Swimmer (20 page)

‘At first that was all. But after three or four nightmares, she was sure she could smell burning, like scorching wool; and one night, when the boy was sitting on the end of her bed, she saw smoke pouring out of his sweater. Night after night the boy came back, and each time the smell of burning grew stronger and the smoke grew thicker.'

‘Didn't she tell anybody about these nightmares?'

‘Her father was away on a six-month business trip and her mother was a very nervous type, so she didn't like to. But one night the boy came into her room, and the smoke grew so thick that she felt as if she was being choked. Smoke was even coming out of his
hair
.

‘It was then that he turned around to look at her, and she saw his face for the first time. And it was then that he burst into flames. All of his clothes were on fire, his hands were on fire, his legs were on fire. He was screaming and screaming at her, kicking and struggling as if he was trapped, and couldn't move.

‘She got out of bed and tried to beat out the fire with a blanket, but the boy was charred black and there was nothing she could do to save him. She woke up sweating and struggling and badly shocked. And when she switched on the light, the room was still filled with smoke and there was a faint scorch mark on her bedcover.

‘It happened again the next night, and the next night, and the night after that. Each time the boy came into her room, sat on her bed and caught fire. And each night the heat was more intense, and the smoke thicker, and her bedcovers more badly burned. She hid the scorches from her mother, in case she thought she had done it herself, but on the third night the cover actually caught fire. She managed to escape but the nightmares went on, and even when she was locked alone in her bedroom with no access to matches the fires continued, until one night her hands were badly burned.

‘That's when her mother first brought Mary to see me. She was desperate, like most of my clients. Ordinary people don't find it easy to ask a sensitive for help, believe me.'

‘So did you manage to help her?' asked Jim.

‘Yes, I did. I held a seance and talked to the boy's spirit and asked him what had happened to him and why he kept appearing in Mary's bedroom. It took five or six confrontations before I managed to get some kind of sensible answer out of him. His spirit was very distressed, as well as vengeful. He was very angry and very bewildered and he was
hurting
.

‘He told me his name was Peter. It turned out that he had been a passenger in his mother's car. She had been taking him to a football game when an oil-tanker overturned in front of them on the San Diego Freeway and his mother hadn't been able to stop in time. There was a multiple collision and his mother was killed instantly. He was trapped in the car with his seat-belt jammed.

‘There was a fire … and even though there were several other drivers standing around, none of them was brave enough to rescue him. He was burned alive, screaming.

‘One of the drivers who left him to burn was Mary's father. So when he kept appearing in Mary's bedroom he was punishing her father for allowing him to die. If his appearances had carried on, he probably would have set fire to Mary's bed and burned her alive, too.'

Michael said, ‘Usually, when somebody burns to death, their spirit finds perfect peace. That's why we cremate people. But the fire that burned this boy was poisonous with plastics and diesel … an impure fire. A sick fire. Your spirit can never find any rest if you've been burned in a fire like that.'

‘So how did you stop him?' asked Jim.

‘She did a very stupid thing,' said Michael.

Susan turned away from the window. ‘There was no other way. He would have gone on visiting her every night for the rest of her life if I hadn't … and her life would have been very short indeed.

‘I did what we call a spirit-transference. That means that I obliged Peter's spirit to enter
me
. I was older than him, mentally stronger than him, and so he had no choice. It's a very difficult thing to do, spirit-transference. It was originally devised in the 1920s by the Irish medium Kate Goligher. She took the spirits of young children who had been killed in accidents, and transferred them into her own mind so that she could calm them down and help them to accept the fact that they had died. She called it “spirit-cradling”, and she said it was the most rewarding thing she ever did – but also the most exhausting. Sometimes it made her very ill. Once she cradled the spirit of a ten-year-old boy who had been crushed by a farm cart and it almost killed her. She used to wake up in the morning with her chest all bruised, hardly able to breathe.'

