Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “We have our own ghosts to lay.” Don adjusted his air tank, popped his regulator. The muscles and veins in his neck stood out in ridges. “I know you’re scared shitless, Doc. How come you don’t show it?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

  Don’s answering grin showed only in his eyes.

  Hindsly seemed to have acquired a new crop of freckles every time Thad looked at him. His pipe successfully lit, the buoy bouncing on gentle waves, he leaned back and stretched his legs out before him. He swiveled to peer again over the side into the waters of the strange stories. “If what you tell me is true, I shouldn’t think you’d want to go in. Eliseo here seems to be the only man of sense among you.”

  Eliseo chain-smoked and stared out over the Metnál with an expression half-vacant, half-sad. “I don’t want to stay long in this place, yes?”

  “Member ol’ Bo teasing about Martha Durwent’s body? Those were the last words he ever said. Wonder if we’d’ve laughed if we’d known.” Don pulled down his mask, stuck his regulator in his mouth, and went over backward. Thad did the same, wondering if terror would strike again and those were to be the car salesman’s last words.

  Tourist brochures listed these waters as running between 80 and 84 degrees year around. But the sudden contact with sun-warmed skin made an icy first impression. Or was it the chill of memory? A momentary fluttering of his heart as it was shocked into changing gears.

  The sun was weakened by a lace-thin layer of cloud. The water alternately brightened and darkened around him. They’d anchored closer to the sub than before. What had been a mound some distance from it was now a depression. A grouper swam over to investigate him, then nosed off with no show of concern or hurry—just the usual glum grouper expression. There’d been no fish here before.

  An old maxim among divers was that if the fish suddenly clear out of an area, the diver would be wise to head for the surface. Why hadn’t they thought of that maxim last time? A school of skinny silvery fish darted about overhead as if catching live, moving food too small for Thad to see. Don hung over the shallow crater that had been a mound, his fins treading slowly, his head connected to the light pool of the surface by a string of bubbles. His clothes clung in ripples to his muscled body.

  Thad kicked his way to where (guessing by the location of the sub) he’d seen the diver sucked into the sand. Finding nothing, he circled the rim of the crater. No bodies of the lost, no gear washed from the dive boat, no coral growth, rocks, seaweed, or grass. Only fine white sand that floated through his fingers and hung on the water before drifting back into the crater. Was there some current here that kept the ocean floor so clean? Or did the monstrosity emerge at intervals? Such upheaval would wipe away normal growth. Would only sand tumble back into the crater when it submerged?

  Don scraped and scooped at the center of the crater as if trying to find a trace of the thing. Thad moved farther beyond the perimeter, looking for signs of debris shoved off to the sides. The thing had been so big he’d have to go a ways. Why wouldn’t the debris have tumbled back in and filled up the crater?

  Not everyone had the opportunity to reexamine a nightmare. Perhaps a nightmare laid to rest was like a ghost. It no longer haunted. Perhaps the giant eyeball was a vehicle of some kind that rose up and out of the water, causing a partial eclipse of the sun as it rose heavenward, with some kind of antigravity device that had caught up the dive boat and the water beneath it. But he couldn’t see how that would explain the disappearance of ships or the fact that time had been altered to give the victims another afternoon.

  Could there be any connection to the fact that people on Mayan Cay dreamed a lot? No. That was probably something in the air or some unknown component in the food or water. Thad thought grimly of how his views of what constituted the ridiculous had altered since his first visit to the Metnál.

  And then on a roughly elliptical course from the submarine—as if the crater were now the pupil of a vast eye and the submarine lay in the eye’s inner corner and he was at the outer corner—he found what he looked for. Normal debris on the ocean floor. No living coral, but dead fish, a mucky-looking rock, uneven contours in the sand. Knowing the shape he was looking for now, he could follow the outline of it back to the center of the eye, where Don still scooped away. Sand formed a cloud around him, some of it rising toward the surface with his bubbles.

