The Twilight Swimmer (13 page)

Kelly lifted her camera and began snapping photos of the scratches, her hands shaking so badly that they couldn’t possibly be in focus.

“What is this?” asked Kelly, her voice quavering. “He did this? The tall man?”

Brandi wandered the room, taking mental stock of the damage. How could she explain any of this to her father? She wouldn’t have to, she supposed. As far as he would know, vandals had broken into the cabin and destroyed everything they laid hands on. He wouldn’t have to know she had been here at all, so long as Kelly kept quiet about the unsettling scene.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Brandi, masking her own unease.

Kelly was suddenly very unsteady on her feet, her eyes rolling. Brandi took her arm and led her over to the wall, where Kelly went limp in her arms and dropped to the floor. She wasn’t quite passed out, but she was severely dizzy. She dropped her camera, and it bounced a few feet away from her, coming to rest against a savaged couch cushion.

“Okay, enough excitement for one day,” said Brandi. “Let’s get you home.”

The Swimmer had felt his skin changing as the sunlight filled the room.

It was torturous for him, like sitting in an oven while the heat was slowly turned up. But it wasn’t the heat that accosted him so severely. It was the light itself. And it turned his skin into a clinging torment. He tried to find patches of shadow to curl up inside, but the light found its way into every corner of the cabin. The pain grew so severe he could hardly make sense of it. Then the fear took over. He lost control of himself, lashing out at the couch, ripping its cushions free and shredding one. He threw his weight against the couch until one corner pressed against the hidden window and shattered the glass. He cried out in frustration and agony, driving his fingers into the wood beneath him. He dragged them through the wood, carving out fragments that drove beneath his nails and pierced the soft skin underneath. It didn’t matter. That pain was nothing to him compared to the onslaught of the light. He raked the floor again and again, with his fingers and his toes. He scratched at the walls, as if to burrow his way inside the wood and take refuge within its dark interior.

But there was nowhere for him to hide. He fought for clarity despite the pain, and he knew he needed to act or he would die here.

He had to find darkness. The darkness he could only be sure of in the water.

His heart pounding, his skin crawling, he wrenched open the cabin door. The dense blanket of sunlight that fell upon him almost took his breath away. His arms came up to shield his eyes while they narrowed to protective slits. He mustered all of his strength, all of his courage, and bolted for the waterway at the base of the hill. His knees were weak, and he struggled to keep his feet, but he still had strength in his legs and they propelled him with tremendous speed. At the water’s edge he vaulted forward, slicing through the air, and dove beneath the surface with the agility that had served him so well for so many years.

The coolness of the water was instant relief to his skin, and had a calming effect on him. But as he kicked hard, working his way back through the waterway toward the ocean some distance beyond, he could still feel the sun pushing down on his body. The water was much too shallow to provide real shelter for him. Its coolness could not save him from the horrors of long-term exposure. And so he swam as fast as he could manage, darting around obstacles, bending his body to accommodate curves in the water’s path. He didn’t dare look up, or even to keep his eyes open. He relied instead on his sense of touch, on his ability to gauge the movement of the water around the walls that confined and funneled it, and on his memory of the course they took the previous night to reach the cabin. He had a mental map of the entire trek, and could easily reverse it to guide himself back to the big water.

The distance wasn’t great for a prodigious swimmer, but he was so badly reduced by the effects of the sun that he struggled to keep up his speed. His energy was fading quickly, and his fear had receded enough that the pain was reasserting itself. His joints were stiffening beneath the skin, the flesh around them swelling. He felt every surge of blood from his pumping heart as the fluid struggled to pass through constricted veins. He needed to reach the depths soon, or he might falter completely and lose consciousness. For him, to lose consciousness would be a death sentence.

But at last, just as his last reserve of strength dissipated and his kicking slowed to metronomic reflex, he felt the temperature of the water drop considerably. He felt a stronger current pressing against him as the ocean sent low waves past the edge of the shore and into the estuary. The discovery that he was close gave him a jolt of adrenaline, just enough to fight through the last of the shallow water and into the bay. The ocean floor dropped off quickly, and he kept his belly flat against it as he descended, with overwhelming relief. The darkness called to him, drew him downward, and the cold wrapped its arms around him. The light faded with each kick of his long feet, with each gyration of his torso. His eyes opened and his irises widened to let in the small amount of remaining light as the sun faded from view, swallowed up by the heavy water between him and the surface. He felt the comforting pressure of the water at this depth, the security it offered.

He was home.

But he wasn’t safe. Not yet.

Severely weakened by his time above the water, his skin badly burned by the sun, he was easy prey for any enterprising predator he might come across. Even scavengers might take him for a corpse and began the laborious process of breaking him down to food and sediment. He was vulnerable to this environment in a way he never would be while healthy and strong. To regain his strength, to recuperate, he needed desperately to sleep. But to sleep in the open would be to invite attack. He could burrow into the sandy bottom, but even that would require strength he didn’t think he could summon.

There. Through the murky haze, he saw it rising from the flat bottom of the sea floor. A structure, curved on one side, poles jutting out from the other at a peculiar angle. It was lying on its side, and had been for many years. He recognized it immediately as a ship, its hull half-buried and its deck sloping down into the sea floor where it disappeared. There were sections of the ship’s exterior that were torn away, by storm or by impact he couldn’t be sure. But the vessel was largely intact. And it was exactly what he needed now – a refuge.