‘Peter almost killed
her
,' said Michael. ‘She used to feel unbelievable pain, as if she was burning from the inside. She suffered it in silence. What choice did she have? If she let his spirit go free, it would go after Mary and burn her alive. Her moods changed, she lost weight, but none of her friends seemed to care. When I first met her she was suffering so much pain she was seriously thinking of taking an overdose and ending it all.'

Susan laid her hand on Michael's shoulder. ‘Michael nursed me through it. He sat with me every night and he helped me to deal with the pain. He looked through every book and every research paper on spirit-transference that he could find. In the end he found a way in which he could put Peter's spirit into a kind of hypnotic coma, so that he wouldn't feel the burning any more.' She touched her forehead with her silver-ringed fingers. ‘Peter's still inside me, he's still inside my mind. But it's like he's asleep.'

‘That's why I wouldn't allow her to hold a seance to confront the Swimmer,' said Michael. ‘From what David DuQuesne told us, it looks like the Swimmer is to water what Peter's spirit is to fire – a spirit which uses one of the basic elements to give itself a physical form, and take its revenge on the people who allowed it to die. If Susan gets spiritually weakened, even a little, there's a serious danger that Peter's spirit is going to come out of his coma and burn her alive from the inside out.'

‘Why didn't you tell me this earlier?' said Jim.

‘I didn't make the connection until we talked to David DuQuesne. Even now I'm only guessing. But the way I see it, the risk is far too great. Susan doesn't like to talk about Peter, or even think about him, in case she disturbs him and wakes him up. You should have seen her, Jim, when she was going through the worst of it. She used to cry for hours because of the pain.'

Jim took hold of Susan's hands. ‘I'm glad you told me why you didn't want to hold a seance, I really am. But we still have to find a way of stopping the Swimmer.'

‘I could
try
to find another medium,' Michael suggested. ‘But after what happened to Gabriel Dragonard, I don't know if I could persuade anybody else to hold a seance.'

‘I wouldn't even dare to ask them,' said Jim. ‘Besides, it seems to me that when we try to raise up the Swimmer's spirit all we're doing is giving her an opportunity to drown even more people. It was sheer luck that she didn't drown me and Laura and Washington, too.'

‘We'll have to look for another way,' said Susan. ‘But let's remember that we have one critical advantage … you can
see
her, Jim, even when she's not in physical form.'

‘I'm going to have to find her first.'

Next morning he was woken up by his doorbell repeatedly chiming. He lifted his head off the pillow and stared at the digital clock beside his bed. When he got it into focus he saw that it was 9.17. God, it must be Mervyn, making his daily call to collect the trash. He squinted down to the end of the bed where TT was still asleep, and threw a box of tissues at her.

‘What's your problem? Some alarm cat you are … I told you to wake me up at eight!'

The doorbell rang again and he called out, ‘Keep your hair on, Mervyn, I'm coming!'

He swung his legs out of bed and picked the T-shirt up from the back of the chair. Then, yawning and scratching himself, he went to answer the front door. He opened it without looking through the spyhole, and turned back toward the bedroom.

‘Mervyn – there's a whole lot of boxes and bubble-wrap in the kitchen closet … if you can take those, too.'

But then a girl's voice said, ‘Good-morning, Mr Rook!' And a whole chorus of voices said, ‘Happy Thursday morning, sir!'

He looked around and there was every member of Special Class II, standing in the corridor outside his apartment, all twenty of them, including Laura and Washington and Christophe and Nestor and the Karakatsanis twins and Jack Hubbard and Katie Untermeyer and Stella Kopalski.

‘I don't believe this,' he said. He was overwhelmed. ‘I never thought I was going to see you guys again. Come on in, find yourselves someplace to sit. I think I'd better find myself some pants.'

The class crowded into his apartment, jostling and giggling and ‘sshh'ing. Jim went back to the bedroom and hopped into his jeans. Then he splashed his face with cold water and tugged a comb through his hair. His face still had wrinkle marks on it from his pillow, but there was nothing he could do about those.

When he came back into the living-room, the class were all sprawled on chairs and packing cases and sitting on the floor.

