Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (28 page)

    "Oh, she was nice enough to me, not a bitch, I mean. Not cruel at all. We even went out for a while, but it wasn't real. It was like she was doing me a favour, to not hurt my feelings. I could tell it didn't really mean anything to her.

    "That was not the way she felt about Finn.

    "I knew there was something between them, right from the first. Finn was younger than she was, barely a kid. but they had known each other all their lives, since they were little. They had always gotten along, I guess, and as they got older that deepened into something beyond friendship. I could see it; I hated to see it, but I did. That should have been me.

    "But what could I say? He was my brother. It wouldn't have done any good anyway. So I kept my feelings to myself.

    "But at the graduation party, when I saw her there, laughing, flirting, talking to Finn, I couldn't stand it. There was something around them, a force field, something between them and the rest of the world. They were together, and all the rest of us were out here, on the other side.

    "I don't even know if they understood it themselves, in any conscious way. But I could see it. And it made me crazy.

    "That day at the graduation party, I kept coming across them. Not in any kind of compromising position, I mean, not making-out or even holding hands. Just standing there, talking. But I could see it, the energy between them, the way they looked at each other. They were together. I couldn't take it."

    Dougal paused to take a drink. When he stopped talking you could hear the waves breaking on the beach outside. The bay had always been part of the admiral's house for me, almost an extension of it. There were no lights on the deck, but the moonlight touched up the shape of things and spilled across the water, so that you could see the silhouettes of neighbouring houses, boats tied up nearby, a distant line of houses on the other shore of the cove, hunched up in the dark with a few lights burning.

    "You know those islands across the bay?" Dougal asked. "The barrier islands. You can see them easily in daylight, green bars on the horizon. They're only about, I don't know, four miles away." Dougal looked toward the islands, invisible in the dark, sipping at his bourbon.

    "I went up to Finn, pointed to those islands.

    '"Think you could swim to those islands?'" I asked him. 'Little brother?'

    "He looked at me, a little up and down look like he couldn't believe I was really that lame.

    " 'Sure,' he said.

    " 'Well come on then.'

    " 'What, right now?'

    " 'Right now. Unless you think you can't,' I pushed him. 'Unless you don't have it.'

    "I knew he was a punk swimmer, no stamina. I also knew that Jeanne was right there, talking to someone else, but well within hearing. She was looking over at us, frowning a little. I knew she was about to come over and come between us, so I pushed Finn harder.

    " 'Come on, little brother, if you can,' and I turned and ran and dove into the water, without even taking my shirt off.

    "He was right behind me, like I knew he would be.

    "We were both a little drunk by then, I guess. We swam out across the cove, into the big part of the bay. It had been a warm day, and the bay was pretty calm, dead still. We tore it up.

    "After a while I pulled up and looked behind me. Finn was still coming on, a little further behind now. I could just see the house, and the beach. I couldn't make out the people; I doubt they could see us at all.

    "When Finn was almost up to me I took off again.

    "The bay's pretty shallow for the most part. In a good low tide you could walk across most of it. But there's one part where the channel comes out from between the islands, where it shelves off, pretty deep. The water gets dark there. You can feel it get colder, deeper, more powerful. You can almost feel that the water is a being, there, a living thing, that knows you're there. Do you know what I mean? It's frightening, sometimes.

    "When we got to the deep part I was far ahead of Finn. Then I thought I heard him call out, call my name: 'Dougal!' I stopped swimming, and hung there, paddling, looking back towards him. At first I couldn't see him; I remember thinking he must have gone under. Then his head came up. He was close enough that I could see his eyes, popping out with panic.

    "'Doog!' he yelled, 'Doog! help me!' Then he went down again.

    "I just hung there. There was something cold in me, cold and unmoveable, cold and dark like the deep water.

    "It's not true what they say about a drowning man goes down three times. Finn never came up again.

    "I watched my brother drown, man! I watched my brother drown.

    "After a while I swam over to where I saw him last, and dove down. I didn't see anything the first time. Visibility's never very good in the bay, too much mud and sediment stirred up all the time.

    "The second time I went down I saw something pale, floating with its arms hanging. Maybe he was dead already, I don't know. I didn't try to find out.

    "I came up again, and started yelling and waving my arms, just in case there was anyone around I hadn't noticed, boaters or fishermen; we were way too far from the beach for them to hear us, or even make us out against the water. Then I began to swim back."

* * *

    The heavy night was heavier now, the darkness thicker. This is why he brought me here, I thought, to make this confession. But there was more to come.

    I thought back to Dougal's return, shivering in the stern of the boat that had finally gone out after them, wrapped in a blanket, his long blond hair darkened by the water, hanging down around his face.

    They never found Finn's body. People thought it must have been carried out by the tide through the channel and out to sea.

    We were quiet for a long while after he told me about Finn. Dougal drank pretty steadily, looking out over the water, his eyes searching for something, as if he were trying to see back through the years to two swimming figures headed for the distant islands.

    Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. The silence seemed to pack my head until I thought it would explode.

    "Where did you go, Dougal? After that?" I asked him. "I lost touch with you. We all did."

    He seemed to travel back a considerable distance before he replied.

    "Went away to school," he said eventually. "Far away. I chose the school I went to because it was far away. I thought I would never see anyone from around here again."

    "Did you?"