  Thad kicked over to him, and the car salesman held up both hands like a surgeon waiting to be gloved after scrubbing up. A coating of sand grains stuck to his hands and halfway to his elbows. Thad sank a fin, ankle, and part of a calf into the hole his companion had made in the center of the pupil-depression. He could feel sand clamp onto his skin under the blue jeans and above his fin.

  When he withdrew his foot, he reached down, to feel the sand clinging to the denim of his jeans transfer to his hand and continue to cling, much like strands of hair charged with static electricity try to bond with any nearby object. Kneeling to dig with Don, he too found hands and arms encrusted with the clingy sand. But as the surface sands slipped into the space left by the charged grains beneath, they could make little headway. On their way up, the clinging sand dropped away, and by the time they climbed into the boat, it was gone. Eliseo pulled in the ladder and started for home before they could remove their tanks.

  Don tried to explain the sticky sand to Hindsly through the spray, engine noise, and clapping of the boat bottom against water as they took the low swells too rapidly. “So I figure it’s gone now. Just left behind a depression and some electrically charged sand. And I think it took Bo with it.”

  “Where is it that you think whatever-it-was has gone, then?” Hindsly asked through teeth clamped tightly around his pipe as they all sat in the bow to keep it down, and had to hold with both hands to stay on the seat.

  “I think it went into space, where it came from, but from now on I’m claiming I don’t have any idea or that maybe it was a Russian experiment or something. Not good for the reputation to go around seeing things from outer space.”

  That afternoon, as Thad walked toward the Hotel de Sueños, Roudan came out onto the porch. He seemed to be listening. Even My Lady turned her head from side to side.

  Roudan raised his eyebrows as if he could understand Thad’s thoughts like Thad often picked up on My Lady’s. “You don’t hear what is missing, Backra? Try for once to come out of your head and listen.”

  “I’m getting tired of your riddles, Perdomo.” Thad decided he was also tired of this man’s intimidation. He stepped up onto the porch and passed Roudan before he stopped. The sound My Lady and Roudan had heard for years and Thad for weeks was no longer there. “The generator.”

  Roudan smiled beautiful teeth. “Makes for warm Belican, Mr. Alesandro.”

  Old Stefano came out from under his house and looked at the air around him as though there was something in it he could see, and then over at Roudan. As if some verbal agreement had been reached, Roudan went to meet Stefano halfway across the cemetery, and they walked off in stride between houses.

  In the dim interior, Seferino Munoz stood behind the bar. The man who’d caught My Lady, Ralph Weicherding, was the only customer. “Dr. Alexander, I was looking to get a chance to talk to you. Let me buy you a drink. What’ll it be?”

  “A Belican. You another investigator?”

  “Press.”

  “You’re not going to believe any of the stuff that’s been happening.”

  “Probably can’t use it, but I can sure as hell believe it. Saw the Gloucestershire on the way here. Appeared out of nowhere, and poof—went right back where it came from.” He described seeing the destroyer along with the crew of the supply boat. Thad told him about the Ambergris.

  “Do you think unlikely things are happening all over the world all of a sudden?” Thad asked him. “Or is it just us?”

  “Haven’t heard about anything like this anywhere else.”

  “Yeah, but who’s going to hear about here
?”

  They discussed the impossible matter-of-factly, as though they’d always known such and were used to it, until Rafaela came to get Thad for dinner. She scolded him all the way across the cemetery and into the house.

  “A big man such as you must have his food in him, Thaddeus, not that Belican poison.” What really made her angry, he suspected, was that she hadn’t been able to find Stefano at all and that she was sure food was already spoiling in the refrigerator and there looked to be no light to mend by this evening and what was she to do? Even entertainment at San Tomas’ one movie house required electric power. Electricity was a fairly recent innovation on Mayan Cay, but it hadn’t taken the people long to forget how life was lived without it.

  “I think Stefano and Roudan went off to see if they could fix the generator.”

  “Ayah, they don’t know anything of that. Eliseo, now, can do good with motor things, but not Stefano.”

