Dead in the Water (31 page)

“You saw what?” he shouted. “What? Tell me!”

“I—I thought I saw, that I was somewhere else.” She licked her lips. “I don’t know, I had a hallucination.”

He was silent. He looked away for a moment. His head averted, he caressed her cheek with his nails, trailing them down her neck, her chest. With great care, he enfolded her in his arms and held her.

“Forgive me for being short with you. Now,” he said against her hair, “Elise”—his voice was honey—“what did you see?”

She thought for a moment. Her heart pounded wildly as she realized she could no longer remember what she’d seen. What she
thought
she’d seen. It had been a mistake anyway, whatever it had been, for here they were, where they should be.

“I’m all right now,” she whispered.

“Of course you are.” He kissed the crown of her head. “Do you think I’d let anything happen to you?”

She closed her eyes, and felt him trembling.

*  *  *

“Hey, let me out!”

In the dark, Ramón pounded on the door. He’d been in there for hours, maybe days, without food or water, without the chance to use the head,
orale
, and with the setting of the sun he’d realized they hadn’t turned on any lights for him, and he couldn’t find the switch.

“Hey!” He pummeled with both fists, kicked the jamb for extra measure. Shit, they couldn’t do this! He was an American citizen! This was, like, violating his civil rights.

“He-eyy!” His voice grew shrill, cracked.

“Don’t,” said a voice behind him. “Being feared is
his
desire.”

Ramón whipped around. “Who said that? Where are you?” There must be another door, one he hadn’t noticed. All right, and now they’d let him out and—

“It’s his sustenance,” the voice continued.

Ramón reached out his hand. “Hey, where are you, man?”

“At the bottom of the sea, I pray to Christ and all the angels.” The sound of weeping. “SOS, this is
Trinity
. Curry, SOS. Mayday.”

Ramón burst out a nervous laugh. “Cha-cha?” He shook his head. No, not Cha-cha. But someone else who wasn’t put together too good, maybe, or just some sailor who liked to talk in riddles.

The weeping grew faint.

“C’mon, man, you freaking me out, bro,” Ramón said, his accent thickening with his unease. “Did you come to let me out?”

There was a long sigh. Then nothing. Ramón waited.

Nothing.

“Ové,
oyé, amigo
!” he called, stepping to the center of the cabin. He ran into the cot and almost lost his balance. Moving away from it with his arms outstretched, he looked like a kid ready to whack a piñata. “You still here?”

Silence.

“Hey, man, c’mon!” He found the opposite wall of the cabin and began to feel along it for the other door. The guy must have left.

“Hey, I’m an American citizen!” Hand over hand, he slid
his fingers over the walls, cried out when he touched a knob, then understood it was the original door. There was only one.

The guy could not have gotten in, nor left, through any other.

A trapdoor, then? A hole in the ceiling?

“Hey, goddamn it!” Ramón bellowed, getting mad now, because he was getting frightened.

Then someone else said, “Diaz?”

It was the voice of Captain Esposito, skipper of the
Morris
, who should be in Hawaii.

Who should not be here.

In the Proteus stateroom, Donna looked up from her book and stared into space.

Lorentz Creutz was the name of the captain of the
Kronen
, a Swedish warship that sank in 1676. It was also the name of the
Pandora
’s staff captain.

She tapped the page. Maybe she remembered his name wrong. Or maybe he was a descendant. Things like that happened. She’d ask.

Shut the book, and turned out the light.

Ignoring the prickles that skittered over her body, and the urge to look under the bed, and the funny feeling that she was being … not watched, but …

not watched. Time for sleep.

She turned on her side and fluffed her pillow. Thought:
Dufus, no one can be descended from a dead man
.

As they grappled in the deserted cavern of the indoor swimming hall, the captain cupped Elise’s breasts and saw Nathaniel’s sweet face, and sent out his thoughts:

Consider this, Donna, my beautiful whore, my slut, my temptress, my siren
:

Ajax the Greek lost his ship and in the tempest swam to the cliffs. He would have lived had he not in his arrogance cried out that he was the one man Poseidon could not drown. The god was furious—as he should have been, Donna, as he should have been—and he broke off the rock Ajax clung to. Ajax fell; the waves swept him away, to his death
.

It would do well for you to find some humility. For soon, I promise, I will break off the reality you cling to. And then I will break you, before I drown you
.

And I will drown you. I swear it
.

You are the only one who does not let me in. You have fought me, and for that, I will make you pay, a thousand times a thousand
.

And as for this woman, who had seen … how had she seen? He would let her see a little more, before he crushed her.

He smiled, and kissed her, raging inside because Donna would not hear him.

But Elise would.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes; Elise knew she had done the right thing; and the guilt evaporated and so did the odd memory of something gone wrong, as she and the captain writhed in a tiled Jacuzzi beside the indoor swimming pool. The air was cool and smelled of chemicals, but the champagne was delicious. He had planted an ice bucket and glasses before he had come to fetch her. A man thought of these things. A real man, that is.

In the center of the high plaster ceiling, a single, low-watt bulb struggled inside a white metal cage. Shadows did the hula on the white plaster, and on the diamond-shaped tiles of blue and green that bubbled in the boiling pot of sprays, jets, arms, and legs.

The water moved like a solid oval with the subtle roll of the ship and spilled into the pool; steam rose from the pool like jets of champagne bubbles. The heat and the bubbles made her dizzy; and she vaguely recalled that something had frightened her, terribly, but now everything was more than fine. Poor girls learned much of sex and a bit about shame, oh, yes.

His body was rich; and they slapped together, making waves, long and hard and tight and hot. He was inside her, thrusting, and Elise gasped and dug her nails into his buttocks. He was unending; he was the biggest man she’d ever
had, so big it hurt, but it hurt sublimely, and she stretched her legs open as wide as they could go.

