Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "I’m fine, I’m fine!" he shouted, streaming and spluttering, but he flopped and stumbled before he could right himself. "Boy, the flow’s getting stronger by the second."

  And higher, Gideon noticed. The water now swirled above John’s waist, billowing out his ski jacket. The next surge would have it up to his armpits. "Come on, John, it’s rising. Do you need help?"

  "Nah, I’m okay. I’m—"

  He froze, open-mouthed, with an expression that Gideon, a native Californian, had always associated with the first startling tremor of an earthquake: a puzzled, listening sort of expression, as if you couldn’t quite make yourself believe that the dependable old earth had actually lurched beneath you. No matter how many earthquakes you’d been through, that first incredulous reaction was the same.

  Only there hadn’t been an earthquake.

  "Quicksand?" Gideon asked urgently.

  "I think so," John said. "My foot’s—I can’t—"

  "Oh, my God," Claire said. "John, don’t try to move!"

  He managed a laugh. "Who can move?" But he pulled against the bank anyway, to no avail. The edges crumbled under his fingers and slid in tiny avalanches into the stream. He shook his head and looked up at them. "What do we do now, folks?"

  "We get you out," Gideon said. "How deep are you caught?"

  "I don’t know." He bent, holding his face above the surface while he explored below with his hand. A stray wavelet lapped at his mouth and made him cough. No, not a stray wavelet. The water level had climbed another inch. Gideon fidgeted uneasily. He had no doubts about being able to rescue his friend, but John Lau helpless and dependent was an unnatural and disturbing phenomenon.

  "Just above the ankles," John called above the rapid gurgle of the stream and the deeper roar in the background. He wobbled in the current’s pull and tried to steady himself by propping one arm against the bank. There were more avalanches of sand.

  "That’s not too bad," Claire said to Gideon. "We should be able to pull him out."

  "We need something he can grab hold of," Ray said, distracted enough to let the terminal preposition stand.

  Claire nodded. She was the only one in a long coat and she quickly stripped it off and handed it to Gideon. She shivered as a burst of raw, wet wind plastered her silky dress to her thin frame. Quickly Ray peeled off his mackintosh and put it over her shoulders.

  Gideon took Claire’s coat but shook his head. "No way. It won’t reach from the bank," he said quietly. "I’m going in and pull him out."

  "But the quicksand—" Claire began.

  "Maybe it’s only over there where John is. You and Ray hang on to one end of the coat and I’ll go in holding on to the other. It’s only a few steps to him. If I run into quicksand you can pull me back and we’ll try something else."

  Like what, he wondered darkly as he lowered himself down the bank, holding on to a sleeve of the coat with one hand. Let’s just hope Ray had a nice, neat alternative tactical plan all worked out. Above him, the two of them hung on to the coat with teeth-grinding determination, their slight bodies braced as if they had a tank on the other end.

  It was a good thing they did. He had prepared himself for a stiffer current than before, but it caught him by surprise all the same. It was no longer the hard, pummeling push they’d waded through a few minutes earlier, but an intense suction that clutched at his heavy, sodden clothes and

  yanked him to his right like a bug caught by a vacuum cleaner. He lost his footing before he ever found it, and would have tumbled downstream if not for Claire’s and Ray’s dug-in heels and resolute grip on their end of the coat. With his legs drifting like streamers in the current, he held doggedly to the sleeve until he righted himself, turning sideways to the flow to offer as little resistance as possible. The sand under his feet seemed solid enough.

  "Sort of grabs you, doesn’t it?" John said, barely audible over the increasing tumult of the water.

  "No problem," said Gideon. "Everything’s under control. You ready to be rescued?" He glanced warily to his left. No surges on the way.

  "I don’t know about this," John said. "This is going to be a hell of a blow to my ego."

  "Gideon!" Claire called. "If your feet are all right, don’t take any chances—try to reach him without moving them!"

