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understand why you didn't want to tell me. Not many people do, not at first.
Did she my anything to you? Did she give you any kind of message? Were you
able to communicate with her in any way?'
'She - spoke my name a few times. Then she asked me to make love to her.'
'Yes,' Edward nodded. 'Several people have had that experience. Go on. What
else did she do? Did she actually make love to you?'
'I had - well, I don't know what to call it. I had some kind of a sexual
experience. It was extremely cold. I'll never forget how cold it was. Do you
remember in The Exorcist how the room got so cold? It reminded me of that. It
all ended when I saw her as she must have been when she was involved in her
car crash. You know -blood, bones - it scared the living hell out of me.'
'Is that why you're not going back to Granitehead tonight?'
'Do you blame me?'
'Of course not. I want you calm for tomorrow, anyway, when we dive. Anxiety
leads to stress, and stress leads to mistakes. You don't want to drown your
first time out.'
'I wish you'd stop being so damned optimistic about this dive.'
A waitress in a black tuxedo vest and black bow-tie brought us our drinks.
While Edward sampled his beer, I took out my ballpen and said, 'There's
something else. A kind of written message, burned on the sheets of the bed. It
was still there this morning.'
I wrote on my paper coaster the letters that had appeared on my bed, copying
them as exactly as I could. SALVAGE. I pushed them over to Edward and he
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examined them carefully.
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'Salvage?' he asked. 'You're sure it's not "savage"?'
'No. It's definitely salvage. It's the second or third time the letters have
appeared. Once they were scrawled on my bathroom mirror, and once on the side
of my kettle. It's salvage. It's an appeal to me to salvage the David Dark.'
Edward pouted his lips skeptically. 'You really think that?'
'Edward, when you see one of these apparitions, you're aware of feelings and
thoughts that you've never ever had before in your life. It's an intuitive
experience, as well as a sensory one. Nobody said, "This means that you're
supposed to salvage the David Dark." They didn't have to. I knew.'
'Now listen,' said Edward, 'I know that I'm given to drawing tendentious
historical conclusions, but I really think that you're jumping a whole lot of
logical steps here without any substantive reasoning at all. To find and bring
up the David Dark we have to be analytical, as well as theoretical.'
'Do you have anybody close to you, who's recently died?' I asked him, in the
softest of voices.
'No, I don't.'
'In that case, trust what I'm saying. I've seen my own dead wife, right in
front of me. I've had sex with her spirit, if that's what it was. I'm already
beginning to realize that there's another existence right alongside of ours,
and it's crowded with pain and self-doubt and fear and longing. Maybe if we
bring up the David Dark, like you've always wanted to do, we can find a way to
ease that pain, and settle that doubt, and calm all those fears and those
longings, for good.'
Edward looked down at the table. He puffed out his cheeks. 'Well,' he said,
without any trace of sarcasm, 'you sounded almost religious there, for a
moment.'
This is religious, isn't it? It's all tangled up with religion?'
Edward looked doubtful. 'To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is. If
you've actually seen those apparitions,
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then you know more than I do, at least in terms of practical experience.'
I raised my glass. 'Here's to tomorrow's dive. I don't want to go, but I think
I'm going to have to.'
FIFTEEN
Shortly after ten o'clock, I left the Tavern on the Green and went upstairs to
my room. Edward had left around nine-thirty to go home to his sister, and
there had been no sign of Gilly, so I decided to have a steak and a jacket
potato on room service, and spend the rest of the evening boning up on the
diving manual which Edward had lent me.
I had a corner room on the sixth floor overlooking Salem Common, and through [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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