The Pan Book of Horror Stories

SUBMERGED A. L. Barker

Diving into the river, Peter Hume always felt he was entering something of his own. The brown water never rebuffed him, even the first chill on his skin had a curious softness, like snow; everything crisp and taut in his mind relaxed and was drenched.

It was a mild river, dropped into a steep slot between its banks and thatched over with trees. Some instinct for secrecy kept it at work, quietly shifting the soil, settling with the persistence of a hermit into a deeper, browner bed. The colours here were not the bright mirror colours of a river. Loosestrife, with its carnival purple, strong yellow ragwort and red campion, all had a diffidence; softened, almost brumous, they enriched without decking the river bank. Round the occasional eddies, bright beans of sunlight jumped and jazzed until late evening, and then all that was left of their energy was a thin, milky mist.

Peter couldn’t often stay so long, he had to go home to supper or there would be questions. He wasn’t supposed to swim in the river anyway, there was some talk about its being dangerous because of the submerged roots of trees. Peter knew all about those, they added the essential risk which made the river perfect. He had been careful never to give any promise, for his conscience was lively and would have kept him to it. His mother supposed he swam in the quarry, and Peter’s code, which was rigid enough within the letter of its law, did not require him to disillusion her.

The other boys rarely came to the river. They preferred the quarry which was twenty feet deep in places and ideal for diving. Peter sometimes went with them, but there was nothing to see under water, whereas here, once you had the knack of diving between the roots, it was like being in a bony world of dim arches and aqueducts, caverns and slanting forests. Peter did not try to persuade anyone else to his way of thinking, he preferred to keep the river to himself.

For his first dive, he always went to the left of the willow, where there was nothing more exacting than a couple of stumps which could knock every breath from his body at the slightest miscalculation. That first plunge, with the water roaring in his ears and the mud smoking up from his outflung hands, was the moment of relaxation. The world was at once bounded by a bank, the sky was a fragmentary blue between the leaves, and until it was time to put on his clothes again he felt no distinction between himself and the river dwellers—the otters, water rats, minnows, and frogs. He was as contented as they, plundering the mud or floating on his back and beating up a white spray which looked, on that sober water, surprising as a glimpse of petticoats under brown homespun.

This was a Saturday afternoon. From early morning the distance had never been still, the heat quenched all movement save a small, tireless jig of solid and motionless things. Peter’s skin was thirsty for the river even while he went, meekly, to have his hair cut and, fuming, for his music lesson. But the afternoon was his own, and that first plunge, to the left of the willow, past the stumps and up through ribbons of cool weed, absolved him of the morning’s sufferance.

He came up breathless, shaking the wet hair out of his eyes. Ripples were widening round him, already they had reached the bank and were moving the grasses. It was nice to make himself felt like that, he wished he could see it happening in the air as he moved about, although he wouldn’t care to have other people’s ripples getting mixed up with his own.

He lay on his back, and the noise of the water in his ears was like the intermittent singing in a shell. When he thought about the river, he could always remember that sound and the way his hair was gently lifted from his scalp and floated.

Looking up, he saw that the blue sky was trying to burn through the leaves and get at the river. Had it ever been dry? How much hotter would it have to be before the sun could suck all this water up and bake the mud? It was supposed to have happened once to the earth, and there were cracks so big that you would need a bridge to cross them, and looking down, you’d see the fires burning at the middle of the earth. That must have been some heat wave. Peter let himself sink like a stone.

Of course, there could be two opinions as to the delights of the river bed. Peter was not squeamish about the soft fleshy mud creeping round his ankles or about the things which slid from under his feet. He trod firmly, feeling the weight of the water on his eyeballs, seeing only a little way through the greenish gloom. There was one thing he needed now, and that was a knife, carried between his teeth like a sponge diver. He had almost saved enough to buy one.

Under water was no solidity except in touch. Banks and tree roots had no more substance than the reeds, they moved together as in a tiny draught. Peter could see what appeared to be the ribs of a huge skeleton, greening and forgotten on the river bed. They formed a narrow black tunnel with an arched opening which reminded him of a church door.

Peter shot up to the surface, drank in air and blinked in the violence of the sunlight. He stayed where he was—treading water—his wet head shining like glass. It was as well not to move away because he was positioned exactly for his performance. As usual, he was dubious about it, his heart began to knock. A certain excitement was permissible, due to the occasion as a whisper to a church. Any other, lesser emotion belonged to some girlish self which he would gladly have detached and drowned.

