by Del Howison
That’s what I’ll do.
When I reached the top of the fence, however, it was too precarious to spend any time scouting the area. I couldn’t even spot the girl before making my off-kilter leap. My sneakers smacked the concrete. I stumbled forward, fighting to stay up, and managed to stop myself just short of the pool.
Then I stood up straight and looked around.
The pool was brightly lighted, clean and blue and shimmering. The girl didn’t seem to be in it. Nor was anybody else in sight. Here and there, I Saw wet places on the concrete apron—probably where the girl had climbed out after her dives. Across the pool, the patio lights were on. The ranch-style house, mostly glass facing the pool, looked dark inside.
“I’m glad you came.”
I jerked my head toward the voice and found the girl high to the left, striding out on the diving board.
“Thanks for asking me,” I said. My heart was thundering.
She halted near the end of the board. “Do you enjoy watching me dive?” she asked.
“I couldn’t really see much from where I was.”
“This should be better for you.”
“Much better. Thank you.”
“Thank you for coming over.”
I smiled and shrugged, amazed by her friendliness.
“Do you mind if I take this off?” she asked, reaching behind her back with both hands.
I almost choked. “Whatever … you want.”
Her hands were busy behind her back for a few seconds. Then behind her neck. After giving her bikini top a swing by one of its neck strings, she sent it flying out over the pool. It made it to the shallow end, where it splashed softly and drifted toward the bottom.
The skimpy pants of her bikini flew not quite so far as the top.
This cannot be happening, I thought. I am dreaming. I’ve gotta be.
But it was just one of those things you tell yourself when something happens that is just too wonderful or too horrible to believe. Sometimes you actually do wake up and find that you’ve been dreaming. I knew I was awake, though. Or at least I knew it with as much certainty as anyone ever has in matters of consciousness or reality.
“Ready?” the girl asked.
I stared at her up there. She stood straight and naked at the end of the diving board, arms against her sides. Illuminated from below by the underwater lights, tremors and ripples seemed to be climbing her body.
“Ready when you are.” My voice came out husky.
She leaped straight up and came straight down. Both feet hit the board. She bent her knees as the board bowed beneath her. Flinging her arms high, she jumped again as the board hurled her upward.
She bounced again and again, going higher each time like a girl on a trampoline, her short hair leaping around her head, her breasts lurching and jerking. Finally, she went so high that she soared above the reach of the lights. Up there, a pale wonderful form against the summer sky, she leaned forward and spread her arms and glided out over the pool like some unknown and wonderful human bird. Then she suddenly tucked her knees up close to her chest and tumbled downward, somersault after somersault so fast I couldn’t count them until at the last instant she somehow unbent herself. Arms straight out over her head, back arched, buttocks gleaming, legs tight together and straight above her, toes pointing at the stars, she lanced into the pool with hardly a splash.
Down deep, she curved away from the bottom and glided underwater to the shallow end. There, she stood up. Wiping water from her face, she turned to me.
“Was it okay?” she asked.
“Okay? It was … great.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve never seen such a beautiful dive. Or diver.”
Her smile spread. “That’s very nice of you. Wouldn’t you like to come in for a swim?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Sure you would.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Do I?”
The two parts of her bikini were barely visible against the pale blue tiles of the pool bottom. “Well,” I said, “You have one.”
“But I’m not wearing it.”
“I noticed.”
She laughed softly. “There’s no reason to be shy around me.”
I shrugged.
“But you are, aren’t you?”
“A little, I guess.”
So then she waded through the waist-high water, waded straight toward me and climbed out of the pool. Water spilling off her body, splashing the concrete around her feet, she stepped up to me.
“I’ll help,” she said.
“I don’t—”
“Sure you do.” Her fingers worked at the buttons of my shirt. I stood motionless, stunned, embarrassed, excited, more than a little disoriented.
This cannot be happening. Not to me.
After my shirt was off, she began with my belt. I took hold of her wrists and shook my head.
“You are shy.”
“It’s just—”
“This?” She reached lower and pressed a hand against the bulging front of my pants. “Feels lovely,” she said. “Why would you want to keep it hidden?”
“I don’t know.”
“Allow me.”
“All right.”
She removed all the rest of my clothes and then we made love on the concrete beside the pool, me on top, my knees hurting, my mouth kissing her all the way down beginning with her eyes, lingering a long time with her open urgent mouth, moving downward to her wonderful soft firm breasts with their stiff nipples, then down and down, down to the slippery cleft between her wide-open thighs, kissing and tonguing her there while she writhed and flinched and moaned, then working my way back upward with my mouth and sliding my penis into her.
For a while after we’d finished, I sat on the edge of the pool and watched her dive. She was magnificent, soaring high, twirling, folding in half to touch her toes, somersaulting, arching gracefully and slicing her way into the water.
As wonderful as the dives were, I found as much joy in watching her climb all sleek and dripping out of the pool and stride away, making tracks on the smooth, dusky concrete, and climb the high ladder to the springboard.