  That made sense. All they needed was for both of them to be stuck in the quicksand. Keeping his feet planted and one hand twisted firmly around the coat sleeve, Gideon reached out his other hand and leaned across the stream, trembling with the strain of staying upright in the powerful and unrelenting drag of the current. But even with his arm extended to its utmost, so that he was grunting with the effort, his straining fingertips were a foot short of John’s.

  On the bank, Ray was going through the contortions of getting out of his tweed jacket without releasing his grip on Claire’s coat. "Gideon, if I give you my jacket, you can let John grab hold of it. If I can just…"

  But Gideon doubted that the coat-to-Gideon-to-jacket-to-John arrangement would provide enough leverage to pull John’s 200-pound body out of the sand. And he wasn’t sure the struggling Ray could extricate himself in time anyway. Even in the minute or so that he had been in the stream there had been a frightening rise in the level. It was up to his ribcage now, and very soon it would be impossible to stay on his feet. Already it was almost at John’s armpits, so that he was trying to keep himself upright by paddling his arms like a man treading water.

  No, there was no time to wait. What he should have done, he realized now, was to ford the stream where they’d crossed it before and knew it was free of quicksand, and then pull John out from the bank on the far side. But it was too late for that now. He was going to have to take a chance with the quicksand.

  Carefully, he moved toward John, "skating" over the surface as Claire had told them to do if they found themselves near it. He inched his left foot gingerly forward, feeling for the quicksand (what did it feel like?), listening tensely for the next surge. His outstretched fingers were within ten inches of John’s …six inches…By God, he was going to make it. Two inches…

  John strained toward him. "Just …a little…"

  "Unnh …" Gideon slid his foot forward another couple of inches.

  At the precise moment their fingertips touched, he stepped into it, and he understood the expression John had had on his face. It felt as if he’d put his left foot into a swaying rowboat, or taken a step on an unsteady trampoline, or an old-fashioned waterbed. Or a huge, wobbly bowl of gelatin that would capsize if he put any weight on it. It was nothing like what he expected, and it was weird, all right.

  He teetered, off balance, and leaned backwards onto the leg that was on firm sand. As he did things got even worse. Another surge, a curling, crashing breaker this time, rumbled down the channel toward them, and Claire and Ray jerked ferociously on the coat, dragging him up the bank and out of its way.

  "John!" he shouted futilely, scrambling to his feet, safe himself but still able to feel the touch of his friend’s fingers on his own. They had been so agonizingly close…There was nothing he could do but watch, powerless and shaken, as the great swell of water swept by them, burying John for terrible, slow seconds.

  "Look, he’s all right! He’s alive!" Ray blurted out when John’s head emerged at last from the settling water.

  With his eyes tightly closed, his black hair matted and wet, and his cheeks puffed out from holding his breath, his head looked to Gideon like something that had been stuck on a pike on London Bridge, but after a moment he proved Ray right, sucking in a huge breath and opening his eyes.

  "I think it’s time for plan B," he called weakly across the stream. The water, rising more and more swiftly, was lapping at his chin. He glanced apprehensively to his right, looking for the next surge.

  And Gideon felt the first sick stab of real fear. What the hell was he going to do? How was he going to get John out before the next wave did him in? Goddamn him for being dumb enough to step in the crap just when th
ey were almost home!

  Panting with frustration, practically hopping from foot to foot, he looked wildly around for a stick, a pole, an idea, but of course there was nothing. Ray and Claire stood slumped together, with no suggestions, still pointlessly hanging on to the dripping black coat. John, God damn him, just sat there uselessly, like a bump on a log, up to his neck, with nothing to say. One more surge and—

  At the sibilant, rumbling murmur all of them looked sharply up to see the dull, brownish-gray breaker, nudging its scud of flotsam and yellow foam before it, roll smoothly and evilly down the channel towards them, so high this time that it spilled over the sides.

  And Gideon had an idea. He ran quickly upstream along the bank, towards the oncoming breaker, only managing to get in four or five strides before pulling level with it. Then, pushing off against the edge of the bank, he launched himself into it in a shallow dive angled back downstream, in

  John’s direction. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Claire and Ray staring openmouthed at him.