  The electricity was still not on by morning, which meant no water. Thad wandered around San Tomas and noted the people with buckets lined up at the few backyard hand pumps that hadn’t been converted when electricity befell the island. There were no wells on the Cay, but rainwater was collected and channeled into underground cisterns.

  Between the beach-side police station—which was so tiny the one officer of the law sat inside and talked to everyone through the window like a sidewalk vendor—and the half-finished church was a paved basketball court with concrete benches surrounding it. On the back of each bench was the name of the donor—usually a businessman—just the last names lettered in fading paint. “Grosswyler” looked strange right next to “Perdomo.”

  Without really thinking, Thad leaped into the air and slam-dunked an imaginary ball through a hoop with broken strands for a net. Then he slid his hands into his pants pockets and turned away from the court, willing himself to put aside the picture of Ricky’s last basketball game. It had been Ricky’s last game of any kind.

  He hadn’t done too badly, either, for a gangly kid who was all feet and was meant to grow into a big man. Thad, Molly, Ricky, and a teammate had gone out for hamburgers afterward. Ricky complained about pains in his legs. They all thought it was just because of the strenuous game. Sometime in the night he threw up the hamburgers and complained about a headache. Kids vomit for the least reason, and that act alone could cause a headache. No fever. He’d be better by morning. Kids are tough. By morning Ricky couldn’t walk. Thad had to carry him to the car and then into the hospital. By noon Richard Edward Alexander was dead.

  The impossible had happened then, too. And it was every bit as horrible.

  An autopsy along with blood samples taken before death proved Ricky was missing an important antibody in his blood. Sooner or later Ricky would have come in contact with a strep germ and been unable to fight off the infection, the doctors said. It was a miracle that it hadn’t happened sooner. Ricky had rarely been ill, had an enormous appetite, was active and bright. And growing faster than most of his friends. There’d been no warning of that disaster, either.

  Thad stared at his feet. He held his breath and squinted at the toes of his shoes until he made himself see the dream woman with the fluffy auburn hair instead of the stilled face against the satin sheen of a casket’s lining.

  26

  Geoffrey Hindsly perched on the edge of a low dresser, a plastic glass in his hand. He leaned forward like a captain about to brief his squad. “I’ve asked you all here this afternoon to give you the information the team of oceanographers gleaned from the Metnál.”

  Thad sat on the rushlike matting that covered the floor of Hindsly’s cabana and leaned against one of the twin beds. Don Bodecker sat next to him, while Dixie and Martha Durwent lounged on the bed at their backs. Eliseo Paz and Harry Rothnel sat on the other bed. And the reporter, Weicherding, stood in the doorway as if, once he got the scoop, there could be a battery of telephones in San Tomas to run to and rush in the story. Geoffrey had poured them each a Scotch on arrival, and Eliseo looked as if he’d like to find a potted plant to dump his into.

  “You were all involved in some way and have every right to be informed of at least what can be known at this time.”

  The room was close, jammed with too many people, too much tension. And it wasn’t easy to work up tension in the lazy tropics. Still Hindsly rattled on his excuses for telling them what he’d called them there to tell them. The bathroom door stood open about two feet from Thad’s foot, and he traced the mud-termite tunnel up the pipe that brought cold water to the sink.

  “God damn, get to it, will ya?” Don helped himself to more of the Englishman’s Scotch. “Worse than a whole convention of Baptist preachers.”

  “What? Oh, yes, yes, of course.” Geoffrey reached behind him for some papers he’d been sitting on. “Now, this shouldn’t take long, all very simple actually. Let me see here … Yes, here it is. Now, the sand sticking to your hands the other day could not have been electrically charged, as you suggested, Mr. Bodecker, because water is a conductor, and particularly salt water, and any such charges or whatever would have dissipated throughout the medium.”

  “So what was it?”

  “No one knows, but the scientists did find evidence of this odd phenomenon on their dives as well, and have taken samples back to laboratories for further study. Also, Mr. Alexander, your concern for the barrenness of that particular spot—actually, there are vast regions in all the world’s oceans that are desertlike, compared to the colorful coral gardens tourists tend to visit. And even within the Metnál, not every last foot is covered with coral banks, as illustrated by the fact that there are great channels all the way through it that allow the passage of heavy shipping, you see. So that’s no real mystery there, is it?” He pointed his pipe stem at Thad.