    He smiled oddly. "No, not really." He reached for a bottle, knocked it off the table. We were both pretty drunk at this point.

    "But something followed me," Dougal said after he had retrieved the rolling bottle and topped up.

    "Something? What do you mean?"

    "Something. Little things, at first. Little reminders. Just to let me know I wasn't forgotten, wasn't forgiven. Little things like you would hardly notice." He looked over at me in the dark, squinting through the shadows and the whiskey.

    "Like when I went to my dorm room, the first time. My roomie hadn't showed up yet; I was there by myself. When I sat down on my bed, to get a feel for the place, it was wet. I pulled the sheets off: it was soaked through, as if someone had turned a hose on it."

    "A practical joke? People do terrible things to freshmen sometimes."

    "Maybe. But it was salt water. You could smell it. And not clean salt water. It smelled like the mudflats at low tide, with every dying thing in the universe turning to rotten black mud, bubbling and stinking. It smelled like that.

    "I ran out of there.

    "But when I went back later, my new roomie was there, unpacking. My bed was dry. I couldn't smell anything.

    "That's the way it was. At every important point in my life, every time something was about to happen, to change, to begin, there would be a reminder. I knew it was Finn."

    "Finn?"

    Dougal nodded. "I knew. Things like that didn't just happen by accident. He was letting me know, telling me it would never be all right.

    "When I went to take my bar exam, the first time, for instance. They had those plastic chairs, you remember, with the Formica slab to write on, metal legs. The seats were contoured to fit your ass. But in the seat of my chair there was a pool of water, with a strand of eelgrass floating in it. Eelgrass! I was in the mid-west, miles inland. How did eelgrass get on my chair? How did he know which chair I was going to pick?

    "Things like that kept happening. They fucked me up, threw me off my stride. I failed that bar exam, you know. The second time, too. I gave up after that. I knew Finn would never let me pass it.

    "Some mornings I'd wake up wet and chilled, as if I'd slept outside all night. The sheets lay on me thick and heavy, like wet sailcloth. Everything smelled of mud and death.

    "Then I knew he'd been there, with me, all night."

    Dougal's lost his mind, I thought, lost his mind from guilt and drink and sorrow. My own grief woke up and opened up a pit in me. I poured whiskey into it. Maybe losing your mind, I thought, wasn't the worst thing that could happen.

    "Little things like that," Dougal went on. "He was always with me. Isn't that what they say? 'I am with you always,'" he laughed derisively.

    "But I tried to get on, you know? I kept trying to live my life."

    "You can get used to anything," I lied.

    "Not this. I began to brace for it. I tried to be ready for it. But it always seemed to take me by surprise.

    "I got married at one point," Dougal said, as if he couldn't believe it. "To Marcie, someone I worked with, a great woman. We were pretty happy together at first. I couldn't believe Finn would let it happen. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, for him to show himself, but nothing happened. I actually began to think it was over, that he was satisfied somehow, and would leave me alone now. That by falling in love and getting married I had atoned, or balanced things in some way.

    "But I was wrong. He was just waiting, waiting for things to get good for me, so that when he ruined them there would be something to lose, something that would hurt.

    "Marcie and I did the whole married thing - car, house in the 'burbs. No kids, thank god, but we talked about having them, made plans.

    "Then, after about a year, I began to smell that smell, that evil low-tide reek, everywhere. I tried to scrub it out of the house. I became a fanatic, cleaning everything constantly. My wife thought I'd lost my mind.

    "I began to find things, too. Between the pages of a book, there'd be a piece of marsh grass, still damp. And there was sand everywhere all of a sudden, gritty underfoot. Sand in my bed. That smell. We were still in the mid-west, I was determined never to go back to the coast, never to smell salt water again, never see anyone I knew from here. But it all came to me.

    "Then, I started hearing him."

    "Finn? Did he speak to you? What did he say?"

    "Not words. That might have been better. It couldn't have been worse. What I heard was breathing, someone breathing. But not regular breathing - gasping, gurgling, choking - the sounds of someone trying to breathe under water. It got so it was the background music to everything I did.

    " 'What are you always listening for?' my wife would ask me. It aggravated her. I never listened to
her,
she said, right before she left me. She said she wanted to be with someone who was actually
there
all the time, who wasn't always sitting there wishing he were anywhere else, listening to things no one else could hear.

    "There was more to it than that, of course. You fill in the gaps. But the upshot of it was that we got divorced. I left town, bummed around a while. That's when I started drinking, seriously, I mean.

    "I stopped hearing the breathing after the divorce. Everything stopped. But I knew he was just waiting for me to settle down, to get happy again. So I kept moving, kept drinking.

    "I lived that way for years.

    "Then my mom died, down in Florida. Dad had died the year before - I missed the funeral. When I went down there to take care of things, I found out we still had this house - they couldn't bear to sell it, and had rented it out when they moved to Florida. So I came back here to get rid of it.

    "That was a mistake. I knew as soon as I walked in the door that I would never leave here again. Finn wanted me here. All of his persecution had this one end, to drive me back to this house.

    "And here I was.

    "I would sit here and drink, like this, night after night. I would sit here and yell at the water, challenge him.

    " 'Come on out, Finn! Here I am! I'm waiting for you!'"

    "Then, finally, he came up out of the water and showed himself to me."

    I shuddered; in spite of everything Dougal had told me up to now, I wasn't ready for this.