Katie was framed there in the window look down at me, back-lit from the bathroom’s white tile glow.
I could swear she was smiling.
FOUR
I’m falling and falling and falling…
It seems to be taking its own kind of time, my body turning languorously through the warm night air…now the lattice pattern of the trellis rungs rushing in a white blur, now the tops of trees and housetops beyond the Dean’s property, changing lines of perspective in their own time frame…now the shimmering, kidney-shape of the pool—which I would surely miss in lieu of the unforgiving patio brick and concrete.
I saw, with the next revolution of my plunge, that it would be close—but then neither brick or concrete but the tile lip of the tool ended my sight in a red explosion, most of which I guessed was my spraying brains.
Only somehow it didn’t.
And warm night air became the shock of cold water as I struck head-first and set up what must have been a cannon ball column of chlorine.
I kept my eyes open the entire time, my logic being: how many times in a lifetime do we get to witness the end of it, thinking absently somewhere in my dizzied brain, how deep will I go…will I keep descending through the chill grip of the water that had saved me only to knock myself senseless against the pool bottom? The concrete bottom was rushing up nearly as quickly now as the concrete patio.
I put out my hands to stop it and actually made light contact with the rough-textured base, the glowing wall lights making rubbery smiles and scowls in the toothy face of the pool drain beside me.
I didn’t fight it, didn’t attempt to claw my way back to the surface. Maybe I had come so close to death that the idea had lost its terror and even held a kind of foresighted peace about it, as if I were warming to the whole idea. Or maybe I was too drunk to know what was really happening. Or maybe the fact that I could not and never had been able to swim a single stroke had something more tangible to do with it.
So, holding my breath sensibly, looking about me curiously at the chaos of scrambling bubbles, I elected to settle patiently near the bottom by my new friend the drain and see what came next. Even if anyone hadn’t seen my high dive from the bathroom window, someone surely heard the explosive splash. One of the kids--Miss Sanders, maybe—would wander back through the French doors and spot the funny pink human sitting down there with the red face and bulbous cheeks.
That was when the pool lights went out.
Or was my brain just clouding over from lack of oxygen? Anyway it began to get darker rapidly if strangely warmer…the surrounding water taking on a distinct tea-colored hue, more like a lake or river than a pool, that felt both alien and familiar at once.
I heard an echoed, watery thud above, looked up at the quickly disappearing surface and saw a lean projectile that turned out to be Rita (an excellent swimmer, I knew) rocketing down to me in a cone of giddy bubbles and foam. Poor Rita. She must have grown so exasperated trying to wrest a normal expression from the Dean’s wife she’d wandered out here to the pool area.
Through the more and more soupy blur I saw a quick shadow dart across my field of vision before Rita quite reached me. Had I been anywhere but a guest of the Dean’s property I’d have sworn it was a fish. And something else…
…the hard pool bottom, when my toes occasionally brushed, had gone soft and oozing like the floor of an estuary, and it began to look as if someone had removed the poolside garden and planted its field of softly green waving shoots and tendrils down here…
Rita swam up into my face with a pale smile—nearly luminous—and I was about to ask her incidentally about the plants before realizing not only could I not swim underwater, I probably couldn’t talk either.
Rita, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem at all: her voice an eerie aquatic gargle that turned the warm water around me chill again. “I saw you looking at her ass…”
“Who--?” I gargled back.
“You know who…the Bracken woman. Fine. If she has such great hips you can damn well stay down here and think about them!”
And Rita was gone again in a flurry of bubbles.
And so was my breath.
I could feel it in my chest now—rather the lack of it—a steady pressure like a big hand pressing hard on my sternum.
I decided maybe it was time to make a little effort, get my feet under me and push off the bottom, claw my way upward. I had just succeeded in make a few yards of progress when I felt the firm pressure of a cold hand close about my ankle.
I looked down in wide-eyed frenzy...
…into the chalk-white face of the little drowned girl…
* * *
I choked out a scream that was mostly water.
Everything went blindingly white. At the same time I heard the frantic thump of running feet.
Rita flung the door open, face a mask of fear. “Elliot? What in the world!”
I watched her through a rushing curtain of spray, looked around, eyes stinging from the downpour.
“Elliot?”
I shook my dizzy head, flinging water on her nightgown. “Sorry. Bad dream.”
“Dream? In the shower?”
The white tile glistened through a roil of steam. “—or daydream…or something.”
Rita was watching me closely, brows knitted. “God, I thought you’d fallen…”
I coughed water once, shook more water on her, twisted off the knobs. “No. No, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded rapidly, coughed again into my fist. “Fine, fine.”
She gave me a lingering, not-quite-convinced look.
I smiled reassurance, cupped her cheek, reached past her for a towel. “Breakfast ready?”
She nodded in a moment, finally turned uneasily to the bathroom door. “Coffee is. Better hurry, you’ve got a nine o’clock class.”
“Right.”
“And that noon appointment with the doctor.”
“What doctor?”
