Spirit (40 page)

Chester had been thinking the same thing. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Guess we're just tired. How about calling it a night?'

‘This water's definitely cold. Is your heater on the fritz?'

‘It was working fine this afternoon. I'll have Hernandez take a look at it tomorrow.'

Raymond swam to the side of the pool, and was about to lift himself out when a little girl suddenly appeared, almost from nowhere, through the bushes. She was very pale, and she was dressed in white, and it seemed to Chester almost as if her long white hair were flying up in the air, rather than hanging down.

Raymond was half-way out of the water but he dropped back in again with a heavy splash. ‘Hey, Chester, we've got ourselves a visitor!'

‘Hey, sugar, this is private property!' called Chester. ‘Besides, you shouldn't be out so late, should you?'

‘I'm fine, thank you,' said the little girl. Her eyes were very strange: almost as if she had no eyes.

Raymond said, ‘I'm glad you're fine, sweetheart, I really am. But the point is I'm kind of buck-naked here, arid getting cold, and I need to get out of this water.'

‘Then why don't you?'

‘Because I don't have any clothes on, and you're a little girl, and men shouldn't show themselves to little girls. It isn't nice.'

‘You're afraid I'll laugh, aren't you, because you're fat and you're ugly. You don't have to be afraid I'll laugh, because I'm very serious tonight.'

‘Oh, you're serious? What are you serious about?'

‘I'm serious about you not getting out of the pool.'

Raymond said. ‘What is this? Come on, kid. I'm freezing in here. If you don't scram I'm coming out anyway.'

Chester stood up in the water. ‘It's all right, Raymond, I'll deal with this.' He, at least, was wearing shorts, a voluminous pair of red-and-yellow Bermudas with palm trees printed all over them. He waded over to the edge of the pool where the
little girl was standing, and gripped the edge so that he could heave himself out. He was just about to pull himself up, however, when he noticed the little girl's feet. They were bare feet, stained inky-black and purple with frostbite. But more alarming than that, they were floating an inch above the tiled surround.

Chester jerked his head back and stared up at her. ‘What the hell? You're – ' She was smiling at him, such a winning smile, her face was white as snow, her eyes as dark as shadows. With a graceful sweep of her body, she bent down and circled her arm over his fingers. He saw something flash, and he felt something brush his knuckles, but at first he didn't realize what it was. The little girl spun around and around, her white dress flying out like convolvulus flower. Chester ducked down in the water again, preparatory to heaving himself out, when he saw that the side of the pool was swimming with blood, and that blood was running down his arms. He raised both hands, and saw that the little girl had sliced through his fingers – sliced so deep that he could see the bones glistening.

He let out a great roar of indignation and fear. ‘She's cut me! She's fucking cut me!'

The girl laughed at him, and stopped her spinning, and came back closer. In her right hand she was holding up a long triangular shard of mirror.

‘You can't get out,' she told him, in that strange muffled voice. Shirley Temple talking through a handkerchief. ‘I won't
let
you get out!'

‘Look at my hands,' Chester babbled. ‘Look what you've done to my hands!' He held them out in front of him, and they furiously dripped blood into the water, little clouds and tangles of crimson.

Raymond surged towards the side. Naked or not, he wasn't going to allow some crazy child to keep him imprisoned in this pool. He hoisted himself up into the tiled surround, close to
where she was standing, his arm raised to protect himself. Without a sound, she swept her arm in a fast criss-cross pattern in the air, and suddenly Raymond's arm and shoulder were cross-hatched with cuts.

He tried to stand up, but she cut him again and again, the wounds proliferating as if by magic. His belly was sliced from side to side. His hairy thighs were drenched with blood. He cupped his hand protectively over his genitals, but she cut the back of his hand open, and more blood poured down between his legs. He dropped to his knees. He was silent with shock. The little girl danced around him, cutting his ears, cutting his cheeks. He swayed, and tried to keep his balance, but then he dropped back into the water, in an ever-spreading fog of blood.

‘Raymond!' shouted Chester, and started to walk out towards him. Chester didn't swim too well, even when his hands weren't sliced to ribbons. ‘Hang on, I'm coming out to get you!' He turned to the little girl and screamed at her, ‘What the hell have you done? You're out of your mind! You're insane! You could have killed him!'

