Fantasy The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Edward removed one of the spotlights and proceeded by arm strength alone, propelling himself from different surfaces like an astronaut in zero gravity, his dead legs trailing behind him. When he couldn’t reach a surface, he pulled himself through the water with his arms, his upper body strength more than a match for the dead weight below his waist. While he swam, the spotlight hung from a strap around his neck, its light playing madly across the canted interior of the Coolidge, sweeping across the skeletal ribs that separated us from the open sea. I would tap my tank to get his attention and indicate a shot I wanted. He’d hover then, the light casting its own ghosts. With hand signals we’d worked out years ago, I’d move him around until I had just the effect I was looking for. The underwater Nikon would whir and click in my hand, the noise of its tiny motor magnified tenfold by the pressure of all that water. Another ghostly image recorded. Another piece of history laid bare.

  Beyond the promenade, moving steadily deeper as we ventured astern, we entered the main dining hall, the tables and chairs long gone to rot, now just a deep bed of silt to port. Beyond that massive room, we entered the smoking lounge and found the Lady. She stood guard over a dangerous looking rampart of bed frames. The beds had been brought in to house the troops. Look­ing at the twisted mass of rusted metal, like some mad fence around a concentration camp, I couldn’t even begin to guess how many thousands of men must have been crammed into this one room. Like the toilets, there couldn’t have been any privacy.

  With Edward holding his light, I photographed the Lady. Her colors were remarkably bright for her age: red dress with gold brocade and ruffled collar; yellow hair pulled back from a high Elizabethan forehead; green vines and pink flowers behind her. The unicorn was still as white as porcelain of the toilets on the promenade. He was reared up on his hind legs, his tail raised and his mane, though hidden behind the long, trailing sleeve of the Lady’s gown, appeared swept by a strong breeze. The Lady’s expression was one of beatific benevolence, her arms raised as if she were welcoming all those who came to visit, as if she was grandly gesturing to the splendor all around her. Only the splendor of the Coolidge was long gone. Nothing but ghosts remained.

  I didn’t realize Edward was gone until the light rolled free of where he’d wedged it. I was turning to frown at him for not holding it still, when I caught movement from the corner of my eye. In the threshold of an aft exit, I saw something white slip around the corner and vanish. Edward’s neoprene suit was black, like my own, so it couldn’t have been him. I’d chalked it up to some sort of fish turning the corner, my peripheral vision making it larger and brighter than it probably was. The light continued its roll, playing across the exit, revealing a dense cloud of silt rising from the floor, tossed up by whatever I’d seen.

  Edward was gone.

  With the camera housing, I tapped my tank three times in rapid succession, then did it again—our distress code. The silt cloud by the doorway expanded, all but obliterating the opening. Setting aside my mounting fear, I turned and swam for the abandoned spotlight, moving carefully so as not to create any additional turbulence in the room. When I’d retrieved the light, I immediately focused it on the doorway. The light reflected back from the cloud of silt, blinding me.

  I tapped my tank again.

  Nothing.

  Damn you, Edward, if—

  But there he was, pulling himself back through the open doorway; pushing off the frame and gliding through the expanding silt. I let the light blind him, wanting to see his face. Just before he squinted his eyes and turned his face away from the light, I saw fear, an expression I’d never known Edward to wear, not in all our diving experiences.

  When he was close enough, I caught him by the vest and dragged him toward the bow, ignoring the great clouds of silt that billowed up from my flippers. We outran the silt into the dining hall and then onto the bridge where I shoved Edward rather too harshly toward his sled. He didn’t look back at me as he powered the thing up and shot for open water. I can well imagine his rage at being handled that way.

  We made the decompression stops. Edward fiddled with his sled, showing me his back. It took forever to reach the surface.

  Gunter checked his watch when we broke the surfaced.

  I stripped off my mask and spit out my regulator, grabbing for Edward. “What the hell were you doing down there?” I screamed at him.

