by Leslie Lutz
“It’s full of water, Felix.”
“Maybe it’s in a can. Canned pizza.” And he giggled and said it again through the giggles. Graham and I laughed. Steph frowned at us.
“We can’t trust Graham,” Steph said. “He was going to kill us.”
Felix stared at Graham’s profile, curious but not afraid. “You weren’t going to kill us, were you, Graham?”
“Nope.”
“Just trying to scare us, right?”
“Yep.”
“Like at Halloween. A trick.”
“Right.”
Felix looked at Steph triumphantly, and Graham’s smile faded. “I was just hungry. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger unless you were armed and pointing something at me.”
“Comforting,” Steph said.
His expression went a shade darker. “If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”
Steph turned away and crossed her arms, contemplating the canopy of palm fronds moving in the wind that ringed us and the sinkhole. Then she turned again to peer into the dark water, a ripple of fear passing across her features. “You sure what we need is actually down there?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. A big mishmash of supplies, things we brought with us on the Andrews, things we took from the enemy. Why would I lie? I don’t want to go down there any more than you do.”
Ben limped to a flat rock near the edge of the water and sat, grimacing as his leg bent. Red streaks now spread out from the edges of the bandage, and everyone knew, even Felix, that Ben was dying. He told me that morning he’d been wrong, that he had only a few days, not a week.
I walked to him and felt his forehead with the back of my hand . . . burning up with fever. I looked into that sinkhole one more time. Dark. Murky. God knows what’s in there, I thought.
“Bad idea letting him off the leash,” Steph said, nodding to Graham.
“Graham knows the layout of the place,” I said. “Besides, I could use a dive buddy. Might get into trouble.”
Steph pointed at Graham accusingly. “He’s trouble. He said he’s never been diving before.”
“He’s willing and you’re not.”
“I don’t know how.”
“That’s not stopping Graham, now, is it?”
Steph glanced from Ben’s face to mine, and then settled her scrutiny on Graham. “Suit yourself, Sia. But I learned a long time ago not to trust people like him. I bet a thousand bucks he’s gonna kill you down there, load up on food, and come back up with a bazooka. Then we’re all dead, and he can eat for friggin’ weeks.”
All of us fell silent, and I turned back to the sinkhole. On impulse, I dipped in a finger and tasted it. Salt, like Graham said. Which meant this body of water somehow led to the open ocean. Could be an aquifer, all the water bubbling through the little pores of limestone, although Mom and I had been to dozens of these islands near Key Largo while scouting out new dive sites, and we’d never come across any sinkholes or limestone anything. Of course, at that point, I wasn’t sure we were anywhere near Florida anymore.
As I stood and got to work, fitting the regulator on the tank, showing Graham how to do the same, another thought came to me, that the sinkhole was connected to the ocean by caves. My hand stilled halfway through tightening the strap on the BC.
“What is it?” Graham asked. He had been watching me and mimicking my every move, putting together his gear.
“Nothing,” I lied. Caves tunneling under the island, leading out to sea. That thing could smell us in the water, so we were in a special kind of trouble. I doubted we could find the storeroom Graham had told us about in less than ten minutes. But I didn’t tell Graham what I suspected. This was a reckless first dive as it was—into a deep, dark hole with poor visibility. No one did something like this on a first day. But today would get even more dangerous if he panicked.
I finished slipping on my gear and sat near the edge, watching Graham fumble his way into the BC. He stumbled as he adjusted the strap, the weight of the tank throwing him off. As he picked up his fins and made his way gracelessly to me, I couldn’t help but laugh. I had been laughing more today, ever since he told me about this place. Hope bubbling up from a deep place, which felt fantastic after two weeks of despair. Or was it three weeks? A year? I wasn’t sure.
“You making fun of me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, and he sounded defeated. “Like I said, water’s not my thing.”
“You joined the Navy.”
“That’s how I found out.”
