Swimmer (14 page)

They drove up a tightly winding track until they reached a large, single-story house set amongst a stand of sugar pines. The house was brand-new, very geometric, with huge picture windows and verandahs all around it. There were three cars parked outside it: a silver Jeep, a Volvo station wagon and a classic red Corvette. Washington's eyes immediately widened. ‘Look at that 'Vette, man! That's a '62, last of the real Corvettes. Three hundert sixty horsepower with Rochester fuel injection! How much
money
does this dude make?'

As they parked, a tall man with an iron-gray crewcut appeared on the front verandah, restraining two slavering Dobermanns. He was very tanned, with deep-set eyes like Kris Kristofferson. He wore an impeccable pink shirt, light gray permanent-press slacks, and sandals. ‘Ms Silverstone? I see you've brought an entourage!'

‘I'm sorry, Mr DuQuesne,' said Susan, as she climbed the steps. ‘But Jim here insisted on bringing two of his college students … they were friends of the boy who drowned.'

Jim came up behind her, and immediately the Dobermanns started snarling and straining at their chains. Their claws clattered on the oak decking, and they were so keen to jump on Jim and tear his throat out that David DuQuesne could hardly hold them back.

‘They smell something on you,' said David DuQuesne, clinging on to the handrail to stop himself being dragged across the verandah.

‘Guess it's my cat.'

‘Your
cat
?' said David DuQuesne, as if he couldn't believe that a grown man could do anything so effete as to keep a cat.

‘Yes, I have a – cat. Quite an intelligent cat, as a matter of fact. Bit of a fortune teller.'

‘You'd better go inside. I'll put these brutes back in their kennel.'

While David DuQuesne took the dogs away, the five of them wandered into his living-room. It had mountain views on two sides through floor-to-ceiling windows, and it was so sunny and light that it was almost like being outside. The floors were highly polished oak, with Persian scatter-rugs, and the furniture was all white leather, and huge, so that they felt as if they had strayed into an episode of
Land of the Giants
. On the walls hung vast abstract paintings in smeary grays and blacks with occasional red spots on them.

They were still looking out of the windows when David DuQuesne came briskly back in, extending his hand. ‘Sorry to have kept you. I'm David … you're Susan, and this must be Jim.'

‘This is Laura and Washington,' said Jim.

‘And Michael,' said Michael, when nobody else introduced him.

‘Please, sit down,' David told them. ‘Would you care for a drink? I have some very good Chardonnay.'

Susan said, ‘Mineral water for me, thanks. Alcohol plays havoc with my aura.'

‘Umm … you wouldn't have a
beer
, would you?' asked Jim.

An unsmiling Chinese woman in black silk pajamas brought them drinks and nuts.

Once they were settled, David sat back and said, ‘I don't usually get myself involved in personal consultations any more. But I was very intrigued by what Susan told me on the phone. If what she told me was right, then this is the first reappearance since the 1950s of an extremely dangerous urban manifestation.'

Jim said, ‘I gather Susan has filled you in on what's happened so far … little Mikey drowning, and then Dennis Pease, and Mervyn nearly being drowned in his bathtub?'

‘That's right, she has. She also told me about her spirit-trace, too. Very brave of you, to try a spirit-trace with this particular bogey-person.'

‘Ignorant, more than brave,' Jim admitted. ‘And I'm afraid to say that there was another incident this morning. One of my female students was trapped in the shower. The water was boiling hot, and she was very severely scalded. In fact we don't even know if she's going to pull through.'

‘You witnessed this incident?'

Jim nodded. ‘I saw the figure again, too. The water spirit.'

‘And it was
boiling
? I never came across that before. That's extraordinary.'

‘All I need to know is: what is it, what does it want, and what can I do to get rid of it?'

David DuQuesne said, ‘The reason I agreed to see you was because what Susan described to me sounded like a rare but very potent urban legend.'