After a particularly exciting dive in which she descended from the sky facing me all the way down, she remained submerged and glided over to me. My legs were dangling in the water. Not surfacing for air, she parted my knees. Then she came up between them and took me into her mouth.
When we were done, she climbed out of the pool and sat beside me. We held hands.
“Would you like to try diving?” she asked.
“It’s awfully high,” I said.
“That’s what makes it so exciting.”
“Anyway, I’d rather watch you. I’ve never seen anyone who can dive like you. Have you ever competed?”
She shook her head. “I do it only for myself. And for you.”
“I sure appreciate it.”
“I know you do.” Smiling she turned and kissed me on the mouth and I felt a nipple rub the side of my arm. I put my hand gently on her other breast. When she took her mouth away, she asked, “Will you come back again after tonight?”
“Are you kidding?”
Smiling, she kissed me again.
“When do you want me?” I asked.
She whispered, “Always.” Then: “Now.”
I eased her backward and we made love on the concrete by the side of the pool. This time, I was on my back. Straddling me, she seemed to suck my rigid flesh up into her. She was snug and juicy.
Braced above me, she glided up and down, squirming and moaning, her breasts hovering over my face. I caressed them, fingered her nipples, and she eased downward to let my mouth reach them.
When it was over, she lay on top of me. We were both breathless, sweaty, worn out. I remember wrapping my arms around her wet back and squeezing her hard against me. I remember her giving my chin a playful nibble.
I was still buried inside her whe
n I fell asleep.
* * *
I woke up on my back on the concrete beside the pool. The girl was no longer on top of me. I sat up and looked around for her.
The pool and the patio lights had been turned off, and the house was dark.
The girl seemed to be gone.
I turned my gaze to the high dive. It was illuminated only by the dim glow of distant streetlights, but there was enough light to see the girl if she’d been there.
She wasn’t.
I opened my mouth to call out. And realized I’d never asked her name.
I called toward the house, “Hello?”
It gave me the creeps, shouting like that at such an hour of the night.
No answer came.
Well, I thought, I’ll see her tomorrow.
I put on my clothes, climbed the back fence, and returned to my house by the same route I’d used earlier that night.
* * *
Today I couldn’t wait to see her again.
Couldn’t wait for dark.
In the afternoon, I visited a flower shop and bought a bright, beautiful bouquet in a vase decorated with seashells. Home again, I showered, shaved, and dressed like a guy getting ready for his first date with the love of his life … and maybe I was.
My plan was to present her with the flowers, and then take her out to a nice restaurant.
If she’s home.
Please let her be home.
Carrying the vase of flowers, I left my house by the front door, went to the sidewalk, and headed for the corner. Though I’d rarely paid attention to the houses on the other side of my block, I had a fairly good idea about the location of the diving girl’s house: the fourth from the corner.
Walking there, I grew more nervous and excited with every stride.
I came to the fourth house and halted, shocked, sinking inside.
FOR SALE.
No!
I only met her last night! She can’t be moving away. It isn’t fair!
Fair?
Sick inside, I crossed the lawn and walked straight up to the bay window and stared in. Carpet. Walls. No furniture at all. Not even draperies across the wall of glass at the back of the house.
I could see all the way to the pool.
And gasped, “Huh?”
I dropped the vase and ran. The gate by the side of the house was locked. I climbed over it, dropped to the other side, stumbled and fell, and scampered up and ran some more.
And halted and stared.
I wanted to believe I had the wrong house, but the high dive was there. So was the pool. It was all there.
The concrete apron around the pool looked like an old, abandoned street, weeds growing out of the countless cracks, it’s pavement littered with debris: twigs and leaves, a few old newspaper pages and food wrappers and hundreds of other odds and ends that had probably been brought there by the wind.
The chrome of the high dive’s ladder, so shiny last night, was dull and mottled with rust. The springboard was tilted crooked as if broken and ready to fall.
As for the pool itself, you could climb in, walk down to its murky water from the shallow end and your feet would stay dry until you were almost below the broken springboard. The lingering water was green, afloat with moss and litter.
I went to the shallow end and climbed down its rusty ladder. Leaves and other matter crunching under my shoes, I walked carefully down the sloping bottom. I stopped twice to bend down and pick up parts of a skimpy garment.
I brushed them off.
They felt slightly damp. They were white and smelled faintly of chlorine.
I took them home with me.
* * *
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening writing these pages, telling my story of the diving girl.
I’m almost done now.
Darkness has fallen. In a couple of minutes, I’ll shut off my computer, turn off my office lights, open the blinds of the back window, and begin my wait.
Do I know what’s going on?
No.
Not at all.
I know only one thing for sure.
If the pool lights come on tonight and she climbs the high dive, I will go to her.
Whatever she is.
