The Twilight Swimmer (12 page)

The Swimmer had never been above water after dawn.

On more than one occasion, he had watched the sun rise from perhaps thirty feet below the surface. He had flattened his body on a gentle current, his shoulders thrown back and his long legs floating, looking up through layers of distorting ocean as the black sky turned a blue that was somehow darker. He had watched the blue lighten, watched pinks and oranges erode the already fading night sky until, even from his depth, the sight of the morning taking hold was brilliant and humbling.

But his enjoyment of the sunrise was always short-lived. The same light that turned the sky into a glorious mosaic of pristine color also penetrated the protective water. Like the colorless creatures that skittered across the ocean floor, he was meant to inhabit the darkness. That he could see at all was a testament to his need to hunt at every depth, not of his fitness for life in the shallows. Only at night were his eyes fully functional, dilating from corner to corner, to capture the subtle light of the moon and stars. Only at night could he break through the foaming crest of a wave and let the cool air touch his skin with no fear of the light.

That morning, after Brandi’s departure, his fear became crystalline reality. Dawn broke outside the hunting cabin, and the Swimmer felt his heart beat more rapidly in his chest until there was no space between the beats. It became the rolling rumble of thunder, a storm of excitement and anxiety roiling behind his ribs. He was drawn to the window cut into the wooden wall, even while the light that brought it into sharp relief caused his stomach to churn and his muscles to tighten involuntarily. He had never seen these colors without the filter of water, and the assault on his senses was overwhelming. His eyes were not designed for exposure to so much beauty. His pale skin was not designed for the direct touch of the light.

And before long, the corrosive light was filling the cabin. Shaken from his reverie, the Swimmer felt his eyes contract to blot out the invasive light. The clothing Brandi had given him offered some protection for his body. But before long, he felt the gentle warmth on his skin intensify.

He was burning.

In sudden panic, the Swimmer threw himself on the floor before the sofa. The furniture was nearly large enough to shield his body from the shaft of light that pressed urgently through the window. But his feet extended a few inches beyond the end of the couch, and he felt the skin of his exposed toes tighten and wrinkle, like bacon sizzling on a griddle. The sensation was subtle, but the danger was unmistakable. Likewise, his shoulders were broad enough that lying on his side left his right shoulder too high to be shielded by the back of the couch. Sunlight reached over the sofa and kissed the point of that shoulder, causing the Swimmer to wipe frantically at the area, desperate to cool it, but to no avail.

The window. He had to cover the window.

He threw his shoulder into the base of the couch and pushed hard, forcing its peg legs to scrape along the wood panel floor. The loose leg immediately broke free and spun off into the corner. He hardly noticed. He kept pushing. The angle of protection afforded by the couch was gone, and the sunlight beat down on the Swimmer with greater fury. He cried out, the pain intense, but kept pushing until the couch struck the back wall. The back wasn’t tall enough to cover the window, but the Swimmer dug his fingers under the bottom edge of the frame and, with a single burst of strength, lifted the couch up on one end. Cushions spilled from the couch and bounced into a disorganized pile. But all the Swimmer noticed was that the level of the light in the room had dropped substantially. The window was concealed.

Light from the window still illuminated its edges, however. Like a large man standing in a doorway, the couch loomed in vertical silhouette, its corners glowing orange and fuzzy. The light bounced off the back of the couch and entered the cabin at an angle. Much less light than before, but more light than the Swimmer could comfortably bear. He tried to push the couch closer to the window, to press it flush against the wall, but the remaining pegs on the bottom of the couch left a two-inch gap. Exhausted, his skin still searing from exposure to direct sunlight, the Swimmer dropped to the floor and leaned against the couch. There was a rectangle of light on the floor before him, the outline of the couch magnified by the sun behind it. He pulled his feet away from the light, drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.