‘What's that, urban legend?' asked Washington. Michael frowned, but David DuQuesne didn't seem to be irritated in the least. ‘I'll give you a well-known example. There's a story that went around every high school in America. A girl and her boyfriend drove out to the woods one night. They ran out of gas, so the boyfriend told the girl to stay in the car while he walked to the highway and filled up a can. He told her to lock all the doors, which she did. But about twenty minutes later, she heard somebody banging on the roof of the car. Then this guy appeared, smiling at her through the windshield. He lifted something up in his hand, and it was her boyfriend's severed head. She screamed and covered her eyes. But then he knocked on the window again, and this time he wasn't just holding up her boyfriend's severed head, he was dangling his car keys, too.'

‘Yeah, I heard a story like that,' said Washington. ‘Only the knocking on the top of the car was the boyfriend's feet, hanging from a tree right over the car.'

‘There are dozens of legends like that. Some of them are obvious hoaxes, like the South American bush spider that was supposed to be hiding under public-toilet seats, and biting women whenever they sat down. Or the family guard-dog that was found choking when its owners returned home, and when it was taken to the vet they found a burglar's finger stuck down its throat. We
need
stories like that, just like we used to need stories about devils and vampires. They help us face up to our fears. They're a kind of updated superstition.'

‘But they ain't all just superstition, are they?' Washington interrupted. ‘Some of them must be real … like that boiling-water person we saw today.'

David DuQuesne poured himself another glass of white wine. ‘No, Washington, they're not all superstition. I personally believe that, when certain specific tragedies happen within our modern society, new demons can be … created, for want of a better word. These aren't demons from ancient cultures. Not Astaroth or Beelzebub or Loki, or even Native American demons like Coyote and Big Monster. These are demons of modern American civilization – products of our own special terrors. The Hitch-hiker … Mary Worth … the Ant Boy, whose friends covered him with molasses and tied him up naked next to a fire-ants' nest.

‘In almost every one of these urban legends, somebody dies and comes back to take their revenge on the people who hurt them. Did you ever read about Black River Falls, Wisconsin? In 1897, they had a plague of homicides and suicides and people going mad. In fact, they used to happen so often that the local newspaper scarcely thought them worth putting into print. One woman deliberately drowned herself head-first in a water-butt, and farmers were always cutting their throats or hanging themselves or throwing themselves into the river. One guy even blew his own head off with dynamite – filled a hole in the ground with explosive, leaned right over it and lit it. Said, “Here I go, and the Lord goes with me.”

‘The story went that – less than a month before this happened – Black River Falls was visited by a traveling carnival … with clowns, and mimes, and bareback riders, and a freak show. And that carnival changed the whole town for ever. Once it had left, those who survived spoke of terrible apparitions: dead babies crying in the night; lunatic screaming in people's attics when there was nobody there; hunchbacks running through people's back yards. And on the anniversary of that guy blowing his head off – every year, eleven o'clock in the morning on the dot – they'd hear this massive bang from the back of his house. People said you could set your watch by it.'

‘I'm not sure what you're trying to tell us,' said Jim.

David DuQuesne stood up and glided over to the window. ‘I'm trying to explain to you that modern American legends aren't all campfire stories or internet hoaxes. What happened in Black River Falls is true. There are photographs to prove it. And, what's more, after the carnival had left, a private detective called A. P. Moran went to look for it, because one of the townswomen complained that she had been raped and robbed by one of its owners, Douglas Shade.'

‘Did he have any luck?'

‘Oh, yes. If you can call it luck. Three years later Moran found the remains of the Shade & O'Bryan Traveling Carnival in a long-forgotten railroad spur, way up high in the Rockies. It seems as if their railroad had been overtaken by severe winter weather, and they had decided to hole up until the snowstorms died down.

‘They were dead from typhoid fever, most of them, and the ones who hadn't died from typhoid had succumbed to hunger and hypothermia. They had tried to eat their show-horses and even one of their lions, but it looked as if the weather had bested them in the end, and somebody had put up a cross in the snow which said nothing but
CARNIVAL
. Pretty appropriate, since “carnival” means “feast of flesh”.'

