Swimmer

by Graham Masterton

  ‘And if they threaten your friends and the people you love, like the Swimmer?’

  ‘Well, that’s different.’

  ‘No, Jim, it’s not different. It’s just more of the same. Don’t you realize why I can’t go with you? It’s not really your untidiness or your taste in music. It’s your gift. Or your curse, or whatever you want to call it. How can I live with somebody who feels he constantly has to fight against dangers the rest of us can’t even see? You were almost drowned today. What happens if you come up against a spirit that’s much too powerful for you to cope with?’

  ‘Karen, you have to trust me.’

  ‘I do trust you. But not to ignore ghosts and demons when you see them.’

  The car-hop drove up in Karen’s Saab convertible, and she climbed into it. Jim gave her a kiss and said, ‘I’ll call you later. Watch out for anything watery, won’t you?’

  She drove away and he stood outside the café watching her go.

  ‘Sir?’ said the car-hop, after a while.

  ‘What? Yes, sure, you can bring my car around.’

  ‘I’d like to, sir, but the muffler’s fallen off.’

  It cost $27 for a taxi to take him up to David DuQuesne’s house in Hidden Valley. The air-conditioning wasn’t working properly and by the time they arrived he was slithery with sweat.

  ‘You want me to wait?’ asked the taxi driver.

  ‘No, but next time I feel like a Turkish bath I’ll know who to call.’

  David DuQuesne came out on to the verandah to greet him, his dogs scrabbling on the deck as bloodthirstily as they had before. ‘You look hot,’ he remarked. ‘I’ll have Amy bring you a beer.’

  He released the dogs and for a split second Jim thought they were going to pounce on him, but they tore straight past him, almost knocking him over, and bounded off into the grounds. ‘They smell rabbit,’ said David DuQuesne. ‘Much more exciting than cat.’

  He ushered Jim inside and through to a cool and elegant study with a large desk of limed oak and a collection of twisted sculptures made from driftwood. On the desk were arranged about a dozen color prints, five-by-fours, and six or seven black-and-whites.

  ‘Whenever I’m investigating an urban legend, I always find that one photograph is worth a million words. What do we all remember about Bigfoot? Not the sworn testimony of the men who saw him walking through the woods, but that one blurry picture.’

  Jim picked up one of the black-and-white photographs. It showed a crowd of young people in a swimming-pool, waving their arms. At the foot of the photograph was the typed caption: June 9, 1991: Hi-jinks in the pool at West Grove Community College to celebrate the year’s end.

  ‘A friend of mine works in the photo library at the Los Angeles Times,’ said David DuQuesne. ‘I asked her to dig up every picture she could find of the day when Jane Tullett was drowned.’

  ‘And? Do they tell you anything?’

  ‘I think they do, yes. I’ve placed them in chronological sequence. Here – look: this shows Jane being lifted out of the water after she was drowned. She’s wearing this distinctive navy-and-white swimsuit with diagonal stripes. That’s how I was able to identify her in this first picture in the sequence. Here – in picture one – we have a general view of the pool, with everybody jumping around and splashing … but in the background Jane is making her way toward the diving boards. You can’t see her face but there’s no mistaking that costume.

  ‘In this second picture we can see her climbing the ladder to the top board … and there she is, that’s a very good shot of her just before she dived … arms spread, back straight – excellent posture.’

  Jim picked up the fourth picture. ‘I can’t see her in this one … there’s just a whole crowd of students.’

  ‘Ah, but you can see her if you magnify it. I put it through my computer scanner and zoomed it up. Here … those look like nothing but waving arms underneath the diving board, but right there you can see Jane’s legs as she disappeared into the water.’ He drew a circle with a red marker. ‘As you can see, it’s a clean dive, and she doesn’t appear to have struck anybody else.’

  ‘The coroner said that she could have hit her head on the bottom.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s likely, when you consider that she went into the water at the proper angle, and the water was certainly deep enough to prevent her from striking the floor of the pool.’

  ‘What am I looking at in this next picture?’

