The Visitors, page 11
“I don’t care what you mean. I’m not going to pay money to stay in a hotel when there’s a perfectly good house right here.”
“It isn’t a good house! It frightens me!”
“Then go home.”
She looked at him for several moments, and then she said, “I’ll tell you one thing, George Merkimer. If I go home it’ll be for good, and it won’t be the home you’re thinking of. If I go home it’ll be to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and anyone who wants me will have to take a dog team to find me.”
He returned her stare, and for a while there was silence. “Go ahead,” he said at last. “I dare you.”
She rose from the table. “Will you call a cab?”
“Call your own cab. This is your idea.”
“Very well.” She looked up the telephone number and made a call, and he watched in silence. Then she hung up, and glared at him defiantly. “Make my excuses to Kathryn, will you?” she said. “Tell her I’ll write a bread-and-butter letter shortly.”
His face tightened into an icy smile. “And what do you think you’re going to use for money?”
“And now I’ll tell you another thing,” she said. “Your whole world revolves around money; you can’t even look at a tree or a pond or a cloud without wondering how much it would cost to buy it. Well, there’s a big section of the world that gets along very nicely without money, and I’m going back to it.”
“Very pretty. Will a speech like that buy you a ticket to Upper Moose Jaw, or wherever?”
“I’ve also put away enough, over the last ten years, to buy my own transportation.”
His smile broadened into a grin. “So money comes in handy, after all,” he said. “You wouldn’t be so brave without it.”
“You wouldn’t be anything without it. Nobody would look at you twice, and God knows nobody would put up with you.”
He looked out the window for a minute or two, then said, “How did you manage to put away any money? You can’t have done it on what I gave you.”
“You’re right I couldn’t. I did it by padding the household accounts—a little here, a little there, and over the years it added up. I had a feeling it might come in handy, and I was right.”
“You bitch.”
“What did you expect? I earned it—I earned it five times over, and just because you’re too cheap to give it to me doesn’t mean I didn’t have it coming. And I thank whatever ghosts are in this house for getting me out of the whole messy arrangement before I lost my mind. At least where I’m going I’ll have some self-respect, and not be what I was with you. It’s a big relief, and I’m here to tell you I feel better already.”
For the first time it occurred to him she was actually leaving. He had been indulgent at first, believing that in the long run he had the upper hand, but now it appeared that not only was she in grim earnest, but also that he had no way of stopping her. He rose from the table and stretched. “All right,” he said, with a yawn. “Joke’s over. Go back to your room.”
“I will not.”
“Do as you’re told, woman, or I’ll lock you up. And if you want to argue, I’ll have you arrested as a common thief. Now shut up and go to your room.” It was a transparent bluff, and he saw it hadn’t worked, so he moved closer to take hold of her. Then he saw her eyes widen, and she screamed.
“George!” she shrieked. “Look behind you!”
Instinctively he turned and looked, but saw only the cellar door swinging slowly open. A cold draft came up the stairs, and he slammed the door and bolted it, just as he heard Estelle run out the front door. He followed as far as the living room, and saw her run down the driveway and hail the taxi that was coming up the hill. She got in, and the taxi turned around and sped off. He watched it until it was out of sight.
ELEVEN
Fess Dorple became something of a celebrity as a result of his skin-diving in the cove. Previously, people had thought of him as a well-meaning but slightly slow youth, who would never be more than one of Doc Mellish’s workmen; now he had an aura of adventure about him, and people liked to be seen talking to him. This brought out hitherto unknown qualities: where he had once been quiet and retiring, he now blossomed forth as a raconteur, revealing incidents in his past that nobody would have guessed possible.
One afternoon he was in the Heart’s Ease Café, regaling the customers with an account of an abortive moose hunt, when Rabbit Warren came in and slid onto the stool next to him. Mother automatically uncapped a bottle of ale, and Warren sipped it slowly while Dorple finished his story. Then Warren said, “I know where you can do some more diving, if you’ve a mind to.”