‘But what does this have to do with this water spirit?' asked Laura.

‘Nothing, really. Nothing and everything. It just goes to show that the so-called supernatural can be just as real as you and me. The Shade & O'Bryan Traveling Carnival had contracted typhoid fever during a visit to Black River Falls in 1894. They had made it as far as the Rockies, but no further.'

‘But you said they visited Black River Falls in 1897,' said Laura. ‘How could they have done that, when they all died three years earlier?'

‘Maybe the new carnival was nothing but impostors, using their name,' suggested Jim.

David shook his head. ‘I have original nineteenth-century photographs of most of the carnival troupe, and I can assure you that the showpeople who arrived at Black River Falls in 1897 weren't impostors. They were
the exact same people
. You can pick out the same clowns, the same trapeze artists, the same girl selling the cotton candy, even.'

‘What's your point, man?' Washington wanted to know. ‘Maybe they got froze to death and maybe they thawed out and came alive again.'

‘Impossible … even if it were possible. Most of their bodies were mutilated and half desiccated.'

‘So how do you explain it?' asked Jim. ‘Are you saying that the showpeople who arrived at Black River Falls … they weren't real? Were they ghosts? Or were they some kind of delusion? Some kind of hysterical mass-suggestion?'

‘I don't know, Jim, to be frank. But whatever they were, they still managed to drive the population half mad. All I'm trying to explain to you is that people have been known to appear long after they were supposed to be dead, and that they can take some pretty unpleasant revenge.'

‘You think this water spirit is somebody who died?'

‘That's my guess. After Susan had called me, I remembered a very similar manifestation in the nineteen-fifties. I checked through my archives and found it. There were several reports in the
Los Angeles Times
as well as a feature article in
Time
magazine. In the summer of 1954, seven children between the ages of nine and eleven were drowned in the Sherman Oaks area. Nobody really took any notice until Jo-Anne Millar drowned – she was the daughter of Gary Millar, who used to play Randy in
Wagon Train
. Then there was a whole mess of publicity, and a huge police investigation, but that didn't stop three more children from drowning.

‘All seven children were members of a synchronized-swimming team from St Bernadette's Elementary School in Stone Canyon Avenue. They were one of the attractions at the school's July fourth celebrations that year. Apparently there was a cook-out, and fireworks, and a swing band, and then the girls gave a floodlit swimming show.

‘The next morning, however, when he was clearing the streamers and the paper cups out of the pool, the school janitor saw a body floating at the bottom. It was Esther Jordache, nine years old, the youngest member of the swimming team. The coroner said that she must have gone under sometime during the swimming display, and what with the water being churned up, and all the other girls' legs thrashing around, she hadn't stood a chance.

‘Her mother hadn't worried when she didn't come home because she was supposed to be sleeping over with a friend. And her
friend
wasn't worried because Esther was always kind of a quiet, introspective girl, and so she assumed that Esther had decided not to sleep over after all and simply gone home.

‘But only a month after that, another member of the synchronized swimming team was drowned, and two more followed. There were witnesses to all three drownings, and all of them said that the girls looked like they were pulled right under, straight down, they didn't even struggle. Two witnesses said that they saw arms coming out of the pool and dragging the girls down, even though there was nobody else in the pool.

‘The coroner decided that these witnesses were suffering from shock, and that they simply imagined what they saw. But a well-known historian called Harold Bronsky said the drownings bore a striking similarity to an incident that occurred during the Civil War, when a young Yankee soldier called Stephen Andrews was drowned while crossing the Mattaponi River under fire. Seven of his fellow soldiers were wading across the river close by, but none of them made any attempt to save him because they were afraid of being picked off by Confederate snipers. During the course of the next two months, however, every one of his fellow soldiers died by drowning. Two while they were fishing in a boat; another in a flooded shell-hole; another while he was swimming in a lake; and three more while they were crossing Dismal Swamp under cover of darkness, with full backpacks and rifles, and waded straight into a deep pool that none of them could see.