The Deep 2015.06.23
Page 24
She didn't know what he was talking about. Tim did.
"Haeberle," he said.
HAEBERLE
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Cal volunteered to get Haeberle's tanks and his go-home line. He was the logical choice: he knew where the man was.
Tim wanted to go, but Cal persisted.
He was the logical choice.
He was the right choice.
And Cal didn't want Tim looking closely at Haeberle; seeing the stab wound. Wondering if maybe he had been the first to act; if it hadn't been self-defense, but murder that happened down here.
So Cal went.
And Haeberle was gone.
But for some reason it wasn't a surprise. Not here, not now, not after all that had happened. It just seemed inevitable. One more impossibility that followed all the others in an inevitable chain of events leading to the deaths of all who still lived. So when he saw the empty area where he had left the other man's corpse, Cal didn't rant, he didn't complain. He just thought one thing:
Of course.
GAMBLES
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Sue seemed livid when Cal got back, and Tim couldn't tell if she was mad at her father, or at the situation, or both. Probably both. The chances of whatever reconciliation they had been on the verge of enjoying was likely about to be cut short.
Cal separated Tim's tanks. One each. He attached the extra regulators Tim had brought back from his abortive dive earlier in the day. Gave one set to each of them.
They didn't test the tanks. They would either work or they wouldn't. They would either die or they wouldn't. Testing the tanks would use up precious air they couldn't spare.
Tim was the only one with a BC. He bled all the air from it. They had to drop as fast as possible or there was no way Cal's plan would work.
Step one: get to the bottom.
Step two: tie on.
Step three: get to the Nelson Chem boat.
Step four: Cal and Tim find a life raft while Sue finds scuba gear they hope to heaven is there.
Step five: they shift to the tanks, get back to the anchor line, tie the raft to the go-home line and inflate it.
Step six: they don't die on the way up, even though they're guessing at deco stops.
Step seven: they get to the top and hope the raft is there and hope the thing below leaves them alone and hope the Navy finds them.
Step seven, Tim knew, was the big one. The impossible one.
And it was all they had. Their only remaining hope.
They jumped off The Celeste. She had sunk so low that they were knee-deep in water before they jumped off. They wouldn't be returning to her, one way or another.
Back into the deep.
Tim took lead. He swam under the boat, then clipped onto the anchor line. He was aware that when The Celeste went under the anchor line would be useless.
Everything's a gamble. A bad one.
He felt himself falling as he swam. Heavy. Realized he hadn't drawn a single breath from his tank yet, either. Afraid. Of so much.
He inhaled. Air. But he had no idea how much.
He clipped onto the anchor line. Pointed down and swam.
Plummeted, the others trailing behind in a long caravan of ridiculous hope.
Typically, it wasn't a good idea to move toward the thing trying to kill you.
He tried not to think of it. Tried to think only of breathing in, breathing out.
The secret to immortality: breathing in every time you breathe out.
He had to try not to laugh around his regulator. Hysteria at one hundred feet wouldn't be a good idea.
He still had his dive computer, but it wasn't much use. They'd reach bottom when they reached bottom. They'd run out of air when they ran out of air.
He realized that they were alone. Unlike previous trips, there were none of the strange floods of sea life that had pummeled and pulled at him. He wondered what those had been. No doubt they were part of all this, creatures controlled by the thing at the center of the boats, just like Mercedes had been controlled.
That's what happened to the bodies. Taken out by Jimmy J… or just got up and left themselves.
But the fish?
No answer. Maybe they had been acting as sheepdogs to the sheep, trying to herd them closer to the center, trying to get the ultimate prey to enter of their own accord. Perhaps they had been driven mad by whatever power lay at the bottom of this trap.
Maybe it was something else. Something so alien as to be unknowable.
Maybe it didn't mean anything at all. That, for some reason, scared him the most. The things which we cannot define, which we cannot understand, are always the most frightening. It is not the dark that scares, it is the fact that anything could be in it… and that means we can never understand anything of what it hides.
They fell.
Touched down.
Tim clipped his go-home line to the anchor line. He felt hands pulling at his BC – Sue and Cal, holding tight to him so they wouldn't get swept away and lost in the nothing of the deep… or worse.
He felt a sudden urge to take them both in his arms. Especially Sue. He resisted only because there was no telling when one or all of them would run out of air.
Some regulators are designed to let the air out slower and slower as air runs out. Some simply cut out completely. Tim had no idea which kind he was currently breathing through. But his mind made it seem as though the air was getting thin, harder to pull out.
Was it? Was it imagination?
He pushed away from the anchor line, into empty water.
He didn't want to, but he bled some precious air into his BC. He had only found the Evermore – the Nelson Chem boat – before by floating well above the surface of the shipwreck to which The Celeste had anchored.
