The Dark of Summer

He stood up, folded the plastic wrappings and stuffed those into another safety pocket in his wet suit.

The job finished, he turned to leave — just in time to encounter a middle-aged fisherman in blue jeans and a sweatshirt; the man had just come down the galley stairs, as quietly as Morby had, though his quiet had been that generated by familiarity and not by purposeful stealth. He stepped into the corridor and flipped on the overhead lights, bathing Morby in what seemed an intense, white glare.

Morby brought up his pistol.

The fisherman gaped at the sight of the big man in the diving suit, for he had clearly not known there was anyone down here.

“What the hell—” he began.

Morby shot him three times, all in the chest.

The fisherman dropped like one of his anchors, stone dead.

Morby waited, very still, for someone else to follow the dead sailor. When a full minute had passed, he realized that the man had been alone.

Quickly, then, he walked down the corridor, stepped over the body and went up onto deck, without a glance backward. He had not wanted to kill the fisherman, but he'd seen no other possibility. The man had caught sight of his head, his face, and would be sure to remember him. Though Morby lived just outside of Boston, he kept a summer cottage at Calder, and he would have been spotted by this man sooner or later.

Now, with the mini-timer's fuse rapidly running down, Morby went over the side of the Princess Lee, swam to the beach and risked a quick run along the sand to the dock where he'd left his gear. It was still there.

He pulled up his hood, slipped into his oxygen tanks and buckled them across his chest.

The gelignite had not gone off.

He put the pistol and the ammunition clips into the tin box, sealed that, snapped the chain onto his belt. Lifting the box, he started forward, wading into the deeper water under the dock. When he was in up to his waist, the explosion lifted a dark lid off the world and let a fierce red-white light in. The noise followed: like the worst thunder in the world.

Morby grinned, waded deeper, then went under. In the confusion on the beach, it was easy for him to swim out of Jenkins' Niche unnoticed.

TWENTY

While Ben was downstairs on the telephone, Gwyn got out of bed, chose a pair of clean pajamas from the bureau, and went into the bathroom to freshen up and to make herself more attractive. Her hair really needed washing, but once she brushed the tangles out of it, it didn't look too bad. She washed her face, powdered it slightly, applied a thin coat of clear, moisturizing lipstick. Slipping into the clean pajamas, she looked and felt like an altogether different person than the girl who had just eaten supper. She was still tired, very tired, but not so weary as she had been these past two days. And, right now, though sleep was attractive, she did not long for it in quite such an unholy fashion as she had this afternoon.

When she came out of the bath, Ben Groves had not come back yet — though the dead girl was there.

“Hello, Gwyn.”

She stepped around the apparition, went to the bed and got under the sheets, as if it had not spoken.

“That's not a nice way to be.”

She said nothing.

She prayed for Ben to return.

The ghost came and stood at the foot of her bed, raised its arms in her direction. “The longer you ignore me, the more you try to shove me out of your life, Gwyn, the harder it is for me to stay here.”

“Then, go away.”

“You don't mean that.”

“I do.”

“Without you?”

“Yes.”

“But don't you love me?”

Gwyn said, “No.”

“I'm your sister, your blood!”

“You aren't.”

The dead girl made a face, disgusted, and she said. “Don't persist in these foolish denials.”

“They aren't foolish at all. My sister died when she was a little girl, when she was only twelve. You're a grown woman, someone else altogether or a figment of my imagination. No matter that you look like me, that you look like Ginny. You're not.”

“I've explained this all before, Gwyn.”

“Not to my satisfaction.”

“Gwyn, I do need you. The other side keeps tugging at me, wanting me back. If you won't accept me, I can't stay here. But I need you, more than I've ever needed anyone or anything, to make things more pleasant on the other side, to have someone to talk to.”

“I'm imagining you,” Gwyn said.

“You aren't.”

“I may be going mad, but I know it. That's something, anyway.” She was trembling badly.

The ghost climbed onto the bed, making the mattress sink at the bottom, and she crawled up toward Gwyn. She touched Gwyn's bare arm with her fingertips, and she said, “There, now, does that feel like a figment of your imagination?”

Gwyn said nothing.

“I've told you that, temporarily, I'm as real as you are, as fleshy as you, and not to be ignored.”

“Then you'd better get out of here before Ben gets back,” Gwyn said. “If he sees you—”

“Oh, he won't.”

“I thought you said you were as real as me, temporarily?”

“I am,” the dead girl said. “But a ghost has certain abilities that come in handy. I can keep him from seeing me, if I wish.”

Gwyn said nothing.

“Please speak to me, Gwyn.”

“I'd be talking to myself, then,” Gwyn said. “And I really don't need that. So why not go away.”

The dead girl studied her closely for a moment, then crawled even closer on the bed. She said, “Gwyn, I'm your sister, and I love you, and whatever I do is for your own good.”

Gwyn was quiet.

“It's better for you on the other side, with me, in death. Here, you have no one, no one at all; you're alone and afraid, and you're clearly quite ill. I'm going to take you with me, for your own good.”

Gwyn did not realize the full import of what the dead girl had said, for she was still operating under the assumption that she could best handle the situation by ignoring it Then, a moment later, it was too late for her to puzzle out the specter's meaning, for the creature unexpectedly leapt on top of her, bearing down onto the mattress, locking her there with its knees and its weight, clamping two white, dry hands around her neck and feeling for a strangler's grip.

Gwyn frantically grabbed those ghostly wrists.

They felt solid.

She tried to push them away, to break the specter's hold on her throat, but she could not manage that.

“It'll only hurt for a minute,” the dead girl promised her, smiling sweetly down in her face.

Gwyn reared up.

The ghost held her tight.

The pale hands increased the pressure on her throat, like the two halves of a soft but capable vise.