Submerged Read online

Oh my God, what’s he doing? Cecilia braced herself against the glass, watching her liquid world guzzle away. I’ve got to get out of here before—

  She stopped. The frantic need to escape dropped from her like lotus petals. An ancient memory out of elementary school days washed over her. She was back in Miss Buxton’s fifth grade class, hearing her teacher convey a rather interesting fact about Our Friend, The Human Body. Cecilia’s eyes widened as a sweeping vista of possibility opened before her.

  Of course! Eureka! Whoo-hoo! With a wicked, wonderful smile, she stopped resisting and instead rode the rushing current of Pinot Noir to what was now her desired destination.

  Splashdown in Brent’s stomach was the figurative kickoff. She wasted no time spreading out from there. She sent threads of herself through every organ she fancied, invading any soft tissue that suited her intentions. When she took over his tongue, she relished his reaction of petrified surprise, but this was only the appetizer. Soon enough she was feasting with glee over his desperate struggles to cast out the alien presence making him say…things—horrible, incriminating, disgustingly honest things!

  He babbled about what a gold mine the Crawn Institute was, so long as there were well-heeled, gullible women who fancied themselves patrons of the arts. He described how that half-assed excuse for a school was his own private hunting preserve for one seduction after another. His recitation of conquests fell short of the “Catalog Aria” from Don Giovanni, but he took pains to tell Maud that his was still a work in progress. She fled the apartment weeping, but saved. She never noticed that while his confessions came freely, his eyes held the anguish of an animal caught in a leg-hold trap. Content with her handiwork for the moment, Cecilia gave Brent’s brain a strategic tweak that rendered him unconscious on the floor before she took off to rejoin Lara.

  The psychopomp was still loitering in the soup pot. She greeted Cecilia’s return with a cheerful, “Ready to go Over now?”

  “Not quite.” Cecilia recounted what she’d seen, what she’d done about it, and what she still intended to do before she was finished with Mr. Crawn. Part of her plans involved making his hands write checks to support Rita and her baby and making his libido-linked body parts unlikely to cause any further mischief. “I’ll come with you eventually,” she concluded. “I don’t plan to play puppeteer with Brent forever; just until he’s eighty or dead, whichever comes first.”

  “My money’s on dead. Take your time,” Lara said. “I’m not one of the Furies, but I do admire their work. You might want to consider choosing the Classical afterlife for your final destination and asking them for an internship when you’re done with your business in this world. But tell me, where did you get the power to take control of him like that?”

  “From you.” Cecilia’s hands traced graceful eddies through the soup. “And from this. Remember what you told me about water? How I’m in it and of it, breathing it and being it until further notice? Especially being it.” Her self-satisfaction was worthy of a cat, than which there is no higher bar set. “Water is my servant, just as you said. It answers to me!”

  The naiad nodded uncertainly. “That still doesn’t explain—”

  Cecilia paid tribute to Miss Buxton’s memory by assuming her long-gone teacher’s crisp diction when she said, “The human body is approximately sixty per cent water.” She laughed. “So is his.”

  “How about that. I guess you’re never too immortal to learn something new,” Lara reflected. “I’ve met some smart souls in my day, but no one as brilliant as you. Sweetie, you’re a genius!”

  Cecilia received the nymph’s praise with the tranquility of a forest pool. Her spirit was at peace. After so many years of not fitting in anywhere, she was in her element at last.

  THE DEEP END

  F. Brett Cox

  Breathless, Charlie floated toward the light.

  He rose in silence with nothing to either side. No motion but his own. He lay as still as he could, rigid, legs together, arms stiff by his sides. A comfortable coolness surrounded him. He felt it on every inch of his body except the space around his eyes that let him focus on the light.

  As he got closer, he could hear muffled sounds from above. Now there were dark shapes moving at the edge of his vision, but he ignored them. His goal was the light.

  Closer…closer…

  Suddenly one of the dark shapes moved directly above him. Instinctively, Charlie loosened his body and tried to float past it, but he was too late. He floated directly into it. A soft bump, a violent thrashing about, a sharp blow to Charlie’s chest, and the coolness and the quiet went away.

  “Ow! Watch it, doofus!”

  Charlie whirled on the surface of the pool, clutching his chest where the boy he had collided with had kicked him. The boy looked older, but Charlie’s diving mask had fogged up and he couldn’t tell for sure. He was certainly bigger. “Watch where you’re going! Jeez!” The other boy slapped both his hands on the water, giving Charlie what should have been a choking splash, but his mask protected his eyes and nose, and he had been splashed often enough to know when to close his mouth. Charlie fell back below the surface, flipped over, and swam away as fast as he could, scissor-kicking like his dad had taught him, left arm still wrapped around his chest.

  Charlie followed the downward slope of the pool bottom toward the deep end. At the deepest point, directly below the diving board, there was a drain cover set into the concrete bottom. Just like the pool he swam in back home in Virginia, where it was trouble if anyone saw you getting too close. You want to get stuck if the pump comes on? (And rumors of much worse: I heard some guy sat in the drain when it was on and it sucked his guts out of his ass! Charlie didn’t believe that for a minute. Who would be that stupid?) But also like back home, the pump in this Kansas hotel pool was loud, and you could tell immediately if it was on. Right now it was quiet, so the pump was off.

