Only Gilly noticed that my enthusiasm was forced. She suddenly looked across at me, and said, 'Are you all right? John? Are you all right?'
'Sure. Just a little tired, I guess.'
'Something's bothering you.' '
'You know me so well already?'.
'I know you better than anybody else on board.' She came over and held my arm, and stared at me seriously.
'You're worried,' she said. 'I can always tell when somebody's worried.'
'Oh, yes?'
'Is it the wreck that's worrying you? Do you really, believe they're going to find a demon in it? I mean, a demon"?'
'There's something down there,' I told her. 'Believe you me.'
'Well,' she said. 'I'll protect you.'
I kissed her forehead. 'If only you could.'
The tide was on the turn, and Dan Bass had estimated; that there was time for one ten-minute dive over the spot where we had located the disturbance. We weighed anchor and raised the diving-flags, while Dan and Edward changed into their white wetsuits, and the rest of us stood around and chafed our hands in the rapidly-cooling wind. Dan and Edward went over the side without a word, and we leaned on the rail and watched their spectral white shapes swimming away under the murky water. (
'Are you going to dive again?' Gilly asked me. 'If this is actually the wreck of the David Dark, then ‹yes. But first of all I'll get Dan to give me a few lessons in the pool at Forest River Park. It's salt water there, so t if you swallow it you have a really authentic taste of ocean.'
We waited for almost 15 minutes for Edward and Dan to reappear. Each of them had 20 minutes of air, so we weren't too worried about their safety, but all the same the tidal stream was beginning to flow more strongly now, and the waves were becoming choppier, and if they were tired they were going to find it hard work swimming back to the launch again.
Jimmy brushed back his hair with his hand. 'I hope they haven't run into anything weird,' he said; and he was expressing the fear that all of us felt. He checked his watch. 'If they don't come up in five minutes, I'm going in after them. Forrest, help me get into my suit, will you?'
‘I’ll come with you,' said Forrest.
But Jimmy had only managed to strip off his shirt when two fluorescent orange heads bobbed to the surface only 50 or 60 feet away, and Edward and Dan came swimming methodically back to the diving-lines which trailed all the way around the Diogenes' hull. Edward, before we pulled him in, gave us the St Louis taxi-drivers' signal, which meant that everything was okay.
He tugged off his mask, rubbed the water out of his beard, and looked at us all triumphantly. 'She's there,' he said, 'I'm certain of it. There's a scour-pit which looks as if it was caused by a buried wreck, about 130 feet in length. Tomorrow we'll go down with air-hoses, and see if we can blow some of the sediment away.'
Dan Bass was less sure of our find; but agreed that it was the most likely trace so far. 'The visibility's real bad down there at the moment; you can hardly see your hand in front of your mask. But there's something there, you can make out the shape of the mound that it's made. It's worth taking another look.'
We logged the point exactly with landmarks and compass bearings. We didn't want to leave a marker-buoy, in case some nosey treasure-hunter decided to go down and take a look at what we'd been up to.
Edward came up to me, half-dressed in a polo-neck sweater and an athletic supporter, and said, 'Do you think you can have another go at your father-in-law? See if you can persuade him to rustle up some money. If this really is the David Dark, we're going to need a proper diving-ship, and excavation facilities, and a way of bringing her up once we've dug her out of the mud. We're going to need extra divers, too, professionals.'
‘I’ll try,' I said, reluctantly. 'He didn't seem too enthusiastic about it the last time I spoke to him.'
'You sure have a cute ass, Edward,' said Jimmy, walking past. 'What do you think, Gilly? Doesn't Edward have a cute ass?'
'To tell you the truth, I was admiring the clouds,' said Gilly.
Edward said, 'Come on, John. Give it another try, hunh? Ask him. He can only say no.'
'All right,' I agreed. 'Let me take those sonar traces along. Perhaps I'll convince him.'
As the sky began to darken, we sailed back into Salem. The first lights began to sparkle in the streets, and there was a strong smell of salt on the wind.
'You know that Salem was named for «Shalom», the word for peace,' said Edward reflectively.
'Let's hope we can bring it some,' I replied, and Gilly, behind me, said, 'Amen.'
Twenty-Seven
Gilly and I had an early dinner at Le Chateau, an elegant pink-and-white decorated restaurant that had just opened on Front Street. Gilly had changed into one of her own dresses from Linen & Lace, a simple off-the-shoulder design with a lace bodice and silk-ribbon ties. We ate monies marinieres and pintadeau aux raisins. The candles nickered between us; and if the David Dark and all its attendant ghosts hadn't been hanging over us like a black slate roof that was about to collapse, we would have had a happy, cheerful evening, and probably gone back to Gilly's place and made love.
As it was, we didn't dare. Pragmatic and practical as Gilly was, she nonetheless knew that I was still carrying with me the unexorcized memory of my recently-dead wife; and that any intimacy between us would act as a catalyst for vicious psychokinetic forces. Gilly personally believed that the forces came from inside my own mind, that my own guilt was strong enough to make windows shatter and apparitions appear. She simply didn't believe in ghosts, no matter what any of us told her. But however the forces were unleashed, she didn't want to risk a repetition of what had happened at the Hawthorne Inn. Next time, one of us might be seriously hurt, or even killed.
'Do you think you'll ever remarry?' she asked me, as we finished our brandies after dinner.
'It's hard to say,' I replied. 'I can't envisage it just yet.'
'But you're feeling lonely?'
'Not right now.'
She reached across the table and traced a line across the knuckles of my left hand with her fingertip. 'Don't you sometimes wish you were Superman, and that you could turn the world backwards, and rescue your wife just before the accident?'
'It's no use wishing for the impossible,' I said. But at the same time, my mind said slyly, you've done it, John, you've already arranged it; when the David Dark comes up from the bottom of the ocean, you'll have your wife back again, Jane, just as she was before the crash. Smiling, warm, and loving; pregnant, too, with your first-born child. Only Anne Putnam knew what I had done; what bargains I had made to have my family returned to me from the region of the dead, and to save Anne herself from Mictantecutli's anger. And when I had driven her to Dr Rosen's clinic late last night, Anne had promised me solemnly that she would tell nobody what I had pledged to the Fleshless One; and that my bargain with the demon would always remain a secret. After all, her life depended on it, as much as Jane's.
I felt guilty, of course. I felt that I had betrayed Edward and Forrest, and Gilly, too, in a way. But there are times in your life when you have to make a decision in favour of your own happiness, at the possible expense of other people, and I believed that this was one of them. At least, I had managed to convince myself that this was one of them; and that with Anne's life so dangerously at risk, I was powerless to do anything else.
There are always a hundred good excuses for cowardice and selfishness; whereas courage is its own justification.