Rita gave me her look from the doorframe. “Dr. Bracken? She called? Remember? Meeting in your office this morning? Sure you’re all right?”
Not really.
* * *
“’Story is about principles, not rules’,” I read, leaning against the front of my desk.
“Can anyone tell me what McKee is saying here?”
I looked out over the class. No one could. Miss Sanders was applying lipstick before her compact.
“All right, let me read further, then. ‘A principle says, ‘This works…and has through all remembered time.’ The difference is crucial. Your work needn’t be modeled after the “well-made” play; rather, it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers break rules. Artists mask the form.”
I closed the book with a thump, dropped it on the desk behind me, addressed the class again. “Anyone?”
Still nothing.
A slow morning. Wednesday, middle of the week slump, always tough.
And truthfully my mind wasn’t on screenwriting either. I had a secret riddle I was ruminating over. A personal one. How the hell had I gotten out of that pool last night?
When your mind is elsewhere you fall back on the old teacher’s trick: let the students teach the class and make them think it’s really you doing it.
But no hand ventured aloft. And only a few eyelids.
In desperation I looked to the back row for my favorite anarchist, the implacable Mr. Thomas. “Mr. Thomas? Any views?”
Slumped and surly in his best James Dean ‘tude, Mr. Thomas snorted once as he tore up little bits of paper and let them settle like snow on his desk. “You don’t want to know my views, Mr. Bledsoe.”
I sighed, glancing at the black-rimmed wall clock. “No, Philip, actually I do. In simple declarative sentences, what’s your opinion?”
Mr. Thomas smiled smugly without looking up. “Bullshit.”
I nodded patience, crossed my arms. “Not quite a sentence
, but never mind, would you care to amplify?”
Thomas tore up little pieces of paper, collecting a small drift. “’Through all remembered time.’”
Well, at least he was retaining. “’A principle works through all remembered time,’ yes. Do you disagree?”
Thomas lifted his handsome eyes slowly. “Whose time?”
I shrugged easily, not seeing the trap coming. “All time, I suppose.”
Thomas’ smile shifted from smug to victorious. “No. The quote says “all remembered time. That means someone had to be around to remember it.”
“All right. I’ll give you that, it’s a bit of a clumsy sentence, but I think what McKee is saying is—“
“What McKee is saying, in applying principles to screenwriting, is that those principles existed as far back as anyone can recall. But screenwriting wasn’t even practiced before the 1920’s.”
Not strictly true, but his point was salient. Was I about to be bested in my own class? “I believe McKee means those principles that existed within the timeframe of—“
“Who’s principles? McKee’s?”
“His own, I assume, yes, and those of practitioners before him.”
“Bullshit!” Slightly more emphatic.
Miss Sanders glanced up from her compact.
“I believe you’ve stated your position, Mr. Thomas, what I’m interested in is—“
“Formula.” Thomas sneered.
Most of the rest of the class was looking up now. A fight!
“I’m not sure, Philip, what—“
“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Bledsoe?”
“Fire away.”
“Do you think screenwriting is an art form?”
I felt the room grow a little closer.
“Well, I think that anything can subjectively be called an art—“
“Simple question. Do you believe screenwriting is an art form or not?”
Every eye in class on me now.
“Screenwriting is a craft. One which requires skill and—“
“You’re evading the question, Mr. Bledsoe. McKee clearly believes in the ‘art’ of screenwriting. Do you concur?”
I looked absently into Miss Sanders’ pretty face. All I could see was the chalky visage of the little dead girl at the bottom of the pool.
“No.” I said softly.
To a collective gasp.
* * *
“And how did that make you feel?” Katie Bracken was sitting in my private office at the university, at my desk, actually. I paced before it. Somewhat at loose ends.
“’How did it make me feel.’” I repeated. “Good question. I don’t know. Empty, I guess.”
“’Empty’?”
I thought about it, hands shoved in my front chinos pockets, pacing back and forth, a leopard in his cage. I stopped and looked down at her, lounging there comfortably in my swivel chair behind my teetering mountain of papers and paraphernalia. My chair, my mess.
“What’s this, Twenty Questions? Psychoanalyzing me now?” I took an unfriendly step toward the desk. “And what the hell are you doing here anyway? You didn’t even bother to phone me. You set this meeting up through my wife.”
“Fiancée.”
“I seem to recall asking you to please stay away from me, Miss Bracken.”
“I don’t think you said ‘please.’ We’re running out of time, Elliot. We must get on this case.”
“You must get on your case. I’ve nothing to do with it.”
“Everything, actually. You’re a major part of it.”
“And that’s another thing. I don’t care for your insinuations about my private life, about what I do, who I am. And don’t tell me it’s part of my so-called phobia therapy. I happen to be fine with hating cats.”
“So why did you keep our meeting this morning? Never mind, tell me why Mr. Thomas got you so upset.”
For some reason I kept entertaining her. “Because, like you, he has this prescient fetish. This arrogant idea he knows the world better than God. He’s a callow, narcissistic little shit! In other words, a typical sophomore.”
