bubbles rushed out of his lungs.

  Six

  Jim came struggling along the corridor of his apartment building with his dog-eared brown-leather briefcase under one arm and two sacks of shopping under the other. He hadn’t bought any food – he had no appetite after hearing about Dennis – but he had needed some Whiskas for Tibbles Two and some kitchen-cleaning spray so that he could leave his work surfaces looking slightly less gummy when he left on Wednesday and flew off to Washington.

  He still wasn’t sure
what he was going to do with his car. It was nearly fourteen years old and it needed new shocks and a head gasket, but he didn’t want to part with it. It came from the era when cars weren’t cars, they were ocean liners. Eight-point-two-liter, twenty-one feet long. Maybe Mervyn could look after it for him. Mervyn was ostentatious enough.

  As he passed Mervyn’s apartment, he saw that the front door was half open. He hesitated, then set down his briefcase, went back and knocked on it. ‘Mervyn? You in there?’ He knew that Mervyn liked to spend his afternoons in seclusion, playing music, and it was very unusual for him to leave his door ajar.

  ‘Mervyn? It’s Jim.’

  He set down his shopping and cautiously stepped into Mervyn’s apartment. It was furnished with a leopard-print three-piece suite and its walls were decorated with circus posters, Barnum and Bailey, Pindar and Bouglione, Forepaugh and Sells. Acrobats, clowns, and buxom ladies with ostrich feathers in their hair riding equally buxom horses. On the bureau stood a framed photograph of a woman in a straw hat who bore a very strong resemblance to Mervyn, with the same sad eyes.

  From the bathroom came the sound of Cole Porter music … somebody singing ‘You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To’. Jim listened outside the door, but there was no sound of Mervyn singing along, which he usually did. Jim gave him a quick postman’s knock. ‘Meryvn? … Hope I’m not intruding. Your front door was open and I just wanted to check that you were okay.’

  No answer. He waited for a moment, and then he knocked again.

  ‘Mervyn? Are you in there? You haven’t drowned or anything, have you?’

  Still no answer. He eased the door open and peered inside, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t catch Mervyn in the tub or – worse still – sitting on the john. At first it looked as if the bathroom was unoccupied. But when Jim took two or three steps inside, he saw the white whale-like curve of Mervyn’s backside in the bathtub.

  ‘Mervyn!’ he called out. ‘Mervyn! What the hell’s happened?’

  Mervyn was lying face-down. The bathtub was empty, and he was clutching the plug in his hand. There were streaks of blood running from his nostrils and down the drain, and his lips were blue.

  Jim tried to turn him over on to his side, but he was still slippery and he was far too heavy to lift. He pressed his fingertips against Mervyn’s carotid artery but he couldn’t feel a pulse.

  ‘Mervyn!’ he said, shaking him. ‘Mervyn, can you hear me? It’s Jim!’

  Jesus, he thought, Jesus. This is all I need. He went back to the living-room and picked up the Madame Pompadour-style phone with shaking hands. ‘Ambulance? I’ve got a guy here who’s drowned in his bathtub. Well, I really don’t know. I’m just a neighbor. Yes, I’ve tried to put him into the recovery position but he weighs nearly three hundred pounds.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said a nasal voice at the other end of the phone. ‘A paramedic team will be right with you.’

  Then all he could do was pace around the bathroom, glancing now and again at Mervyn’s huge, flabby, inert body; and wonder how he could have drowned in an empty bathtub.

  He was just about to call 911 for a second time when Mervyn gave a thick, phlegmy cough. He coughed again, and let out a deep, sonorous sigh, as if he had been disturbed during a particularly happy dream. Then he coughed again, and lifted up one hand, so that his fingers squeaked against the side of the bathtub. Jim knelt down beside him and helped him to lift up his head. His nose was enormously swollen, like a clown’s, and his eyes were puffy.

  ‘Mervyn, it’s Jim. Are you okay?’

  ‘Jim … hi. Am I dead?’

  ‘No, you’re not dead. You’re lying in the bath. What happened?’

  ‘That water-woman. The same water-woman we were talking about last night. She was going to kill me. She came right out of the water and she was going to kill me.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Do I look like I’m kidding? At first I thought she was a snake but she wasn’t a snake and she grabbed hold of my throat and she tried to drown me.’

  ‘Come on, Mervyn, we have to get you out of there. It looks like your nose has been broken.’

  ‘Tell me about it. She smashed my beezer on the bottom of the bath.’

  Gradually, groaning and puffing, Mervyn managed to turn around and lift himself out of the bath. Jim was waiting for him with a Turkish towel held out wide and his eyes averted. ‘You’re an angel, Jim. An angel from heaven. I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.’

  ‘You’ll manage. I called the paramedics … they should be here in a minute.’

  ‘You’re an angel. You should be sitting at God’s right hand.’

  ‘Well, not just yet, Mervyn. Here, come and sit down. You’re shivering.’

