she panted. “Come on up. You’ve done the hard part.
Now let’s see if I can find the lights.”
The lights were tiny lanterns for which Rosalie found flashlight cells somewhere. They illuminated a chamber containing tables, chairs, beds, racks of instruments, cup-boards of food.
“Isn’t it nice, love? Wasn’t I lucky to find it?”
Chandler stared about, beginning to breathe normally again. “What is it?”
“Some sort of experiment, I think.” She had found a mirror, coated with grime and was scrubbing it clean with someone’s neatly folded sweatshirt. “People used to live here in the old days,” she said, propping the mirror against a wall and pirouetting in front of it. “Oh, lovely! Really I looked a little bit like this once, back inwell!”
“Now what do we do?”
She pressed her hair back, squeezing water out of it.
“Why, we rest for a minute, love. And if I can find it, we drink some champagne. And then we do something very nice.”
Chandler picked up a harpoon gun and put it down again. He could not help wondering who had built this trapped bubble of underwater living-space. “Cousteau,” he said out loud, remembering.
“You mean that skin-diver? Well, no, I don’t think so, love. He was French. But it’s the same idea.” She produced a bottle from a chest. “Champagne!” she crowed.
“Just as I promised. A bit warm, I’m afraid, but still it’ll give you heart for the next bit.”
“And what’s that?”
But she would not tell him, only fussed over him while he popped the scarlet plastic cork out with his thumbs and retreated, laughing, from the gush of foam.
They drank, out of a mug and a canteen cup. Chandler could not help prodding at her for information. “The boat’s going to be drifted away, you know. How do we get back?”
“Oh, love, you do worry about the most peculiar things.
I do wish you’d relax.”
“It’s not entirely easy” he began, but she flared at him.
“Oh, come on! I must say, you’ve got a pretty” But she relented almost at once. “I’m sorry for snapping at you. I know it’s a scary time.” She sat down beside him, her bare arm touching his, and said, “We might as well finish the champagne before we go. Want me to tell you about when I went through it?”
“Sure,” he said, stirring the wine around in the glass and drinking it down, hardly hearing what she said, although the sound of her voice was welcome.
“Oh, that lousy headdress! It weighed twenty pounds, and they put it on with hatpins.” He caressed her absently. He had figured out that she was talking about the night New York was bombed. “I was in the middle of the big first-act curtain number when” her face was strained, even after years, even now that she was herself one of the godlike ones”when something took hold of me. I ran off the stage and right out through the front door. There was a cab waiting. As soon as I got in I was free, and the driver took off like a lunatic through the tunnel, out to Newark Airport. I tell you, I was scared! At the toll-booth I screamed but myfriendlet go of the driver for a minute, smashed a trailer-truck into a police car, and in the confusion we got away. He took me over again at the airport. I ran bare as a bird into a plane that was just ready to take off. The pilot was under control… . We flew eleven hours, and I wore that damn feather headdress all the way.”
She held out her glass for a refill. Chandler busied himself opening the second bottle. Now she was talking about her friend. “I hadn’t seen him in six years. I was just a Md, living in Islip. He was with a Russian trade commission next door, in an old mansion. Well, he was one of the ones, back in Russia, that came up with these.”
She touched her brow where her coronet usually rested.
“So,” she said brightly, “he put me up for membership and by and by they gave me one. You see? It’s all very simple, except the waiting.”
Chandler pulled her to him and made a toast. “Your friend.”
“He’s a nice guy,” she said moodily, sipping her drink.
“You know how careful I am about getting exercise and so on? It’s partly because of him. You would have liked him, love, onlywell, it turned out that he liked me well enough, but he began to like what he could get through the coronet a lot more. He got fat. A lot of them are awfully fat, love,” she said seriously. “That’s why they need people like me. And you. Replacements. Heart trouble, liver trouble, what can they expect when they lie in bed day in and day out, taking their lives through other people’s bodies? I won’t let myself go that way… . It’s a temptation. You know, almost every day I find some poor woman on a diet and spend a solid hour eating cream-puffs and gravies. How they must hate me!”
She grinned, leaned back and kissed him.
Chandler put his arms around the girl and returned the kiss, hard. She did not draw away. She clung to him, and he could feel in the warmth of her body, the sound of her breath that she was responding.
And then she whispered, “Not yet, love,” and pushed him away. “Time for water sports!” she cried, getting to her feet. “You’ve loafed here long enoughnow let me show you what’s fun!”
Ten minutes later, wearing scuba gear Rosalie had turned up from somewhere, he was following her out through the grayish green sea.
After the first minute, it was not like swimming at all.
For one thing, you didn’t feel wet. And you were breathing, through the mask and the tube in your teeth. It was interesting, he thought; but he could not help wondering if this was what Rosalie had meant by “fun.”
They had weighted themselves with belts of metal slugs, but he was still buoyant and had to fight continually against rising to the surface, where Rosalie seemed to have overweighted herself and kept sloping down toward the distant bottom. Swimming was slow, especially as Rosalie had insisted he carry a long-bladed butcher knife”In case of sharks, love!”
But still! He was under the water and breathing. He followed her, expecting something, but not knowing quite what.
There were sharks, all right. He had seen a dozen of them, and there was something off to the side right now, circling behind him, almost invisible in the distance. He regarded it with great suspicion and dislike. Even if you couldn’t get really killed in a borrowed bodyyou yourself couldn’t; he was not prepared to think about what happened to the prisoned owner of the bodythere were things that were not attractive about the prospect of great unseen jaws suddenly slicing a ham away.
Rosalie half turned to him, beckoned and started down.
Dimly he could see the bottom now, or at any rate something that was where the bottom ought to be. Rosalie was spinning there below him, waiting for him.
It was quite dim, this far from the surface of the sea, but Chandler could see the gleam of her eye and her cheerful wink behind the mask. She stretched out a hand and pointed above him and behind.
Chandler half turned to see. There were five of the great shadowy bulks there now, and they seemed to be moving toward him.
Frantically he kicked and squirmed to face them, but Rosalie caught his arm. She held him, and gestured for him to hand her the knife.
Chandler was frankly terrified. Every childhood fear sprang to life in him; his breath caught, his heart pounded, something churned in his belly and forced its way into his throat. It was no good telling himself that this was not really his body, that his own flesh lay secure in a split-level living room twelve thousand miles away; he cringed from the threat of the grim, silent shapes and it was all he could do to stay in this threatened corpus to see what Rosalie wanted to do.
He gave her the knife. She glanced upward at the sharks calculatingly, then pursed her lips, winked, blew him a kiss and neatly, carefully, sliced his airhose in two.
His oxygen blew out in a cascade of great, wriggling bubbles. Water rushed in. He felt her tearing his facemask off, but water was already in his eyes, mouth, nose. He coughed and strangled, more startled than he had ever been in his life; and then she touched his chest with the blade, daintily and precisely. Fire leaped along his side and a cloud of blood began to diffuse through the water.
She ripped off her own facemask and slit a careful line across the eighteen-year-old’s borrowed abdomen, then reached out her arms to him.