This performance was partly a pleasure, partly an endurance test. Until it was accomplished, Peter felt he had not more rights over the river than any of the myriad gadding gnats. Afterwards, by the law of possession of the tamed by the tamer, he considered himself established beyond deeds or bonds.

The ribs under water were tree roots left arched and empty by the river’s delving. They were big roots, thicker than Peter’s wrist, and there were enough of them hooped over to form a short, tortuous tunnel. Peter had explored it and found he was just able to squeeze through before his breath gave out. It was a foolhardy trick, that was its great attraction. Peter knew that if he ever got wedged in that bony tunnel, he would drown as miserably as a cat in a sack.

But danger was a saving grace. Without it, Peter would not have been able—nor would he have needed—to establish his suzerainty over the river. He was convinced that if he ever swam here without going through the submerged tunnel, the river would be estranged from him, his sense of property and kinship would be lost.

He looked down at his hands, pawing the water like a dog to keep himself afloat. If he came often enough he might get webs across his fingers and his blood might cool. Then he could live here without any trouble, and explore the river from beginning to end. He could follow it down to the sea, and when he was tired of swimming he could make a boat with a cabin and a couple of guns in the poop. A boat was always useful—if he stayed in the water all the time his skin would probably go green and pimply like a frog’s. That thought troubled, not his vanity, but his dread of the conspicuous.

A bird flashed past him and vanished in the shadows. For a moment the brown homely river was fired by something tropical—a flicker of cobalt, bronze, and scarlet. The improbable kingfisher.

Sight of that pure violent motion inspired Peter. He dived fiercely. The tunnel rushed to meet him, the dark entrance quenching the image of the kingfisher. Then his head and shoulders were under the first root. Twisting, levering, held fast in a green skeletal gullet, with mud clouding round him, shins and elbows scraped, he yet found some sizeable satisfaction in the ordeal. He was proving himself and the more desperate the struggle, the more splendid and impeccable the proof. All scars were honourable, his lungs withheld not only the river but the force of a mighty and malignant enemy.

The tunnel ended in a last twisted hoop with a clump of shadowy weed beyond. Peter squeezed his head and one arm and shoulder through first. His hand slipped, then grasped the weed. Some of it came away, mud boiling up with it, but the main clump was firm and he hauled himself free by it. Then he was moving upwards, and a dim, gnomish world dropped away under his feet.

It was like coming in out of the dark when the sun beat down on his head and shoulders. He swam grunting to the bank, pulling the water aside familiarly as one who casts off his tangled bed sheets.

For a few moments he lay stretched out on the bank until his skin felt sticky and partly dry. Then he sat up, looked behind him at the empty blond fields, still juddering with heat, and back again at the river. There was wild angelica growing on the far bank, green umbrella ribs blown inside out and ending in a frivolous froth of white. The water did not reflect it, there were too many bright beans just here, but Peter thought it looked cool and eatable. He wished now that he had brought something to eat, he began to tease himself with visions of ice cream—enough to fill a decent-sized bowl, and a spoon in the middle, leaning a little sideways as the ice cream came to the rich liquefying stage which he loved best.

But he was not inclined to hanker after hypothetical pleasures with real ones to hand. As he slipped back into the river there was no splash, only the slow ripples moving out. His mood was now leisurely and relaxed. He followed the ripples, letting himself sink slightly in his laziness before he would lift an arm to make a stroke. Pursing his lips, he blew fleets of bubbles along the top of the water, snuffled it, floated and enjoyed it with the intensity of a very young animal. Ice cream was forgotten, even when he saw the angelica again it did not remind him of something to eat. There was a faint lilac tinge on the flowers and the stalk was flushed a rich purple. It was prettier than any of the flowers his father grew in the garden, but then, he conceded as he floated idly into midstream, it was only right that his own river should have the best flowers.

The sun, the stillness, the drowsy boom of water in his ears, lulled him into a half doze which the river’s slight chill would not allow to become complete. Drifting from shadow to sunlight and back to shadow again, he watched the burnt-out blue of the sky, thickly figured with fiery leaves. Thoughts that were partly dreams slipped through his mind. Imperial, childish dreams. The mild river fostered them as school and home never did. Brittle, boy’s bones stretched in a flash to the shape and substance of a man; his child’s mind—bigoted and unsteady—was great’ with the sum of wisdom; fame, honour, wealth, were all got as glibly as prizes at a fair.

