The Deep 2015.06.23

by Michaelbrent Collings

  How could you kill someone who wasn't real?

  But for all its ridiculousness, the paper made him uneasy. He crumpled it. Wished it away, and was surprised that it didn't puff right out of existence.

  How can that be? What's happening?

  And the answer came right away: He must want this to be happening. He must desire this moment on some fundamental level.

  Why?

  Time will tell. Give it a minute.

  His muscles unclenched. A little.

  Raven watched him crumple the paper. Didn't ask for it back. "Did you kill the real Mark Haeberle? Take his place to get away from the manhunt, wait 'until the heat died down,' as I believe your kind say?"

  Haeberle's muscles seized again. "'Your kind'?"

  Raven ignored both the explicit question and the threat implicit in Haeberle's tone. "That would explain why you aren't the experienced diver we were expecting."

  Break his neck. Slam into him and thumbs around his throat so he can't scream and twist and he's dead and I pull him to the front of the boat and dump him and no one's the wiser.

  I could do that.

  He almost did. But something held him back.

  This moment had been brought to him. All the moments of the past few days came to him: killing the old Mark Haeberle, stashing his body, running from the FBI agents who were after him.

  And then this.

  It meant something. His imaginings were leading him somewhere. Not just to an inevitable sexual encounter with Sue and Mercedes – though that would certainly be pleasurable, for him and them – but something greater.

  Play it out.

  "What are you going to do?" he said to Raven.

  The other man pursed his lips. Cocked his head as though thinking. "My view is that there are several ways this can go down. You can wait to be put in a naval brig when they pick us up, then transferred to death row when we get back, or…."

  A long pause. Haeberle let it hang there for a moment. He remembered for a moment a game his mother had played: The Quiet Game. "Let's see who can be quiet fastest," she'd say to him and his brother when she was having one of her "headaches." Whoever won got a spoonful of brown sugar. Whoever lost got put in the closet for a few minutes or hours or days, depending on her mood.

  Haeberle always won. The one time he spoke first –

  (accidentally Mommy it was an accident please don't put me away in the dark!)

  – he killed his brother and won by forfeit.

  Mother hadn't given him his brown sugar. She just screamed. Which meant she lost the game. He put her body in the closet and ate all the brown sugar he could find.

  But this Quiet Game was boring. He didn't know what the prize could possibly be, so why play?

  "I'm waiting," he said.

  "Well, the way I see it, whatever treasure's down there, it can best be retrieved and brought up by all of you. Many hands make light work and all that. But once aboard…." Raven spread his hands. Weak hands, the hands of a creature unborn and unreal. "It might be better if there were only two of us when the Navy got here. One of us, actually, since you would be hidden in the hold. Everyone else would be tragic collateral to the strange seismic activities of the last day."

  Haeberle's head started to hurt with that last sentence. There were so many words, so many big words. And so many of them weren't needed.

  Bastard. Trying to hurt me.

  Kill you. Bastard.

  "Or I could kill you," Haeberle said. Surprised that he was showing his hand like this. "Just take it all."

  Raven nodded as though he had expected this. "You could. But then who would hide you? And if you killed all of us, the Navy or Coast Guard would tear this boat apart looking for evidence of what happened. And you'd have to just sit here waiting for them, because I don't think you're enough of a sailor to fix this boat, let alone get yourself back to shore."

  "What if there's nothing down there? Just junk and ocean?"

  Raven's eyes squinted to dead slits in his face. "That would be unfortunate for you. Let's hope it isn't so."

  And Haeberle felt something unpleasant that crawled through him like an eel, cold and slimy and horrible.

  I'll kill you.

  TOUCHDOWN

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Tim found the bottom. He found it by following the line, the pull of his BC, and the jungle drums that pounded ever louder in his ears.

  He waited for a moment at the bottom of the anchor line, waiting for his pulse to quiet, waiting for those drums to fall back into the mists of his mind.

  They didn't. Just kept pounding, boom-boom-boom.

  I'm narced.

  He'd expected it. At one-fifty everyone felt symptoms of nitrogen narcosis. Everyone felt the change in pressure not only as a giant hand clenching them, squeezing them, but as a subtle shift in the mind itself. The vision closed ever-so-slightly, black around the edges like an oil slick gathering around; a leviathan of the deep beginning the long, slow process of swallowing you.

  Narced.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  Fish of every conceivable kind swam around him. But not the unnatural schools that had enveloped him on the way down. These were simply the fish drawn to a high-food-yield area. Coral drew in microorganisms, which in turn drew in larger fish, which were fed by larger fish in turn, and so on up the food chain.

  Many of the most colorful fish in the world made coral their home. Clownfish were immune to the stinging nematocysts that coral used to paralyze prey, so they hid deep in the coral, finding refuge and safety there. Parrotfish ate the coral and defecated the rock and stone they chipped off along with the live organisms.

  It was a beautiful ecosystem. But here… it simply wasn't possible. There couldn't be coral like this, coral that would have taken decades, centuries, perhaps millennia. Not in a place that had been tossed up six hundred feet in a day. Even if it had existed on the floor and merely been shifted up, there would have been evidence of breakage, of destruction.