They floated up.
The current took them.
Please, please, please.
He didn't know if it was prayer or mantra or just empty words ringing through his mind, but the word repeated in time with his breaths. Please, please, please, in, out, in, out, the secret to immortality.
The wrecked destroyer passed beneath them. Quickly when worried about losing your way, but far too slow when sucking the last molecules of air from a dry tank.
Then it fell away.
Tim saw the Evermore.
And saw a problem.
ENOUGH
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Oh, no.
Not enough.
Not enough to have a sunken ship.
Not enough to be out of air twenty-five fathoms down.
Not enough to have a monster out to kill us.
The current had them. And Sue saw now what Tim had described: the black light. The spinning globe of near-microscopic flotsam lit to a brightness that should have been white but somehow wasn't; somehow was a color neither white nor purple nor blue nor any other she had a word for. It invited the eye to slide off it, invited the eye to reject it.
It was right in front of them. They were traveling toward it.
And she didn't worry about barreling into it. Tim – or any of them – could stop their forward motion at any time.
But the Evermore was off to one side. To get to it they would have to reel out far enough that they would enter that whirling submarine storm. Would enter whatever lay at its center.
Nor did she think they could simply try and swim sideways. The current was too strong. Too fast. And she suspected that no matter where they went, it would pull toward the black blossom of light at the center of the ships that served as the only gravestones to uncounted sailors. Something in there existed only to pull things to it. To suck in life, and spit out only bones, only death.
Tim stopped them. They jerked to a halt, and she saw that he was wondering the same thing she was: What now? How do we get to the Evermore?
UNDERSTANDING
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Cal fumbled for Tim's arm. Shook it. Tim didn't react. Cal shook harder, wondering if the younger man had fin
ally snapped. He couldn't blame him if he had.
He finally grabbed the back of Tim's mask and pulled on it.
That did it. He whipped around and looked at Cal.
Good. Cal needed Tim aware.
He turned to Sue. She was already looking at him. Wondering what was up.
Good girl.
He began motioning. There were some common hand signals in scuba diving: hold it, something is wrong, out of air.
But what he was trying to say… not so much. And this damned pounding in his head wasn't helping any. Not just the unrelenting fear that had taken up residence in his mind since the moment Mercedes became something else. It was narcosis, he knew. But knowing didn't make it easier to handle. Didn't make his thoughts less muddled.
What if this is a stupid idea? What if it won't work?
No one else has anything better.
What about just letting go? Would it be so bad?
He started. Jerked in place as the last thought found its way between the last cracked bits of his courage. Was it even his own thought? Or had the thing at the center of the strange light found some way to enter their minds – not just to read them, but to influence them?
If it had, they were all well and truly boned.
Just keep on. Keep trying. Save Debi.
No. Debi's dead. Gotta save Sue. Save Sue.
He kept motioning. Pointing to Tim. Pointing to the go-home line. Pointing to Sue, trying to make her understand.
Tim nodded. So did Sue, both of them motioning understanding almost at the same time.
But he didn't know if they did understand.
Didn't know if understanding was even possible in a place like this.
FLASH
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Tim began pulling the go-home line. Yanking the three of them back toward the anchor, hand over hand, hand over hand. One foot at a time, wondering how far would be enough, how far they could go before running out of air.
Wondering if this could even work.
Normally he would reel in the line, use the spool clipped to his BC to keep the cord from getting tangled.
He couldn't do that this time. He just let it drag below them. Hoping it wouldn't snag on some outcropping of rock, some bit of wreckage, or even simply tangle on itself.
He kept pulling.
Something flared. A subtle change in the brightness around them. He had his flashlight, that pitiful yellowish globe that protected little and served at this point mostly to remind how much they were at the mercy of the elements and of whatever thing hunched at the center of the ships and below the sand at their feet.
But whatever happened behind him changed the quality of the light. Overpowered it completely, if only for a moment.
He did not look back.
He feared to know.
DEAD
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As Tim pulled the three of them back, Sue joined her father in desperately swimming, pushing sideways, the opposite direction of the Evermore.
She felt sick inside. Not just from the horror of all that had happened; the decision she had made to follow her dad's newest plan caused her gorge to rise in her throat. Each second ticked away in time with the jungle beat of the narcosis raging through her veins.
There would be no way to reach the Evermore.
There would be no tanks there.
There would be no raft.
There would be no way to climb to the surface with proper deco times.
They would die.
She kept kicking. Finless feet so much less useful, but doing what she could.
A light flared. The direction of the strange thing in the center of the ships.
She looked.
