Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  We’d planned to start the dive around midday when the lake would be completely in the sun. Better light that way. More chance of seeing whatever it was we were supposed to find. So far, we were right on time.

  But it had been one very busy morning getting ready. After breakfast, bundled against the early morning chill, we had set up a temporary camp on the sandbar twenty feet from the water’s edge. Then we hauled all the diving gear down on horseback. It had taken most of two hours to get set up for just one dive for the day. We talked about the possibility of making a second dive the next day, depending on what we found. I really didn’t want to think about that. This one dive was going to be more than enough as far as I was concerned.

  After we had set up the gear, Fred had taken me on an exploratory walk around the lake. He used an old photo of the main street of Roosevelt to make wild stabs at where things used to be.

  The photo looked like any other old photograph of a mining boomtown. The street was mud. Wood and log buildings lined both sides and all the buildings in the center of the town were two stories tall and had covered sidewalks.

  As we walked along the single-file trail around the lake, I somehow kept expecting to see the ghost come shimmering up out of the water. Three or four times I caught flashes of something down through the water and swore to myself it was the ghost. Yet each time I knew it wasn’t. After a while I started reminding myself that I didn’t believe in ghosts, habitual or otherwise.

  In the daylight, the lake looked a little bigger than it had through the trees the evening before. It filled the valley from side to side, a distance of maybe a football field. From end to end it ran a quarter of a mile, with a little twist to the left at the bottom end where the stream cut up and over the mudslide. The slide was now covered with an eighty-year-old forest and looked exactly like the rest of the mountain. Of course, Fred had to remind me, just as we were walking along the slide, about the cases of dynamite buried somewhere among the trees.

  Where the water had gone over the slide, there was a huge logjam filling the upper section of the lake. The trail ended right at the logjam and started again thirty yards away on the lodge side. Fred didn’t even hesitate. He walked right out on the logs, skipping and jumping from one log to the next like a six-year-old child walking along a curb.

  To me, the logs didn’t look that solid, even though they weren’t sinking at all under Fred’s weight. He stopped in the middle, straddled an open water space with each foot braced on separate logs, and motioned for me to come on.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, pointing down.

  I eased out on the nearest log. One end was jammed into the mud of the bank. The other end disappeared twenty feet later under two other logs. It felt solid enough, so I worked my way out toward Fred. The farther from the bank I got, the more apparent it was that I was walking on the remains of broken up buildings. The logs looked like giant Tinkertoys jammed in solid from the floor of the lake all the way to the surface. Down through the clear water I could see layer after layer twisted and turned in all directions like a mixed-up spider web.

  I made it to Fred’s location, braced myself so that I wouldn’t slip, and took a look at what he was pointing at. It was an open space of water running like a well down through the logs. I figured I could see maybe fifty feet down with no sign of the bottom. A large trout swam lazily out of the shadows of one of the logs and then disappeared under another.

  “I tried to fish here once. Hooked a good sized rainbow and immediately lost it in the logs. Dumb thing to try.” Fred laughed as he looked around. “A bunch of timber, huh?”

  “That it is,” I said, trying to get an idea of just how many buildings it would take to jam this much of the lake solid. “Think there’s much left standing down there?”

  “From the looks of this,” Fred said. “I doubt if there’s anything at all. You ought to see the pictures in the historical society, taken on the day the town was flooding. Some guy took it from a place back up there.” Fred pointed up the mountain wall across the lake.

  “It shows most of the large buildings on Main Street twisting and floating as the lake got deeper and deeper. Hell, an entire area of town was just tents laid out in rows like in the army. Can’t imagine spending a winter up here in one of those. But I guess some people did.”

  “Does seem amazing, doesn’t it?” I looked down through the layers of toy-like logs, each one obviously hand cut. The entire valley was amazing. No wonder Fred and Constance had picked it. There was more than enough history and exploring to do here to keep their guests interested in the Old West for weeks on end.

  ***

  “I think I got it,” Fred said, patting the top of his tank. He looked over at me. “Ready?”

  “No. But when did that ever matter?” The butterflies were having a great time in my stomach. I wanted to go back up on that huge front deck around the lodge and sit, stare off at the mountains, and drink.

  “Tanks,” Constance said as she held up Fred’s dual scuba tanks so that he could slip his arm through the straps. Susan moved over and did the same for me. Carla used to help me, but that seemed a lifetime ago. I couldn’t imagine what she would have said about this nutty dive.

  I let the tank’s vaguely familiar weight nestle down against the middle of my back as I tightened the straps into place. I had to admit, it almost felt good. For the first time in years, I could feel my heart pounding from something other than bending over to move a beer keg.

  Susan turned my air valve on with a quick turn and then slid the mouthpiece over my shoulder. “You’re on and ready,” she said. I glanced back at her. She obviously knew diving.

  “Good luck,” she said. She wasn’t smiling.

  I slipped the regulator into my mouth and bit lightly. It tasted of disinfectant and rubber. An odd, but familiar, taste from my past. I took a couple of deep breaths to check if everything was working properly, then glanced at my gauges. Right on the money. I picked up my fins from the log beside my dive pack. “All set?”

