Swimmer by Graham Masterton Page A

his voice, whooping and laughing. He had always been such a bright, wild, enthusiastic boy, ready for anything.
    Michael said, ‘I can never get used to these spirit-traces, they’re so weird. Look at it: that happened last night, that really happened, and there they are, doing it all over. Makes you wonder if you ever get any rest, even when you’re dead, or whether you spend the rest of eternity acting your life out again and again, like some kind of never-ending loop.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ said Jim, peering out across the ocean. The waves seemed to be almost black, like a glistening, restless sea of Indian ink. He could see Dennis rising up on one foamy crest after another as he paddled further and further away from the shore.
Don’t do it, Dennis
. But Dennis had already done it, and his drowned body was already lying in the West Grove Mortuary.
    Susan arched her head back so that she was staring up at the sky. ‘Show yourself!’ she demanded. ‘I know you’re here! Why don’t you show yourself?’
    The wind began to rise; flecks of spume began to fly off the tops of the waves. But Dennis and his friends kept on plowing out into the ocean, and Jim could hear them calling and whistling to each other as they went.
    â€˜Maybe it was just an accident,’ he said. ‘Anybody could drown in a surf like that.’
    But Susan turned to him, her white face lit up in harlequin colors by her rapidly spinning crystal. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There’s a presence here. I can feel it. It’s coming toward us, from the north-east, and it’s coming very quickly.’
    â€˜You can
feel
it?’
    â€˜It’s just like the wind. Hold my hand, Jim, it’s almost here. I want you to tell me everything you see.’
    When the apparition appeared, however, Jim was speechless. It came running over the sand, so light and fast that he could barely see it. A young woman, almost completely transparent, running toward the ocean with her hair streaming behind her.
    â€˜She’s there!’ he told Susan, tugging at her sleeve. ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t we stop her?’
    Susan unexpectedly gripped his hand, and very tightly. Michael glanced at them; and there was an odd, possessive look in his eyes. But when he saw Jim looking at him he immediately turned his head away and stared out over the surf.
    Dennis had paddled so far out that Jim could see only the tip of his red metallic-flake surfboard; and occasionally his head, with the red bandanna tied around it. But he could clearly see the water-woman, swimming toward him. She left a trail in the sea, she lit up the tops of the waves, leaving a ghostly arrow-shaped wake behind her, phosphorescent green and glittering sapphire-blue. She swam as straight as a torpedo, and almost as fast; so that even when she was only a few feet away from Dennis he still hadn’t seen her. Why should he? Who expects an invisible woman to come swimming toward them at eighteen knots?
    Dennis must have sensed
something
, however, because he turned his head around, gripped his surfboard a little tighter, and shouted out, ‘Guys? Is everything okay? What’s the matter?’
    It was then that the young woman’s luminous trail disappeared deep under the water, so that Jim could see only the faintest greeny-blue glow of her. There was a long moment’s pause, and then an arm suddenly rose up, an arm made completely out of water, and clamped its hand over Dennis’s face. ‘Help me!’ he screamed out. ‘
Vinnie, help me, I’m drowning! Help me, Vinnie! Something’s pulling me down!
’
    His friend turned his head around wildly; but the troughs were so deep and the white spume was blowing as thick as blossom; and he couldn’t see anything at all. Jim, on the shoreline, saw only a rapidly dimming radiance, which died away as the spirit dragged Dennis deeper into the