  ‘This is the most interesting picture of all. Again, I had to enlarge it to make sense of it. But if you look right down here in the bottom left-hand corner you can just make out a swimming cap and a pair of eyes breaking the surface of the water, close to the side. That’s Jane, coming up after her dive … and you can see from her eyes that she doesn’t look at all concussed.

  ‘Now look at all the students around her. They’re wildly splashing each other, and so many of them have their eyes closed or half closed, it’s not surprising that they didn’t see Jane coming up.’

  Jim examined the photograph carefully. He recognized Piper and Mary, not far away from Jane’s emerging head, but they were facing the opposite direction. However, there was another girl, much nearer to Jane, and she actually had her face turned toward her … so she must have seen her.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ asked David DuQuesne.

  Jim took off his glasses and peered at the photograph even more closely. ‘She looks blonde, doesn’t she … but all you can see is the back of her head.’

  ‘I’ve located her in four other pictures, but you can’t see her clearly in any of them. But look at this.’

  The next picture showed the same girl even closer to the side of the pool, holding on to the rail with her right hand. Her left hand was out of sight below the water. The water was so churned up that it was impossible to see clearly below the surface, but David DuQuesne produced an enormous blow-up of the area where the girl’s left hand would probably have been. And just below it, there was a distorted pattern of diagonal stripes.

  ‘This isn’t conclusive proof, by any means,’ said David DuQuesne. ‘But it looks to me as if Jane executed a perfect dive and came up safely. But this girl in the photograph struck Jane’s head against the side of the pool and then deliberately held her under water until she drowned.’

  David DuQuesne showed Jim the next and last picture, which showed Jane lying at the poolside while the swimming coach was trying to revive her. Jim recognized a much younger version of himself, in sunglasses, and most of the rest of Special Class II.

  ‘I think these pictures are unique,’ said David DuQuesne. ‘They show the actual moment when an urban legend came into being. I’ve made my whole living out of urban legends, but there’s rarely any incontrovertible proof that they actually happened. But this one, my friend – this is something special. Not only that – if you can identify the young lady who’s holding Jane underwater, then you’ve got yourself a halfway decent chance of appeasing Jane’s spirit, and putting her to rest for ever.’

  ‘Why do you think Jane herself didn’t tell me who it was, at Gabriel Dragonard’s seance?’

  ‘My guess is that she doesn’t know. She came to the surface – bang! – her head was knocked against the side of the pool, and she was pushed back under before she had the chance to catch her breath. It’s obvious from the random way that the Swimmer is drowning your friends and your students that she blames all of you … and especially you. She considers that you were ultimately responsible for her safety, and that you let her down. Or even that you and your class were actually part of a conspiracy to drown her.’

  ‘That’s crazy, why should she ever think that?’

  ‘Vengeful spirits get some pretty strange ideas into their heads, Jim. Especially when they died so young.’

  ‘Can you make me some copies of these pictures? I can show them to Piper and Mary and some of the other students who were there at the time.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll print some o
ff now. There’s one important thing you have to think about, though.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘What are you going to do when you do identify the girl who drowned her? Are you going to report her to the police; or summon up Jane’s spirit and have her confess to her, and apologize; or what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was hoping you were going to tell me that. I don’t have a whole lot of experience when it comes to exorcizing urban legends.’

  ‘I don’t either, I’m afraid. You think I wouldn’t have gone back and exorcized Mad Frank Butler if I knew how to do it? Jane Tullett’s spirit deserves some rest in heaven, but Mad Frank Butler deserves to go to hell.’

  ‘You still think about your brother, huh?’

  David DuQuesne’s face was momentarily illuminated by the light from his photocopier. ‘Every day, Jim. Every single day. It’s what gives my life purpose.’

  Laura Killmeyer was waiting for him when he got home, sitting on the steps outside his apartment building with Mervyn, who was entertaining her with his notorious alternative version of ‘Strawberry Fields’.