  Fred finished a check of his regulator and nodded.

  I worked my way across the sand and rocks to the edge of the water, sat down, and let my legs float. Damn, it was cold. I could feel it right through the wet suit. I wasn’t looking forward to letting the water trickle inside my suit, let alone trying to let my body warmth heat that water up.

  “Cold, huh?” Fred said as he sat down on the sand beside me and kicked his legs a few times.

  “Maybe we should wait until we get some dry suits,” I said. I could feel the water starting to trickle down into my boot lining. It felt as if the lake were trying to pull my body heat right through the rubber.

  “I think we’ll be all right,” Fred said. “For as short a time as we’re going to be down there.”

  “Just make sure that if you start getting too cold, you signal for the surface. I’ll do the same.” I looked Fred square in the eye to make sure he was hearing me.

  “Deal, partner,” he said, then smiled. I knew he was serious. He was as concerned about us making this dive as I was. He wasn’t going to be doing anything beyond his limit. That made me feel a little better. Not much, but a little.

  I turned to Constance, Susan, and Steven. “Any sign of the ghost yet? We could use a tour guide.”

  All three of them glanced out over the lake and then shook their heads.

  “Just kidding,” I said and turned back, facing out over the water. “Not funny, I guess,” I whispered to Fred.

  He chuckled, then pulled his mask on.

  I pulled the hood of my wet suit up into place, inflated my flotation vest enough to keep me afloat, grabbed my mask in one hand, and pushed off into the water with the other.

  The biting sting of the water cut at my skin as the first trickles seeped into my wet suit. For some reason, the first drops that got inside the wet suit always went right down my spine and into my crotch, a feeling I had never gotten used to and always dreaded. This time was no diffe
rent. Maybe even worse. I suddenly felt short of air and forced myself to take longer, deeper, and much slower breaths.

  I floated, half-turned up on my back, working on making sure my mask would stay clear, then getting it snug down onto my face. We stopped thirty feet out from the shore, facing the three watchers.

  “Follow our bubbles along the trail there with the extra tank,” Fred yelled, pointing to the path along the right side of the lake. “We have any troubles, we’ll surface and go that way.”

  Constance nodded. We’d worked the plan out beforehand, but for some reason, Fred seemed to want to make sure it was clear.

  “Be careful down there,” Constance shouted.

  “We will,” Fred yelled. He turned to face me. “Ready?”

  I took a couple deep breaths through my regulator, then pulled it aside. “Ready. But let’s watch this cold.”

  He adjusted his mask and gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  I quickly dashed water one last time through my facemask. Here we go, ready or not. Crazy. Nothing but crazy.

  I let some air slowly out of my vest and sank below the surface. I had forgotten a lot of the feelings of being under water. First off, my breathing echoed through my head, making me sound like the villain in a dozen bad slasher movies. Also the feeling of weightlessness returned. A feeling of freedom. How could I have forgotten that?

  As my ears popped the first time, the words of a song began to play along in my head in time with my breathing. We’re off to see a ghost. A wonderful, wonderful ghost. I couldn’t get the stupid tune from The Wizard of Oz out of my head. Of course, there was no doubt we were off to see something and this sure wasn’t Kansas. I tried to clear the song away, but it kept floating around in my mind until I drifted to a stop on the bottom. Amazing what a person thinks about when he’s under stress.

  My wrist gauge said we were in twenty-six feet of water. The bottom was smooth and sloped quickly away toward the lower half of the lake and the slide. From the looks of the slope, the main site of the old town might be in eighty or ninety feet of water instead of only sixty. I hoped not. At that depth, the light would be bad.

  I shot a little more air back into my vest so that I couldn’t stand on the bottom, but not enough to send me back to the surface. Then I looked around.

  Fred was holding onto the stump of an old tree to my right as I faced down the slope. He worked for a moment on adjusting his vest, then looked up at me and gave me the okay sign.

  I pointed down the valley and he nodded. We started slowly swimming through the clear water, side by side, about eight feet off the lake floor and an arm’s length apart.

  Down the slope stood an underwater grove of a dozen or so old pine trees. They had most of their branches and looked dark and eerie in the shimmering light. Tucked in below them were the foundation of a small building and the stones of its fireplace and front step.

  As we passed the small grove, the bottom leveled out and it became apparent that we were swimming over what was once the town’s main street. Probably its only street. On both sides of us now were mounds, buried foundations of buildings lost under eighty years of silt. Shallow holes marked others. It seemed that the entire town was part of the logjam. Nothing but old trees and a few stone fireplaces broke through the silt bottom.

  We drifted over one of the foundation mounds. Besides the fireplace stones and a few other lumps covered by silt, there was nothing to see. I swam over to one of the lumps and brushed aside the four or so inches of silt. It turned out to be an old bucket, upside down and so rusted that it came apart in my hand.

  I shrugged at Fred and swam back up out of the drifting cloud I had stirred up. We had no hope of finding anything down here. That was becoming very clear.

  He pointed down the valley and I nodded yes.

  It was then that I saw the ghost.