  But there was no such thing. Even in the weak aureole created by his dive light, the coral looked healthy, established, permanent. The fish that darted among them were varied, gorgeous flashes of rainbow caught in the dark.

  It was a gorgeous sight, a beautiful underwater jungle. To some, it was a meal: sharks were often plentiful around coral reefs.

  He hoped to Heaven there weren't any here. Sharks – even the big ones – generally were inclined to leave people alone. But he thought of them as something akin to coyotes. One on one they probably weren't a threat. But the more there were, the more you started to look like a meal for the pack.

  He forced himself to look away from the beauty that surrounded him, to search for the point where the anchor had caught. It had found a rocky outcropping, coral-encrusted and looking ancient as time itself. There was a curve in it that looked like the overgrown eye of a giant's needle.

  Tim had a spool of nylon rope, and he used this to tie the anchor to the eye. Tying down was primary thing the first diver did: making sure the anchor was secure not only at the point it had caught on, but lashing it down to an additional hold point so there was no way it would loose and drift away, potentially stranding any divers.

  The next order of business: letting the others know it was safe to come down.

  As safe as it could be, at least.

  Tim had two Styrofoam cups attached to his gear. They were attached to another spool, this one of fishing line. He let go of the cups and unreeled the line, letting the cups disappear above, swallowed by the darkness that still surrounded him.

  Visibility was maybe ten feet here, thanks to his light. Without it he wouldn't be able to see his hand in front of his face.

  The cups disappeared. They would pop to the surface in a few minutes. The others would see them and know Tim had secured the anchor. Time to dive.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  He looked at his dive computer. At this depth he had twenty minutes to look around. Twenty minutes before
he had to begin the long climb back to the surface, stopping periodically at deco points. Twenty minutes of jungle drums and a vague sense of disconnect, as though his spirit held to his body only by the most tenuous of ties.

  He was about to look up when something caught his eye. Not a flash, not even a glint. More the hint of such, the promise of a glimmer.

  He leaned down. He was careful to touch nothing – he didn't want to disturb anything down here, not even in a place as impossible as this. He just waved a hand above, trying to stir away the surface sand. Silt whirled away. It revealed a thin rectangular shape, perhaps four inches long, two inches wide, a half-inch thick. Free of its burial plot it shone brightly in Tim's light and he started to tremble.

  It was a gold bar.

  Worn mostly smooth by years below, it still held traces of some kind of stamping. Wavy lines, some writing long-faded to illegibility.

  A swastika.

  Now Tim's trembles became shakes.

  Nazi gold. Dammit, this is Nazi gold.

  He looked around. Trying to make a shift in his mind. Trying to see something in the dim shapes around him. Trying to figure out if he stood on something natural, or if the coral had clung to something that had once held men.

  There were still boats listed as missing on the roles of national maritime conflicts. Only twenty-five years previous a pair of divers had discovered an unknown U-boat a mere sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey. The U-boat had come close enough to just about see swimmers on the beach, and no one had even known about it until the 1990s.

  So was it beyond the realm of possibility that this was a bar of gold from some still-missing transport ship?

  Why here? Wouldn't a transport ship be going somewhere closer to Germany's territories?

  He could barely make sense of the question. The drumbeat in his ears clouded his thinking, made answers a near-impossibility.

  And then there was the thought that he was looking at thousands of dollars. More.

  Gold.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  Gold.

  Boom-boom.

  Gold gold gold gold gold.

  He reached for it.

  Stopped himself.

  Didn't touch. Didn't take.

  He could always come back for it.

  But not now. No reason to do so. And something about it felt… wrong.

  Still, he wanted to look around. To see if there was more.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  He pulled a final spool of line to the front of his gear. Secured it to the anchor line.

  And swam into the darkness. A single line trailing behind him. Darkness pressing in, drumbeats all around.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  He swam farther.

  The anchor disappeared behind him.

  GRACE

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Mercedes Peterson had nothing.

  Only a few years ago she had been rich – rich in friends, rich in family, rich in money, which to her was the least important of the three.

  Now… the money was gone. The friends had somehow dried up when her bank balance dipped to nothing.

  And family?

  She felt tears pushing against the backs of her eyes. Insistent and persistent, the tears were always there, it seemed. Always waiting for the smallest excuse, the moment when they could push out and reduce her to the wreck she had been for so many weeks.

  She had taken this trip because it was a chance to leave it all behind. Not a trip she could afford, not even one she felt she deserved.

  But it was one she needed. An opportunity to stop being the Mercedes –

  (Don't say it, don't even think it!)

  – Peterson she had to be, and start being just Mercedes. Just a woman with no past, no stories. Only the present. Far from land, far from her reality. She was in the permanent now of each passing wave, the only ups and downs the gentle swells that rocked the boat.

  That was the theory, at least. Not that it worked out in practice.

  The one thing more people wish to run from than anything else is themselves. And that is exactly the one thing that gives no heed to time or distance. Self is always present, and since self is defined by the sum of past events, that means those past events are always present. The past transported by the time machine of experience, transmuted to present emotions, thoughts, actions.

