I wedged the extra gear close to the marker buoy’s line, grabbed my underwater spotlight and looked up, paying attention. If it wasn’t a joke, I needed to know what was coming toward me.
Through my naked eye, the lake’s surface was a lucid obsidian disk. It was vaguely luminous and star speckled. Through the green eye of the monocular, though, stars glittered brightly against an emerald sky. I could see the silhouette of the marker buoy above and the silver thread of rope that anchored it.
I had done a full turn before I finally saw what was making the noise. It was large and dark and symmetrical. It appeared to be descending at an angle, following the slope of the lake bottom, coming fast in my direction.
I closed my right eye and touched my fingers to the outer ring of the monocular, trying to focus on the object as it drew closer. It wasn’t easy to track, because the thing was gaining speed as it descended. Automatically, I began sculling backward in retreat—an instinctive response that was silly. I was running away, even though I didn’t know what was coming at me.
For a moment, I believed my first guess was right: I thought it was a chunk of rock pushed into the water by King because it was like watching something tumble downhill. The thing wobbled and bounced and kicked up sand, snaking its way toward me like a drunken skier on a vertical slope.
In my right hand, I had the big underwater light. I didn’t think I would need it because of the night vision system, but I used the spotlight now, swimming on my back so I could maintain visual contact. As the thing rumbled closer, I kicked harder—but then it abruptly slowed, then stopped. I watched it wobble and spin, and then it fell onto its side, kicking up another explosion of sand.
I stopped swimming and righted myself. I painted the object with light until I was sure of what I was seeing. I was breathing hard, I realized. Arlis Futch’s warning had spooked me, which now caused me to feel stupid. I had overreacted to a threat that didn’t exist.
I swam over and took a closer look. Near the mammoth tusk, where I had left my extra gear, lay the steel wheel from the shredded truck tire. It was thirty pounds of metal, minus the rubber.
King had done it, of course. He had pried the thing free of the tire, then rolled it into the lake to scare me. I had been wrong about the rock, but my instincts had been right about King.
Some people feed on the destruction of others. They are emotional scavengers, and their feeding assumes aspects of frenzy even when it ensures their own doom. But King would never find out that he had succeeded in scaring me. The man had sealed his fate when he’d sabotaged my attempt to help Tomlinson and Will.
I switched off the spotlight and secured it to a D ring on my BC. Because I’d had to use the light, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust before using the monocular again.
As I waited, I found myself glancing over one shoulder, then the other, studying the vacuous emptiness of an underwater lake basin at night. King’s joke had jolted my system with adrenaline. Now I felt a lingering buzz of paranoia.
Was something out there? Something that could see me without being seen? It is an ancient fear, the wellspring of all monsters and religions.
My intuition whispered, Yes, something’s out there. It was a feeling I had, a premonition of danger. Perry had seen something big in the water, his reaction was proof. The strange undertone in Arlis’s voice when he’d warned me was additional proof and even more compelling.
Intellectually, though, I knew that premonitions are nonsense. Intuition and lottery numbers are memorable only if they pay off, but both are fast forgotten when they fail to produce.
I don’t buy either one.
I went back to work.
I couldn’t find the opening to the karst vent. It made no sense. What the hell had happened during the last two hours? The mammoth tusk was where I had left it, close to the vertical crater, and the line to the marker buoy was still hanging straight. Nearby, the bottom looked unchanged, but the opening to the tunnel had vanished.
Impossible. Has there been another landslide?
I considered switching off the night vision monocular and using the spotlight again. But visibility wasn’t the problem, I decided. More likely, I was disoriented—everything on the water, and underwater looks different at night—so I gave myself a couple of minutes to get my bearings.
I positioned myself at the edge of the drop-off. I faced the remains of the limestone ledge and reconstructed the bottom in my memory.
Finally, I figured out what had happened. Sand and shell from the top of the crater had funneled down and covered the entrance.