Peter was strictly practical. This mood being past, he would drop his fantasies and go back to the business of life as he found it. Day-dreaming was part of the river, and that was so much his province, he had every right to fill it with himself, lifesize—and beyond.

A sudden noise, a thrusting among the undergrowth, jerked him wideawake. Someone coming. Still on his back, he stared from under his hand. The bushes were snatched aside, an odd, ridiculous figure burst through and almost overbalanced into the river.

It was a woman in a red mackintosh. No longer very young, and so plump that the mackintosh sleeves stretched over her arms like the skin of scarlet saveloys. A green crescent-shaped hat with a spotted veil had tipped over one eye, leaving the other glaring round the polka dots. She would have been funny, but there was something chilling about her, about the steep expanse of speckled red chest heaving under her torn blouse, about the brassy hair tumbling down on her neck, and the skin of her face dreadfully, darkly suffused.

She stood there, too breathless to speak, turning her hands towards Peter with an awful beckoning motion. He stared in horror, and her one visible eye glared back at him. He was frightened by her, by the contagion of her own deadly fear. He thought she was mad: his skin prickled and he backed away through the water.

She cried thickly, “Come out! Come out of there for God’s sake!”

As he gazed, open-mouthed, she was looking over her shoulder back the way she had come, and her hands were moving towards him as if they could draw him ashore bodily.

Peter did not move. Those hands, that huge, speckled bosom bursting from the flimsy mackintosh, revolted his maidishness. He tried to avert his eyes, but he was almost mesmerized by her physical power—not of muscle land sinew, but the power of animal, abundant flesh.

“Come out! Come out, you idiot!” She stood on the very edge of the bank, leaning towards him. “You’ve got to help! Do you hear? I’ve got to have help!”

Slowly Peter moved in to the bank, but when she reached out and tried to snatch at him, he drew away.

“Please turn your back while I get to my clothes.”

His voice sounded thin and ridiculous; the woman’s one eye narrowed. “So’s you can make a bolt for it? Think want to look at a tadpole like you? Get out!”

Peter stayed where he was, treading water, his face scarlet but stony. She swore at him, using words and threats which heightened the colour in his cheeks. He would not move, he stared past her at a disc of sunlight trembling on a tree trunk.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” She turned her back. “Get out and get your trousers on. Unless you’re so modest you want to dress in the water!”

Peter said nothing. He was scrambling up the slippery bank towards his clothes, draped over a branch. She swung round as he stepped into his trousers; with flaming cheeks and a horrible sickness in his stomach, he hauled them up over his wet skin.

She stared at him from between the leaves, and he had a feeling that she was staring right through his body and seeing something beyond.

“There’s a man coming to kill me,” she said, and put a leaf aside with terrifying gentleness. “I can’t run any more, I’ve got to stay here. So have you. He won’t lay a finger on me if there’s a witness and a chance he’d swing for it. . . .”

He heard, before she did, the thudding of feet on the baked earth. She saw his look, and turned to face the opening in the bushes through which she had come.

Instinctively, Peter crouched out of sight, screwing his shirt into a ball and pressing it against his chest. The man, when he came, was almost as bad as the woman. Almost, but not quite, because he was a man, and although he was frightening, there was not that strange undertow of fascination. He was huge—to Peter it seemed both the man and the woman were mountainous while he had dwindled to something tiny and bloodless like a gnat, and the river was just a brown ditch.

The man stood on the top of the bank staring down at the woman. He had hardly any neck, and he must have weighed about fifteen stone. His little flat head was stuck between his shoulders; there was something of the tortoise about him, the same ponderous air of trouble and defeat, just now opposed by his mood.

People often got angry, and Peter found it amusing to watch, especially if they danced about, like his father. This man was angry, but it wasn’t funny. His rage was quite outside him, as the woman’s fear had been. It moved his hands for him, as her fear had moved hers. Over and over again they rehearsed an action inspired, not by the brain but by the blood. The fingers were drawn in, the fists thickened until they were bunched solid, and the grip expended on itself.

Peter shivered, he longed to run, but the impotence of nightmare kept him still. Very slowly the man came down the bank. As he passed through a patch of sunlight, his face showed glistening wet, his bushy brows were loaded with the sweat streaming from his forehead.

The woman waited calmly. She had one hand on her hip, and she did not seem to be so frightened now.