  ‘You’d be shivering if you saw what I saw. She came right out of the bath, whoosh! And, just like you said, she was all made out of water. Hot water, too.’

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

  ‘No thanks. I already drank half the bath. Jesus, I thought I was dead, for sure. If I hadn’t have pulled out the plug …’

  ‘Something seriously weird is going down here,’ said Jim. ‘First there was that little Mikey, drowned last week. Then the cops came round to the college today to tell me that one of my students was deliberately drowned in the ocean. Now you.’

  ‘It’s this water-woman,’ coughed Mervyn. ‘She’s like a … serial drowner.’

  ‘It looks that way, doesn’t it? But why Mikey? And why you? I don’t know for sure that she had anything to do with Donald Pease drowning, but from what the cops told me, it sure sounds like it.’

  At that moment, there was a brisk knock on the door and two paramedics came in. ‘Somebody drowned?’ asked one of them, a big swarthy man with a heavy black mustache.

  ‘Nearly, but not quite,’ said Mervyn, dabbing his nose.

  ‘I can see. Your nose is some kind of a mess, ain’t it? What happened?’

  ‘I – ah – I slipped on the soap. Cracked my nose right on the edge of the tub.’ Mervyn glanced at Jim as if to say, ‘Let’s not make this any more complicated than it already is.’ He didn’t care for the Los Angeles police very much, and he certainly didn’t want them trampling all over his apartment, looking for evidence of a woman whose material appearance had simply poured away down the drain.

  The paramedic sat on the couch, pinched the end of Mervyn’s nose between finger and thumb and wiggled it. ‘That hurt?’

  ‘Ow! What the hell do you think? I just broke it in fifty-eight places!’

  ‘Hit your head at all? Any black-out? Any concussion?’

  ‘I don’t know … I may have been unconscious for a minute or two.’

  ‘Okay … whyn’t you get yourself dressed and we’ll wheel you round to the ER.’

  Jim gave Mervyn a helping hand, and Mervyn rose unsteadily on to his feet. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Jim asked.

  ‘No, no. I’ll be fine. Really. This handsome young paramedic can take care of me, can’t you?’ He peered closer at the paramedic and said, ‘You were never in Village People, were you? No, maybe not. Before your time.’

  Before he left, Mervyn laid a hand on Jim’s arm and spoke confidentially into his ear. ‘You realize what the connection is, don’t you, between what happened to me today, and that student of yours, and young Mikey?’

  Jim knew what he was going to say. ‘It could be nothing more than a coincidence.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But if I were you I’d go around to every single person I cared for, and tell them to start wearing life-jackets, even in the shower.’

  He called round at Susan Silverstone’s house on Franklin. Nobody answered when he rang the doorbell, but he heard voices around the back, so he pushed his way through the dense sub-tropical plants until he reached the courtyard where the fountain was splashing.

  Susan was dressed in tight black satin jeans, a scoop-neck black-silk sweater and strappy black sandals. She was potting a row of fe
rns, and talking to them while she did so. ‘There, my frondy little friend … how does this nice little blue ceramic number suit you?’

  A young man in jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt was sitting on the garden swing with a can of beer held between his thighs. The canopy above the swing was overgrown with ivy so that Jim couldn’t see his face. He was idly kicking himself backward and forward with one bare foot.

  ‘Susan?’ said Jim. ‘Hope I’m not interrupting anything. I tried reaching you on your mobile phone but it was switched off.’

  ‘I do that,’ said Susan, standing up. Her raven-black hair was tied with a white satin bow. ‘It’s enough of a nuisance communicating with the dead, let alone the living.’

  ‘It’s come back,’ Jim told her. ‘The water spirit, whatever you like to call it.’ He told her about Mervyn, and about Lieutenant Harris’s suspicions that Dennis Pease had been deliberately drowned.

  ‘Did you know that ferns were hermaphrodites?’ said Susan, in a matter-of-fact tone, easing another one out of its pot. ‘Whenever they want more ferns, they have sex with themselves. Don’t you think that’s far less messy than the way we do it? And cheaper. You don’t have to take a fern to the movies.’

  She paused, and then said very seriously, ‘It’s looking for revenge.’

  ‘Revenge? What kind of revenge? Revenge for what?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jim. I may be clairvoyant but I don’t have any idea. The only way to find out what any spirit wants is to ask it – which could be very dangerous, considering how malevolent it is. But if it’s drowning people, one after another, it’s doing it for a reason. Spirits hardly ever commit random acts of destruction. Even poltergeists throw plates around for a reason … not that it’s ever very easy to discover what it is.’

  ‘Will you help me? You see, the thing is that, even if I didn’t know young Mikey, I knew Mikey’s mother; and Dennis Pease was a student of mine; and Mervyn’s been like a brother to me. Well – more like a sister, but very close.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Susan, turning around. In the shadows of the courtyard her face shone luminously pale.