  ‘How’s it going, Mr Rook?’ she asked him, one eye screwed up tight against the sunshine. She was looking a little more like her old sorceress self this afternoon, in a purple T-shirt with gold stars sewn on it, a pair of black satin pedal pushers and gold-painted Nike shoes.

  Jim tiredly rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I think I’m making some progress … but I had another run-in with the Swimmer.’

  ‘Hey – are you okay?’ asked Mervyn. ‘I thought you were looking a little under the weather.’

  ‘Under the car-wash, more like,’ Jim said, and told him what had happened.

  Mervyn said, ‘It’s unbelievable. You’re not going to be safe anywhere at all until you get rid of this thing. You won’t even be able to leave the faucet running while you wash your teeth.’

  They went up to Jim’s apartment. Tibbles Two was sleeping outside on the balcony, although he saw her ear prick up and swivel around to follow what they were saying. Jim laid out the photographs of the West Grove College swimming pool on the table and showed Laura and Mervyn how Jane Tullett had been drowned.

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard to find out who this girl is,’ said Mervyn. ‘Her swimsuit’s not particularly distinctive, but she does have some kind of dolphin motif on it, see?’

  Laura said, ‘I can’t believe that she managed to drown Jane in front of all of those people and nobody saw her do it.’

  ‘It’s the old trick of doing something in plain sight,’ said Jim. ‘If people don’t expect to see you drowning somebody right in front of them, they won’t. Anyhow – Laura, what did you manage to dig out of those old books of yours?’

  ‘I looked up water spirits in every single one of them, and there’s a whole lot of stuff about kelpies and shellybacks and all kinds of horrible spirits that can drag you into the sea and drown you. And there’s something about Swimmers, too. I don’t think David DuQuesne was completely right … Swimmers appeared in the seventeenth century, so they’re not just a modern phenomenon. The Puritans wrote about them as far back as 1659. But what you said Michael told you about polluted water, that was right. As far as I can make out, the only times when Swimmers appeared was when people were drowned in slimy stagnant ponds or wells tainted with sewage. So, like he said, the water itself was sick, so the spirits in the water were sick.’

  ‘Good work. But did any of your books suggest how to get rid of water spirits?’

  ‘Not really. In the seventeenth century people tried to have them exorcized by a priest, but that never seemed to do any good. The Swimmers only appeared to be satisfied once they had drowned everybody who had taken part in drowning them, and their friends, and their children, and sometimes their livestock too. Sixty-five head of cattle walked into the ocean off Providence in 1789, and all of them were pulled under, one by one, and drowned.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring – not,’ said Mervyn. ‘From now on I’m going to take an aqualung into the tub.’

  ‘There was only one mention of a Swimmer being completely exorcized,’ said Laura. She rummaged in her bag and brought out a tatty old book with a broken spine. ‘It’s in this book … De La Demonomanie des Sorciers, by Jean Bodin. Look, I’ve marked the page. It was in Newbury Old Town, Massachusetts, in 1659. A woman called Biddy Morley was ducked in the town pond for being a scold. They kept her under for too long and she drowned, but five years later, on the anniversary of her death, she came back, “the verrie image of her, but fashion’d from water”.

  ‘According to this, she dragged her husband into the pond and drowned him. And anybody in Newbury Old Town who had witnessed her drowning, or given evidence against her for being a scold, they were drowned, too – either in the pond or in a water-butt – and one man drowned while walking on the seashore.’

  ‘So what did they do to get rid of her?’ asked Jim.

  ‘They could never catch her, because she was made of nothing but water. But one day they persuaded one of the local wives to act as bait. She was bathing in a wooden tub in front of the fire when the Swimmer appeared right out of the water in front of her and tried to drown her … just the way Mervyn was almost drowned. But her husband and two other men had been hiding in the next room. As soon as the woman screamed, they pulled her out of the tub and threw bucketfuls of blazing pitch over the Swimmer. Her spirit had no time to escape, and her physical form was evaporated, pfff, into a cloud of steam. Bodin says here, “There was such screaming and exhalation of steam that they thought they had conjur’d up all the demons from hell.”’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Mervyn. ‘You have to fry the bastards.’