  Except the drain cover was pushed to one side, and in the space between the edge of the cover and the side of the opening, the water was swirling. Not the whirlpool of the pump in operation, but churning like the water was boiling. Like there was something thrashing around in the drain.

  Charlie wanted to edge closer for a better look, but the collision had knocked out whatever breath he had stored up. He was out of air. Two kicks brought him to the surface, where he gasped, inhaled, and dove back toward the deep end.

  The cover was still off, but the churning had stopped. He floated to one side of the drain and peered into the opening but could see nothing except, a couple of feet down, the beginnings of the pump hardware. Maybe it wasn’t as loud as he thought.

  This time, as he made his way back to the top, Charlie made sure there was nobody above him. His chest wasn’t so sore now. He broke the surface and immediately began sweeping the water with both arms while pumping his legs beneath the water in the bike-riding movement his dad promised would keep him both vertical and above the surface. Your body wants to float. Unless something’s weighing you down, you don’t have to sink. Unless you want to, Charlie had thought, even back then, when he was little and first learning how to swim.

  Charlie lay back in the half-tread, half-float that was his favorite way to stay on the surface. He bit down on the snorkel attached to his mask, exhaled into it sharply to clear it of water, and then took several breaths through it, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to. The mask and snorkel weren’t just prize possessions—they were the true signal of summer. When he pulled them out of the box that spent most of the year on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, that meant summer was here and it was time to go to the pool.

  His big sister Katie made fun of him, as usual. So you need to see the sharks coming in the pool? Or is there treasure buried in the deep end? I know—you’re just waiting for a girl to lose her top underwater so you can get a good look!

  Charlie ignored her like he always did. The mask and snorkel made him feel—connected. When he floated face down, all he could hear was the sound of h
is own breath funneled in and out of the snorkel. Then the dive: bending the top half of his body down, throwing his legs up as straight as he could, and letting their weight push him beneath the surface. He could see clearly, even if it was just bare concrete walls, and the closest thing to treasure was an occasional hair clip or pair of sunglasses. Every once in a while, when people crashed through the water after jumping off the diving board, as they hurled toward the bottom, they did almost lose their swimsuits, female and male, kids and adults. Charlie couldn’t help noticing the sudden curves of skin so much paler than the rest of their bodies—not that he would ever admit that to Katie. The mask and snorkel didn’t just connect him to this underwater world—they made it his world.

  Which was why when Mom had talked about packing as efficiently as possible for the trip to Kansas, he campaigned to take his mask and snorkel for the hotel pool he and Katie had been promised. The fact that he knew he couldn’t take his swim fins—both heel straps had torn off—gave him some leverage, and he looked on in triumph as his mother wrapped the mask in his swimming trunks and laid them in his suitcase. He laid the snorkel by them himself.

  Now, after a few more satisfying breaths, he spat out the mouthpiece, took off the mask, and clutched its strap tightly while he looked around. This pool was never as crowded as the one back home, but today there were a lot of people, both in and out of the water. He looked for his mother and saw her reclining in the glaring white lounge chair that was twice as big as any of the folding chairs they normally took poolside. She was reading a magazine and sipping through a straw from some big drink in a plastic cup. He turned a full circle in the water, looking quickly past the kiddie pool. (Ick! Might as well go swimming in a toilet.) He had never been happier than when, three years ago, when he was six, his rapid progress as a swimmer had convinced his parents to let him go in the regular pool. He saw some older girls talking with some older boys and noted that one of the girls was Katie, taking full advantage of Dad being in meetings all day. The lifeguard was sitting in a wooden chair built into the top of a narrow platform that rose above the diving board. The lifeguards back home were sometimes not much older than Katie, but this one looked almost as old as Charlie’s dad. By the diving board there were three boys talking. He thought one of them might be the boy he had bumped into when he floated up from the bottom of the pool and he quickly looked past them.

  There were a lot of things Charlie just didn’t get about this trip, beginning with why they were supposed to think it was a vacation to travel from their home in Virginia to Kansas City just to hang out at a hotel while his father attended yet another one of the conferences he had been sent to with his new government job—a soldier in President Johnson’s War on Poverty, his mom had said, and this time we’re going with him to the front. Or why he had to share a room with Katie instead of having his own room (and if it was too expensive like his mom said, then why not just all of them stay in one room and save even more money? Grow up, little boy, Katie had snorted—her answer to pretty much everything.) The trip out had been exhausting, although the parks in the mountains were fun, and Katie and he had found it equally funny that Dad had made such a deal about their having breakfast in Paris when they stopped in Paris, Kentucky. And there was the pool. Not as big as the one back home, which was a lot nicer than either the scuzzy old club house or the tiny golf course that went along with it. But he had a pool to swim in here, and that was enough for Charlie.