“Where?” said Dorple.
“A couple of divers quit the salvage job, and they’re looking for replacements. The company don’t have no divers they can spare.”
Dorple thought this over. “What’s the money in it?” he asked.
“I ain’t doing the hiring. I just heard they could use a diver.”
Down the bar, Gloria Tritt spoke up. “Fess Dorple, if you take that job you’ll never come to the surface again. You go down, and you won’t come up.”
“Well,” said Dorple, defensively. “I did it once. There’s nothing to it.” He hadn’t particularly liked the dive, expecting as he did to find a body, and the thought of returning to the boat didn’t appeal to him.
“You were lucky once,” said Gloria. “In that cove, nobody’s luck holds more’n once.”
This, clearly, was a challenge, but Dorple would have preferred not to take it up. He was therefore grateful when Mother said, “What kind of talk is that? If a man did it once, it stands to reason he can do it again.”
“Mother, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gloria snapped. “That cove’s so full of haunts it’s a wonder there’s room for the fish.”
“You’ll believe anything,” replied Mother. “If someone was to tell you frogs had wings, you’d pass it on as gospel.”
“All I know is what happens,” Gloria said. “Too many people’s died in that cove.”
“You thought the house was haunted, too,” Warren put in. “I took you all through it, and you didn’t see one damn spook.”
“That was daytime.”
“Well, Fess ain’t going to be diving at night,” said Mother. “He’s going to do it in daytime, just like the rest of them.”
“So why’d they quit?”
“I hear the old man’s a bastard.”
The door opened and Zeke Frobisher came in, followed by Steve. “Looks like we’re late,” he said. “Nobody work today?”
To Mother, Gloria said, “Ask Zeke. He’ll tell you I’m right.”
“What’s that?” said Frobisher.
“Fess is going to do some diving in the cove, and Gloria’s trying to tell him it’s haunted. She thinks ghosts can go under water.”
Dorple realized that, as far as the rest of them were concerned, he had accepted the job. He started to say something, but Frobisher spoke first.
“Any man’d go in that cove is outa his mind,” Frobisher said. “That cove ain’t nothing but a death trap.”
“Then how come Fess got away with it?” Mother asked. Turning to Dorple, he said, “What about it, Fess? Did you see any ghosts when you was down there?”
“Not exactly,” Dorple replied. “But I ain’t said I’d do it—”
“You see?” Mother said to Frobisher. “The one man who’s been down there says there’s no ghosts.”
“As a matter of fact,” Dorple began, “I don’t know if the money’ll be enough to—”
“Then what happened to the boat captain?” Gloria persisted. “How come he disappeared?”
“Probably went over the hill,” said Mother. “All I know is no ghosts can go under water. And I’ll bet you even money Fess don’t see one single ghost all the time he’s diving there.”
“You got a bet,” Gloria replied. “And I’ll give you three to one he don’t come back.”
“Is that all right with you?” Mother asked Dorple. “Will you tell us if you see a ghost?” Dorple nodded numbly, and Mother turned back to Gloria. “O.K. A buck even, he don’t see no ghost.”
“A buck even,” said Gloria. “And three to one he don’t come back.”
Mother thought a moment. “If he don’t come back, how’ll we know he seen a ghost?”
Gloria laughed. “That’ll be obvious,” she said.
“All right,” said Mother. “You got a bet.”
Dorple went down to the cove next day, hoping they’d have found some other replacement, but the foreman signed him on immediately. They were going to try once more, the foreman explained, to put chains under the boat, and then lessen the strain by blowing compressed air into the flooded spaces. Uncle George stood on the dock and shouted instructions, which were ignored. “You got it clear now?” the foreman said. “You know what you gotta do?”
Dorple nodded, adjusting the straps on his weighted belt. Then a thought that had been nagging at him since yesterday returned, and he said, “What happened to the other divers?” The foreman waved a hand in disgust. “Temperamental bastards,” he said. “They wanted everything their own way.”
