Mr. Raven laughed. Just a single bark, nearly a cough. No brightness or humor in it. "This?" He gestured at the body on the floor. "This is shit. I have something important to talk about."
Tim's gaze joined Sue's. She could see him asking himself what the boat owner wanted. And she could see that he was terribly worried about it.
So, she realized, was she.
What could make a dead, weirdly eaten body into a non-issue? Into "shit"?
Mr. Raven turned away. Went to the stairs that led to the salon. Climbed up and disappeared.
The others followed. Only Tim and she remained.
He gestured. After you.
She left. Not because she wanted to hear what Mr. Raven was going to say.
She thought she had seen the body move again.
Impossible. Just the tarp settling down.
Just the tarp.
DEPTH
~^~^~^~^~
The dying sun pushed pink fingers into the room. It cast a dull glow about the salon, a new night's darkness fighting the last light of a sunny day. Darkness winning, as must be, as was inevitable.
It was the kind of thing that might be beautiful, but just as easily eerie and strange. Everyone's skin was yellowed, jaundiced by the lowering sun. Eye sockets became hollowed by the long shadows cast.
It was, Tim thought, like a group of skeletons had gathered for a strange party in the salon.
They were all there, even Geoffrey and Mercedes. Haeberle stood beside the narrow staircase that led up to the wheelhouse. He held the gold piece, turning it over and over in his hands and occasionally rubbing it against his now-streaked shirt, cleaning it as much as he could. He wore a distant, calculating expression that Tim didn't like.
Geoffrey had been sitting at the small table where people could eat meals or play cards or just b.s. during the parts of the trip when they weren't actually diving. Now he stood and reached toward Haeberle.
"Hey," he said, "give someone else a chance to look at –"
He fell silent as Haeberle looked up at him. Tim could see why. The other man's expression had gone from cold and distant to completely present, with barely-contained mayhem dancing like flame across his visage.
"I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here," said Mr. Raven. He was standing directly in front of the steps to the wheelhouse, as though to remind everyone that he was the owner, the captain. Tim thought it likely that was purposeful. Mr. Raven liked people to know he was in charge.
Coming from anyone else, this line – so overused in movies and TV shows that it had become cliché – would seem like a joke. But not from Mr. Raven, and not now.
Tim felt his lips pucker. "I'm wondering why we haven't called in what happened."
He had tried to get Mr. Raven to go up and call in the discovery of the dead body, and maybe to radio any Navy vessels in the area to find out what was with the wave that had so battered them. Mr. Raven ignored him.
"The law is quite clear," said Mr. Raven. "We're required to report certain injuries, or if someone goes missing. But someone long dead?" He shook his head. "That's… a gray area." He waved, dismissing the subject. "In any event, we have something strange to deal with."
Jimmy J rubbed his arm. He had gotten a long strip of gauze from the first aid kit while Mr. Raven was herding everyone into the salon, and now his forearm arm was wrapped in white. Tim didn't understand why he had done this until Jimmy J had told him about the sharp pain he felt when the body fell on top of him. The other dive leader showed Tim his arm and sure enough, there was a long thin slash on it.
"I didn't see it at first, but I guess I must have cut myself on the guy's equipment," said Jimmy J. "Not much blood but it hurts like your momma on top of me."
Now Jimmy J didn't make any jokes. He just rubbed his arm when Mr. Raven said there was "something strange" to deal with and answered with a very direct and serious, "No shit."
Mr. Raven shook his head. "Not the body. I'm talking about the ocean floor."
Tim felt himself perk up. What did Mr. Raven mean?
At the same time, though, he felt something akin to panic roll through him. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to be good. He could feel it.
"What about it?" said Geoffrey. "It's sand and sand and sand, right? We haven't even found many fish to look at. Which, by the way, has made this dive a huge bust and a huger waste of money." He crossed his arms and looked like nothing more than a man-sized child about to throw a tantrum.
"My apologies for the lack of fish, Geoffrey," said Mr. Raven in a tone that indicated he couldn't possibly care less about the other man's displeasure. "But of more concern is the fact that the ocean floor is currently one-hundred-fifty feet below us."
Tim froze. So did everyone else – except Haeberle, who kept turning the gold over and over in his big hands.
"Mr. R," Jimmy J finally said. "That's… that's wrong."
"We're over an eight-hundred-foot shelf, Mr. Raven.," said Tim.
Mr. Raven shook his head. "No, we were over an eight-hundred-foot shelf," he said. "But whatever caused that wave also seems to have caused a massive shift in the ocean floor."
"That's not possible," said Sue. She was seated at the table with her father, and Cal slammed his fist down on the cheap wood as if to punctuate her sentence, to accentuate the truth of it.
"That's ridiculous," he said.
Mr. Raven nodded. "I agree. But the sonar, the bottom finder, the fish finder – every piece of equipment I have confirms it. So the question isn't if it really happened, the question is…." He looked around the salon, meeting each person's eyes in turn. "What are we going to do about it?"
Geoffrey snorted. "We get the hell out of here. We go home."
