Lanny = hireling
We got it. Lanny was a hireling of Fred Stavis, who couldn't dive due to a burst eardrum, whose company Dive Solutions did the grunt work for Oscar Flynn, who had once saved Lanny from drowning, to whom Lanny owed some kind of twisted life-debt.
Flynn or Stavis or the both of them had sent Lanny down here to do a job and that told me all I needed to know—this job was bad news.
We checked our dive time on our wrist computers and Tolliver gave the okay sign. He unclipped the guideline reel from his BC and tied off the line on a knob of rock and then, without dissent, the three of us nosed into the tunnel.
I took note that Lanny hadn't set a line. He surely knew the basics, diving for Stavis's company. He surely knew how to make a safe entrance in an overhead environment. I guessed he hadn't wanted to leave a breadcrumb trail for us to find.
Too late for that.
We swam into the tunnel with controlled frog-kicks. We hardly needed to kick at all, thanks to a mild inflowing current.
The light zone did not penetrate far and so we relied on our torches, sweeping them back and forth to illuminate the way ahead. There were not likely to be more surprises pressed against the walls because the walls were fairly smooth and offered no crevices in which to hide.
Still.
We proceeded with a large dose of caution.
There was no sign of Lanny, up ahead. Either he'd come to a fork in the road or he'd progressed where our lights did not reach.
It was okay. Plenty of dive time. Plenty of room. The tunnel was wide enough for the three of us to fit side by side with room to spare. But damn it was a burrow into the reef and I felt squeezed.
My mouth went cottony. I tried to recall the taste of fennel on my tongue. All I could taste was stale canned air.
My breathing picked up. My bubbles speeded up.
Time to hum. Slow down that breathing. I searched for a tune, anything but the Jaws theme—a lullaby would be nice and I found myself humming All the Pretty Little Horses. Two bars in I realized where I'd gotten that tune, Oscar Flynn singing to the dying sea lion on the beach. I tried to shut it down but it morphed back into Jaws.
I abandoned humming and began to recite the Gettysburg Address.
Fourscore and seven years ago—a score is twenty so fourscore is eighty plus seven equals eighty-seven and it was the math and Abraham Lincoln that calmed me down.
Up ahead, the tunnel was widening.
Lanny was nowhere in sight.
I had my breathing under control but my mind took off on its own. What was ahead of us? What sort of surprise lay in wait? Something beyond our field of view. Something like that huge ghostly shape I had glimpsed two days ago across the chasm in the dying kelp forest. Only down here, the shape would be close. Identifiable.
My mouth went dry as toast.
Which is preferable, lady? Shadows of the mind or reality in your face?
CHAPTER 41
The tunnel flared wider and then opened into nothing.
We found anchorage on a rock wall and played our beams in flashes and slashes, and shadows lived and died, and we found that we were anchored at the mouth of a cavern.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
And then somebody's light caught Lanny hugging the left-hand cavern wall.
He raised a hand and shielded his goggled eyes. His own glove light was off. He switched it on. Behind him on the wall was a recessed area with shelves of equipment. Some sort of control panel. He turned and opened the panel door and his glove light revealed a keypad. He punched a button and the keypad lit up.
And now more light blazed.
A floodlight.
We shielded our eyes.
When my eyes adjusted I saw the breadth of the cavern. It was large enough to moor a fishing boat.
Large and tall and wide but who knew how deep because it was bisected by a fence.
The fence rippled in the gentle current.
What kind of fence ripples?
I painted the fence with my light and saw that it was made of mesh.
Mesh so fine that my light wouldn't penetrate.
The depths beyond were unfathomable.
The fence skeleton, though, was revealed in the floodlight—a fence framed with PVC piping, fitted flush with the ceiling and floor and corner walls, a fully enclosing fence.
I wondered what the hell lay beyond.
There was a gate to the beyond but it was shut.
The gate, too, was fine mesh and it was framed within the fence.
I fixed on that gate. I saw how it worked. It was cabled to the control panel on the left-hand wall. The cable was hard to see—you had to be looking—but I'd become familiar with cables and I spotted it tucked along the frame of the fence, leading to the wall, and from there it snaked to the lighted control panel. And then I spotted the second cable snaking out of the control panel, feeding into a fissure in the wall. I knew that cable, how it snaked up through the hole in the reef up to the fake rock, and from there to the sound link on the cage.
Down here—just like up top—there was a rock-faced door, sparkling with fake crystals. This door stood ajar. Lanny must have opened it to access the control panel.
Oh Lancelot.
What are you doing here?
I went deadly cold.
His job. What else?
Tap a key, throw a switch, turn it on, turn it off, who the hell knew because Lanny sure wasn't talking.
Walter and Tolliver and I still latched onto the wall at the cavern mouth.
Lanny watched us watching him.
The floodlight illuminated us as well as Lanny. All of us revealed. Tolliver letting go of his anchor in preparation to kick off, and Lanny at the wall looking twitchy.
Tolliver made one of his diver signals: flat hand, palm down, moving slowly up and down. Take it easy.
Lanny did not take it easy.