It was an unsatisfactory answer but it was all he was going to get, so Dorple pulled down his face mask, took the soft rubber breathing tube in his mouth, and adjusted the valves to his air tanks. The air was cold and tasted tinny, and he breathed experimentally a few times before he clambered down the ladder and dropped backward into the water. He flipped his fins and jackknifed under.
The moment he got below the surface he was afraid. He didn’t know of what, because the water looked no different from the time before, but a numbing fear gripped his chest and made his breath come faster. Below him, in the murky gloom, he could see the white outline of the boat like the underbelly of a shark, and on all sides the water disappeared into darkness that seemed to hide a thousand terrors. Everything looked unnaturally large, and menacing. He assured himself it was just the stories the people had told him at the bar, and that it was impossible for ghosts to be under water, but the fact remained that all his instincts urged him to get to the surface. He waited, about ten feet down, for his heart to return to normal, and he concentrated on the necessity of breathing regularly, while his eyes searched the gloom for any signs of danger. There were kelp-covered rocks, and a small cave in front of which he could see a lobster waiting, and there was the quick flash of a school of minnows darting past. Strands of reddish seaweed undulated slowly in the current, and he could hear the rattling sound of the waves breaking against the rocks. The sounds of his own breathing were loudest of all, hissing and rumbling in his ears. Cautiously, keeping his head moving from side to side, he flippered downward and circled the sunken boat, then touched bottom at the spot where a length of chain lay beneath the keel. He worked for a while on the chain, remembering what the foreman had told him to do, and he was so absorbed in his work that he failed to notice a school of small squid, which appeared in formation and hovered behind his shoulder. They were perhaps six inches long, and white, and they moved in such perfect unison that they might have been a single organism. They darted back and forth, their stabilizing fins fluttering madly, and then suddenly Dorple saw them and let out a bubbly, strangled scream, and they vanished. He backed against the hull and sank slowly to the sand, unable to gather the strength even to kick himself free and rise to the surface. His breath came in great, labored gasps, and he knew he was using too much oxygen, but he was powerless to do anything until he recovered from the shock of seeing what looked like thirty thousand tiny eyes staring at him out of an acre of tentacles. Finally his heart returned to normal, and he started to get up. Beneath him, something twitched at his behind, and he swirled around and saw he’d been sitting on a horseshoe crab, which now glided off across the sand, its spikelike tail forking defiantly upward. He hung onto the side of the wreck for a moment, smiling because he now knew there were no ghosts; what had frightened the others were natural phenomena of the sea. They had frightened him, too, but he’d been able to conquer the fear, and was now master of himself. Looking down, he saw the edge of a small box, and he stopped and tugged at it. It came away with a sucking motion and a cloud of sand, and he brushed it clean and opened it, and for a moment his breathing stopped and the bubbles ceased to rise from his mask. With a great effort he resumed normal breathing, so as not to disrupt his flow of air, and he stared at the box in his hands. He was looking into a cask of jewels such as he had never seen; there were gold clips, and diamond bracelets, and ruby pendants, and sapphire chokers, and an assortment of odds and ends of precious stones and gold and silver knickknacks that looked like the contents of a pirate’s chest. But this was a new box, and Dorple felt it probably belonged to the owner of the yacht.
But suppose it didn’t? Suppose it had come from another wreck, or had been dropped by someone else, what would be his chances of keeping it if he reported it? Pretty small, pretty damned small indeed. Most likely the foreman would claim it, and to hell with who had owned it to begin with. Better than to throw it away by reporting it, he should hide it for now, and come back at night and recover it. He looked for a hiding place, and saw the small cave with the lobster in front of it. The lobster retreated to one side, raising its claws over its head, as Dorple swam over and placed the box in the mouth of the cave. Then he returned to the wreck and glanced up at the surface, which looked like a muddied window pane, and slowly began his ascent.