I swam to the approximate area and began digging with my hands. For every scoop of sand I removed, it was replaced by double the amount. I found a sliver of oyster shell and began probing until I found an area where I could bury my arm up to the shoulder without hitting rock. If it wasn’t the exact location of the tunnel entrance, it had to be close, so I marked the spot with another inflatable buoy.
For several more minutes I attempted to dig but finally gave up.
Damn it!
Now I really did need the sand dredge, which meant I would have to depend on King once again—if Perry could talk the man into getting into the water.
Before moving on, I decided to try to signal Tomlinson and Will. I had been reluctant for a simple reason: I feared they were no longer alive to answer.
Using one of my smaller flashlights, I leaned over the spare tank and banged out Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits. I did it several times, then switched off my night vision and settled myself in silence, listening.
I didn’t expect an immediate response, but I got one.
The signal I received was faint, very faint, and as surprising as it was galvanizing. I heard a series of eight bell notes repeated several times.
It was Morse code for “fine business.” Everything was okay. Tomlinson, at least, was still alive. Suddenly, I was no longer tired.
There was no mistaking the distinctive pattern, but where was it coming from? The signal seemed to seep out of the rocks around me instead of from a specific location or direction. If Will and Tomlinson had escaped into the karst vein, how far could they have traveled?
I pulled the spare bottle closer to the marker, wincing as I imagined myself reentering that black hole, with its lichen gloom and shadows. I rapped on the tank, then pressed the side of my head into the sand and listened.
When Tomlinson responded, the metallic clanking was slightly louder.
Yes. They were somewhere in the karst passageway, which they had followed it a long distance, judging from the sound. Their air had to have run out more than an hour ago, so I’d been right. They had found an air bell or a breathing hole.
I attempted to parrot Tomlinson’s “fine business” message—maybe it would buoy his spirits. Next, I muled the rest of the gear and placed it near the marker as my brain worked out the details.
I needed the sand dredge, but I couldn’t surface right away. Part of my deal with Perry was that I would present him with proof there was more to salvage—and a reason to make King help me with the hose.
Finding more coins would take time, but that’s what I had to do. I wished now that I had grabbed a few extras when I’d had the chance and hidden them for later.
Carrying the spotlight but not using it, I began swimming slowly along the drop-off searching the bottom. I had seen several coins lying in the sand and I was confident I could find at least a few. Question was, would it be more effective using the monocular to search or the spotlight?
I tested both, then decided the light was better. Maybe it would cause the coins to glitter in the distance.
I switched off the monocular. Using oyster shells, I marked off the beginnings of a grid, trying to swim a straight line as I counted off the number of times I kicked with my right fin. Ten strokes would equal about twenty yards—a big search area at night, but I was counting on luck to help me.
I gave myself a time limit. One coin or a dozen—however many I found—I wou
ld surface after ten minutes. I would give the coins to Perry, who would then order King back in the lake so he could help me with the hose.
It seemed like a workable plan: Find a few coins, then swim straight back to that damn hole and blast it clear with the dredge. But I had ignored a fundamental reality when it comes to diving: It is never, ever easy to find something underwater even when you supposedly know where it is.
Seven minutes later, when I was about to give up, still empty-handed, I stumbled onto a vein-rich pocket of gold. It was in a little basin of oyster shells and sand where largemouth bass had fanned out a nest. The spot produced a dozen Cuban coins. I found five in a heap, the others scattered nearby.
As I kicked toward the surface, I stashed six of the coins in a mesh pocket inside my wet suit just in case I needed them for later.
TWENTY
BY 6:20 P.M., IN THE LAST ANGLING RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, Will had hacked away enough roots and stone with his knife for Tomlinson to pull his face up to the airhole, look into the small chamber above them and say, “You know why the place stinks so bad? Something lives here.”
“What?”
“An animal lives in here,” Tomlinson repeated. “Something big. And it’s definitely not a vegetarian. At least the place is above water level, but, whew, what a stench.”