He turned back to the keypad and punched in more numbers.
The gate in the fence slowly swung open.
I flinched.
Lanny lunged toward the gate and ventured inside the fenced-off room.
For a moment I was relieved, I thought if he's going in there that means he knows what's what. He knows it's safe in there. Safe from what, who knows, I didn't really care to know.
But he'd come here to do a job and now the job was taking him in there.
And we'd come to stop him.
We pushed off and swam across the cavern to the gate and paused there and Tolliver gave me a palm-up sign—stay here, stand guard, who knew what I was standing guard against but there was one unbreachable rule down here. Don't get stuck. Don't get on the wrong side of a gate that is wired.
Inside the fence, on the wrong side of the gate, Lanny was suspended, looking around.
Looking lost.
I understood. It was an unsettling room. Hell, the whole cavern was unsettling but this fenced-off room, more so. It was our first clear look inside—our lights did not penetrate the depths and barely pierced the murk up front, by the fence—but it was enough to see that the room was netted like a kids' indoor netted ball pit. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the entirety of this room was netted with the same mesh that netted the fence and the gate. The mesh rippled slightly.
Up front, near the fence, the murk was pierced by two dim shafts of light.
Lanny was suspended, as if in a trance, in the strange light. He looked up.
We looked up.
The light came from small holes in the ceiling and I figured they must be chimneys that punched through the body of the reef up above, allowing in light from the open sea. Degraded light, filtered light, and along with it came a soft rain of particulates, all of it filtered through mesh.
Lanny came out of his trance and headed for the left-hand wall.
A control panel was mounted there.
I thought, no no no.
Tolliver and Walter ventured into the room.
Lanny reached the wall and yanked
open the panel door, revealing a keypad, a twin to the keypad panel on the wall outside the fence. This inner keypad was lighted, already activated.
I saw the power cable running along the wall, linking the inner and the outer panels.
Twin keypads, cabled, yoked. Live.
Walter and Tolliver were taking their damn time, mindful I guessed of spooking Lanny into punching the wrong keys.
Too mindful, too slow, come on come on.
Lanny was fumbling with his BC, taking something out of a pocket.
Walter and Tolliver at last got a move on, and flanked him.
Lanny let go of whatever he'd been fooling with and tried to push them away.
Tolliver escalated, grabbing him by the arm.
Lanny twisted to escape, his free hand reaching for the panel, and now Walter intercepted him. And still Lanny struggled, and for a moment I feared that hoses and regulators were going to get dislodged, that the entangling divers were going to stir up silt and blind us all here in the guts of the reef.
But it was two against one.
Lanny slumped, and the thing he'd been fooling with floated behind him, attached by a lanyard to his BC. I aimed my light at it. It was a slate with a string of numbers neatly written. A password? He'd been trying to enter a password?
Only, Walter and Tolliver interrupted him.
I wondered what the password would have set into motion.
With Lanny secured, my breathing evened out and I took the time to take note of the second cable that exited the control panel. This cable snaked along the wall deeper into the fenced-off room.
I followed it with my light, searching for an explanation.
My light found another puzzle, another gate, a small gate this time, a PVC mesh gate framed into the wall. It led off this unsettling room into another... What?
This new gate was shut.
I looked again at Lanny's slate floating like a bathtub toy. No, not at all a toy. A password to open this new gate, what else?
Walter and Tolliver began to maneuver Lanny away from the panel.
As I waited at the main fence gate—above all else making sure that gate did not close—I noticed a new light.
I froze.
The others noticed it, and froze.
We were no longer alone.
CHAPTER 42
The new light was in the tunnel.
And in short order a diver materialized in the tunnel, silhouetted in the light zone, following his torch light into the floodlighted cavern.
Coming our way.
He swam sleekly and strongly, even his controlled frog-kick a confident thing.
He entered the front room of the cavern and without pause angled himself toward the left-hand wall, toward the panel that Lanny had abandoned when he fled into the fenced-off room.
The diver appeared to give no notice to me at the gate, floodlit.
He studied the keypad a moment.
Then he finned over to the fence and put his torch light against the mesh and it filtered through enough to catch the three men at the inner control panel. Lanny pinioned by Walter and Tolliver.
And then the diver turned back to study me at the open gate.
He was an unnerving sight. Big, a slab of a man. Face a mask. A mask behind the dive mask—slick black Neoprene skin from chin to hood, sealed around the mouth where the regulator fitted, leaving only eyes and nose visible behind the dive mask. His eyes were dark as the abyss and, I swore, steeped in venom.
The eyes, if nothing else, identified him.
He hung there slowly finning, holding himself in place.
My breathing took off. I willed myself to chill and somehow located a nugget of outrage and that steadied me. I grew the nerve to feel affronted that he'd come—why had he sent Lanny down here to do the job, and then come himself? I felt misled.
No no no, you've got that wrong, lady. You and Tolliver and Walter misled yourselves. You wanted to believe that it was going to be just a question of stopping Lanny and hauling his ass out of here.
Not a question of confronting Oscar Flynn.