I peered into the sinkhole again. “Before we go in, I’m gonna give you one more chance to tell me what’s going on down there.”
“Told you. It’s a lab.”
“Who created the lab? The United States?”
“Can’t say.”
“What were they doing, or studying?”
“Can’t tell you that.”
“Was it dangerous?”
He paused, thought about it, like a man probing a wound in his mouth with his tongue. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Steph made a disgusted sound. Ben was too focused on the pain, which seemed to come in flashes, to notice the conversation. And Felix, sitting there, rubbing his empty belly and staring at me, his big sister, as if I was going out for takeout and would come back with a grocery bag full of sushi and Subway sandwiches.
I turned to Graham. “You’re going to help me find food and medicine, and you’re not going to do anything to screw this up. I don’t care how scary it is down there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Roger that.”
“Get in.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In Clear Springs Lake, just outside of Dallas, there’s a dive spot you’ve never tried called the Silo. It’s sixty feet down and has a circular catwalk on the bottom so students can kneel on it and practice their skills, like knot tying and mask clearing. But it’s silty and black and cold, kind of like diving in a well. Dark as death, as oblivion. You find the catwalk railing by touch. Shine a light on your instruments and you see number soup. Tie knots blind. If you drop your mask, you’ll never find it. The fire department trains there for rescue dives, and they all hate it.
Just after you went away, Felix, Mom, and I missed our weekly visit with you because we were at that lake. Mom and I lied and told you we’d had the flu. She didn’t want you to know she’d called up her old boyfriend and begged for work—anything—so she could pay the bills. Steve hired her out of pity, and all of us headed to Texas. He even sent her a hundred dollars through Western Union so we’d have gas and food money. It was a two-day drive, and Mom drove straight through.
When we pulled up to the lake and stepped out of the car—which was running on fumes—Steve didn’t say hello or hug anyone. He just handed Mom an envelope of money. She burst into tears. And took it. Hugged him for a long time while I took Felix down to the lake to look for turtles.
That was the trip when Mom and I started to fight. A lot. She wanted me to sit in the advanced course with the paying students, read the textbook, and get a 100 on everything. I wanted to play my guitar in the tent and do the easy dives when I felt like it. I’d never gone deeper than forty feet before, and I wasn’t ready.
In the end, Mom won, like she always does. She took the guitar she’d bought me six months before, the one she’d been so excited about me learning to play, and locked it in the trunk. Then she told me to sit at the picnic tables by the lake with all the adults. I took knowledge tests and learned how to search and rescue, tie knots, navigate blind, and all the things I can now do in my sleep. I had no idea she was grooming me to be your replacement.
On day two, we dove the Silo, all the way to the dark and muddy bottom. We’d been warned, but when I hit that first thermocline—the cold seeping into my wet suit and the blackness thickening into a hood over my eyes—I sucked do
wn my air like a sprinter. At the bottom, my ears filled with the sounds of my own breath, and I shined my light through the silt to find Mom. The beam made it three inches and petered out. In the Silo, unless you’re holding someone’s hand, everyone’s on their own.
One of the guys with us panicked, although I didn’t know that until we’d finished our dive and Mom and I debriefed in our tent. Too much for him, even after all the warnings about disorientation and darkness and cold. Mom had to hold on to his leg to keep him from bolting to the surface and popping a lung, or worse. But I didn’t see any of that. At the bottom of the Silo, all I knew was what I could feel: the blackness, the cold, and something hitting me in in the stomach and in the face . . . an elbow, a fin, a who-knows-what, because you can’t see crap.
After I’d finished tying a bowline and checking out colors on a color chart—I couldn’t see anything, so what was the point—I felt around the dark for another diver, hooked arms, and surfaced. Topside, the seven of us floated on the warm surface layer of the lake, and everyone talked at once, lots of swearing and “I’ll never do that again.” But I didn’t say any of those things. And not because Mom was watching me for my reaction, to see if I had the stomach to do what had to be done—dive when it wasn’t fun, lie about my age, and help her run the charter. No, I didn’t say those things.
