"There was more to it than that, of course. You fill in the gaps. But the upshot of it was that we got divorced. I left town, bummed around a while. That's when I started drinking, seriously, I mean.
"I stopped hearing the breathing after the divorce. Everything stopped. But I knew he was just waiting for me to settle down, to get happy again. So I kept moving, kept drinking.
"I lived that way for years.
"Then my mom died, down in Florida. Dad had died the year before — I missed the funeral. When I went down there to take care of things, I found out we still had this house — they couldn't bear to sell it, and had rented it out when they moved to Florida. So I came back here to get rid of it.
"That was a mistake. I knew as soon as I walked in the door that I would never leave here again. Finn wanted me here. All of his persecution had this one end, to drive me back to this house.
"And here I was.
"I would sit here and drink, like this, night after night. I would sit here and yell at the water, challenge him.
" 'Come on out, Finn! Here I am! I'm waiting for you!'"
"Then, finally, he came up out of the water and showed himself to me."
I shuddered; in spite of everything Dougal had told me up to now, I wasn't ready for this.
"You saw him?"
Dougal nodded. "I still see him."
"When does this happen?" I asked, "on the anniversary of his death or something?"
"Oh, no." He shook his head. "Every night."
I glanced out the window at the moonlit deck. "Are we waiting for him now? Tonight?"
Dougal nodded. "He should come soon. He comes around this time. Every night. You'll see."
After that first time, Dougal told me, he had kept the curtains drawn. "But I knew he was out there. I could feel him, smell him. Hear him, too, feeling along the glass, looking for a way in."
It was late now, and in the heavy stillness of that summer night you could hear everything: insects chirring, a distant speedboat gunning through the darkness, out of sight across the bay, the waves shushing in on the beach, lapping against the bulkhead.
Then there was a sound that cut across the regular rhythm of the waves, a slopping, wallowing sound. Dougal stopped talking; his face fell apart, as if someone had just cut the strings that held it together. A rotten, low-tide stench filled the room, getting stronger and stronger until I could barely breathe.
Deep in the shadows, I saw something lying on the deck; I was sure it hadn't been there earlier.
Then whatever it was stood up. It stumbled across the deck and pressed itself against the glass.
"He wants to come in," I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice in the still room.
"I won't let him in," Dougal said. "I'll never let him in."
The figure felt its way along the windows until it reached the far railing of the deck. You could hear the soft pat of its hands against the glass, hear the slight creaking of the window-frames as it pressed against them.
It was too dark to see clearly. I got no more than a glimpse of white flesh through the window, flesh too white to be living, and somehow soft, corrupt, swollen.
I saw the palms of its hands against the glass.
It was appalling. I shut my eyes, and shielded them with an open hand, the way you do against sun-glare, to make sure, I guess, that no image of that thing could get through, light or no light.
When I opened my eyes again it had gone, though I thought I could make out a dim form moving slowly towards the end of the dock. Another minute and something clambered down the pilings and slipped into the bay water.
We sat there in silence for a long time. Dougal's breathing was rough and uneven, as if he'd just run up a flight of stairs. I had to consciously keep myself from holding my breath. I didn't want to draw the dense, rotten miasma of salt marsh and mudflat that filled the room into my lungs.
"You saw that?" Dougal asked after a while.
"Yes," I admitted. "I saw it. How do you know it's Finn?"
"It's Finn. No doubt about that."
"What does he want?"
"This is what he wants. He wants me to remember. He doesn't want me to forget. He doesn't want me to have any more happiness, any more life, than he does."
I thought of Dougal, sitting here in the dark, night after night, waiting for his dead brother to visit him.
"Are you afraid? Do you think it's trying to get in to do you harm?"
Dougal shook his ruined head. "Oh no. He can't harm me. He hasn't the power to hurt me, physically. That's why I opened the curtains, to confront him, to show him I'm not afraid of him. That way he can't hurt me."
I looked around the empty house, its shut-up rooms smelling of mildew, stuffy, peeling walls, the whole house falling apart. I looked at Dougal, his body destroyed by alcohol, his life reduced to a nightly vigil of horror and guilt.
"I think I'd better go," I said. Dougal nodded, never taking his eyes off the window, staring out over the bay.
"He won't come back now," Dougal said. "Not tonight."
"Good night, Dougal," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.
Dougal just sat there, silently, cradling a bottle in his lap, staring out at the water.
I let myself out.
Dougal had done all the talking, but I had had something I meant to tell him. In the event I never came out with it. That was just as well.
I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had married Jeanne Cary. I thought he had enough to bear without that.
I drove her home the night of the graduation party. She had been planning on getting a ride from Finn, or Dougal. Otherwise I might not have met someone like her. I comforted her. No, it wasn't like that. But when we met again, there was an opening, an emotional contact already made. We started from there. One thing, as they say, led to another. We spent some good years together before I had to watch her die of cancer. Now that was over and I was back where it all started.
I wouldn't have minded seeing her again, but that was not given to me.
Driving back home along the shore road, I stopped just before the road bends away from the water and looked back towards the admiral's house. On the far point I could just make out the looming shape of it, shadows hovering over a spark of yellow light, the small table lamp burning at the back of the room overlooking the deck. I knew now why Dougal hadn't lit the other lamps.
I knew Dougal was still sitting there, drinking and staring out at the bay. I also knew that one night, when he felt he had waited long enough, been punished enough, Dougal would get up and open the door.
I opened all the windows of my car to let the warm summer night air chase out the heavy, rotten stink of low tide mud that had followed me from the admiral's house and filled the car interior to choking. By the time I pulled up in front of my house I couldn't smell it any more.
TONY RICHARDS
Man, You Gotta See This!
See, there's this thing about Jer.
There was a Monet exhibition in our city once. I and Kara — my then girlfriend — trooped through with the rest. Gazed upon the garden scenes and renderings of fog-bound London. Were awed by the way the paintings changed with age and failing eyesight. Loved it. But…
There is something more than love, in art. I found that out right at the end.
The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room that just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.
It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.