  “You didn’t see it?” He was hanging onto the Farallon and it was still running. He was using it to keep himself afloat. I’d never seen him do that before. He looked exhausted. He was shaking.

  “See what?” I asked, some of my anger subsiding.

  “The ghost.”

  “I lied to you.”

  “About what?” I asked, signaling our waitress for another round. It had taken two to get Edward talking.

  “Everything,” he said without meeting my eyes. “The accident that put me in this chair. About my father.”

  I tried to recall what he’d told me over the years about his father. Very little. I knew the man was dead, but couldn’t recall how he’d died. In the rare conversations in which either of our parents had been a topic, I’d gotten the sense that Edward’s father had been one of the absentee types, that Edward had seen very little of the man. He’d never given me any indication that this had been a problem for him, though.

  “I never owned a Camaro. Never owned any automobile, for that matter.”

  The waitress brought out drinks. As she turned away, I pushed Edward’s closer to him, using it as an opportunity to lean out and squeeze his forearm. “Hey, man, forget it. We all tell little white lies from time to time. Remember that time I told you about feeling up my older brother’s girlfriend? Hell, that was really my brother and his best friend’s girl. He used to tell that story all the time. I just kind of adopted it as my own when I was younger and it’s stuck with me all these years. Hell, I’ve been telling that lie for so long that it really seems as if it did happen that way.”

  “In time we all come to believe our own lies,” Edward said with a slight nod. He still hadn’t looked at me.

  “No lie,” I said, still trying to lighten the mood. It didn’t work. “Look, Edward, why don’t you just tell me what you saw on the Coolidge and—”

  “When I was young,” he said, looking up at last, “my father and I were inseparable. I told you I grew up on the Outer Banks? That was the truth. But I lied when I said my father was a carpenter. He was a fisherman.”

  A chill ran up my spine. “Look, Edward, I think I know where you’re going with this. If you’re just trying to pull off some elaborate hoax . . .”

  “Shut up and listen, Mickey. For once, just shut the fuck up.”

  I pushed back a bit from the table. “Sure. But if you’re going to tell me your father’s boat went down at sea one day, all hands lost, and now you’ve seen his ghost swimming around in the Coolidge, I’m going to be forced to remind you how far we are from the Outer Banks. If the old man was such a great swimmer, then he never should have drowned in the first place.” I re­gretted it as soon as it was out, regretted it even more when I saw the hurt and anger in Edward’s eyes, but I’d always been quick to put my foot in my mouth.

  Edward reached for the wheels of his chair.

  “Wait,” I stammered, catching the arm of his chair. “Damn, but I’m sorry, Edward. You know what a stupid fuck I can be sometimes. Please forgive me. Let’s start over, okay? You said you never owned a Camaro. Why don’t you start by telling me how you wound up in the chair? Let’s get that out of the way first. Then we can talk about your father. Okay?”

  He said nothing. The thick cords of muscle in his forearms were set to propel the chair backward. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold onto it if he did.

  “You have to agree to go back to the Coolidge with me tomorrow.”

  “Sure, Edward. I’ll go back with you.” It was, after all, what we’d come for.

  “And this time, we do a deep penetration. Past Gunter’s ma
ps. Down into the stern, all the way into the bilge hold if necessary.”

  I nodded. “If you promise me that we’ll follow proper safety procedures. Rig guidelines. Run a safety line between us. Carry some extra lights.”

  “Agreed.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Tell me then. Start from the beginning.”

  The Coolidge’s third cargo hold had been used for medical storage. More serious than the loss of the vessel itself or the equipment of the 43rd had been the loss of the medical supplies stored there. The Coolidge had been carrying Atabrine to fight malaria on Guadalcanal. Most of the supplies have been salvaged, but they say if you dig around in the silt against the port bulkhead, you can still find a few intact phials of Atabrine and morphine among the eye droppers and syringes, tubing and surgical clamps and so on. Edward and I passed through the hold without probing her mysteries, tethered by thirty feet of nylon line. I only shot a few halfhearted photos without fussing over the lighting or the angls.