“Well,” she said scoldingly, “you’ve got yourself into a fine old paddy, haven’t you?”

The man came on, his expression unchanging, his hands rehearsing their action. Then, just before he reached her, she sprang forward, flung her arms round him and put her mouth on his. His hands came up, the thumbs spread wide, and fastened round her neck.

And now, at sight of those two figures, locked together, the dread of the unspeakable was added to Peter’s fear. Trembling, he waited for the man’s hands to perform what they had practised, to close and crush as they had crushed the air. They stayed where they were, round the woman’s neck, almost hidden by the coil of brassy hair. After one convulsive grip, they fell away and just rested there, heavily.

Peter did not relax. He had been staring too hard, the figures of the man and woman dodged in front of his eyes, coloured solid blue and sometimes red. He knew that the worst was yet to come. There was no peace between them, only something violent which this embrace was muffling for a moment.

The woman drew away gently; put up her hands and took the man’s loose fingers from her neck.

“Well, then,” she said, smiling, “what did you do with the knife?”

The man’s size was of no account now, his rage had been snuffed out, and all that was left him was an odd, tortoise-like defeat. He looked at his empty hands and touched his pockets.

“You dropped it somewhere, didn’t you?” She laughed at him. “You would! You lose your savings, so you think you’ll knife me in case I took them. But then you lose the knife—does it sound sense?” She eyed him, head on one side, like someone considering an awkward child. As he only stood there, looking dazed, she sighed and began to pin up her hair under the green hat. “I’ve taken it very well, considering—accusing me of pinching your money and chasing me with a knife! Why, I’ve never touched a farthing—is it likely when you carry it round with you all the while? You’ve lost it somewhere. That’s you all over.”

She stood there, her plump arms held up, fastening the last strands of hair in place, and she didn’t seem to be looking at the man. But Peter could see that she was watching him with sideways glances which didn’t go at all with what she was saying. Peter wondered when she would call to him to step out and be a witness. She seemed to have forgotten all about him, and although he was terribly cramped, he dared not move in case he made a sound and reminded her that he was there.

“Yes,” she went on, briskly tightening the belt of her mackintosh, “that’s what’s funny about you—the way you lose everything. Though, I must say you did yourself a real good turn when you lost that knife. Others aren’t so careless as you—they don’t lose the rope they keep for hanging, you know!”

She thought that was a good parting shot, and with hands thrust into her pockets, turned her back on the man and started to clamber along the bank.

“Where are you going?” He asked a question, but there was no question in his tone. Rather was it as if he could not believe even in his defeat until she stated it.

She looked back over her shoulder at him, still standing bewildered by her kiss, almost searching for the fury which had driven him here and then dwindled like vapour. Perhaps she saw something of the troubled tortoise in him, because she laughed.

“Just one more thing you’re losing—little me! So long!” Still laughing, still looking back, she pushed her way through some clumps of purple loosestrife. Her scarlet mackintosh was overlaid with purple flowers, her face, all screwed up with laughter, looked back over the blossoms and then, just as Peter was thinking of making a dash for the open fields, the face seemed to drop out of sight, the red was suddenly blotted out, leaving only purple loosestrife, violently shaken. At the same moment, a scream and a great thudding splash froze Peter’s first tentative stirring. The woman had fallen in.

In that moment, the river won back all Peter’s esteem and affection. From his hiding place only part of the water was visible, and he dearly wanted to see what was happening. But he was naturally wary, he stayed still, contenting himself with the huge brown ripples brimming on the surface and lapping high up the bank.

After the splash it was very quiet. The man stood there, gaping at the loosestrife expectantly, like someone watching a conjurer’s hat. The tall flowers settled back into stillness, there was only the stealthy chink of water as the eddies spread wide.

Peter wondered what the woman was doing. He held his bunched shirt against his mouth to stop himself from shouting. Why didn’t the man move? He must be an idiot.

Peter was scornful of him now. If he had only a tiny brain like a pea, then his huge body was all the more ridiculous. It was nasty, too, as the woman’s big speckled chest had been nasty—because there was too much of it.

The man trampled slowly into the loosestrife, parting it uncertainly with his hands. Peter followed him, dodging low out of sight.

It was easy to see where the woman had fallen in. Earth on the edge of the bank had powdered under her foot, leaving a scooped hollow. It was just here, by a great clubbed root, half submerged, that Peter took his bearings for his ‘performance’. The tunnel lay almost immediately below, it was even possible to dive to it from here because the bank dropped away into deep water.

