Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

  It looked like a Christmas tree.

  It was hung with all manner of gaudy decorations. There were anemones the color of strawberries and apricots and limes, some of them large as dinner plates. There were volcano-shaped sponges and spreading sea fans. There were orange and red and purple and rainbow-hued sea stars wrapped around rocky knobs. There were creatures for which I had no names. Huge white stalks topped with carved disks sprouted from the rock like cauliflowers. Squishy things the shape of caterpillars in neon red and yellow crept along the wall. One bright cobalt-blue crawler wore a crown of gold spikes and could audition for a Disney flick. The cracks and fissures of the pinnacle were inhabited by crabs and snails and one tiny red octopus. A thick-lipped thing in a huge scalloped shell hogged an entire ledge to itself.

  We ascended the pinnacle, searching for a gaudy purple in the gaudy tapestry.

  It was Tolliver who found the hydrocoral, looking like the photo we'd seen in Dr. Russell's office.

  Stylaster californicus.

  Tolliver pumped his fist.

  We were not going to whack at it. The organism took twenty-five years to grow one inch, so I’d read. Taking even a tip would rob it of a few years. Tolliver used his underwater camera to do the sampling.

  Walter pried off a pinch of the Franciscan rock near the coral and I marveled that he'd found an unoccupied section of wall to sample.

  We’d done well at Target Blue. We’d found a credible source for the kelp and pebble embedded in the holdfast caught in the Outcast anchor. And we had found a credible source of the mineral grains and coral bits embedded in the yellow float's rope. What we had not yet found was any sign of a float anchorage, any reason the float would have been attached to this slice of the pinnacle.

  We conferred in sign language.

  Consensus: ascend the pinnacle, looking for signs of a float anchorage. Then cross the ridge to Target Red and see what we can find over there.

  ***

  There was nothing more to be found on the Target Blue pinnacle, other than beauty. When we reached the spot where the pinnacle butted up against the caterpillar ridge, we struck out for Target Red.

  And then Tolliver investigated a shortcut, a tunnel through the ridge.

  Dim light showed at the other end.

  On land, I'd entered tunnels and mines and caves, out of necessity. I wasn't fond of overhead environments but, actually, this one looked navigable.

  We all switched on the fat torch lights mounted on our gloves.

  The tunnel opening was a toothy triangle that quickly swallowed Tolliver and then Walter and then me.

  Finning carefully, silt avoidance technique.

  There was life inside the tunnel—some of the same animals clinging to the walls as clung to the pinnacle—but here in the darker realm, in this gullet through the ridge, I did not see beauty. I saw only shadows of life and it wasn’t the shadows per se that unsettled me, it was the imagining of things unseen that tightened my chest.

  My bubbles came faster, hit the ceiling of the tunnel, died there.

  I angled my torch to illuminate the crowding right-hand wall and calmed myself with a quick and dirty field ID of the rock. Sandstone.

  All right, then.

  Up ahead, Walter was just exiting the tunnel.

  I finned toward the light.

  ***

  I emerged from the tunnel to find Tolliver and Walter gripping a rock outcrop, bodies drifting in a gentle current.

  I too grabbed hold.

  My legs trailed.

  It wasn’t just the current that had us holding on tight. It was also the scene before us.

  I took in this new underwater world.

  Was this right?

  CHAPTER 26

  Target Red was ailing.

  Here, just outside the tunnel, the water was edging toward murky.

  Farther on, advancing into Target Red, the water degraded like a spreading stain.

  Up above, the algal bloom shrouded the surface, a rotten version of a kelp canopy. Down below, the kelp forest was thinned. A forest in distress. Hardly a forest at all.

  By the beam of my glove light I saw particulates falling from the plankton bloom above. Dying, decaying, they rained down upon the stunted forest and whatever life lurked unseen and sank to the seafloor below.

  Here and there, where the algal bloom had begun to break up, pencils of weak sunlight penetrated the gloom.

  As my eyes adjusted to this ghostly undersea world I began to get the lay of the land.

  We hung at the mouth of the tunnel. Above us a large overhang jutted out from the ridge crest and below us the ridge sloped down to a steep dropoff. A canyon plummeted who-knew-how-deep into a bowl, a chasm, and above the chasm there rose enclosing canyon walls that seemed to hold this place separate from the main body of Cochrane Bank.

  I picked out the rocky reef topping the left-hand canyon wall.

  Our target reef.

  We needed to swim over there.

  But we just hung where we were, grasping rocky knobs, gaping.

  I envisioned Violet Russell's slide show, the tongues of hypoxic waters welling up onto the continental shelf, and I wondered if that was going on here, if upwelling low-oxygen high-nutrient waters had spurred the growth of this deadly algal bloom.

  Whatever combination of ingredients, it had made this place a toxic cocktail.

  I sucked in a deep draft of my own canned air.

  Walter jammed an elbow into my arm, and pointed.

  It took a moment for my vision to penetrate the cloudy water and scraggly kelp to see what he had seen.

  Tolliver was looking now, too.

  On our target reef, caught in one of the sunlight pencils, something silver flashed. I could not make out details but I could make out a bare-bones shape.

  A metal cage.

  We looked at one another and nodded. That's where we needed to go.

  Tolliver made one of the hand signals he’d taught us, moving his hand across his torso in a wave motion. Current. And then he pointed to himself and then to us, positioning one hand behind the other.

  As ever, he was taking the lead and, as ever, I was glad of it.

  We struck out into the bowl framed by the canyon walls.

  The current, actually, took us, a rather gentle flow that nevertheless lent a helping hand. It seemed to follow the curve of the bowl. I thought, it's a circular current, it's an eddy, it's the eddy that Tolliver pointed out up top when we first arrived and saw the slight dip in the water that seemed to hold the scummy algal bloom in place.