"I second that," said Mercedes. As usual, she was sitting by herself on a chair bolted to the wall. She sounded worried, as though voicing her opinion was not merely uncomfortable for her, but actively dangerous. Still, Tim was glad to hear her voice. She had listened intently and courteously to instructions and requests on the dive trip, but had barely said three sentences the whole time. Tim had started to worry about her – not that she would cause trouble or be a danger on the boat, but rather that she might be heading into trouble and/or danger when she got off it.
"So let's go," said Geoffrey. "I'm tired and bruised and I don't –"
"That's not all, is it?" said Haeberle. His deep voice seemed to creep through the cracks in Geoffrey's perma-whine. Strong, quiet – because if you were strong enough you didn't have to raise your voice.
Mr. Raven smiled a Cheshire smile.
Tim remembered that the Cheshire cat had been Alice's sometime guide, but one of very little use since the area she traversed was one of dream or perhaps nightmare. A place where nothing made sense.
"No, indeed," said Mr. Raven. "That's not all by a long shot."
And down the rabbit hole we go.
Mr. Raven pulled a crinkled piece of paper from his pocket. It hung there in his hand like a damaged bird, something injured but still possibly dangerous. Tim took it when no one else moved to do so.
"What is this?" he asked.
"A printout of what the 3-D sonar found at the bottom – the new bottom – here."
Tim felt breath on his shoulder. Jimmy J was leaning over him. A bit of a space invasion, but that was Jimmy J for you. And under the circumstances Tim couldn't blame him for wanting to see what Tim held.
Jimmy J pointed at a spot in the center. "What is that?"
Tim shook his head. Curiouser and curiouser. "Looks like –"
"Is that a ship?"
Tim started. He had been so intent on the printout that he hadn't even heard Cal stand and join him and Jimmy J.
"I think it might be, yes," said Mr. Raven.
Something clicked. Tim jerked at the sound.
Easy, man. Calm down.
It was just Mr. Raven, turning on a light that hung from the center of the ceiling. Tim realized that his eyes stung from lo
oking at the printout, from the gray on gray and then gray on black that the paper had become.
Night had fallen. The thin fingers of the sun had drawn into a dark fist and disappeared into the black of open ocean.
Mr. Raven held out his hand to Haeberle, obviously waiting for the man to give him the coin. Haeberle pointedly ignored him; kept flipping the coin over and over, pausing to clean it a bit more every so often.
Mr. Raven's hand withdrew. He looked perturbed. Beyond perturbed, actually. Close to enraged. He took a few visibly deep breaths. Then said, "I wonder… I wonder if the ship might be where this coin came from?"
Tim kept looking at the bottom profile. The mass in the center that, sure enough, seemed to be the right shape to be a vessel of some kind. It could also be a pile of rocks, some coral – anything. But maybe….
Jimmy J pointed at another mass beside the one in the center of the sheet. "What's this stuff over here?"
Tim shook his head. "Doesn't matter. This is all academic. Maritime law is so complicated, chances are whatever's down there ends up belonging to some government, or the descendants of the passengers or the insurers."
Mr. Raven nodded. "I agree. Which is why I haven't called it in."
He let the implications of that statement hang in the air.
No one knows.
Just us.
We have it to ourselves.
And this gold piece came from somewhere.
Tim heard the chain of thought as clearly as if Mr. Raven had laid it all out for them verbally, with Power Point presentation and music for dramatic effect.
He thought it was insane.
And there was a powerful urge to follow along with the idea. It is human nature to seek, to explore, to look for what is unknown and conquer it through understanding what it is.
It is also human nature to hope for the easy way. To desire a windfall, the kindness of fate falling disproportionately upon us. It is why the lottery plays in almost every state, why we bet money on horses and why the slot machines rest not one minute of one day in Las Vegas.
Tim was more than a little disconcerted to find himself falling into both categories of human normality.
What is down there?
What if it's a treasure?
But he shoved them away. Pushed them from him and re-established what he had to think of as sanity.
He opened his mouth to voice his objections. To say how dangerous this would be, how little chance there was that anything lay there except the bottom of the ocean – a bottom that had risen almost seven hundred feet in a matter of seconds.
And as if to aid his recall of the moment where the world blew up around him, the ocean rising and slamming him face-first into the dive ladder, a sound rolled through the salon – through the entire boat.
Tim had a moment of recollection, an instant where his body remembered where it had heard this sound before and clenched in readiness.
Then the ocean swelled below them. Just like it had before, when he was pushing a dead body onto the boat. Only this time it was more powerful, if that were possible. It felt like a giant fist slamming into the bottom of the boat, ramming the entire craft upward and then even more violently dropping it out from under them.
Tim felt himself curl into a ball – the position we hold when we enter the world, the posture to which we return when we fear we might leave it. Something hit his shoulder, hard –
(the ceiling holy hell I just hit the ceiling)
– and then he bounced away from it as gravity seized him and yanked him downward again.
The boat tilted madly to port, then held there a long moment. Tim tumbled sideways, feeling someone barrel into him – Sue, her arms going reflexively around him – and then a long –
(too long too long we're dead too long)
– moment of dead air when the boat continued listing to the side, hanging at a forty-five degree angle over the water, deciding whether or not to fall.