  She tried to be just Mercedes. And she failed miserably. The tears always pressing.

  The only time she found relief was during the dives. In the water, the deep blue of the sea beneath what most people thought of as the sea… peace. Something like the bliss she imagined holy men and women felt when not merely communing with their gods, but being utterly at one with them.

  But still, each dive came to an end. Each fall from Hell to a kind of grace ended when she first put her hand on the dive ladder, when she first climbed aboard the dive platform and the water drained from her wetsuit. Dry, she was herself again.

  And that was the greatest tragedy of all.

  Then… the coin. And suddenly she was able to look away from her past, to look beyond her present.

  What if there was more?

  What if there really was treasure?

  She couldn't afford to hope. Couldn't afford the crushing pain of failure if the hope turned to ash.

  But the hope came anyway.

  That was why she was suiting up for a dive beyond anything she had ever attempted before.

  She was falling to grace again. And perhaps – just perhaps – falling far enough that she could find a bit of that grace and bring it back up with her.

  She could have her life back.

  Something drew her out of herself for a moment. Jimmy J's voice, snapping out with a tone as close to agitation as she had ever heard. The kid was cute – she'd have gone for him once upon a time, back when she –

  (deserved)

  – was young enough for that sort of thing. And one of his more attractive qualities was his laid-back attitude to life. Just taking it as it came.

  Which simply meant he hadn't experienced enough of it to know what it was really like. The simple passing of years would cure him of his relaxed manner quickly enough.

  But for now he was innocent. And beautiful in the way that all innocents were.

  Still, something was cracking through that innocence now. A seabed that leaped up to meet them. A friend gone deep below. And now….

  "What are you doing?" he said.

  Mercedes looked up. Saw Jimmy J looking at Geoffrey as the commodities trader – whatever the hell that was – came out of the salon.

  She didn't like Geoffrey. She didn't think anyone on the boat did – probably including Geoffrey himself. He was the kind of man who viewed everything as a possible return on investment. Especially people. Everything went in the credit or debit column of his personal ledger, and if you weren't a credit you weren't worth knowing.

  He was nice enough to Mercedes. At least, he was as nice as she suspected he was capable of. She knew why. Knew that she looked damn good in a bikini. She had worked hard enough for it, countless hours of Pilates and a million vertical miles on the Stairmaster.

  Fat lot of good it did you.

  But underneath that surface niceness, that shallow attempt at charm, he was just one more man. Just one more person willing to use, abuse, and lose her.

  Now Geoffrey was flapping his finned feet as he crossed the deck, moving toward the dive platform.

  "What are you doing?" Jimmy J demanded again, more insistently this time.

  "You really think I'm going to let him find all the gold?" said Geoffrey, pointing at the twin Styrofoam cups that bobbed just off the port side of the ship.

  "Are you nuts?" said Jimmy J. "He just barely –"

  Splash. Geoffrey paused only long enough to throw a middle finger before disappearing into the water. Bubbles where he had gone down. Then nothing.

  A moment later, Mercedes was ready as well. She headed toward the platform.
r />   Mr. Raven was standing nearby, and she thought she saw him nod minutely. For a moment she couldn't figure what he was nodding at – not her, she was sure of it. Then Haeberle nodded back, his own nod not nearly so subtle. And he began pulling on the last of his gear.

  She felt chilled. Haeberle gave her the creeps.

  No. Not that. He scares you. Scares you silly.

  True enough. The big man looked at her from time to time. That was bad. He smiled sometimes, too. That was much, much worse. The smile never went quite to his eyes. They were alive with a fire that reminded her of a wolf's, eyes reflecting the dying embers of a campfire, waiting for the fire to die, for that first moment of darkness when it could lunge into the camp and begin its bloody work.

  No, Haeberle was not someone she wanted to share space with. Not The Celeste, not even the whole ocean.

  But she had no choice.

  She kept walking to the dive platform.

  Sue and Cal were arguing. She liked them. Especially Sue. She was a woman, which was a huge point in her favor. Beyond that, she seemed genuinely sweet. Someone who sat with her at mealtimes, who chatted gently about nothing at all because she obviously sensed that nothing at all was the only thing Mercedes felt comfortable talking about.

  Mercedes didn't even really contribute during their chats. Just listened, and that was nice. She could be there without having to figure out what to say, what deflections to use, what lies to spin.

  "I'm going," Sue said to her father.

  "Just… just wait a minute, can't you?"

  "No. You may not care, but I need to know what happened."

  Cal looked utterly stricken at that last. His face curled in a mix of surprise, pain, and regret.

  Sue walked toward the platform. Mercedes gestured for her to jump first. Sue did. Bubbles. Bubbles.

  Gone.

  Mercedes jumped in after her.

  Praying for her fall to grace.

  Please, God, let this change things.

  TANKED

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Sue descended through the nothing-space of the sea, drifting in a controlled fall that took her rapidly from bright to night. She turned on her dive light. It was a Big Blue TL15000P: fifteen thousand lumens that cleaved the darkness like a white-hot knife. It was far more powerful a light than most divers carried, but she liked to see past the few feet that other dive lights illuminated.