Air. Sweet air. I heaved to the surface and into… sunlight. My face was barely above the waves. My face was only inches from a boat. My eyes, looking up, saw my father, my father who has been dead so many years. He was gasping and he was holding the still frame of Maple Cabershaw, desperately trying to breathe life into her limp form, as all around him the boating party came to the aid of the young girl who had nearly drowned in the lake.
* * *
Time is nothing to them. What of it to me, then? Why should I care how I found myself in the lake house? Why should I care that the floors were new? The curtains clean? The smells of fresh bread in the kitchen so delicious? I remembered little of finding my way. Of slipping beneath the waves, away from the past, away from my father, swimming unseen and away from the newest madness, rising from the lake, sodden, dripping, always dripping, hearing nothing but the echoes of barking dogs but being drawn by something, some thread that was dancing me on its string, and then I was in the great hall of the lake house, where I found Christopher Marken holding Cecil Cabershaw by his hair, raising his brittle-looking axe and bringing it down, beheading the man. There was a hiss of smoke without flame, cold without a source, and Cabershaw’s body shivered, but the head, God save us, still lived. The head still lived. It grew tentacles, tendrils like seaweed, and it began to run, to escape, to flee the promised kiss of that brittle axe.
“Shoot it!” Marken said, seeing me. “We can’t let it escape! Bring it down!”
And I rose my gun, and I fired four shots. Four. Only three bullets missing from my Webley, but I know what I have done. I fired four shots. Four bullets. But they curved. The trajectory of my bullets curved. They slammed into Marken. Brought him down. He was an innocent. He was a good man.
I have been misquoted, you understand. I never said he killed the dogs. I never said he killed young Joslie. I only said he was responsible. He said as much to me, cursing his failure, as he died.
It was not blood that came from his veins. It was water. Water from the lake.
Despite this, I believe that Markie was a good man.
When I awoke, I was sprawled outside the decrepit and long-unused lake house, with the waters of Lake Henpin slapping at my feet.
* * *
Captain Levetts, I fear I am no longer writing a shooting report. This is now a note to you. And to my wife, if you think that is best. I have learned many things in the days since Marken’s death. I have recovered some of what he left behind in the tower, ferreting them away before the mysterious fire that claimed the lives of his workmen and collapsed the entire tower into the basements and caverns below. I have read of the Cabershaw family in such books as the Cthäat Aquadingen and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I now have more knowledge that I can possibly hold. My brain wants to scream it away. I will allow my brain to do this in the only way possible. I am writing this in your office bathroom, now, where I have excused myself for some moments from Mr. Ulton, the psychiatrist, and where I am watching the sink in your bathroom dripping and dripping and dripping, and I could stand here and speak to it. But I won’t. I won’t do that.
I know that you have my gun in your desk. My Webley is there. Taken from me. For the best, it was said. It will be a simple matter to force open your locked desk. I will find my gun.
First, before that, I will save you from the embarrassment of having a suicide on your force. I hereby resign.
It has been a great honor to serve the people of Leighton. Tell my wife I love her, and to never let the water run for too long. It’s a waste, you know. An awful waste.
Oh.
A thought.
I have just now solved the mystery of my Webley.
Three bullets or four?
I understand, now.
Time means nothing to them.
The fourth shot has yet to be fired.
•
The Ocean and All Its Devices
William Browning Spencer
Left to its own enormous devices the sea
in timeless reverie conceives of life,
being itself the world in pantomime.
—Lloyd Frankenberg, The Sea
The hotel’s owner and manager, George Hume, sat on the edge of his bed and smoked a cigarette. “The Franklins arrived today,” he said.
“Regular as clockwork,” his wife said.
George nodded. “Eight years now. And why? Why ever do they come?”
George Hume’s wife, an ample woman with soft, motherly features, sighed. “They seem to get no pleasure from it, that’s for certain. Might as well be a funeral they come for.”
The Franklins always arrived in late fall, when the beaches were cold and empty and the ocean, under dark skies, reclaimed its terrible majesty. The hotel was almost deserted at this time of year, and George had suggested closing early for the winter. Mrs. Hume had said, “The Franklins will be coming, dear.”
So what? George might have said. Let them find other accommodations this year. But he didn’t say that. They were sort of a tradition, the Franklins, and in a world so fraught with change, one just naturally protected the rare, enduring pattern.
They were a reserved family who came to this quiet hotel in North Carolina like refugees seeking safe harbor. George couldn’t close early and send the Franklins off to some inferior establishment. Lord, they might wind up at The Cove with its garish lagoon pool and gaudy tropical lounge. That wouldn’t suit them at all.
The Franklins (husband, younger wife, and pale, delicate-featured daughter) would dress rather formally and sit in the small opened section of the dining room—the rest of the room shrouded in dust covers while Jack, the hotel’s aging waiter and handyman, would stand off to one side with a bleak, stoic expression.
Over the years George had come to know many of his regular guests well. But the Franklins had always remained aloof and enigmatic. Mr. Greg Franklin was a man in his mid or late forties, a handsome man, tall—over six feet—with precise, slow gestures and an oddly uninflected voice, as though he were reading from some internal script that failed to interest him. His much younger wife was stunning, her hair massed in brown ringlets, her eyes large and luminous and containing something like fear in their depths. She spoke rarely, and then in a whisper, preferring to let her husband talk.
Their child, Melissa, was a dark-haired girl—twelve or thirteen now, George guessed—a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel. Always dressed impeccably, she was as quiet as her mother, and George had the distinct impression, although he could not remember being told this by anyone, that she was sickly, that some traumatic infant’s illness had almost killed her and so accounted for her methodical, wounded economy of motion.
George ushered the Franklins from his mind. It was late. He extinguished his cigarette and walked over to the window. Rain blew against the glass, and lightning would occasionally illuminate the white-capped waves.
“Is Nancy still coming?” Nancy, their daughter and only child, was a senior at Duke University. She had called the week before saying she might come and hang out for a week or two.
“As far as I know,” Mrs. Hume said. “You know how she is. Everything on a whim. That’s your side of the family, George.”
George turned away from the window and grinned. “Well, I can’t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively—although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store.”
“And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer.”
This was an old, well-worked routine, and they indulged it as they readied for bed. Then George turned off the light and the darkness brought silence.