For a moment I thought, what if it's just the boss coming to check up on the hireling—Flynn sending Lanny to fix what he'd broken and wasn't that a big-hearted gesture to trust in Lanny, to give him the chance to redeem himself? And even to follow him on the chance that he might need some help?
I wanted to buy that.
I didn't want to be here with this masked man between us and the exit to the open sea and so I hoped that he would simply shoo us all away so he could fix whatever still needed fixing.
One giant Lanny-sized blooper took down the acoustic link to remotely operate these keypads. Was that it?
So far, Flynn had made no move to engage with us.
We were free as fish to swim away.
And leave him to do what he came to do.
I just couldn't do that.
I looked into the fenced room and saw Walter and Tolliver struggling to move Lanny toward the gate. Lanny was not on our side. Still the hireling in employ of the boss. Not just the boss—the man who had saved Lanny's life.
I shot another glance at Flynn, still at the fence.
Assessing.
Waiting.
Who knew?
And then something changed.
I felt my legs moving. I had a firm hold on the frame of the gate but my legs floated outward, into the front room. The current had changed. It was no longer inflowing into the cavern as it had been when we entered. It was now outflowing, reversing course. I glanced up at the chimney holes and saw the particulates in the light shafts, flowing outward now. It was a whisper of a current urging the particulates and me and everybody else in here out. It was a sweet current that could carry us out through the tunnel and into the open sea.
That is, once Walter and Tolliver had wrestled Lanny over here to the open gate.
And then we could turn our attention to Oscar Flynn.
But Flynn turned his attention to me, first.
He left the wall and slowly finned my way.
I thought, he's going to try to shove me inside and then he's going to shut the gate, shut us all inside, and I thought the hell, that's the unbreachable rule, don't get stuck on the wrong side of the fence, and I grabbed hold with both hands and braced myself but I was going to need some help and I looked to Walter and Tolliver, to shout hurry up and get here. My kingdom for a voice in this airless world.
But Walter and Tolliver were paying me no attention.
Nor was Lanny. He wasn't even struggling any more.
The three of them had disentangled, linked only by limp handholds, facing into the depths of the fenced room.
Something changed.
I looked to Flynn, who had reached the open gate, who was a lunge away from me, but he too had shifted focus, away from me, staring inside the fenced room.
I turned to see what they were all looking at, back there in the dark reaches of the cavern.
Ghosts.
CHAPTER 43
I found myself clutching the gate with one hand, other hand flung out in front of me, palm up. Stop.
They didn't stop.
They weren't divers and they didn't have eyes and even if they could see I wasn't going to be stopping them.
There were three of them and they came forward out of the depths of the fenced room, a ghostly procession out of the dark, a shadow nightmare ghostly sight that was solid and real coming my way.
Stop, hell, who could stop them?
Not Tolliver nor Walter nor Lanny who had retreated and plastered themselves to the fenced-room wall in order to make room because those oncoming creatures nearly filled the space.
And Oscar Flynn? I didn't know, I couldn't look at him because I was staring at the things coming my way.
They were lit by our torches in flashes and slashes and that was not enough to fully display these things but one thing was clear.
They were enormous.
Bigger t
han me. Bigger even than Flynn.
They passed now into the shafts of light from the ceiling holes and the degraded light showed flesh-colored things, flesh that never saw the sun.
They came drifting forward on the outflowing current.
They came with their colossal bells pulsing.
One came ahead squeezing past the others as if it wanted to get somewhere first, and the current took it up against the fence, the soft mesh giving, and there it caught a moment until it pulsed away from the impediment and the current urged it to the gate where I clung.
It was going to touch me.
I looked wildly toward Walter, still trapped against the inner wall with Tolliver and Lanny. Tolliver had his dive knife out and Lanny had his hands over his mask to hide his face and Walter flapped his hands at me: go go go.
I looked wildly for Flynn, he'd been right there at the gate with me but now he was gone.
I didn't take the time to hunt him down.
Damn me, I fled. I let go of the gate and fled, kicking like goddamn dolphin but I didn't kick fast enough because the tips of my fins kicked the gelatinous bell. It took in my fins. I screamed. A silent scream that nearly burst my lungs and my heartbeat pulsed along with the bell and then I hissed out a long exhale, a torrent of bubbles.
And then I kicked free.
I jerked my head and found Flynn. He'd backed up against the front room wall, giving the things room.
The guilt at abandoning my friends, trapped in the fenced room, sickened me but only for a moment because they were now in a better place and Flynn and I were in a worse place.
The giants were flowing out through the gate.
The first giant pulsed its way through—the gate itself a good eight-by-eight feet and the creature filled it with little room to spare. It came head-first, bell-first, bulling its way ahead, and behind it trailed strings. Hundreds upon hundreds of thready strings, and they were caught up into bundles but the strings of each bundle entangled with the others to form one spreading undulating mass of thready stringy tentacles.
The stinging cells on the tentacles would be too small to see.
Easy to imagine.
Billions upon billions of nematocysts.
The thing bumped into me.
Skeleton Sea Page 25