Because I wanted to go back.
That’s what I’ve been afraid to tell you, Dad; why I didn’t rat out Mom when we saw you again, about her old boyfriend and the weekend trip to Texas.
I wanted to go back down to the bottom of the Silo, which I’m pretty sure is not normal. And not in a “being different is good” way. More of a dysfunctional, “I’m-going-to-end-up dead” way.
The feeling, the thrill of fear, the whole world eaten up and gone, it did something for me. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just my instincts and breath and the glorious challenge of it all.
So here’s my third confession. At midnight, I snuck out of the tent, put on my gear, and swam out into the ink-dark lake. Then I sank to the bottom of the Silo, six stories down, and tied knots in the dark. Sheep shank, bowline, clove hitch. Without gloves first, then again with them on, because my fingers were so cold I couldn’t feel them. And for the first time since they locked you away, all of me was in one spot. Not thinking about you, or how I would manipulate the parole board at your hearing with my sad, sad story, or Mom and how she needed me to grow up and keep the charter business from failing. I wasn’t thinking about the crappy apartment we’d moved to after you left, how the lack of heat made it hard to sleep because we couldn’t pay the electric bill, how we kept our food in an ice chest because the fridge didn’t work. All of that was gone. In the Silo, I was new, just born, tying knots in the dark.
So when Graham told me where we’d have to go, to the bottom of the weird sinkhole on a haunted island in God knows where, planet Earth, yes, I was afraid.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it.
All that stuff I wrote about how scared I was to fish for lobster, with the thing out there, sniffing the water for me—I wasn’t telling you the whole story. Truth is, this island has done something to me, molecule by molecule, making me, I don’t know, more me. I didn’t tell Ben, or Steph, or Graham. I kept it from Felix, who would just copy what I do and end up dead. I never once told anyone, throughout all the horrible things that happened to me on the island, that I needed the fear somehow, regular, like a daily coffee. But I’m telling you now, Dad, because . . . I don’t know why. Because I wanted you to know.
Graham and I slipped into the sinkhole, and I went over the basics. How to purge the air from a BC so you sink. How to add it so you rise. How to release your buckles if you catch on something. How to buddy breathe if you run out of air. It was the quickest scuba lesson I’d ever given.
He floated beside me, looking down at his BC like someone had just put an alien suit on him and asked him to fly.
I pointed to the two lift bags I’d attached to a clip on the front of my gear. “If we have the time, we’ll send some food to the top with this.”
He eyed the equipment. “How does it work?”
“Kind of a reverse parachute. I fill it with air from my regulator and the whole package floats to the surface. Can you tie good knots?”
“Every knot in the Navy manual, plus some you’ve never heard of, sweetheart.”
I took in the cocky expression. Good. Where we were going, he would need that.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Always.”
“I think the answer is, ‘I was born ready.’”
He nodded. “That sounds about right.”
I smiled and put in my reg. That smile was cheap to give and cost me nothing. Chances were high we were dealing with caves, not an aquifer. I was expecting the phosphorescence to light up the sinkhole. The Sense said it was coming, that the beast liked it here. That it belonged here. And I’d feel that beautiful fear turn to a hammer, until that monster swept up, wrapped its silky filaments around our ankles, and pulled us down.
The dive knife strapped to my thigh gave me comfort. For fishing line, not coral. You used to tell the dive students that, back in the Keys when you had a career and a life, when my only job was to help people fill out the waivers. Leave Mother Nature alone, use the knife to deal with what mankind gives you. A bad way to go, tangled up in fishing line until your air runs out.
Today I was breaking my rule, ready to shove it into what Mother Nature gave us. It would cut through filaments as easily as fishing line. As long as there weren’t too many of them, as long as they didn’t pin my arms by my side, as long that thing didn’t pull me into its body, wriggling like a fish . . .
