Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

I looked down at my arms. White and shrunken, they were unbending slowly like snakes in the early spring. A ram of water hit me, flung me onto the tiled floor and rolled me against the wall. I sat up gasping. Above the roar of the water, the woman let out a laugh of childish pleasure.

Melliotes was leaning easily against the opposite wall. Waterdrops glistened like dew in his personal thicket. One of his hands held a nozzle attached to a white rubber hose. The other rested on a chromium wheel in the wall. Cold water gushed in my face.

I moved toward him on hands and knees, sideways, with my face averted. Water rushed under me and laid me on my back. I twisted onto my feet and jumped for him, was stopped in midair and dropped, forced back to the wall. I stood up again.

He took another nozzle from its hook, sighted along it like a sharpshooter. “Look at this one,” he said. “My prettiest fountain.”

A tiny stream of water sprang across the room and stung my chest. When I looked down, a six-inch letter M was printed in red on my skin, oozing droplets of blood.

“Speaking of killing, as you were,” he said, “this little fountain will kill.”

I moved across the room and got one hand on his throat. He shook me off and I staggered, almost too weak to stand. The heavier stream of water pounded me back to the wall.

“It will kill,” he said. “It will blind.”

“Do it to him,” Macon said, with girlish whinnyings.

“I’d like to. But remember we have to stay on the right side of the law.” He said it seriously.

The water took my legs from under me, rapped my head on the wall. I lay where I fell until the door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. Then I slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. Then I sat up. My chest and stomach were covered with red welts turning blue. And I was wearing his monogram.

The door was made of white enameled steel tightly fitted into the frame. It opened outwards but was knobless on my side. I hit it twice with my shoulder and gave up.

The skylight was frosted glass reinforced with wire netting. But it was a good twelve feet off the floor, beyond the reach of any human leap. I tried climbing the wall by way of the taps and nozzles. All that got me was a shower-bath I didn’t need. I closed the tap I had accidentally opened and watched the water with loathing. It ran into a central depression in the floor where it was caught by a drain. The drain was covered by a circular metal screen. The screen lifted out when I got my fingernails under it. I squatted over the four-inch pipe which was the only way out, and wished I was a sewer rat. A soggy idea moved in my head like a half-drowned animal.

There was another way out of the white room. It was hermitically sealed, built to hold water. If I could fill it with water, I might be able to float myself up to the skylight. A dangerous experiment, but not so dangerous as staying where I was, waiting for Melliotes to think of other games. The first thing I had to do was plug the drain.

I took off my shoes and socks and crammed the toe of one shoe into the opening, wadding the socks around it. Then I turned all the taps on full. Water hissed and gushed and splattered from the wall. I dodged it as well as I could; Melliotes had given me a bad case of hydrophobia. Standing in the furthest corner, I watched the water creep up over my ankles, up to my knees, all the way up to my waist. In fifteen or twenty minutes I was afloat.

It was pleasantly warm, and I gradually lost my fear of it. I lay on my back and waited for the ceiling to come closer. When I raised my head, I could hear the trapping air hissing out through the cracks around skylight. After a long time, during which I rose surely and imperceptibly with the water, I was close enough to the ceiling to reach it with my hand.

I trod water and swung a fist at the skylight. Without intending to I pulled the punch; if my fist went through I knew I’d mangle my hand. The blow cracked the reinforced glass but rebounded ineffectually.

I took some deep breaths and dove for one of my shoes. The water was clear and still except where the incoming streams bubbled and tumbled from the nozzles in the wall. A shaft of sun angled down from the skylight and turned the liquid mass to a cube of pale green light. I stroked along the floor and got my hands on the extra shoe. My ears were aching from the pressure of tons of water above me.

There was a sudden movement in the water, tremor and vibration that turned my stomach over. Something I hadn’t counted on was happening to my plan; it looked as if I’d cleverly arranged to die like a rat in a well. I started for the taps to turn them off. But first my lungs needed air and there wasn’t much left at the top. With the shoe in my hand I gathered my legs for the upward push.

Another tremor shook the water and me. A metallic crackling sounded from the direction of the door. It had been built to hold water, but not an entire roomful of the stuff. As I turned in swimmer’s slow-motion the white door bellied out like a sail and disappeared in a churning rush and welter. The released weight of the water pushed me after it. My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.

I was swept through the empty doorway, banged against the opposite wall of the corridor, somersaulted along it. I caught a door-frame with one hand and held on while the water tore at me. The current slowed almost as suddenly as it had begun, and the level of the water subsided. I found the floor and braced myself in the doorway.

Melliotes was in the room with the woman. She was struggling in the water, splashing with arms and legs. He bent over her and lifted her in his arms. She clambered on him, a hairless pink monkey gibbering piteously. My shoe was still in my hand; it was a Scotch walking shoe with an iron-shod heel, and I used it on the back of Melliotes’ head. He fell in the shallow water with the woman clinging to him. Father chimpanzee and child.

I looked around the room. The woman’s white uniform, an up-ended wastebasket, a scattered bunch of flowers, papers and oddments of clothing, floated in the ebbing tide. There was a white oak desk, a leather armchair and couch, all marked by the water. A piece of office stationary on the desk bore the letterhead: ANGEL OF MERCY NURSING HOME. HYDROTHERAPY AND COLONIC IRRIGATION. PRIVATE ROOMS FOR PATIENTS. DR. G.M. MELLIOTES, PROPRIETOR. A Venice address and phone number.

The heavy red drapes at the window dragged suddenly. Through the slats of the Venetian blind I could see a sunlit lawn bright with flowerbeds and deckchairs. A thin old man in tropical cotton was walking from one chair to another, if you could call it walking. He moved erratically, in several directions at once, as if the terminals of his nervous system had been cut. Fortunately he was in good hands. The Angel of Mercy Nursing Home could give him a permanent cure.

Something small and clammy and furious scratched at my legs. I moved away from her. I didn’t like to touch her.

“He’s drowning,” she cried. “I can’t turn him over.”

Melliotes was spreadeagled on the wet-dark carpet, his face in a puddle of water. I looked at the bloody back of his head and felt no pain. I took him by an arm and leg and flipped him over. The whites of his eyes were showing, threaded with red. His chest was heaving like a tired dog’s.

The woman minced around the desk and opened a drawer. She came back toward me holding Melliotes’ gun in both her hands. I didn’t intend to die in that company, and I slapped it down. She growled in the back of her throat and hugged her meager breast with pipestem arms.

“I want my clothes,” I said. “And put something on yourself. I can’t stand the sight of you.”