And now he saw other sources of light all around the cabin. The boards that comprised the walls of the cabin were warped, leaving tiny spaces for the light to infiltrate. The frame of the door didn’t fit snugly, and so another rectangle of light appeared on the floor, overlapping the lines produced by the couch’s silhouette. There was light emanating, ghost-like, from the yawning mouth of the fireplace. It was so innocuous the night before, but seemed now, to the Swimmer, to be humming a low, persistent threat.

He was trapped, and the day had only just begun.

During her trigonometry class, Brandi struggled to keep her eyes open. Her teacher, Mr. Haverly, droned on for what felt like hours. He scribbled equations on the board, but they looked like hieroglyphs to her. The adrenaline from the previous night had faded, and left her feeling delirious with fatigue. Staring at the chalkboard, the numbers and symbols appeared to be vibrating. She knew it wasn’t so, and she tried to steady her gaze and force the numbers to settle down, but every word from Mr. Haverly’s mouth seemed to produce a sound wave that caused the whole board to shudder. It was eerie. She could actually see the physical shape of his words.

I wanted to see your voice
, the Swimmer had said.

Her eyes drifted closed. She began to daydream, transported to her kayak as it flew across the channel. She saw his pale head below the surface of the water, his pale hand gripping the bow of the boat as he dragged it effortlessly. She placed her hand on the boat frame, not far from his. Slowly, silently, she slid her hand along the frame until her fingers were almost touching his hand. Cool spray leapt up from the channel where the kayak sliced through the water. It fell like rain on her skin, and on his skin. She edged her fingers closer. She touched him…

“Ms. Vine,” said Mr. Haverly, standing over her. Her eyes flew open, the daydream cut short. “The equation on the board is desperate for your services.”

 
              After class, Brandi strolled down the hall toward her locker. She looked toward the doors at the end of the hall and the bright day outside. It was so enticing, the sunlight. She could dump her books in her locker and make a break for it. She could hitchhike back to the cabin. Back to the Swimmer. No one would stop her. She was expected at the police station after school. Her father had made that clear. But if she left now, maybe she could reach the cabin and make sure he was all right, then hitch a ride back in time to arrive at the station at the expected hour.

To her surprise, she caught sight of Kelly Crutes beyond the doors. She was sitting on the metal bar of a bike rack, flipping through a notebook. Brandi walked that direction to join her, just as the bell rang and sent the other students scurrying into classrooms up and down the hall. But as Brandi opened the door and stepped outside into the late summer warmth, Kelly slid off her perch and started walking away along the brick exterior wall of the school.

“Kelly, wait!” Brandi called as she sped up to catch her.

Kelly didn’t seem to hear her. She was too focused on her notebook. When Brandi finally caught up with her and placed a hand on her shoulder, Kelly jumped, badly startled. She slammed her notebook closed and tucked it under her arm, shielding it from Brandi’s view. “What do you want?” she asked, suspicious.

“Nothing, I just… I didn’t know you were back at school. How are you feeling?” asked Brandi.

Kelly studied Brandi for a long moment, her expression blank. Then her eyes softened and went moist. “No one believes me,” she said in a whisper, her voice wavering.

“Believes what?” asked Brandi, sure she already knew the answer.

“He was there, at the warehouse. I know I saw him. He carried me out of there. He saved my life.” Kelly let out a little squeak, a hint of residual fear from her dangerous night in the fire. “I know he’s real. But nobody believes me. Nobody believes me!”

Kelly burst into tears, her whole body shaking. She pulled her notebook out from under her arm and, with shaking hands, opened it for Brandi to see. On the first several lined pages, Kelly had drawn pictures of a tall, slender man. No hair on his head. Gray eyes staring. The first drawing was very crude, the proportions not quite right for the Swimmer. But subsequent drawings were more accurate, and Kelly flipped from page to page, showing Brandi the progression. The pose was always the same, his body standing upright, shoulders thrown back and chin lifted high. The effect of her flipping from one to the next was something like animation, his body evolving from a generic human outline to take on greater specificity, still human but more exotic. She had captured the slight webbing between his fingers, the slight protrusion of his ribs, the gentle hook to his elbows. And his eyes. With each drawing, she had given his gray eyes greater intensity.