  People swam differently out here, though. They spent all their time on the surface. Few of the other kids back in Virginia were underwater as much as Charlie, but most of them spent at least some time beneath the surface, diving, floating from the bottom to the surface, seeing how long they could stay under, how close they could come to swimming from one side to the other while holding their breath. Some of them had their own masks, although Charlie was by far the youngest who did. Sometimes a couple of the older boys who didn’t care about lifeguards or parents or rumors about losing your guts would grab the drain cover and use it to help them stay submerged.

  But here in Kansas everyone was either splashing around in the shallow end or just swimming back and forth from one end of the pool to the other, stroking and kicking like they were in the Olympics. Charlie wondered if it had anything to do with being in the middle of the country instead of near the coast where he lived, but truth was he just couldn’t figure it out.

  That was why he’d bumped into that guy. He wasn’t used to everyone being there on the surface. It wasn’t his fault.

  Charlie put his mask back on, left the snorkel hanging, inhaled and exhaled three times, held the last enormous breath, and dove beneath the surface. Yesterday he had gotten halfway the width of the pool underwater with no problem, so today he ought to be able to make it. He knew he was supposed to empty his lungs rather than filling them if he wanted to stay submerged, but the extra time he could stay under made up for the extra effort.

  He could tell there were people passing above him and kept pushing forward, deter-mined there would be no more collisions. Between strokes, he looked down. The drain cover was now completely off, sitting on the bottom to one side of the opening. He tried to turn and push back down toward the deep end, but his momentum had carried him farther than he realized. When he bumped against the wall, scraping his right shoulder, he forgot about the drain cover and popped to the surface.

  His mother was still sipping her drink and reading her magazine. That was another thing weird about the trip—how she kept to herself. At the pool back home, she was always with a bunch of the other moms, working on their tans, talking almost nonstop, ignoring him and Katie except when, at least once each visit, she made him get out of the water and lie out on a big towel by her folding chair. I know you’re half fish, but that doesn’t mean you have to look like the belly of one. Now stay put and get some sun. So he’d lie there, dying to get back in the water, and listen to her and the other moms talking:

  —Just look at old Jerry Stallings, strutting around like he’s cock of the walk with that new wife of his. —I know, it’s just a sin, with Marla barely in the ground. —He sure didn’t make things easy for her, did he? —And those trunks! What is that, French? —Not like he has anything the rest of them don’t…—That boy of yours loves the water, doesn’t he? …—What about that boy Katie’s been dating? —Oh, Don doesn’t have much use for him. —Honey, Donald McGuire isn’t going to have any use for any boy coming around after his daughter and you know it…—Sons are not one bit easier, believe you me. I swear I’d rather he went to a whorehouse every Saturday night than spend one more minute with that Creel girl…—The doctor said it wasn’t anything to worry about, but I’m just not sure. At least I can count on him for the Valium…—All right, Charlie, you can go back in.

  But here, she just lay out with her magazine and kept sipping on her drink.

  He threw his arms over the rounded stones that outlined the sides of the pool and took off his mask. Despite all the water splashing over them, they felt hot. “Hey, mom!”

  She looked up, smiled, and said something he couldn’t hear over the splashing and yelling. Someone’s radio played “Summer in the City.” Katie loved that song. On that, they agreed.

  “What?”

  He half-heard, half read on her lips, “You’d better go see your friend,” and she pointed to an unknown spot behind him.

  He turned around, keeping an arm on the hot stones. Gail, the girl he had met at the pool the first day they were here, sat on the edge of the other side, kicking her legs in the water and waving at him. He realized she was calling his name: “Chaaar-lie!”

  He looked up at his mother, wanting to say something grown up like, “Gotta run,” but she had already turned back to her magazine. So he braced his feet against the side of the pool just under the water, pushed off, and dove down at the same time. He looked down to his right and saw that the drain cover was still off. The water in the opening looked like it was churning again,
but from this far away he couldn’t be sure. He wanted to swim down and check it out. But he also wanted to swim to the other side completely underwater and surface right in front of Gail. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough air to do either.

  When he came up he was more than halfway across. Gail was a blur through his mask, but he could tell she was still kicking her legs in the water. He went back under, and before he could decide which direction to take, he found himself on the other side, still underwater directly below her. As much as he wanted to reach out and grab her by the ankles and pull her in the water, he still remembered their conversation on their first day at the hotel and contented himself with popping up at the wall right by her.

  She looked down at him accusingly. “Hey! Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Sorry. It’s pretty loud around here.” It was. As the day got hotter and more people poured into the pool, the noise level rose accordingly. There was a radio on this side, too, playing “Easier Said Than Done,” which was an old one—he only ever heard it back home on the Sunday night oldies show. And here it was the middle of the week. They even did radio different around here.

  “I guess,” she said. Her kicking slowed but didn’t stop.

  He still had his mask on. The first time he had it on in front of her, Gail said that with his nose covered he sounded like he had a cold. He thought it made his voice sound deeper. Not that he would tell her that. “So are you ready to try it?”

  “Try what?”

  “You know.” Now he did reach out as if to grab her ankle.

  “No!” She pulled her foot away and then brought it back through the water, splashing him. “I told you I’m not ready.”

  “I thought you said you liked to swim.”

  “I do! But I’m not ready to put my head under.”

  “Sissy.”