  ‘I don’t know whether we can be sure of that,’ Jim told him. ‘I mean, how old is this De La Demonomanie des Sorciers? You wouldn’t trust a road map published in 1778, would you?’

  Laura said, ‘I’m not making any recommendations, Mr Rook. I’m just saying that the only authority on vengeful water spirits that I could find was Jean Bodin; and he says that using another element is the only answer. Fire to fight water, just like water fights fire. He calls it “the evaporation and the sterilization of the evil spirit”.’

  Jim went to the icebox and came back with his last two beers, which he popped open and shared between the three of them. ‘The problem is – even if setting fire to this spirit is going to work – how are we going to trap it and put it into a position where we can set fire to it? Jesus, I tried to boil a live lobster once. Getting that monster into the pot was like going three rounds with Jesse Ventura.’

  ‘I had a dream about Jesse Ventura once,’ mused Mervyn. ‘He was rubbing maple syrup all over my back.’

  ‘Mervyn … if this fire thing is the only way to get rid of Jane Tullett’s spirit, then we’re going to need somebody to act as bait. A Judas goat, that’s what they call it, isn’t it, when you tie up a goat as bait for a lion.’

  ‘Well, don’t look at me. I was almost drowned the last time.’

  ‘I don’t even know if using fire against the Swimmer is going to work,’ said Laura. ‘Like you said, these are very old books. I know that the kids in all of these television shows like Buffy and Charmed find old magic books and they discover the secret spell and everything’s okay, but this isn’t television, is it? This is real life, and the Swimmer today could be something way different from what it was in 1659.’

  ‘That’s true. But so far we don’t have any alternative, do we?’

  ‘I might remind you of something else,’ put in Mervyn. ‘According to that necklace you bought at the psychic fair, you only have six more days to live. So if I were you, Jim, I’d try to torch this Swimmer as soon as you possibly can.’

  ‘You don’t believe in that, do you?’ asked Laura. ‘I mean, spirits are one thing … but telling the future? I do tea-leaf readings and I look in mirrors to tell people who they’re going to marry. But that’s just fun, most of it. I wouldn’t ever dare to predict when som
ebody’s going to die.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Jim. ‘After the Swimmer, I’m beginning to think that anything’s possible.’

  He took a taxi back down to the Black Velvet Alligator. It was six o’clock before he managed to get there, and Piper was just finishing her shift, wiping the tabletops and emptying the ashtrays. ‘Give you a ride home?’ he suggested.

  ‘No, sorry. Ray always comes by to pick me up. He’s the possessive type.’

  ‘I’m your teacher, Piper. I’m nearly old enough to be your father. Well, I could have been, if I’d have had a willing girlfriend when I was eleven.’

  ‘I know. But you’re still a man, and Ray wouldn’t see it that way.’

  ‘Okay … no problem. But how about taking a quick look at these photographs for me? They were taken by a freelance news photographer the day that Jane drowned. There’s somebody I need to identify.’

  Piper folded a stick of chewing-gum into her mouth. ‘It’s so weird to see all of these people again … Look, there’s me! Wasn’t I frumpy! I’m amazed I ever had any boyfriends at all!’

  ‘You weren’t frumpy – you were gorgeous.’

  ‘Don’t tell Ray that. Please. He’ll go ape.’

  Jim pointed to the girl in the plain swimsuit with the dolphin motif. ‘Her – do you recognize her?’

  Piper squinted closely at the photograph, chewing noisily with her mouth open. ‘Yeah … I think I know who that is. There’s only one person it could be, judging from the way we’re all standing and all. That’s Jennie Bauer. Like I told you, she was the first person to find out that Jane was drowned.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘One hundred and ten per cent. Look at this picture here, that’s her … she always wore these love-bracelets around her wrist. One for every boyfriend, she said. Well, that’s what she said.’

  Jim collected up the photographs and shuffled them straight. ‘Thanks, Piper. You’ll get your reward in heaven for this.’