“The snake is a friend,” he said huskily, and she laughed and threw back her head.

She was getting close to coming, everything constricted, quivering, juicy; she was almost there, and she hadn’t had an orgasm in months that wasn’t self-induced—she’d been faithful since Phil had found out about Hunter—and she teetered on the brink of ecstasy with a full-out hunger that made her feel like she was drowning. Clinging, clinging to him, riding with him, up, up to the crest of the wave—

languidly, she rolled her head to the side—

—the snake is a friend

—and through the steam, saw faces.

She screamed and jerked backward, but he kept at her, pushing and thrusting.

Withered faces, eyeless and slack, and unseeing. The faces of skulls, bleached, pitted; barnacles on strips of flesh; an eel trailing through a jaw. Blackened, charred faces; and with them, the face of a child, smiling wickedly. Their eyes met and the child sniggered.

“Look!” she shrieked, pounding on his back, flailing her arms and legs in blind panic. But he ignored her, or couldn’t hear her—how couldn’t he hear her?—as he pushed and pushed and pushed.

And suddenly he hurt her; his cock was no longer a cock, but something that sliced into her womb. Screaming, arched backward, toward the faces. He had a bottle between his hands, a green bottle, and he was ramming it into her, over and over and deeper and deeper—

—the faces opened their jaws, and they had teeth,

barbs,

harpoons

—and the boy crouched at the edge of the tub now, behind the captain. He laughed low and cruel and delighted; and his face broke apart and slid into the tub, chunks of flesh and gouts of blood; his nose, his lips, plopping into the boiling fleshpot. His face throbbed raw and glistening, and it
laughed; a thing watched her, a thing laughed, with no nose, no jaw, but rows of gleaming ivory teeth.

She struggled wildly, smacking the captain’s hips with her thighs, shrieking, screaming, pleading—

—and the captain shouted with pleasure and plunged into her.

He was cutting her open, rendering her down. In a haze of unendurable agony, she started to black out.

Then he chortled and said in a mocking voice, “That’s how we play spin the bottle, Ms. van Buren-
Hadley
. That’s how we win.”

The boy-thing’s laughter joined his, the child cartwheeling around the tub, his face bobbing around her in a bloody stew. For a moment, the wind whipped around her, and she was freezing, and the cold was almost worse than the pain, but that could never, ever be.

Elise woke up in her own bed, beside her clean-shaven, sweet-smelling, mild-tempered husband.

She was unhurt. Untouched.

She was in her nightgown, and there was no note anywhere.

She went into the bathroom and vomited, and when she came back to bed, Phil rolled over and slung an arm over her hips. She lay there, shaking, and tried to convince herself it had all been a dream.

Elise
.

Phil
.

John
.

Ramón
.

Ruth
.

Cha-cha
.

Cracked in six places; and when it’s full of water, it will go down
,

down
,

down
,

ah, Nathaniel, how I loved you, child! How it hurt me, to hurt you
!

Down
,

down
,

down
,

and it won’t be airtight
.

The door to the museum gaped open. A woman in a white dress and jacket sat at a card table, reading a book. Donna cleared her throat and the woman glanced up.

“Are you open?” Donna asked. It was noon of the third day aboard the
Pandora
, and this was the first time she’d seen anyone inside the museum. The door was always shut.

“Yes. Please come in. I’ll be happy to give you a tour.” The woman half stood; Donna indicated that she should stay seated.

“I came in here the other night with the captain,” Donna explained.

“Oh, with the Captain?” the woman echoed. Capital C Captain. “Oh, but of course. You’re one of the survivors.”

Jesus. That’s what John should make them call his movie.
The Survivors
.

“I was in the lifeboat, yes.”

“Oh, my.” The woman stood. “My. And the Captain has been showing you around.”

“Mmm-hm.” She wandered toward the nearest aisle. The woman trailed after her.

“What is it like?” Her eyes shone with excitement and she clasped her hands over her chest.

“Not that much fun,” Donna retorted. She made a point of staring hard at the objects in the case before her. Cups and saucers. The typed card said they were from the
Bismarck
. She cast back; there’d been something about that in the
Flotsam
book. That guy who found the
Titanic
, he’d found the
Bismarck
, too. She turned to the woman—

—whose face was strangely blank. She stared straight ahead, as if Donna weren’t there, a robot turned off. Wooden, Donna thought, and cleared her throat. The woman jumped, hiccuping a nervous laugh.

“I’m sorry. I …”

“I didn’t know they salvaged anything off the
Bismarck
,” Donna said.

The woman grimaced. “I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t here then.”

Say what? Donna hid a smile. She nodded and walked on. Irritatingly, the woman continued to follow her.

“If you have any questions,” she ventured.

Donna stopped at the case containing the captain’s bottle. The cloth had been redraped, a dramatic, if silly touch.

“Is it true it’s never been opened?” Or weren’t you here then? she added silently.

To Donna’s surprise, the woman took a step backward. She shook her head vigorously, jaw set, fists clenched at her sides. “Absolutely not. Never. It’s never been opened. It—”

“Donna?”

John and Matt stood just inside the door. Donna sidled away from the woman, who was still swearing on her mother’s grave that the bottle had never, ever, ever been uncorked (and who was supposed to really give a shit, Donna wanted to know), and came up to them.

“Hi.” She made Groucho eyes at Matt. “Hey, big guy, you’re looking good.”

Matt’s eyes widened and he gazed at her very hard, very hungrily. He was holding his green dinosaur, practically folding it in half in some kind of urgency. John put his arm around his shoulder. Matt stepped close to him.