The airhole was finally large enough for them both to breathe at the same time, but only if they pressed their heads together in a way that reminded Will of two desperate carp he’d once seen trapped in a puddle at the bottom of a drying lake bed, north of the Rez and south of Oklahoma City.
To talk, he and Tomlinson had to pull themselves close to the roof of the cave and turn mouth to ear, then ear to mouth, the air pocket was that small.
“Let me look,” Will said. To get leverage with the knife, he’d had to submerge and extend his arm, so he had spent most of the last hour bobbing up and down and hadn’t checked what lay beyond the airhole for a while.
Tomlinson said, “There’s a bunch of bones and crap. So maybe it’s an alligator den. Or coyotes, could be. Jesus, I’ve never smelled anything so foul in my life. On the bright side, brother William, we’re almost out! Can you picture the look on Doc’s face when we come strolling back to the truck? I bet he’s called in the cavalry by now. Helicopters, cops—you name it. I’m surprised we can’t hear all the racket they must be making.”
“It took me an hour to get the hole as wide as it is,” Will replied. “It’s all roots and rock. It’ll take another hour, maybe two, to make it wide enough to crawl through.”
“Are you getting tired?”
“Naw. I’m just telling you. I think you ought to try whistling again. It’s really loud—I want to learn how to do that.”
Tomlinson said, “Maybe . . . Once or twice, but that’s all. We’re close enough to being out now, I don’t want to risk another cave-in.”
“Oh yeah, play it safe,” Will said. “I guess that’s smart.”
Tomlinson said, “Yeah, man. There’s no rush now.” After thinking about it, though, he added, “The only thing I’m worried about is Doc and Arlis. They’re probably freaking out, looking for us—and I wouldn’t want Doc to do anything risky. Like trying to search one of those damn tunnels we crawled through.”
“Then you’d better do it,” Will said, meaning Tomlinson should try to signal. “A couple of times at least.”
Tomlinson touched two fingers to his tongue, produced several shrill notes, alert for the sound of collapsing limestone. When it didn’t happen, he settled back, his face showing a private, weary smile. He felt as good as he’d ever felt, coming so close to dying, now to be looking up into the late-winter sunlight. It was a giddy sensation, almost like he’d gulped a couple of sunset rums. It made him talkative.
“I bet your hands are blistered, huh? I’ll do the rest of the digging, I don’t care if it takes five hours. I don’t care about the smell, either. Man, what a beautiful sight to see!”
Will expected Tomlinson to move, but instead the man kept his face to the hole and continued talking. “Oh, wow! You won’t believe this one! On the far wall, I can see a petroglyph—you know, a cave drawing. But it’s not really a drawing. It’s more like someone carved a picture into the rock. It sort of resembles a cow standing on two legs—no, a buffalo. Maybe you can figure it out.”
Will was getting impatient. “Unless I see it, I can’t figure out anything.”
Tomlinson didn’t take the hint. “When de Soto landed in Florida back in the fifteen hundreds, he mentioned a buffalo in his ship’s log. But some people don’t believe it’s true.” There was a pause. “This is definitely an animal den of some type. Gators and crocs don’t nest underground, so now I’m thinking coyotes for sure—the population’s making a comeback in Florida.”
Will gave the hippie a push—the man was a talker, which Will found irritating. He said, “If I want a history lesson, I’ll read a book. Move your bony ass so I can see.” He locked both hands in the tree roots and fitted his face into the hole.
Above them was another rock chamber, smaller than the chamber they were in, but at least it wasn’t filled with water. Will didn’t own a watch, but he saw that it was late, close to sunset, because the chamber had an opening of some type that faced west. He couldn’t see the opening, but he knew it was there because a tube of dusty light angled into the space, showing the far limestone wall of the cave, where there were rough etchings cut into the rock. The petroglyph Tomlinson had mentioned resembled the silhouette of a man with horns. It didn’t look like any buffalo Will had ever seen and he’d seen more buffalo than most people, having worked on ranches and ridden rodeo all over the Panhandle State.