  We were both carrying flashlights this time. I had a spare clipped to my vest, along with two spools of iridescent monofilament line, one of which was already reeling out through a hatch that led to the promenade.

  Edward took a corridor astern, heading deeper. I followed, checking to make sure the guideline didn’t become entangled behind me, kicking easy so as not to disturbthe silt. In the tight passageway, it would be all too easy for a diver to create a blinding cloud with his flippers.

  The passageway brought us to the ship’s swimming pool, mosaic tiles still in place. Beyond it waited the soda fountain and beauty shop. Stranger even than the swimming pool turned vertical was the barber’s chair standing out from what seemed to be the wall. The soda fountain was littered with old Coca-Cola bottles. Edward continued past all of this, barely allowing me time for a single photo. When I delayed too long, the line between us snapped taut, and I was forced to continue or be dragged.

  “Though I loved him dearly, my father was an alcoholic,” Edward had told me last night. “The only time he didn’t drink was when he was working on the boat, which made those times with him at sea the best times in my life. Oh, it was a lot of hard work, especially for a kid, but I didn’t mind.

  “I was ten when he stopped off that night in the bar after a day on the boat, leaving me to wait outside. The night he wrecked the car because he was drunk. The night he put me in this wheelchair for the rest of my life.” There was no bitterness in his voice, just a deep regret and a comfortable resignation. Edward had come to terms with all this years ago, had hidden whatever anger and resentment he still felt behind the lies that had come to be more real to him. But the lies spoke of guilt, and I wondered if somehow Edward didn’t blame himself.

  We were beyond the annotations on Gunter’s maps now. Edward moved deeper into the bowels of the ship, ever astern and toward the keel on our left. The line on the first reel of monofilament was almost gone: nearly 250 feet of line strung out behind us through the twisting warrens of the vessel.

  “Guilt ate the man alive,” Edward continued, as if he’d read my thoughts. “He never took me out on the boat with him again. ‘It’s no place for a cripple,’ he’d say, not meaning to be cruel, just stating fact in the unvarnished manner that he’d always used. Yes, it would have been difficult, but not impossible. The real reason he didn’t want me on the boat is because it would have reminded him of all those times before the accident. It would have driven home the fact that his son would never be whole again and the fact that it was his fault.

  “He drank more than ever. He even started drinking while working the boat.”

  He was getting careless, stirring up more and more of the fine silt that littered the Coolidge. I tugged on the tether to signal for him to slow down. He ignored me. I checked my air supply, checked the time, checked our depth. We were a hundred and seventy some odd feet beneath the surface. At this depth, I had maybe twenty minutes of air left. It was time to turn back, head up to our first decompression stop where our remaining air would last longer.

  “You guessed the rest. There was a storm. He’d been drinking. He never came home.” The pain I’d expected to see in Edward’s eyes wasn’t there. Instead he shrugged and said, “He’s been haunting me ever since. It’s Dad who whispers in my ear, tells me where things are at the bottom of the sea. Oh, don’t look at me like I’m crazy, Mickey! I don’t mean that literally, but even you’ve said there’s something unnatural in my ability to find these things. I get these intuitions that manifest themselves as a voice in my head. It’s the voice of my father.”

  I’d tried to laugh it off, told him I wished his father would tell him where the Santa Maria was laid to rest. Having broken apart on a reef off the coast of Hispaniola and never found, Columbus’ flagship is something of a Holy Grail to underwater archeologists.

  “He’s not really interested in shipwrecks,” Edward replied. “My father wants me to find him.”

  I tugged the line again. The silt and the gloom and the narrow corridor prevented me from seeing Edward, but his weight was still there at the end of the line. I needed to stop, tie off the guideline, and start the second spool. More importantly, we needed to turn back. I braced a flipper against the bulkhead and hauled back on the tether, attempting to stall Edward. As I did, I saw the end of the monofilament slip from the empty spool and slither back toward the bow, vanishing in the dark and the swirling silt.