  What he had in mind was to grab John—to more or less tackle him underwater—as the powerful wave swept Gideon downstream, and use the combined impetus of the surge and his own weight to pluck John out of the sand. Not much of an idea in the first place, and half-formed at best, but it was all he could think of, and under the circumstances it wasn’t bad.

  Or it wouldn’t have been, except for two things. First, his hurried dive landed him not in the billowing crown of the swell but just in front of it, under the heavy, overhanging curl. Instead of being buoyed forward in John’s direction, he was pounded by the crashing curtain of water and forced downward, sprawling and contorted, to bump hard against the gritty bottom and get most of the wind knocked out of him. Then, before he could raise his head to the surface and snatch a breath, the fat part of the swell sent him somersaulting forward, muddled and strangling, close to panicking because John too was underwater by now, with his legs gripped fast in the quicksand, and Gideon couldn’t see where he was. There would be only one chance to grab for him, and if he missed, then—

  He tried to force open his eyes but the lancing pain of the salt water pinched them shut. Bursting with the effort to hold his breath, unable to tell up from down, he flailed his arms and even his legs ferociously, desperately hoping to catch hold of John as he swept by. And miraculously, he tumbled squarely into him.

  It was at this point that the second thing went wrong. When the breaker had borne down on him, John had instinctively twisted his face away from it and hadn’t seen Gideon dive in. So when some hideous creature dragged from the deep by the tide clutched at him from behind with its thrashing tentacles, he naturally swung his fist blindly into the mass of it as hard as he could.

  The punch caught Gideon just under the diaphragm and drove the stopped-up air out of his mouth in an explosion of bubbles. Convulsively, he tightened his grip, only to be hit again, this time in the chest, and then, clumsily and with diminishing force, in the side of the neck. With his head exploding from the need for oxygen, he involuntarily sucked in a throatful of seawater, vomiting it up at once with the last residue of breath in his lungs. He had to come up for air, if he could figure out which way up was, but if he let go of John…

  The lazily rotating pinpoints of light told him that he was losing consciousness, could no longer hold on against the overpowering pull of the tidal surge. He began to lose touch with where he was, what he was doing. The excruciating fire in his chest receded to some more distant dimension. His mind sagged and drifted, and he must have begun to suck in a breath because salt water suddenly burned in his nose. He stopped himself from taking it into his lungs but this time he couldn’t expel it; it pooled at the back of his throat like an icy jelly. He was dimly aware that his legs had been yanked behind him by the full force of the surge, so that he was stretched out horizontally below the surface of the water, like a flag in a windstorm, hanging on with rigid and unfeeling hands to the slick, spongy material of John’s collar.

  It was time to let go, to give in to the tide and be swept away, time to leave John to die in peace, but still he held on, unable to order his stony fingers to unclench. Vaguely he realized that John was still struggling weakly, pulling at Gideon’s wrist. Angered, Gideon shook the collar feebly. Why couldn’t the stupid bastard let him die in peace? John struggled harder, and Gideon, foggily enraged, shook him harder in return as a new tidal surge pulled powerfully at them.

  There was the sensation of a stopper popping from a bottle, and then he was tumbling again, his hands still knotted in John’s collar, and John was tumbling and bouncing along with him. Dreamily, not understanding what was happening, he understood nevertheless that he had done what he had tried to do. When he opened his mouth to exult, the waiting seawater rushed in, and the swirling, mushrooming blackness followed after it, pouring down his throat and expanding to fill his ballooning insides.

  "I think he’s all right," Claire’s worried voice said above him.

  "Of course I’m all right," Gideon said irritatedly. Or was he? He was on his back in two or three inches of water, with his head raised and his cheek lying against cold, wet cloth. Claire’s dress, he realized. His head was on her lap. What was going on? Were they still in the bay? Had he had an accident? Fallen? Abruptly he remembered and pushed himself to his elbows.

  "John—"

  "Right here," John said. "I’m okay." He was kneeling at Gideon’s side. "Thanks for coming in to get me, Doc," he said awkwardly. "Sorry about belting you."

  "Think nothing of it," Gideon said woozily. "Anytime."