The drawings were lichen covered—very old, no doubt about that—and they had the random scrawled look of graffiti.
“Do you see the petroglyph?”
Will responded, “Hold your horses. Give me time for my eyes to adjust.” It was strange after all that time in darkness to see daylight.
“There’s something very weird and powerful about this journey we’re on, man. Feel it, Will-Joseph? Which tells me there’s something powerful about you. Your ancestors are keeping close tabs on your whereabouts for some reason. I think I’m just along for the ride.”
Will turned his face away from the hole. “How am I supposed to think with you talking all the time?”
Tomlinson kept right on talking, anyway. “Maybe you don’t know it yet, but I’m convinced you’re on a very special mission, man. The real deal. I think you’re what we Buddhists call a Tulku. You’ve got all the qualities—the whole transcendent-spirit thing going on. Do you know what I mean?”
Will replied, “I don’t think that thing’s a buffalo. It’s a drawing of a guy wearing horns, that’s all. Another hour or so, I can dig enough, we’ll be out of here. Maybe archaeologists will want to come back and take a look.”
Tomlinson said, “What I’m saying is, people like you don’t dissolve at death. That’s what I meant by calling you a Tulku. I’m not bragging, but I’m the same way. It’s the way we’re born. People like us don’t dissolve at death—I might as well put the cards on the table after all the kimchee we’ve just been through, huh?”
That struck Will as a compliment. He didn’t respond, but he listened more carefully.
“From one incarnation to another, Tulkus add layers of consciousness every trip around the horn—skandhas, we call them. I sensed it in you the first day we met. And I bet you sensed it in me, too. Am I right? Man, I can walk into a concert hall, even if the place is jammed, and spot one of us from twenty rows away. It’s a sort of glow. Like an aura, only with less glow but more light. You know what I’m talking about?”
Will was thinking, Colors, that’s what he means when he says “glow.”
He didn’t say it, but Will had experienced it many times, seeing certain people who glowed—even in a crowded space—just as Tomlinson had said. It was something he had never discussed with anyone, and now was
n’t the time to start. Will said, “There’s a root here, one really big, pain-in-the-ass root. If I cut out a chunk big enough, maybe I can wiggle through.”
“If that’s what your instincts tell you, it’ll happen,” Tomlinson said.
“From here on out, I’m following your lead. We’re riding a very heavy spiritual wave and it’s pulling both of us along like a tractor beam. The tip-off was swimming into the cave with the pottery and the spear points. Now the petroglyphs! This whole trip has been a weird, wild gift, dude, and I’m honored to be sharing the journey. We’re being allowed to see things that other people don’t even know exist.”
Will was tempted to say, What do you mean “we,” white man?, like the old joke he’d once heard, but he didn’t want to encourage the hippie to keep talking.
“That’s an ancient space you’re looking at,” Tomlinson told him.
Will replied, “It’s not the only thing getting old,” and concentrated on what he was seeing.
The cavern above them was about the size of a horse stall, but it had a low ceiling that angled downward, narrowing just as the band of sunlight narrowed. Joining the ceiling to the floor were more tree roots that at first Will thought were stalactites or stalagmites. The roots were clustered as tightly in some spots as the bars on a jailhouse door. At the center of the chamber, roots had been ripped away by something, though, to form a clearing where there were bones and the scattered remains of animals.
Will was at eye level with what looked like a chunk of cow skull. It was some variety of Brahma, judging from the lone remaining horn—the other horn had been chewed to the nub—and the skull wasn’t very old because there was still a flap of hide attached to the forehead.
Will thought, What kind of animal eats the horns off a bull? Jesus, even coyotes don’t bother eating horns.
He wondered about that for a moment, then let his eyes move around the room. He saw more cattle bones, a couple of pig jaws—those pointed tusks were familiar—and what might have been a primitive nest hollowed out in the muck. Will guessed it was a nest because of the rubbery-looking egg casings that lay scattered around the thing. The eggs were big, about half the size of an ostrich’s.
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