“He’s real! I know he’s real!” Kelly shrieked.

She kept flipping through the pages. Now they contained more than a single drawing, more than a single pose. But every picture was of the Swimmer, finely rendered and haunting in its accuracy. Brandi felt as if he was alive on the page, looking out at her with those piercing gray eyes. And as the pictures grew more cropped, more focused on his face, she could make out the faint line under his jaw where he had expelled the dark water he drew from Kelly’s lungs. More unsettling, more captivating, she thought she could see his lips parting.

“I was there. I believe you,” Brandi whispered.

Kelly squealed again and threw her arms around Brandi, throwing them both off balance. Brandi supported Kelly’s weight and prevented them both from falling. “Do you want to see him again?” she asked.

Nervously, Kelly shook her head ‘yes’.

“Where’s your car parked?”

They didn’t speak on the drive to the cabin. Kelly was hunched over the wheel, muttering to herself. Brandi pretended not to notice, but kept a careful eye on the road to make sure Kelly’s distraction didn’t run them off the shoulder and into a ditch. Her two-door was ancient, with bald tires and no suspension to soften the ride as they turned off the pavement and onto the dirt access road that led to the cabin. It was always a bumpy ride, even in her father’s truck. But riding in Kelly’s car felt like riding in a wheelbarrow pulled by a team of horses.

She directed Kelly to park down the road from the cabin. Leaving fresh tire tracks anywhere near the building seemed like a bad idea. Her father was unlikely to drive out to the cabin before hunting season started. And if he did, the presence of the Swimmer would concern him a lot more than evidence a car had been parked on his property. Still, even after the Swimmer was gone, tracks from an unfamiliar vehicle would crank the gears in his detective’s mind. She didn’t want to have to play dumb to any questions he might ask. So Kelly parked down the road, and they walked the last hundred yards to the cabin’s front door. Kelly dug around in her purse and pulled out a digital camera.

“What’s that for?” asked Brandi.

“I have to take pictures. I have to. So I know I’m not crazy.”

“But you can’t show them to any—”

“No! Of course not! I would never do that. Not to him. I would never… betray him.”

Before she opened the door, Brandi took a deep breath and turned back to Kelly. “Don’t be afraid, okay? And don’t frighten him. If you scream or faint or try to grab him… I don’t know what he’ll do. Just don’t do any of those things, okay?”

Kelly nodded as if she was listening, but her eyes were wide with excitement and she absentmindedly tapped her toes on the ground. She wasn’t listening to Brandi at all. But Brandi had come this far, and Kelly wasn’t going anywhere. With another deep breath, her heart thumping and her stomach doing somersaults, she pushed in the cabin door.

The couch was leaning against the wall, half covering the window. Its cushions were lying in a haphazard heap a few feet away. One of them was torn at the seam, its stuffing spilling out in garish white tufts. The window itself appeared to be broken, shards of glass lying on the sill and more on the wooden floor. Both floor lamps were lying on their sides, their bulbs shattered. The trunk of one had been bent at an awkward angle, like a human limb after a grisly car crash. The shade of the second lamp was shredded, dangling in ribbons like a weatherworn flag. All this was startling, but the floor was the most shocking feature of the room. The wood was chipped and dug out in long grooves. It looked as though a heavy axe had been dragged across it, a sharp corner biting against the grain and gouging it slowly. But Brandi knelt to take a closer look and saw that the grooves were uneven depths, and grouped in clusters. Each cluster was five lines, evenly spaced, less than an inch apart. And now she saw, clearly, that she was looking at scratches made by nails.

By fingernails.

Kelly had stepped past Brandi and wandered into the cabin, mouth agape. She followed the scratches to one wall and found additional clusters that ran vertically. Whatever had left these markings had left them… everywhere. It looked like a pack of wolves had been trapped within these walls and tried desperately to claw their way out.