Riptide

crypt, dislodged by today’s quake or any of the seismic events of the past century, or just the slow passage of time.

She swept away some of the dirt, exposing more of the metal surface. Her fingers brushed against something sharp. A corner.

Carefully she cleaned off the rest of it. The thing was a rectangle, ten inches square.

The lid of a tin box.

She probed the dirt until she found a handle, like the handle of a lunch bucket.

Casey had told her not to disturb the scene. But the tin intrigued her.

She tested its weight, lifting it by the handle. Not heavy. She could remove it without disrupting the remains.

She pulled a little harder, and the lid popped up. A rusted clasp on the front had opened.

She couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Probably a bad idea-Pandora’s box, and all that. She did it anyway, angling the flashlight to reveal the tin’s contents.

What she saw was a book. Frayed black covers. Faint smell of mold.

Paper deteriorated rapidly when stored in adverse conditions, but the tin had kept the book safe from vermin, sealed away from visible light and airborne pollutants. The crypt would be cool year round, and the space was dry enough to inhibit excessive mold formation. The box itself would have prevented too many mold spores from settling on the book and foxing its pages.

She looked more closely at the volume. Embossed in gilt Gothic on the front cover was the word Journal.

She knew then that she had to examine it.

Lowering the lid, she put both hands around the tin and lifted it free. It was crusted in earth, dragging clumps of loose soil and a single black beetle that fell off the bottom and scuttled away.

A diary, left with the dead. Hidden away for years, read by no one-except the ghosts interred with their bones.

eight

In her study, she placed the box on the examination table and lifted out the diary. Her hands trembled a little.

The book was ready to fall apart. The binding was badly cracked. The covers were calfskin, black, dry, stiff with age. Other than the gilt word Journal there was no lettering on the front cover, and no decoration except a band of silver running down the spine. Some of the silver had flaked away.

The leaves of the book had yellowed with age. Their edges were brittle, breaking off in powdery fragments. A few starbursts of gray mold mottled the edges of the pages, but the fungus did not appear to have made further inroads.

Carefully she opened the book. On the flyleaf pasted to the inside front cover was a heavy horizontal smear of ink. Something had been written there-an inscription or a signature, perhaps-and then blacked out. Once she got a replacement light fixture for her UV lamp, she might be able to fluoresce the hidden writing.

She turned past the flyleaf. Handwritten notes stretched neatly across the unlined paper. The entries, neither signed nor dated, were written in a neat, scholarly hand, with ornate Victorian flourishes. She estimated there were sixty pages in all. The early pages were missing, having fallen out or been torn loose, and the diary now began in the middle of a sentence.

— of my strange dreams lately. Dreams of blood. More precisely of women’s blood rushing out from between their legs and bathing my bare hands. Ghastly images. I wake in a fever. I shiver as though with ague. What is worst of all, the women all have the same face. It is Kitty's face. She haunts me.

Elaborate diction, rendered in meticulous copperplate, though with a paucity of punctuation. The writer seemed averse to commas, perhaps a sign of a racing mind.

I have taken to drink in the evenings. Without a touch of spirits, sleep eludes me. I fear to sleep, fear the dreams. The women who are Kitty with their bleeding female parts. It must be the onset of cerebral disease. I see a dread prevision of myself in a lunatic asylum, a jabbering maniac. This I fear above all.

Kitty is to blame. I feel certain of it. She infected my soul, planted an evil germ. Perhaps it is her revenge on me, her curse. But this too is madness.

The dreams have not visited me for some time but now they start again. It is because of the incident last Friday. The fallen woman in the street. She so much resembled Kitty from afar. I was certain it was she. Only when I drew near did I apprehend my mistake.

Yet how could I have been so self-deceived? Kitty is no whore. Whatever else she may be, she is above suspicion in that respect.

Dare not sleep. Perambulate all night. In my rooms at first, but later in the streets. Thrice I've been accosted by harlots. Each time I was briefly persuaded the woman’s face was Kitty's.

Perhaps I should not have broken off with her. Perhaps I should have proceeded with arrangements. She would now be my bride, and I would not be hounded by phantoms and phantasies.

Can not rid myself of these horrors. They harry me incessantly. There is a permanent shudder in my blood, a finger of ice running always along my spine. I live with a perpetual smothering anguish. I fear the night. I endure the day.

Wisp has noted my condition. The fool believes I merely need to quicken my circulation with activities outside the school. He has no inkling of my nocturnal torments.

Difficult to maintain mental concentration on my classes. As always surrounded by fools. Despicable creatures. People speak of the innocence of children but it is not innocence, rather it is the bovine blankness of stockyard animals. I hate them all, their oily faces, their pink hands. They plague me, squealing for the sow’s teats.

He had nicknames for the children.

Vole was especially stupid today, fumbling through his Virgil like an illiterate farm boy. Weed and Splotch did no better. Arma virumque cano-Splotch thought it was something about a dog. Cano not canis you blind fool. Weasel got it right but I cannot abide his obsequious fawning as if to translate a few verses ex tempore would earn my eternal gratitude. I did not make Feeble translate at all, there’s no point, even the sport of seeing him fail has grown tedious.

He was a schoolteacher, obviously. All his students seemed to be male. An all-boys school?

The headmaster was the man nicknamed Wisp. He flitted in and out of the entries, a perpetual nuisance to the diarist. But then, everyone was a nuisance to him, “a plague and a contention” as he wrote. The diarist hated everybody-students, employers, colleagues, people he passed on the streets.

His seething hostility perhaps found expression in his bloody dreams. If so, the imagery of violence was intimately bound up in his mind with the symbolism of sex. Possibly it was his struggle to avoid facing the full implications of the dreams that caused them to return night after night. He did not want to admit that he could have fantasies of violence. He did not want to unleash the killer inside.