Then, slowly…
… it tilted back to center.
The motion seemed slow to Tim's adrenaline-soaked vision, but it must have been fast because he lurched to the side – and now he was holding Sue, instead of the other way around – and almost broke himself in half against the salon table.
Something crashed somewhere in the boat. The unmistakable sound of breakage.
And then nothing. No motion, no more headlong falls up and down and side to side. The gentle sigh of the ocean was all that could be heard for a peaceful second, a soughing that sounded like parchment skin rasping over sun-bleached bones in his mind.
Then: groans.
Jimmy J groaned the loudest, following the sound with, "Anyone dead? I think I'm dead."
Tim managed to stand, helping Sue from her position flat on her stomach to her hands and knees. He tried to help her stand, but she waved him off. Apparently she wasn't ready for that just yet.
"You okay?" he said.
"I think so. Just gonna stay here for a sec."
Tim moved to Sue's father. Cal had been tossed below the salon table, and had somehow wrapped himself around the steel pole that bolted table to floor. Tim helped him out, slowly. The man grimaced with every movement, as though he'd been bruised from head to toe. He probably had.
Mercedes was on her feet. She helped Geoffrey, who was sonofabitchbastard-ing in a low voice. Haeberle was flat on his back and Tim moved next to him, but the man knocked away his hand when it was offered. "Back off," he snarled, then rolled to his stomach and pushed himself to hands and knees. Stood.
Jimmy J was helping Mr. Raven to his feet. The boat captain made no noise, but his face was white as a summer cloud.
Tim shouldn't have said anything. He should have waited, at least.
But he was rattled.
He was bruised.
He was scared.
He looked at Mr. Raven. "Still think we should stay here?" he said.
Mr. Raven looked at him. And Tim couldn't tell if the white skin of his face was blushing in embarrassment, fear… or rage.
DAMAGED
~^~^~^~^~
Haeberle watched Jimmy J's head and torso rise out of the access port in the middle of the aft deck. Darkness ruled in the space below the deck, but he knew what was down there. The engine. The first thing they had checked after the wave – or whatever it was – struck them for the second time.
"Well?" said Tim. He looked cocky, even when waiting for news that might determine the course – and length – of their lives.
Not that Haeberle was truly worried. He knew that he wasn't going to die. He couldn't. When he died the world ended, and that was not acceptable in the grand scheme of things.
No, he wasn't worried. But Tim irritated him. Because if everything around Haeberle –
(I hate that name, why did the guy I killed have to be named Haeberle, of all things?
Just go with it, just remember that you're Haeberle, at least for now.)
– was a figment of his imagination, if he really existed in a universe that had sprung into being with his birth and would fade away to nothing when (if!) he died, why in God's name would his dream have coughed up something as annoying as Tim Palmer?
Haeberle decided to waste the guy. Not now. But soon.
It would be fun.
"That… thing, whatever the hell it was, banged the everloving crapola out of the engine. Something's bent, I can't really tell what." Jimmy J sighed, rubbed his chin with his hand. "We ain't going anywhere." He shook his head. "What about you? Any luck on the radio?"
"There's a Navy cutter on its way," said Tim.
"How long?"
"Three days."
"Are you serious?"
"So we go," said Haeberle. He was standing in the doorway to the salon, and as he said the words he felt someone else behind him. Geoffrey.
Tim turned to them both. His face curled in an expression that was divided equally between incredulity and what Haeberle chose to interpret as fear.
"What the hell are you talking about?" demanded Tim.
Yes, he'd definitely have to die. No one talked to Haeberle like this. Even if "Haeberle" was just a name, the man behind it demanded better than this. Demanded respect. Demanded awe.
Haeberle shrugged. "Tomorrow. We go to the wreck."
He stepped toward the middle of the deck. Behind him, he felt Geoffrey –
(Gutless asshole.
But at least he's respectful. Afraid.)
– Mercedes, Sue, and Cal –
(Another one who doesn't show the proper fear. Another one who deserves death.
– follow him out of the salon. Mr. Raven came out a moment later.
"You're nuts. We're not going down there like this. We're waiting for the naval vessels to –"
Haeberle cut Tim off. The look of surprise, anger –
(terror!)
– in the dive captain's eyes was delicious. "We wait for them and we have no chance to get whatever's down there."
Everyone froze around him. Total statues, like he had fallen asleep without knowing it and they had taken up their own nightly position of unmovement, unlife.
"So you want to steal whatever's down there?" Mercedes said. As always her voice was soft, defeated, broken – sexy.
Mr. Raven broke in before anyone else could voice an opinion. "No, no. I think he wants to salvage it. There's a difference. If it looks new, we wait for the cavalry to claim and restore it to its owners. But if it's old…." He shrugged. "We still wait for the cavalry. But we get some work done first."
Mr. Raven grinned. A smile that Haeberle might have seen on his own face when he practiced smiling in the mirror. Wide, sincere, and a little dangerous.
He wondered if Mr. Raven might be a part of him. A bit of his own subconscious made flesh. That bore thinking about.
The Deep 2015.06.23 Page 6