  She was twenty yards away, in the middle of the old road, walking away from us. She wore an old-fashioned light blue dress with lace around the neck. Her hair was tied back and there was a feeling of determination about her.

  I grabbed Fred’s arm and pointed, but he had already seen her. All I wanted to do was head for the surface. Fast. Damn fast. I didn’t want anything to do with a woman who could walk under forty feet of water. No damn way.

  After a moment, I calmed down enough to take a breath and slow my heart so that it wouldn’t come flying right out of my wet suit. After all the talk about her in the last few days, I thought I was going to be prepared when I finally saw her. How stupid that though had been. No one can be prepared to see something so obviously not a part of the world as we know it. Her very presence blew apart everything I had ever thought about death. Forty years of believing one way and suddenly a woman walks along the bottom of a lake and it’s all shot to hell.

  At that moment, it took every ounce of hard thought and concentration to not go madly streaking for the surface. I desperately wanted to be out of the lake, out of that cold, and a damn long ways away from that ghost. But somehow I made myself hold still until I was under control. Then I glanced at Fred. Through his mask I could see that his eyes were as big as I imagined mine were, and he’d seen her hundreds of times before. After a moment he seemed to shake his head and then turn to me and give me the question sign. Were we going to follow her or head for the surface?

  Follow her, obviously, was the answer the little voice in the back of my head said over the top of the wall of fear that was freezing my arms and legs. We were doing this dive because of her. Just because we were now faced with actually going swimming with a ghost was no reason to stop now. My mind laughed at that one and another song from The Wizard of Oz popped back into my head. Lions and tigers and ghosts, oh my.

  I made myself take slow, measured breaths as I watched her walk away. She seemed to walk on a surface that was five to ten inches below the lake bottom. She left no footprints and stirred up none of the silt. As Steven had said the night before, she wasn’t really here. She was still walking the road of the old town.

  After watching her for a moment longer, I finally calmed my breathing and my heart rate enough to give Fred the shrug sign. What the hell. We’d come this far. Of course that kind of attitude was the same as throwing good money away on a poker hand you know you should have folded right at the beginning. Sometimes you have to keep on and see what turns up. Stupid, I think was the word for it.

  Fred nodded and we swam to a position about twenty feet behind her, square above in the middle of the main road and about ten feet off the bottom. Ahead, I could see where the main part of the town had been. Large, flat areas framed the sunken street. A few broken logs jutted out of the smooth surface of the silt. A small school of fish swam around the remains of an old stove. Two rails where horses had been tied still fenced one side of the street. And hundreds of small mounds indicated junk buried under the silt.

  The ghost angled left and stepped up on what must have been a wooden sidewalk. She paused and went through motions as if she was tugging on something, banging her fists against an unseen wall.

  Fred and I stopped over the middle of the street and watched her pantomime. My stomach was clamped up tight and I had to remind myself to slow my breathing. Otherwise I was going to suck down the entire tank of air in the next five minutes.

  There had been a building there and she was trying to get in. After she seemed to slip in the silt, yet no silt was disturbed, she moved to the right, down a few steps and around the side of the flat area, using her hands to steady herself on unseen walls.

  I caught Fred’s arm and gave him an arms-up question sign. He shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t know any more about what she was doing than I did. Whatever it was, it was damn creepy to watch.

  She moved around to the other side of the flat area, up a few more unseen steps, and onto what must have been the floor of an old building. The floor had stayed, but the building and everything in it had floated. Her feet seemed to walk on the old floor surface, about two inches belo
w the silt.

  After a moment she moved toward us, up another unseen stair and then stopped, seeming to touch something. Her actions were so real, so exact, that for a moment I thought I caught a glimmer of what she was touching.

  Then, as she bent over and pulled something out of the front of her dress, the water around her flickered like an old movie and suddenly there was an old upright piano in front of her. I could see the silt and her dress through the piano, but the piano was clearly there. Almost as if it were glass.

  She pulled an unseen bench from under it, sat down, and rested her hands on the keyboard. The resulting chord was off key and she pulled back from the piano.

  Right at that moment, as that impossible sound cut through my already cold body, it took every ounce of willpower I had to not swim as hard as I could for the surface. I didn’t want to see what I was watching. I didn’t want to listen to a ghost play a piano where no music was possible. I wanted to sit at the Garden’s bar and drink and try to force the image of this woman out of my mind and back into the dark where it belonged.

  But instead I floated over the middle of the old street and watched.

  She made motions to warm her hands over something on top of the piano, then started playing. The song was beautiful, haunting, filled with desire and feeling.

  Fred grabbed my arm and gestured hard for the surface. I didn’t need to ask him why. If Constance could hear this music in the middle of the day, she’d think something was wrong. I was right beside him all the way as the impossible music chased us from the dark.

  ***

  Breaking through the surface and into the bright sunlight was like being shaken from a bad nightmare. It felt so good to know it had only been a dream. I pulled off my mask and tried to let the warm rays cut through the first layer of cold. It had felt like a dream, but it hadn’t been one. I was still floating beside Fred in the cold water and below us the music was still playing.