I fit my regulator into my mouth, the equivalent of five cups of coffee pulsing through me. Graham did the same. I gave him a thumbs-down. He blinked at me with a blank expression. He’d already forgotten my crash course in hand signals. I flipped on my dive light, purged my BC, and sank. He’d figure it out.
As soon as we left the air and sunlight, I felt better. The world of bubbles and neoprene, compressed air and breath, rock and silt, and the hollowed-out bodies of ships—it all rushed back, my days with you and Mom on the charter, exploring the coast one breath at a time. Descent. Weightless, we drifted into the dim water of the sinkhole. I hooked my arm through Graham’s to keep us tethered. Below my fins lay darkness, endless velvety black.
I focused on our goal. Five stomachs. One bad leg. We had problems and problems had solutions. And those lay somewhere below.
At forty feet, the natural light disappeared, blocked out by the heavy silt layer above us. The world became a dark closet, a universe without stars or moons or anything but two beams of light.
We kept our descent slow. As we dropped, the air in my BC compressed and we accelerated. I tapped in a few puffs. Reached over to do the same for Graham.
Fifty feet.
Fifty-five.
Breathing and plummeting in slow motion into the dark.
A quick sweep of the sinkhole’s walls gave me nothing but rock. Brown. Gray. Ordinary. No green glow in the abyss below, thank God.
Sixty feet.
Sixty-five.
It was too dark to see Graham’s face, but his hand tightened on my arm.
Seventy feet.
Seventy-five.
Eighty.
Past the point where my grandmother could free dive, when she’d stop her descent and change directions.
Graham’s grip hurt. Nobody did a dive like this their first time. Would he bolt for the surface, like that guy in the Silo? If he did, Steph would get her wish. One less survivor to feed. I pulled him an inch closer.
Eight-five feet.
Ninety.
And then in the depths below us, my beam caught a glimpse of silver.
ENTRY 26
THE LAB. The glint of silver grew distinct. A railing. It came up fast, to my left, and I hooked an arm around it before I passed.
/> We dangled there for a few seconds as I put a little air into both our BCs. Once we were weightless again, I checked my gauge.
Ninety-five feet. I pointed my beam down, and the sinkhole kept going, until my light couldn’t reach any farther. A wave of relief passed through me. Most of the dead would plummet right past the railing and keep going. I had no intention of ever finding out how deep that sinkhole went.
I’d looked at dive tables often enough to picture the rows of numbers. At ninety-five feet, we had twenty minutes to get what we needed and get out. If we overstayed our welcome, we couldn’t skip the decompression stop, which would become a problem if Graham kept sucking on his tank like he was.
We needed to get going, but Graham’s fingers clamped my wrist so hard I couldn’t feel my hand. Terror, panic. I’d been there before, before I developed a taste for places like this. The animal self doesn’t like all that water above, all the blackness.
I turned him to face me, shone my light at an angle so he could see my eyes. Calm and steady, I was telling him. Then I shined the light on my hand and made the okay sign I’d taught him. Not a statement. A question.
Are you okay?
I kept my light on his hands and waited, letting precious seconds tick away. Each moment in the open was one more chance for that thing to smell us, slip through its caves and find us hanging there like ripe fruit on a tree. His grip on my wrist shook.
Too dark. Too cold.
If he bolted, would I go after him? Would I stay here and find the food on my own?
After a full minute of us floating at the railing, he made the okay sign. My body relaxed. I hadn’t wanted to make that choice.
I swam in a circle with my light. Metal dangled off the walls of the sinkhole, glints of silver through the silt. Remnants of something manmade ringing us, as if we were floating in some sort of cored-out engine and its parts were all out of whack. One more sweep of my light and my brain finally made sense of it.
I was looking at the floors of a building built inside a machine, but something had cut clean through the center, the way Mom cuts through the center of a pineapple, turning and coring until it has a nice clean tunnel. That’s what it looked like, a cored-out pineapple, riddled with hallways and gears.