“A lot of intuitive people come off that way.”
“There’s that word again.”
“You should know.” Katie Bracken leaned back in my chair with a squeak. “I think, my dear Elliot, you doth protest too much. You’re upset. Why on this particular day did Mr. Thomas get to you?”
I refused to let this…woman incur my ire. “I never said he did.”
“Did he embarrass you in front of your class? Catch you in a lie? What did you say to them?”
I stood there in my little office and glared at my over-stuffed bookcase, the pile of unread papers on top of it. In a moment I nodded softly. “I did tell them a lie. In a way. A kind of lie.…”
“Yes--?”
I couldn’t believe I was admitting this. “I told them screenwriting is a craft, a difficult and laudable one, but a craft and no more. As opposed to an art.”
“Why?”
“Because, unlike the novel, or painting, screenwriting is collaborative, doesn’t follow the singular vision. In fact, quite the opposite, except perhaps for the first draft. After that it becomes everyone’s script—the producers, the actors, the director’s…often the director’s girlfriend’s. And nine times out of ten it’s savaged. Screenwriting is a collective effort, a homogenized one.”
“Yet you teach it.”
“I teach it as a craft, not a formula like that idiot McKee. Formula begets formula. That’s what leads to summer blockbusters, tent pole movies and a mouth-breathing audience. What the hell do you want from me, Katie?”
“The same thing your students want: the truth. You had a dream, didn’t you?”
I repressed a chill, turned to face her slowly. “Did I?”
“Want to talk about it?”
“So you can pseudo-psychoanalyze my response? Make me feel vulnerable and open to suggestion like the other paranormal crusaders of the world? Thanks, no.”
I glanced at my watch. “I have another class in ten minutes.”
“No you don’t. And your office here does a good job of psychoanalyzing you itself.”
“Is that right?”
She looked around the room. “It’s a mess. A total unorganized wreck.”
“So?”
“You’re outwardly the opposite--well organized, punctual, neat as a pin. Which your well- kept house supports.”
“We have a maid.”
“No you don’t.”
“So I’m conflicted, that it?”
“Who isn’t? But where is the real Elliot Bledsoe? Where does he exist most comfortably, here or at home?”
“Certainly not in my office, at the moment.”
“I make you uncomfortable?”
“Mightily! Any theories about that, Dr. Freud?”
She shrugged. “Could be many things, I suppose. Conflict? Frustration? Sexual attraction?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re more an egoist than Mr. Thomas.”
“You think? Maybe I’m just a callow little shit.”
“I’m telling my girlfriend the truth about you, Katie!”
“Your who--?”
“My wife!”
“Your who--?”
“My freaking fiancée, goddamnit!”
“Freaking?”
“Oh, climb off it! I’m telling her everything, Katie! That you set up this meeting without my knowledge, that the whole phobia-curing thing is a blind because you want me to go on some lunatic paranormal road trip with you, some place down south to hunt ghosts, for chrissake!”
She stared at me.
I became aware my hands were fisted, nails digging into palms. “What!”
“Elliot, I never said anything about a road trip. Or about going down south. Certainly not ghosts.”
Now I stared at her.
She leaned forward on her elbows at the messy desk. “Want to tell me about the dream now?”
I starte
d pacing again. The room could use a new carpet, I realized absently for the first time. “I fell off the Dean’s trellis.”
“I know.”
“Into his pool.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t swim.”
She said nothing.
“But somehow I got out without drowning.”
“Someone from the party pulled you out?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember but I don’t think so.”
“What do you remember?”
I sighed, shoulders lifting, settling. “Not sure. That’s where reality gets mixed up with dream…”
“Don’t worry about that right now. Just tell me what you do remember.”
That chill again, so strong this time it rocked me visibly. “…cold…”
“I know. Tell me.”
I paused by the stuffed bookcase, leaned a supporting arm against it, closed my eyes, tried to let myself go there. “There was a little girl…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know who. Never saw her befo—“
“’Before’ what?”
I shook my head. “Not sure. Maybe I saw her—or somebody like her—on the quad. Couple of times. Not sure.”
“Go on.”
“She was in the pool with me last night. Only…it wasn’t exactly a pool anymore…”
This was beginning to sound demented. I looked over at Katie, saw no derision in her face. “Not a pool…”
“No. More like a…I don’t know, a lake or a river. Dark. Deep. I can’t swim.”
“You said that.”
“I think…I think Rita was there for a moment. She dove in to save me, I think. She’s an Olympic class swimmer. Only she didn’t save me, exactly. She said…”
“She said what?”
I stared at the worn carpet. “…nothing, really, she just smiled at me and swam off again.”
“What did you do?”
“I sat there on the bottom until I ran out of breath…then I finally tried to thrash my way back to the surface.”
“Did you make it?”
“No. Something took hold of my ankle, held me down, underwater.”
“’Something’ or someone?”
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 4