The snow globe swirled harder than ever. Shaken by the hand of a malicious god, an evil child bent not on enjoying the beauty of the swirling motes, but rather on shattering the glass and allowing what was inside to spill out.
Something appeared at the bottom of the snow globe. Then something else. Many somethings.
They were small. Thin lines that went up from the sand like reeds on a riverbank.
But reeds did not move. Did not walk.
She saw arms. Legs. Hands. Feet.
Heads.
Bodies rotted by time, some so covered by slick black threads they were discernible as human only by their outlines; others barely touched by the obscene strands.
She saw Mercedes. Jimmy J. Haeberle.
No. Not them. Not them.
Because if I see them, what if I see her?
She kicked harder. Breath coming in quick gasps.
The dead seemed not affected by the current that flowed impossibly toward the bud of dark light. They walked upright toward the three people kicking away.
Cal touched Tim. Tim stopped pulling them up the line. Rapidly unreeled more cord from his spool.
The dead walked. Swayed in the current, but walked nonetheless.
Sue didn't look at them.
What if she's there?
Her dad wasn't looking, either.
He tapped Tim. Tapped her.
She and her dad stopped kicking as one.
Tim let go of his hold on the go-home line. The current took them, fully and completely.
They flew toward the waiting arms of the dead.
SWING
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The current grabbed them, if that could be said of something that had never really let them go. Held them fast and threw them full-force toward the things –
(Is that Jimmy J? Please don't let that be him, please no!)
– that seemed to rush toward them impossibly fast. As though they were not constrained by the current or the laws of physics or reality itself. Propelled by hate and evil and a need to feed.
The go-home line reeled out between Tim's fingers. Fast. Faster. So fast it burned his palms, left thin slicks of blood that dissipated in red clouds behind them.
They were going too fast. Too far.
They were going to end up in the demons' arms. If not beyond. In the bulbous light that now seemed to pulse at the center of the still-whirling snowstorm of death.
Tim grabbed the go-home line. It burnt his hands, worse than before. Tore the flesh from his fingers. Wouldn't stop.
Then it did.
The sudden cessation of movement was so fast, so violent, it felt like it tore his shoulders from their sockets. But all the energy that had been mostly forward with a small bit of diagonal arc now transferred wholly to that arc.
They swung in the water. Swung just out of reach of the creatures' grasp. Swung past the center of the ships.
Swung to the Evermore.
LOOKING
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Cal didn't wait. He pushed away from the Tim and the go-home line, then began swimming toward the deck of the Evermore.
He hoped Tim was coming, too. Looking for the life raft. And hoped that Tim wouldn't notice that Cal was going to veer off. Because Cal had no intention of following the younger man. No intention of searching for the life raft.
That was a dead end. For all of them.
And Cal had bigger fish to fry.
SEAT
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Sue saw where the tanks were held almost immediately. Some boats kept dive gear in closed bins below seats, others kept them in open air slots. If the Evermore had the latter, there was no way they could have been brought down intact.
But she saw the seats ringing the outside of the aft deck. Saw no spaces below them, just solid wood. She made her way to the closest one and pulled on it.
Nothing. It didn't give.
So the dive gear must be kept somewhere else. Maybe at the forepart of the ship, maybe belowdecks. Either way, she could feel her air petering out. She wasn't going to have time to find it.
Think. Don't give up.
What if this one's just jammed?
She moved to the next seat.
Pulled.
PLEASE
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Please don't let it have any holes.
Please let Sue find some tanks.
Please let Cal –
Where the hell…?
Tim looked around.
Cal wasn't anywhere to be found.
PRESENT
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The second seat pulled open. And it was full.
Tanks. BC. Fins. Regulator. All bundled together like the most glorious Christmas present ever provided.
Sue ditched her tank and regulator – which was so close to empty that the air was nearly impossible to draw anyway. She put the new regulator in her mouth. Made sure it was connected. Drew in a great gasp of air.
Good air.
Sweet air.
She got the tanks attached to the BC, then shrugged into the gear. Felt it all like a comforting embrace.
Now I just have to find tanks for Tim and Dad and wait for them to get back with the raft.
Please let there be a raft.
She didn't look toward the light that still pulsed around them. Because she knew what was there. What was coming toward them.
Hurry. Hurry.
Hurry.
TRY
~^~^~^~^~
Tim wrestled the life raft around the side of the wreck. Saw Sue.
Did not see Cal.
He pulled the bundle to Sue. She was waiting with tanks and regulators. Enough for him and Cal, enough for all of them to make it to the surface – assuming they were fully charged.
No way to check.
He ditched his tank. Shrugged into the waiting BC and tanks she had.
Trying not to look in her eyes.
Then he looked.
And saw beyond her.
The dead.
They were at the boat.
On the boat.
She didn't notice.