Raymond was floating on his face, around and around, surrounded by blood. As he waded out to him, Chester kept calling, ‘Hang on, Raymond! Hang on, Raymond!' and Raymond let out a gargling, choking sound, so at least he was still alive.

Chester found that the water was growing colder and colder, so cold that he couldn't feel his legs. This wasn't just water any longer, this was
slush
, like half-melted ice. The surface was grey and thick, like frozen porridge, and the waves that were caused by Chester's wading were languid and self-suppressing.

‘Raymond!' Chester managed to shout; although it was more of a gasp than a shout.

Raymond gargled, and tried to call, ‘Help!' but then he disappeared below the surface. Chester saw his hand thrusting up, clawing at nothing at all, then even that was gone.

He took a deep breath and dived. He found it almost impossible to submerge himself. The water was mostly frozen, and he might just as well have dived into quicksand. He groped around in the slush, and by chance he found Raymond's leg. He hooked his arm around it, and struck out for the surface. But there was something dreadfully wrong. His fingers met a solid ceiling, cold and complete. The pool had frozen over, to a depth of two or three inches. He groped frantically in all directions, trying not to breathe, but he was out of energy and oxygen.

He tried to punch a hole in the ice, but it was impossible. He wallowed, swallowed a mouthful of freezing water, and let out a shrill, hysterical, bubbling noise.
Hernandez
, he thought.
Hernandez will hear me
. But then he remembered that Hernandez was driving Laura back to Franklin Avenue. There was nobody here but Raymond and him; and both of them were bleeding badly, and both of them were trapped beneath the ice.

He dropped Raymond, let him sink down slowly in the gelid water. Raymond wasn't struggling. Raymond was probably dead already. Bursting for air, Chester hammered at the ice with both fists. Dimly, he could see the patio lights and the vague outline of the house. But then a terrible darkness swept across the pool, blacker than any night. The water was cracking and complaining as it froze even harder. He breathed in water, a whole chilly flood of it, and when he breathed in water he knew that he was going to die.

In the instant before he drowned, however, he saw a face, peering down at him through the ice. It was the most terrifying face that he had ever seen – long and white, with darkened holes for eyes, and fronds that grew out of it; and it was all the more terrifying for being so blurred, through the ice, so indistinct.

He drowned, and sank, but only a little way, because the water was so thick with ice.

Laura stood in the shower for almost twenty minutes, with the water running as hot as she could bear it, soaping herself and scrubbing herself. Eventually she slid back the frosted glass partition and stepped shakily out and wrapped herself in her thick towelling bathrobe, and crept to bed with the shuffling gait of a woman three times her age.

She lay on her side and watched the shadows of the yuccas dipping and dancing on the shutters. Aunt Beverley wasn't home yet, so she couldn't talk. She didn't really know whether she wanted to talk to anybody. The pain and the degradation that Raymond had inflicted on her was more than she could bear to think about. What made it worse was that it was she who had encouraged him to make love to her, she had sat astride his lap, and kissed him, and told him that he was a god. She didn't just feel physically hurt, although she couldn't even touch her bottom and her back felt cracked. She felt stupid, and betrayed, and ridiculous. Had she really thought that Chester was going to bill her as ‘also starring'? Had she really been suckered into thinking that Raymond was going to buy her a whole new wardrobe and a full-length mink?

Her head thumped and her mouth felt as dry as Death Valley. The trouble was, she blamed herself as much as she blamed Chester and Raymond. They were both manipulative and lustful, but she was vain, and it was her vanity that had hurt her, as much as Raymond's cruelty. She still blamed herself for what had happened to Dick Bracewaite, even though he had subjected her to sexual indignities far worse than anything that Raymond had done to her. She blamed herself for wanting too much to be wanted. It excited her, when she knew that men wanted her, and that women envied her. It gave her a bright shining feeling that nothing else did. Elizabeth had her writing, and her career. But all she had was this bright shining feeling, whenever she could get it, which
wasn't often, and sometimes she needed it so badly that she would have done anything, with anyone, just to feel the slightest glimmer of it, the faintest glow.

