Gilly looked at me, and her eyes were glistening. 'It's not the danger,' she said, with a catch in her voice.
'I know. It's the image of the ex-wife.'
'I had that before. I had an affair with a married man when I was seventeen. A bank executive. His wife wasn't dead, of course, but she was always there. Either on the telephone, or in the back of his mind.'
'And you definitely don't want to go through it again.'
She held out her hand to me, 'John,' she said, 'it's nothing against you. It's just that I'm feeling threatened. And there's one thing that I've always promised myself, ever since I started working on my own. Never let anyone threaten you, no matter how.'
I didn't know what to say to that. She was right, of course. She may have thrown herself at me like a sexually-deprived tigress, and I may have thrown myself back at her like an equally sexually-deprived tiger. But she was under no obligation to accept me as a lover with all of the problems I was carrying with me. All the phantoms, and the fears, and the might-have-beens. Not to mention the unhealed wound of my recently-lost wife and our unborn baby.
'All right,' I told her. I let go of her hand. 'I don't like what you're saying, but I can understand why you're saying it.'
'I'm sorry,' she told me. 'I don't think you have any idea how much you attract me. You're just my type.'
'Nobody with a ghost on their back can possibly be your type. They can't be anybody's type. Not until they've been exorcized.'
Gilly sat and looked at me for a while in silence, and then got up and went into the kitchen. I followed her, and stood in the doorway, while she took out eggs and muffins and coffee.
'You don't have to cook me anything,' I said.
'Breakfast, that's all,' she smiled. She broke the eggs into a basin and began to whip them up.
'Have you thought about exorcism?' she asked me. 'Getting a priest around to lay your wife to rest?'
I shook my head. 'I don't think it would work. I don't know, maybe it might. But I think the only way that any of these apparitions in Granitehead are going to get any peace is if we find out why they're so restless, what it is that makes them appear.'
'You mean like raising the David Dark?’
'Maybe. Edward seems to think that's the answer.'
'And what do you think?' asked Gilly, taking out a pan and cutting a little sunflower shortening into it.
I rubbed my eyes. 'I'm trying to keep an open mind. I don't know. I'm just trying to keep sane.'
She looked at me kindly. 'You're very sane,' she said. 'You're also a beautiful lover. I hope to God you can give your wife some peace.'
There was no need to answer that remark. I watched her scramble eggs and toast muffins and perk coffee, and thought about nothing but sleep, and tomorrow's dive. The cold waters of Granitehead Neck were out there now, restless as the spirits of Granitehead itself, waiting for the dawn.
Seventeen
By nine o'clock, we were out in Salem Sound, on a gray and choppy ocean, balancing on the after-deck of a 35-foot fishing boat, Alexis, which Edward and Dan Bass and two of Edward's colleagues from the Peabody Museum had pooled together to rent for the morning.
The day was bright and sharp, and I was surprised how cold it was, but Edward told me that the temperature over the ocean was often as much as 30 degrees lower than the temperature over land. There was a heavy cloud-bank off to the north-west, thick as clotted cream, but Dan Bass had estimated that there would be two or three hours' diving time before the weather began to roughen up.
I liked Dan Bass immediately. He was a wry, self-confident 40-year-old with eyes that looked as if they had been bleached by brine to a very pale blue. He spoke with a clipped accent that sounded very Bostonian to me, and there was a Boston-Irish squareness about his face, but as he piloted the boat into position he told me that he had first dived for wrecks off the shores of his native North Carolina, Pamlico Sound and Onslow Bay.
'I dived once on a World War Two torpedo boat, which was sunk in a storm in '44.1 shone my flashlight in through the windows, and guess what was staring back at me, this human skull, still wearing a rusty steel helmet. I got the fright of my whole darned life.'
Edward was in a very high humour, and so were his colleagues; a serious young student called Jimmy Carlsen, and a freckly, carroty-haired graduate from the Peabody's ethnology department, Forrest Brough. Both were practised divers: Jimmy wore a sweatshirt with 'See Massachusetts and Dive' lettered on the back. Forrest, three years before, had helped to salvage 18th-century cannon and cooking utensils from a wreck off Mount Hope Point, Rhode Island. Both took time out to explain to me everything they were doing, and why, so that even if I wasn't going to be much help to them, at least I wouldn't be a disastrous liability.
Gilly, bundled up in a thick quilted parka with a fur-lined hood, sat in the boat's wheelhouse with her notepad and her stopwatch, and hardly talked to me at all. But she caught me looking at her once, and gave me a smile that told me that everything between us was as good as either of us could expect it to be. Her eyes were filled with tears but it was probably the cold wind.
Edward said, 'We're going to search a little further along the shoreline than we have done up until now. Dan's going to position the boat according to transit bearings we've already worked out — that means we take one fix on the Winter Island lighthouse, and a second fix on the Quaker Hill Episcopalian Church, and where the two transit lines meet, that's where we're going to drop anchor.'
Dan Bass brought the Alexis a little closer into shore, while Forrest took the bearings. It took a few minutes to nudge the boat into position, but at last we put down our anchor, and cut the engine.
The tide's ebbing at the moment,' Edward explained. 'In a little while, though, it'll be slack, and that's the safest time for diving. Now, since this is your first time, I don't want you to stay down for longer than five minutes. It's cold down there, and the visibility is pretty shitty, and you'll have quite enough to occupy your time just breathing and finning and getting yourself accustomed to diving.'
I felt a tightness in my stomach, and at that moment I would have been quite happy to suggest that I should postpone my aqualung initiation until tomorrow, perhaps, or next week, or even next year. The wind whipped across the deck of the Alexis and snapped our diving flag, but I didn't know whether I was shivering from cold or nervous anticipation.
Dan put his arm around my shoulders and said, 'Don't you worry about a thing, John. If you can swim you can aqualung, just provided you keep your head, and follow procedure. Edward's a first-rate diver, in any case. He'll help you.'
We changed into snug-fitting Neoprene wetsuits, tugging on tight Neoprene vests underneath to give us extra protection from the cold. The suits were white, with orange hoods, which Edward said would give us maximum visibility in the cloudy water. Dan Bass strapped on my air-cylinder, and showed me how to blow hard into my mouthpiece before breathing in, to dislodge any dust or water; and how to check that the demand valve was functioning correctly. Then I fitted on my weight belt, and Dan adjusted the weights for me so that they were comfortable.
'Check your diving buddy's equipment, too,' Dan instructed me. 'Make sure you remember how his valve works, how to release his weight-belt, if you need to. And try to remember as much as you can about those emergency procedures.'