HAECKEL’S TALE
CLIVE BARKER
PURRUCKER DIED LAST week, after a long illness. I never much liked the man, but the news of his passing still saddened me. With him gone I am now the last of our little group; there’s no one left with whom to talk over the old times. Not that I ever did; at least not with him. We followed such different paths, after Hamburg. He became a physicist, and lived mostly, I think, in Paris. I stayed here in Germany, and worked with Herman Helmholtz, mainly working in the area of mathematics, but occasionally offering my contribution to other disciplines. I do not think I will be remembered when I go. Herman was touched by greatness; I never was. But I found comfort in the cool shadow of his theories. He had a clear mind, a precise mind. He refused to let sentiment or superstition into his view of the world. I learned a good deal from that.
And yet now, as I think back over my life to my early twenties (I’m two years younger than the century, which turns in a month), it is not the times of intellectual triumph that I find myself remembering; it is not Helmholtz’s analytical skills, or his gentle detachment.
In truth, it is little more than the slip of a story that’s on my mind right now. But it refuses to go away, so I am setting it down here, as a way of clearing it from my mind.
* * *
In 1822, I was—along with Purrucker and another eight or so bright young men—a member of an informal club of aspirant intellectuals in Hamburg. We were all of us in that circle learning to be scientists, and being young had great ambition, both for ourselves and for the future of scientific endeavor. Every Sunday we gathered at a coffee-house on the Reeperbahn, and in a back room that we hired for the purpose, fell to debate on any subject that suited us, as long as we felt the exchanges in some manner advanced our comprehension of the world. We were pompous, no doubt, and very full of ourselves; but our ardor was quite genuine. It was an exciting time. Every week, it seemed, one of us would come to a meeting with some new idea.
It was an evening during the summer—which was, that year, oppressively hot, even at night—when Ernst Haeckel told us all the story I am about to relate. I remember the circumstances well. At least I think I do. Memory is less exact than it believes itself to be, yes? Well, it scarcely matters. What I remember may as well be the truth. After all, there’s nobody left to disprove it. What happened was this: toward the end of the evening, when everyone had drunk enough beer to float the German fleet, and the keen edge of intellectual debate had been dulled somewhat (to be honest we were descending into gossip, as we inevitably did after midnight), Eisentrout, who later became a great surgeon, made casual mention of a man called Montesquino. The fellow’s name was familiar to us all, though none of us had met him. He had come into the city a month before, and attracted a good deal of attention in society, because he claimed to be a necromancer. He could speak with and even raise the dead, he claimed, and was holding seances in the houses of the rich. He was charging the ladies of the city a small fortune for his services.
The mention of Montesquino’s name brought a chorus of slurred opinions from around the room, every one of them unflattering. He was a contemptuous cheat and a sham. He should be sent back to France—from whence he’d come—but not before the skin had been flogged off his back for his impertinence.
The only voice in the room that was not raised against him was that of Ernst Haeckel, who in my opinion was the finest mind amongst us. He sat by the open window—hoping perhaps for some stir of a breeze off the Elbe on this smothering night—with his chin laid against his hand.
“What do you think of all this, Ernst?” I asked him.
“You don’t want to know,” he said softly.
“Yes we do. Of course we do.”
Haeckel looked back at
us. “Very well then,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”
His face looked sickly in the candlelight, and I remember thinking—distinctly thinking—that I’d never seen such a look in his eyes as he had at that moment. Whatever thoughts had ventured into his head, they had muddied the clarity of his gaze. He looked fretful.
“Here’s what I think,” he said. “That we should be careful when we talk about necromancers.”
“Careful?” said Purrucker, who was an argumentative man at the best of times, and even more volatile when drunk. “Why should we be careful of a little French prick who preys on our women? Good Lord, he’s practically stealing from their purses!”
“How so?”
“Because he’s telling them he can raise the dead!” Purrucker yelled, banging the table for emphasis.
“And how do we know he cannot?”
“Oh now Haeckel,” I said, “you don’t believe—”
“I believe the evidence of my eyes, Theodor,” Haeckel said to me. “And I saw—once in my life—what I take to be proof that such crafts as this Montesquino professes are real.”
The room erupted with laughter and protests. Haeckel sat them out, unmoving. At last, when all our din had subsided, he said: “Do you want to hear what I have to say or don’t you?”
“Of course we want to hear,” said Julius Linneman, who doted on Haeckel; almost girlishly, we used to think.
“Then listen,” Haeckel said. “What I’m about to tell you is absolutely true, though by the time I get to the end of it you may not welcome me back into this room, because you may think I am a little crazy. More than a little perhaps.”
The softness of his voice, and the haunted look in his eyes, had quieted everyone, even the volatile Purrucker. We all took seats, or lounged against the mantelpiece, and listened. After a moment of introspection, Haeckel began to tell his tale. And as best I remember it, this is what he told us.
“Ten years ago I was at Wittenberg, studying philosophy under Wilhem Hauser. He was a metaphysician, of course; monkish in his ways. He didn’t care for the physical world; it didn’t touch him, really. And he urged his students to live with the same asceticism as he himself practices. This was of course hard for us. We were very young, and full of appetite. But while I was in Wittenberg, and under his watchful eye, I really tried to live as close to his precepts as I could.