Mud was still clouding up from the river bed, colouring the water like strong coffee, and the surface was not yet quiet. But there was no sign of the woman except that among the loosestrife lay the odious green hat with its spotted veil. The man picked it up gingerly, as if he expected her to be underneath. He turned it over in his hands, looked wonderingly at the river and then called out “Eh?”

The sound of his voice startled him, he swung round, staring, and Peter only just had time to crouch out of sight. The woman was having a fine old game. Either she was under water, waiting to bob up and startle the man, or she had swum downstream and climbed out farther along.

When next Peter stretched his neck and looked over the loosestrife, the man had gone to the water’s edge and was leaning down, hands on his knees, peering in. Peter would have gone and given him a brisk shove from behind, so wiping out the memory of his first ignoble fear, but the rustling loosestrife would have betrayed him before he got near enough.

The creature went down on his knees, rolled up one sleeve and plunged his arm into the water. It was so unexpectedly deep that he nearly overbalanced, and he muttered in alarm. But he kept on, groping about under water, first with one arm, then the other. Obviously he was searching for the woman, and just as obviously, he wasn’t able to swim. That completed his ignominy in Peter’s eyes.

Alter a while the man had an idea. He searched about and found a long stick. With this he was able to prod the steeply shelving earth immediately below the bank. Farther out the water went deeper than the length of the stick. He stood up and, with the dripping stick in his hand, called out “Eh?”

Once again he was shocked by the loudness of his own voice. He called “Eh?” twice more, the third time desperately. There was no answer. His face darkened, his lips grew loose and trembling—if he hadn’t been a grown man, Peter would have sworn he was on the verge of tears.

He looked at the river for several minutes, then with a sudden movement flung the stick away and charged up the bank, breaking and trampling everything in his way. All at once he was in this violent hurry, and when Peter climbed to the top of the bank and looked after him, he was thudding across the field in the white sunlight.

He had only just realized that the woman must have stolen a march on him, climbed ashore farther downstream, and run home. How could a man be so stupid? There was a boy at school, Girlie Thomas, who was a famous dunce, but he wasn’t as slow as that.

Peter watched the man out of sight. He was waiting in case the woman had hidden instead of leaving the river. He was ready to run if she appeared. Standing in the sunlight, he pulled on his shirt, scraping indifferently with his finger nail at the patches of dry mud. He left the tails hanging outside his trousers for coolness, and wandered round like a Russian boy in a smock.

The heat was changing. It was heavier now, oppressing the lungs instead of burning the skin. And the hills which had been blue all day were a thick vegetable yellow. There was a storm coming.

Peter concluded that the woman must have gone. There were one or two places where she could have climbed out while the man was fishing for her with his stick. The banks were pretty steep—you had to know where to get out, or you’d have no more luck than a frog trying to climb up a glass jar.

Peter walked along the bank looking, out of curiosity, for the spot where the woman had left the river. It would be easy enough to see, the grass would be flattened and the dry brown earth wet from her drenched clothes. He did not care what became of the woman, he hated and feared her, but his was a precise mind and here was an event which was not finished. Until it was complete, he did not know how he would confront it, how he would remember it, or whether it would be an advantage not to remember it at all. Those two had done something to his river, he knew he would need to make so many adjustments in his own mind that finally it could not be the same river. It was not such a hermit, perhaps; in some obscure way it had allied itself with them, and he was mildly surprised, as one who discovers an old and sober friend in some cheap vulgarity.

But it was still better than anybody else’s river, the underwater tunnel was still particularly his, and the bony aqueducts and the forests of tenuous weed. He would still want to come, even if he had to treat the river differently.

He frowned with his proprietor’s frown, glancing along the bank. There were no signs of anyone having climbed out recently, no wet patches, no draggled grass. Had she gone to the other side? If she had, she must have been easily visible to the man, and besides, the river was narrow enough for Peter to see that the opposite bank was just as dry and untrampled.

Funny. He climbed on to a willow branch overhanging the water and from this vantage point, stared up and down the river. A rat pottered by in the shadows, refusing to quicken its pace when Peter hissed. The water and the gnats were the only other things that moved; leaves and grasses were pinned under the heavy air.