‘Everybody comfortable?'

‘Saw you on the news last night, Mr Rook,' Christophe volunteered. ‘You and Washington and Laura. That was unreal, that old guy drowning in his own house. Laura said that you guys nearly drowned, too.'

Jim said, ‘You remember I warned you about staying away from water. We were trying to track down the spirit that drowned Dennis and scalded Dottie. Well, we found out last night just how dangerous it can be. We were lucky … but we haven't beaten it yet, and you could still be in danger.'

‘Don't you worry, Mr Rook. After what Washington said, we take the point. With a capital P.'

‘Anyhow,' said Jim. ‘To what do I owe the honor of your all coming here today?'

Arlene Carollo stood up. She was a very tall, thin brunette, with freckles and a wide smile crowded with shining white teeth. ‘We couldn't let you leave without a leaving party, sir. We couldn't have it on Tuesday because of what happened to Dottie, but when we heard that you were still in LA … Well, the e-mails started flying and we decided to hold it today.'

David Baliga stood up, too – a stocky boy with a handsome, square-jawed face, but a slow, monotonous way of talking. ‘The whole class owes you, Mr Rook. What you did for us nobody else could have done and nobody else was ever bothered. So that's why we came. And also to hand in our assignment.'

‘Your assignment?'

‘Sure,' said Jewel Karakatsanis. ‘You asked us to write a four-line poem, remember, about the way we felt?'

‘You wrote it? You didn't have to write it.'

‘Sure we did. We know what kind of a blue fit you get into if we don't turn in our work on time.'

Washington produced two clanking brown-paper sacks from behind his back, and said, ‘Champagne! Well, sparkling wine, anyhow! Let's have a party!'

Roberta Szredinski came forward with a large red box. Roberta was a plump, russet-haired girl who had struggled particularly hard with her reading during the year, because she had been desperate to qualify for a catering course. When Jim had first started to teach her she had scarcely been able to read the ingredients for a recipe. Now she was capable of writing ten-page essays on ethnic foods. She opened the box and displayed a huge white frosted cake with flowers and birds on it, and the message
I thank you for your voices, thank you – your most sweet voices
.
TO MR ROOK FROM SPECIAL CLASS II
.

‘You remembered your
Coriolanus
,' said Jim.

‘I think we remembered most everything, Mr Rook,' said Marcette Griffith, a pretty black girl with her hair threaded with thousands of colored beads, and a scarlet ruffled blouse. ‘You gave us the power.'

Jim went into the kitchen and managed to assemble a motley collection of glasses, while Washington opened the sparkling wine and Roberta cut the cake.

‘How you going to beat this water-thing, Mr Rook?' asked Nestor.

‘I don't know. I'm not too sure that I can, but I'm going to have a damned good try.'

‘Does this mean you won't be going to Washington?'

‘I don't know. I'm supposed to be there on Monday morning at the latest. But there's one thing you can count on, I won't leave you guys in any kind of danger.'

‘You can't put a hold on your whole career because of us,' said Joyce. ‘We can take care of ourselves.'

‘I wish I could be certain of that. If you'd seen the water rearing up out of that swimming pool …'

‘It was
truly
frightening, man,' said Washington.

They filled their glasses and David called for a toast. ‘To Mr Rook, who introduced us to William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams … in fact more Bills than a pondful of ducks. But more than anything else, he introduced us to ourselves. Up until the day we walked into Special Class II, we didn't believe that we could do nothing and we didn't think that we were worth nothing.'

‘Double negative, stupid!' called out Jewel.

‘Whatever, Mr Rook showed us that we had ability, and that we had value; and that's what I want us to drink a toast to today.'

They clinked their glasses, and drank; and if Jim hadn't been so worried about them he would have been happier than he had ever been. But he couldn't stop thinking about Jane Tullett's watery face, and her voice whispering, ‘
What happened in the pool that day?
'

One by one they stood up and read their poems. Shannon Karakatsanis' poem was one of the tenderest.