She closed her eyes and remembered how it had felt, face down on the table, her legs stretched apart, with Raymond forcing his way inside her. It had been agonizing, and humiliating, but the more she thought about it, the calmer she became, because he had wanted her, hadn't he? He had wanted her badly. He may have thought that he was the master, that he was God, but who was really in control? The wanter or the wanted?

She closed her eyes and slept, without even realizing that she was sleeping, and in her dreams she saw other dreams, like spindly horses, and lords and ladies, and people who rushed silently behind you when you weren't looking.

It was almost two o'clock in the morning when Jim Boreas found Aunt Beverley sitting in his white Pontiac Chieftain convertible, pretending to drive. Jim Boreas was one of Hollywood's most successful producers, and tonight he had been celebrating the completion of his latest movie
The Woman In Sable
at his huge art deco house in Bel Air. Just about everybody who was everybody was there, Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando and Alan Ladd. The party had quietened down now. The guests had dispersed around the gardens or gathered in Jim Borcas's den for stag stories and bone-dry 6-oz martinis or retreated to the library to get some serious slandering done. The laughter had died away, the coyotes were calling eerily from the hills. The orchestra had been replaced by a small Tijuana band. Ken Morales and his Pico Brass, and a few bedraggled couples were still shuffling around by the pool like the survivors of a 1930s dance marathon. Six or seven half-deflated balloons bobbed on the surface of the water, occasionally scuttling from one side of the pool to the other when the morning breeze caught them.

Jim had a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty bottle of tequila in the other. He leaned on the car door and said, ‘How are you doing, Beverley? Where are you headed?'

Aunt Beverley twisted the steering-wheel from side to side. ‘I'm on my way to the beach. I feel like the wind in my brain.'

Jim nodded appreciatively. He was one of the easy-goingest producers in Hollywood, balding, self-assured, friendly to everyone. ‘How far have you gone?' he asked her.

‘Oh . . . I'm almost there. Just past Brentwood.
Beep-beep
! Look out, you stupid pedestrian! And as for you, sir,' she said, turning to Jim, ‘stop hanging onto the side of my car, I'm doing sixty miles an hour!'

Jim blew smoke out of his nostrils. ‘How about going for real?' he asked her.

‘For real?'

‘Sure, we can go swimming.'

‘Swimming?' she said, in pretended astonishment.

‘Sure . . . the sea's chilly, the moon's full, What more do you want? Move over.'

Aunt Beverley shifted herself over, and Jim climbed in. He started the engine with a soft
whoosh
of power.

‘What about your guests?' said Aunt Beverley.

‘What about them? So long as the canapes keep on coming and the booze keeps on flowing, what do they care? You know this town better than I do. It's Christians and lions, that's all it is. Christians and lions. And not too many fucking Christians, either.'

He swigged tequila. Then he said, ‘Hold this,' and handed her the bottle. ‘You want wind in your brain? Is that what you want?'

At that moment, Elia Kazan came up, looking sweaty and concerned. He was closely followed by Jim's accountant, and a woman whom Aunt Beverley didn't recognize. ‘Jim, get out of the car, please, you've been drinking all night.'

‘We're going to the beach,' Jim insisted. ‘Beverley wants to feel the wind in her brain.'

‘Jim, I'm serious, get out of the car!'

Jim frowned at Aunt Beverley, and his expression was deeply drunk-serious. ‘Tell me, Beverley, why do you want the wind in your brain?'

‘Because I did something tonight that I want to forget about.'

Oh, yes?'

‘I arranged for somebody to meet somebody, and I don't think that somebody's going to come out of it too happy.'

‘I see! You've got a guilty conscience!'

‘If that's the way you want to put it.'

‘Well . . . there's only one way to get rid of a guilty conscience, and that's to go to meet your Maker, and look Him in the face, and say, “So?” '

Elia Kazan said, ‘Jim, get out of the car, will you? This is crazy!'

Jim violently revved the engine, so that the Pontiac's suspension dipped with torque. ‘Sorry, Gadge. Meet us at the beach, why don't you?'