He swam the length of the ship, perhaps sixty feet from the protruding bow to the place where the stern was buried. If it were resurrected from its ocean grave, the ship might be two hundred feet long. A grand vessel, a titan of another age. It was fashioned of some sort of metal. What kind, he couldn’t be sure. But he recognized the rust that lined its rougher edges, and could imagine the ship sliding overhead, proudly, while he and his kind swam playfully below its rudders and propellers. He had seen them painted in every color of the rainbow: vivid reds and subdued yellows, greens that suggested the vibrant beauty of the plant life that lined the shores. And blues. Such blues! Every shade he knew from the ocean and many he had only dreamed of. The only rival for the beauty of these colored ships were the tiny fish that darted in and out of coral reefs, each one daring the next to be more audacious, more flagrantly stunning. But while these fish could match the ships for sheer beauty, the scale of the ships made each colossus a demigod of the human world. When they fell from glory and sank to the bottom, to the depths of his world, the ships lost only some of their grandeur. Their beauty dimmed by lack of light, they still reminded the Swimmer of their proud heritage, and of the lineage they left behind. Each ship was a marker in time, a stop on the line of human progress, and he never wearied of swimming their mighty shapes and slashing his way through windows and rents in the metallic flesh, to explore the mysterious interiors where men had walked, upright, basking in the same light that held him captive here, in the ocean depths.

But this day, the Swimmer had no time to revel in the majesty of the sunken vessel. He needed to rest. And so he wormed his way through a gaping, glassless window. He swam through a murky room lined with deteriorating furniture only vaguely reminiscent of its original shape. He swam down a long corridor, and laterally through a stairwell that had once been on a vertical slant before the ship found purchase on its side. He found a hatch still attached by rusting hinges, and he twisted his way through the jammed opening. Beyond the hatch, a tiny room. Very little space, but enough space for him. He pressed his haggard body against a pile of a sediment that had found its way inside the ship, wrapped his weary arms around his torso, and slowed his heart to such a degree that it hardly beat at all.

He was safe here. He could sleep.

He could heal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The police station was located a block south of the town square. It was a re-purposed schoolhouse, and still looked very much as it had upon its construction some hundred years earlier. The only meaningful change was to the rear wall of the building. It had been constructed of pinewood, originally. However, when the building was adopted by the police department in the 1960’s, and a row of incarceration cells were installed, the planners thought it was wise to replace the wood with reinforced concrete slabs. There had been some fear, it seemed, that a wily prisoner might dig his way through the pine and find freedom waiting for him on the other side. Or, someone on the outside might attempt to hack through to liberate a cohort. Both of these possibilities were rather silly, particularly in a fishing town where criminal activity was usually limited to public drunkenness. The final determination had been made, however, when a grocery store one block over had gone up in flames. If the same fate befell the newly converted police station, a confined man might be trapped between a wall of fire and a row of vertical iron bars. And so, reinforced concrete won the day.

As Brandi entered the building, she looked up at the apex of the peaked roof. It still had the look of a schoolhouse, and she felt transported to another era every time she stopped by to visit her father. When she was younger, she would come here with Jenny on Saturday afternoons. It was her Mother’s way of ridding herself of the girls so she could go shopping, but the girls were none the wiser. To them, a trip to see their father at the office was a special privilege. While their mother always insisted that they behave like ladies, even at home when no one was there to judge her parental control, Conrad let the girls run around at full speed and holler loud enough to raise the dead. He seemed to enjoy the chaos they brought to his otherwise sedate office. He went so far as to keep a bag of candy in his bottom desk drawer, their little secret from Mom, and the fuel that often sent them running and hollering in the first place. Brandi always went for something chewy and fruit flavored while Jenny preferred chocolate in any and every form. Conrad abstained, but never missed a chance to tease either daughter with the notion that they’d managed to select the exact treat he wanted for himself.

When Brandi entered, she found that the cells at the back of the open room were, as usual, empty. Empty of prisoners, at least. One of the three enclosures had been appropriated for storage and was jammed with overstuffed filing cabinets and cardboard boxes that looked as old as the building. The boxes on the bottom buckled under the weight of the boxes above, papers and other sundry objects bursting out between the layers. A framed oil painting jutted through the bars near one wall. It was a gift to the police department by an elderly man, Davis Carmichael, in gratitude for the rescue of his lost beagle Mimsy. The precocious pup had escaped his withered owner one afternoon during a prolonged nap on the porch, and had disappeared. Davis was distraught at the loss, fearing the worst. Mimsy would never stray from his side for any reason unless she had been victimized by some grave misfortune or by some foul misdeed. Conrad took the case, and managed to track Mimsy down several days later. She was gnawing on a pizza crust outside the new schoolhouse, not a half mile from the porch on which Davis had been napping that fateful day. In return for returning the wayward dog, Conrad had received a painting of the dog, sitting on a velvet pillow, like royalty, snout lifted to the sky. The painting had never been hung, but it had leaned against every wall in the police station at one time or another.

Brandi could hear Sally’s voice, emanating from the storage cell, but she couldn’t see the old woman. She had wormed her way between a stack of boxes and a bookshelf, and was barking orders at an empty room.

“Bring that crate, the blue crate. Can you hear me? The
blue
crate!”

The target of Sally’s orders ambled into the room carrying a blue crate full of dishes. It was the young officer who had found Brandi at the scene of the warehouse fire and driven her home. He didn’t notice Brandi standing by the office door. He was too focused on holding the crate upright so the topmost dishes wouldn’t slide over the lip and crash to the cement floor. “You know you’ve got two blue crates back there.”

Sally emerged from her hiding place, her long gray hair tied back and braided. Her red-framed glasses dangled from a thin chain, bouncing against her frail chest as she wiggled out of the cell to examine the crate. “I said the blue crate, Dallas.”

“And I said you’ve got two blue crates,” Dallas replied. “This is one of them. See? Blue.”

“I’d call it green. Bluish green.” Sally grabbed the crate and gave it a shake, threatening to loose a dish or two after all. Dallas’s eyes went wide with quick panic, but he wrestled the crate out of her grip and turned it away from her protectively. “It’s not the one you want?”