Unwillingly, he went back to the spot where the woman had fallen in. The broken loosestrife was already limp and dark, and there were some flies crawling on the green hat. The water was very deep here, so deep that looking up from the bottom you could only see a pale blur of light far above. . . .

Suddenly he ran and seized up the stick which the man had thrown away. He flung himself down on his knees and poked about in the water. He could never touch bottom with the stick, but he might find if there was anything floating under the surface.

The thought was admitted, his skin grew greenish, a weight dropped and rolled in his stomach. He let the stick fall, knowing that either he would run away now, leaving this horror entrenched for ever in his river, or he would prove for himself that it was nonexistent. There was only one way to prove it.

He came up, fighting, from the first wave of dread. Sight of the slow familiar waters made it so ridiculous that he off his shirt and trousers with a fierce grin at his mawkishness.

All the same, he had never felt less like swimming, so he gave himself no chance to baulk at the water’s edge. Even as his shirt—flung out behind him—settled on the grass, he dived deep.

When the water closed over him he was immediately reassured and didn’t believe any of it. Deep down, nothing was changed, it was green and gnomish, the mud fumed up from his feet and his outstretched hands, the coolness braced his whole body.

The real river, the dim miniature landscape beneath the surface was still the same. There could be no invasion of his province here, he was a fool to think people on the bank above could make any difference. As for the man and woman, he decided as he stroked through the reeds that he cared nothing about them, except that they should never come again; the unfinished event he could finish—when he was sufficiently interested—in his own way.

It was time he went home, but he felt the need of some act which would express his happiness at finding the river his own again. He had not forgotten the purpose of this dive, and now that his dread was groundless, he had every reason to be pleased with himself. As a formal conclusion and to set the seal to his prowess, he decided to go through the underwater tunnel once more.

At the surface he breathed the heavy air and kicked a lacing of foam on the broad waters. Murmurous and still distant, he heard the thunder and wondered how he would feel if that were artillery and a battle on the other side of the hills. He decided to pretend it on the way home, and dived just as the lightning stripped the sky like a blade.

At first Peter thought it had affected his eyes, because he could not see the tunnel, until he was nearly on it. The dark church-like entrance appeared and then was inexplicably blotted out. Not until the moment of collision did he understand that there was something between himself and the tunnel.

Under water was no solidity except in touch, but he knew, before his outflung hands confirmed, what it was hovering in front of him. His fingers slid on something soft; his dive carried him violently against a heavy mass. The impact swung it a little away, but then, as he crumpled on the bottom, it bore down on him from above with a dreadful, leisurely motion.

Peter had never fainted, he had never been under sufficient strain. Now, on the river bed, he came so near it that even the green underwater gloom was blacked out. He saw nothing, he scarcely knew what he did. His mind ceased to calculate; it was his body, reacting to physical nausea, swamped and drowning, which made him strike out blindly, seeking to batter and break the web of water. His fist hit something yielding, he turned and hammered it with hands and feet and it gave like pulp. But it swung aside and he was free. Still fighting, still blind, he shot up to the surface.

Above water he heard, as if from some other person, the harsh see-sawing of his own breath. Without respite he struggled to the bank and dragged himself out. Never had the earth felt so brisk and salutary or the daylight so clean. His skin still crawled with the touch of soft and slimy things; he lay panting and shuddering.

It was the thunder which roused him and the glare of lightning. He rubbed himself down with his hands and began to huddle into his clothes. The very dailiness of dressing reassured him more than anything else, and by the time he had tied his shoe laces he was engaged—squeamishly but logically—with the method, instead of being obsessed by the result.

The mystery of how the woman left the river without a trace was solved. She had never left it, she was down at the bottom, out of sight. But drowned people usually floated on the surface. She must be caught up, perhaps by one of the roots probably—Peter coldly conceded it—a foot or an arm was wedged in the vaulting of his tunnel. If that were so, why hadn’t she struggled and freed herself? She could have, easily. Once he had wedged his foot under a root—only a sharp twist was needed to loosen it.

He went cautiously to the loosestrife and peered over. There was the clubbed root jutting from the bank. She might have hit her head on that as she fell and been unconscious. Or she might have got her foot or arm so tightly fixed that she couldn’t get away, and so she just drowned down there while they watched for her on the bank above.