  "How’re you feeling?"

  "Fine." And he was, more or less. Aching throat, queasiness, mild nausea, muscles as weak as a baby’s and still quivering, but he didn’t seem to be hurt. "How long was Iout?"

  "No more than a couple of minutes. I’m not sure if you were ever completely out."

  It had felt like a week. "How did I get up here? Did you pull me out?"

  John shook his head. "Couldn’t. We washed up on a rise in a couple of feet of water. I tried to drag you out, but I didn’t have the strength. I couldn’t even pull myself out. All I could do was get your head out of the water. We would have just laid there and bought it on the next surge if Ray hadn’t dragged us out. Just in time too."

  "Ray pulled us out?"

  "Now, really," Ray’s mild voice remarked from Gideon’s other side. "Is a tone of such marked incredulity necessary?"

  GIDEON and John were both tottery but able to walk unsupported, and the four of them reached the base of the Mont at last, hauled themselves off the tidal plain, and mounted the stone steps to the gardens in a weary, none-too-steady file. Looking straight ahead, they walked with dignity (which wasn’t easy; John had lost his shoes and socks, Gideon one of his shoes) past the sullen and staring group of people who craned their necks to see them from the North Tower.

  "Why do you suppose they’re looking at us that way?" Ray asked, sounding giddy. "Are they annoyed with us for being lackbrained enough to walk merrily out into an incoming tide, or because we spoiled their afternoon by not getting drowned after all?"

  In their shaky condition it seemed hilarious, and they made their way down the Grand Rue snorting and choking with laughter. But by the time they got to the car a predictable reaction had set in; they were depressed and their teeth had begun to chatter with cold. Their clothes, still dripping, clung freezingly to them. Gideon stopped at the first hotel they came to, a brown, grimy old place near the railroad station on the Rue Couesnon in Pontorson, a few blocks from the causeway.

  The landlady, Madame Gluges, was not wildly hospitable. For exactly what purpose, she demanded in plain-speaking French, did they wish a room? Having put this question to them before committing herself as to whether or not space was available, she folded her stocky, sweatered arms and eyed them suspiciously, waiting for them to defend themselves.

  Her guardedness was understandable; the foursome did not evoke confidence: three wet,
bedraggled foreigners— two of them hulking, dangerous-looking devils—and a frowzy Frenchwoman, all of them waterlogged and luggageless. The brawny Oriental was actually barefoot, as if he’d come straight from the jungle, the other big one was wearing just one red and gray jogging shoe, and all of them had an overexcited, wild-eyed look. Drugs? Whiskey? Who knew what their story was? Fugitives from the police? Escapted convicts who had just swum ashore? Hardly a sight to warm the heart of a provincial hotel proprietress used to a quiet clientele of respectable (or at least solitary) traveling business representatives.

  Ray didn’t help matters by promising they would be on their way by six, inasmuch as they only needed the room for an hour, but Claire quickly explained that they had been caught in the bay and wished merely to stay long enough to take hot showers and, if possible, to dry their clothes.

  Very well, madame said, thawing a little at Claire’s soft manner, but it would not be possible for all of them to share a single room. The men in one, the woman in the other. On different floors. Only when this unequivocal condition was humbly accepted did she soften. She would charge them for only one room, not two, and if they would leave their clothes outside their doors, she would have them taken to the basement and put in the linen dryer.

  With propriety thus guaranteed, Madame Gluges relented still further. While they were getting out of their wet clothes she knocked on their doors, bringing to each room an insulated pitcher of black coffee laced with cognac— and incidentally assuring herself that Claire was where she was supposed to be. Nevertheless, it was a kindness and gratefully received, so that by the time they had handed over their clothes and donned blankets or bedspreads, their hearts and bodies were beginning to rewarm.

  There was one shower per floor, and while Ray, gorgeously draped in a royal blue chenille bedspread, stalked like an Indian chief through the dim hallways in search of it, Gideon and John, a couple of braves in plain gray blankets from the closet, sat in the room, nursed their bracing coffees, and talked.