“You took your time about it,” the foreman said, as Dorple hauled himself up the ladder. “What kept you?”
Dorple raised his mask, spat, and began to unfasten his weights. “It ain’t easy,” he replied. “You should try it yourself sometime.”
“I did,” said the foreman. “I been down there myself, so you can’t tell me nothing.”
Dorple glanced at him, and smiled. “That’s what you think,” he said.
All the regulars were at the Heart’s Ease Café when he walked in. Mother looked up, and his face broke into a leathery smile. “Ha!” he said. “He’s here! Gloria you owe me four bucks!”
Gloria swiveled on her bar stool, and surveyed Dorple sourly. “Sonofabitch,” she said. “I’d never of thought it.”
“Four bucks even,” said Mother. “Pay up.”
“Not so fast,” Gloria replied, as Dorple leaned casually against the bar. “He ain’t said if he seen no ghosts.”
“What about it, Fess?” said Mother, grinning. “Did you see one?”
Dorple examined his fingernails, determined to milk every possible bit of suspense out of the situation. “That’s hard to say,” he replied. “For a moment there, I wasn’t so sure.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?” said Mother impatiently. “There’s money riding on this.”
“I’ll tell you how it was,” Dorple replied. “Gimme a beer first.”
“This one’s on the house,” said Mother, uncapping a bottle and setting it on the bar.
Dorple took a long swallow and wiped his mouth. “Well, it was like this,” he said. “The minute I get down there, I know something’s wrong. I can’t describe it—it’s just a feeling, like when you come in a dark room and know there’s someone there.”
“So!” said Gloria, triumphantly. “A ghost!”
“So I get down to the wreck,” Dorple went on, ignoring her, “and all around I see things moving—the shadows are moving, the seaweed is moving, and things are creeping and crawling along the bottom. Things I never see before, and all of them are kind of moving and floating around, like—”
“Any corpses?” asked Gloria. “Was there any bodies, or skeletons?”
“None that I seen,” Dorple replied. “There coulda been, though. I didn’t go too far from the wreck.”
“You coulda been standing on a skeleton and not know it,” Gloria said, darkly. “They sink into the sand.”
“Gloria, shut up and let him tell the story,” said Rabbit Warren. “He knows what he seen and what he didn’t.”
“At any rate, I’m working on the chain,” said Dorple, “and suddenly I get this feeling there’s something behind me. At first I don’t wanta turn around, but I figure I might as well know if there’s something gonna jump me, so I look back”—he stopped, and took another long swallow of beer—“I look back, and there’s this big blob of white, with thousands of eyes staring at me, and then—VOOM! It’s gone! Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Vanished. I thought I’d like to die.”
“It was a ghost!” Gloria shouted. “I win the bet!”
“Wait a minute,” said Mother. “What do you think it was, Fess? Do you think it was a ghost?”
Dorple paused, and looked at the ceiling. “I got to be honest with you,” he said, at last. “I think it was a school of squid.”
“Squid my ass!” shrieked Gloria. “If it was squid, where’d they go to?”
“They move pretty fast,” said Dorple. “First you see ’em, then you don’t.”
“You just said it was a big blob!” Gloria protested. “A big blob of white!”
“That’s what it looked like. They was packed kinda close together, and when I first looked at ’em all I could see was white.”
“There ain’t no squids get that close together,” said Gloria. “This was a ghost.”
“Well, maybe.” Dorple drained his beer, and slid the glass forward. “Gimme another,” he said.
“Now, don’t go backing off like that,” Mother said, uncapping another bottle. “Either it was a ghost or it wasn’t; we can’t leave it open when there’s money on it.”
“It was a ghost,” said Gloria. “And nobody’s gonna tell me different.”
“Well, he’s here, so you owe me three bucks on that bet,” said Mother. “You can’t get around the fact he’s here.”