Peter found that deduction could have a purely cerebral excitement stronger than squeamishness. He so far forgot his diffidence as to push through the loosestrife and stand on the very spot where the woman had last stood. He examined the clubbed root for marks which might bear out his theory. To his disappointment, the dry, horny wood showed no signs of having been struck by anything recently. He went down on his hands and knees to look more closely, and was wishing he had a magnifying glass when he caught sight of the woman’s green hat. It still lay there, and flies still crawled on it as if it were something that had been alive and was now dead.

All at once Peter realized what had happened. He scrambled up and stared at the river with loathing. It was knocking away a little earth from the bank, carrying it off, delving deeper into its quiet hermit bed. It had always looked secretive; it still did, only now it had a secret to keep. There would be something else, something strange, to move under water with the reeds and the solid roots, turning, dipping with a slow, waltz-like motion.

Peter ran all the way home, but the storm broke before he was indoors.

At first, Peter thought intermittently about what had happened. He never spoke of it to anyone. There was something shameful about it and, anyway, it was none of his business.

He had the weapon of youth, the power to bury deep that which was more profitably forgotten. In a few days, not only the event but the place of the event—the river—dropped out of his mind for long periods. And the river had been important to him. When he was unable to go and swim there, he had kept it as a retreat, a place of his own, and at rare moments—rare because he was not given to day-dreaming—he would summon the memory and use it as a panacea for some grievance or a vehicle for indolence.

He hardly noticed the loss. It was as if he had closed a lid on the river. If by chance it was lifted, he did not remember the brown, soft water, the quiet colour, the jumping beans of sunlight. There came only a pang of alarm, a warning not to invite memory. This he prudently heeded, the lid was replaced on the river and all its associations.

When the woman’s body was found, weeks later, local gossip boiled over, and some of Peter’s school-fellows went to look at the place by the loosestrife. Peter usually fidgeted when they discussed it, and turned the subject by some violent horseplay. As he had considerable authority among his friends and set for them the fashion of their interests, they soon followed his lead and talked no more about the drowned woman.

It was his parents who really irritated him by their transparent tact. They treated the subject as too extreme to fall within his knowledge or understanding. It confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing but a great deal of wilful mystery in adult affairs.

If the boys had dropped the matter, there were others who had not. Peter was cleaning his bicycle one morning when Girlie Thomas ran up and hung over the garden gate.

“Say, Hume! Heard about the murder?”

Peter looked up with interest. “What murder?”

“That woman they got out of the river—she was murdered.”

Peter straightened, oily rag in hand. “Who says?”

“Who?” Girlie Thomas hooted indignantly. “Everyone I knows she was. Anyone could tell that. She was hit on the head and thrown in the river, besides—they’ve got the man that did it!”

Peter resented hearing news from Girlie Thomas, especially this news. With his thumbnail he began to prise a flint from his tyre and refused to look impressed.

“It was a blacksmith from Mulheath way,” Girlie Thomas went on, his boots scraping the gate panels. “My pop says he’ll swing for it, unless it’s manslaughter. How many years do they get for manslaughter?”

“Don’t know,” said Peter shortly.

Girlie Thomas looked over his glasses. “You used to go swimming in the river, didn’t you, Hume?”

“So what?”

“Well, you might have been there when it happened.”

Peter grunted. “I never go to the river now. I don’t I like it. And stop kicking that gate, Thomas. My father doesn’t like that gate being kicked.”

“Who’d tell him?”

“I would.”

“Yes, you would, squealer,” agreed Girlie Thomas, and when Peter made a dive at him, ran off, whistling amicably enough.

Peter went back to his bicycle. He stood frowning and spinning the cranks. It was quite true about not liking the river. He didn’t. He hadn’t been there since the day, and he wouldn’t be going again. He preferred to swim in the quarry with the others.

Those two had done something to the river. He couldn’t swim there any more, his skin crept at the thought of the brown water, the soft, pulpy mud. And the underwater tunnel—it belonged to the fat woman now.

They thought the man had killed her. That wasn’t right, he should have thought anyone would know it wasn’t. For a moment he was shocked at adult fallibility. Came again the pang of alarm, the warning not to remember, not to resurrect that pitiful self, shrinking in the lee of a nightmare. It had been ugly and stupid; most of all, it had been shameful in a way he could not understand. There was in it the very substance of those whispers, innuendoes and stories which he heard often at school, which he did not disbelieve, but did not care to verify. It was not his affair and there was no part which he would wish to claim as his.

The lid was replaced, and it was almost as if there had never been any river. Whistling, he wheeled his bicycle into the road. He was going to swim in the quarry.