  “How about her Majesty’s ship Gloucestershire?” Ralph Weicherding asked from the doorway.

  “She has been listed as presumed sunk, lost at sea with all hands on board, until any further evidence proves otherwise. All ships of the County class and similar construction and design, which add up to only three or four, are being called into the yards for a full structural investigation. They’re fairly new, you know.”

  Don threw back his head to rest on the bed, narrowly missing Martha’s kneecap, and brayed at the ceiling. “Just another damn recall!”

  “Well, it really is the only logical procedure, isn’t it?” Hindsly turned back to Thad. “Further, on the matter of sparse coral growth in the area, there were certain chemical imbalances in the water that might well have discouraged coral growth.”

  “Why wouldn’t the chemicals just ‘dissipate in the medium’ like the electrical charges?”

  “Ummn, good point. Afraid I don’t know. See if I can scare up someone who does, though, what? Now, for the cause of the tragic mishap that has brought us all here. Over half the survivors of that trip mentioned the presence of great quantities of sand in the water directly afterward. That phenomenon invariably occurs after earthquakes that have disturbed the ocean floor. And you all reported having experienced something like a shock wave in the morning. So severe, in fact, that your nose, Mr. Rothnel, began to bleed. The oceanographic team submits that was a tremor, preparatory to the earthquake which was to follow that afternoon.”

  “Any seismic records of a quake in the Caribbean that day?” Harry asked quietly. One didn’t come to own a “slew” of bakeries by being stupid.

  “None that I know of. But that matter is still under investigation. The team, remember, just left Belize early this morning. I’m merely giving you the preliminary findings because I thought after all the strain it would be unfair to let you wait. Another factor leading to the verdict of an earthquake, by-the-bye, is the Moho or Mohorovicic discontinuity—which I don’t fully understand but which apparently is a dividing line between the earth’s protective crust and whatever is beneath it, or some such thing. The Moho off the east coast of Central America is suspected of being very near the surface, making i
t an ideal spot for subterranean activity.”

  “How about the egg?” Don asked.

  “Eyeball,” Thad corrected the car salesman.

  “The humongous silver thing,” Harry compromised.

  “Yes, well, they postulate that too can be explained by the earthquake theory. Since so many wrecked ships litter the area—”

  “And just why is that?” Martha spoke up for the first time. She sounded sullen and unconvinced.

  “Because, Mrs. Durwent”—Geoffrey Hindsly sounded gentle and condescending—“there are so many coral banks about for shipping to snag against and sink. There’s no mystery as to why the Metnál is known as a graveyard for ships, nor has there ever been.”

  He paused to relight his pipe, and the sweet smell added thickness to the close air. “But to get on with what I was saying, the gray or silver object variously described here could have been the metal hull of a ship—long wrecked and abandoned and perhaps partially buried—pushed to the surface by the force of the earthquake. It is unlikely, but conceivable, and would account for most of the events experienced by the passengers of the diving boat.”

  “Except for the size,” Thad said.

  “The size, yes. Well, that might be explained by the fact that in the extreme danger and horror of the turbulence, the object appeared larger than it was, merely because of the understandably shocked condition of those viewing it, as is not unusual in a case such as this. None of the witnesses’ accounts have agreed on exact size or shape. Or color, for that matter.”

  Eliseo decided to drink the Scotch after all, made a face, and cleared his throat. “So if this wreck comes up as you say, mon, then where does it go?”

  “That, I’m afraid, is still a mystery. One suggestion is that it sank into a crevasse opened by the quake in the ocean floor. The crevasse then might have closed up again—no more wreck. Which I realize is a fair-size crevasse and sounds a bit farfetched, but you must admit not nearly as farfetched as what you’ve all been thinking.” The freckles on his forehead scrunched together in a look meant to denote significance.