  “So,” I asked, my blood gone cold, “you saw your father in the Coolidge?”

  “No. I saw a cat.”

  “A cat? What do you mean, a cat? What would a cat be doing underwater? And I thought you said you saw a ghost?”

  “I did. I saw the ghost of a cat. A white Siamese.”

  “Edward, this is getting ridiculous . . .”

  I pulled on the tether, but it wouldn’t give. I tapped the distress code on my tank with my flashlight. I kicked furiously, attempting to draw Edward back down the corridor toward me. My actions stirred up great billowing clouds of silt.

  “Used to be, all I ever heard in my head was my father’s voice, but over the years I’ve started hearing others. Now I’ve begun to see them.”

  “But really, Edward—a cat?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s just the first step. My eyes have been opened now. Somewhere on the Coolidge there are other ghosts—I’ve heard them. I have to find them. If you see one ghost, it indoctrinates you. Before long, you’ll be seeing more.”

  The tether went slack. The pounding in my heart eased somewhat. Since I wouldn’t let him advance, Edward must have turned back. I reeled in the line, waiting for it to pull taut again against his weight. It never did. Thirty feet of line coiled in the muck swirling about my feet . . . and then came the end of the line . . . with nothing attached.

  Edward?

  I plunged aft, heedless of the silt thickening about me. My light was useless. I couldn’t see the bulkheads, the ceiling, the deck. My panic contributed to my disorientation and in seconds I was unsure which way was up. I no longer knew if I was heading fore or aft, if I’d turned to port or starboard at the last intersection of passageways. I tapped my tank. I banged the walls. I removed my regulator and screamed Edward’s name.

  We were going to die down here.

  I couldn’t see my hand held out before my face.

  I searched for the monofilament guideline, praying for its bright strand to flash back from the beam of my light. Nothing. I hung suspended in a directionless void, my oxygen bubbling away with every—

  My air bubbles! The Coolidge lay on a steep incline. The bow was at the top of the reef. The bow was up. My air bubbles were rising . . . up!

  I followed the bubbles to the nearest surface, which logic said had to run parallel to the starboard hull. Teasing the bubbles to run along the surface rather than adhere to the marine growth, I followed them to the next intersection, where I faltered. Left had to be the direction of the upper deck, but there were also salvage holes that had been
cut to allow access to the engine room and the lower decks. Was one of those holes closer to open water than working my way back up to the promenade? I didn’t have time to debate it. I didn’t have the air to hesitate. I turned left and pressed on, propelling myself at top speed, ignoring the additional silt that I disturbed behind me.

  Forgive me, Edward.

  Another intersection. I proceed straight through. The beauty shop should be ahead with its barber chair. Beyond that—

  The corridor came to an end against a series of un­recognizable doors. All closed. All rusted shut. I turned and made my way back to the corridor, took the left turn. The beauty shop should be—

  Another intersection. I turned left again.

  I checked my depth. Somehow I was moving deeper, which meant I was heading aft. No . . . wait. It could also mean I was heading to port. The port side of the ship was down. I retraced my path, came to the intersection and couldn’t remember which way I had come from.

  I was lost.

  Bubbles flow up. Up is toward the bow. But up is also to starboard, isn’t it?

  I was running out of air. My panic just made it worse. At this rate, I wouldn’t have enough air to decompress.

  Something brushed my face mask. A long, thick strand of brown. I caught it, ran my light over it. It was the end of a rope. What the hell—” It tugged in my hand, nearly escaping. I wrapped it in my fist and hung on.

  Hand over hand, I climbed the length of the rope, even as it drew me through the ship. The clouds of silt swirled and eddied about me. I couldn’t see anything but the rope where it vanished into the thick soup ahead of me. Then the dark faded to gray, and the gray to the green of the deep ocean. I could see it ahead, just the other side of the thinning silt and the splines of the girders surrounding the promenade. The rope played out, slipping through my hands. I floundered for a second in the silt-out, but then my hands found something . . . no, that’s not right.