  Holding us in place, in now.

  It was a great circling eddy created by seabed topography, by the winds and tides and if I allowed myself to be as poetic as the ancient mariner, by the fickle gods of the sea.

  I suddenly wanted to bolt, to strike out perpendicular to this swirling current, to escape.

  But Tolliver just rode it like a pro, and so then did we, taking our ride to the left-hand canyon rim and then we flowed up along with the eddying current to skim the jagged reef.

  We resumed control, heading for the silver cage at the far edge of the reef. We swam through spindly stalks of the degraded kelp forest, a sad lonely place. The reef was carpeted in dead crabs and shriveled worms. I would have welcomed the company of a grumpy kelp crab. The only life I glimpsed in passing was a nearly translucent snail clinging to a ragged frond, a snail whose shell was pitted as if it had been sandblasted.

  I again thought of Violet Russell. Not her slide show this time, but her words. Ocean acidity is rising. Carbon dioxide is souring the seas.

  This water was not simply oxygen-starved, it was growing acidic—chemically etching the shell of the snail.

  ***

  We approached the far edge of the reef.

  It was a little better here. The stain was fading here.

  I looked up. The algal bloom was fading there, directly above.

  We were beneath the outer edge of the bloom.
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br />   As we finned toward the cage we saw a blaze of color in this graveyard, a bright sulfur yellow.

  It was what we had been hunting.

  A bloom of yellow floats was attached to the bottom of the cage. From the tunnel we had glimpsed only the top of the cage. We saw it full-on now. The cage sat down in a hole, perhaps for protection from the currents. It was made of metal pipes, a silvery stainless steel. The frame was open at the top, closed at the bottom, anchored at the corners with heavy-looking metal feet. One of the pipes sprouted the package of yellow floats, like a kelp stalk sprouting gas bladders.

  Same size, same shape as the yellow float hidden in Robbie Donie’s shrine at Morro Rock.

  I looked at my companions. Cocked my head. This has got to be the source, right?

  They nodded their agreement.

  The cage was about five feet square—big enough, it struck me, to hold a diver—although the contents were nothing so dramatic. Within the cage, attached to the pipes, were various boxes and canisters and what looked like temperature gauges. Some sort of instrumentation. Attached to the top was a chunky camera. Attached to the base was a squat cylinder with the label Sound Link.

  Monitoring the algal bloom? Monitoring the shoaling hypoxic waters? Made sense, I guessed, although wouldn’t Dr. Russell have mentioned it? Well, not necessarily. I suspected that there were many agencies monitoring the condition of the sea, and like a bureaucracy, one department doesn’t know what the other is doing.

  I wrote on my slate: NOAA? I’d done a lot of research since we’d begun this case and when it came to all things ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was the top dog. I showed the slate to Tolliver.

  He shrugged. Not his bureaucracy.

  His patch of ocean, though. He looked from the instrument cage to the bloom overhead and then back at the stain of Target Red and he shook his head.

  No dive-signal interpretation needed. This was a bad scene.

  I turned back to the scene of the floats. Although the cage was anchored by its metal feet it was clearly meant to rise at some point—else there would be no floats. Some sort of recovery system, I guessed. The six floats were attached to a canister by means of braided nylon rope with snap hook fasteners. Easy on, easy off.

  I thought of the bent snap hook on Donie's float. Had it broken free and found its way to the surface? And if so, is that where Donie found it? Or, he might have found it elsewhere, drifting on the currents.

  First things first. The geology.

  I grabbed the steel pipe and pulled myself closer to the cage to get a good look at the floats. As they bobbed in the current they scuffed against the rocky walls of the hole and I could imagine those braided ropes picking up a grain or two. The rock was Franciscan basalt, I judged, although we’d want to take a sample for confirmation.

  And what of the purple hydrocoral? Where was that source?

  I scrutinized the wall of the hole, thinking I was hunting for one more lifeless gray animal, and it came as a surprise when I spotted a purple nubbin in a crevice, and then I recalled Russell saying that this hydrocoral retained its color in death. Whether technically dead, it had surely been battered, losing a good quarter-century of growth, and if this had occurred during the installation of this equipment I thought that’s some damned careless work.

  I pointed out the nubbin of Stylaster and Tolliver took out his camera and photographed the remains.

  Walter set to work chiseling off a sample of the volcanic rock.

  I swam over to the nearest stalk of kelp and snapped off a sample. Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp, one of the survivors in this ailing forest, still holding fast to the rocky reef.

  I thought, a boat could anchor here and snag a bit of holdfast.

  It was odd not being able to run through the scenarios as we worked. Hand signals just didn't cut it. Had Robbie Donie anchored here, or at Target Blue? When? Why? Squid-hunting? Float-finding? And then he returned. Squid-fishing again? Success this time? And then what? Overboard? Or pull up anchor and motor someplace else? Overboard there?

  Alone? With company?

  I swam back to join the others at the cage and gave a thumbs-up.

  It's a start. A good day's work.

  Tolliver checked his dive computer and gave his own signal: one hand held flat, the other underneath with the tips of the fingers touching the flat hand. Time to head back.

  ***

  We crossed the reef to the chasm and struck out into the eddy.

  A liquid whisper: going my way?

  You bet, heading back to the tunnel that would shortcut us through the ridge to the sunny side, to Target Blue, to the anchor line up to Tolliver's boat.

  I didn't bother to consult my compass. I assumed Tolliver had consulted his. I assumed Tolliver could find his way around down here with his eyes closed, which was what it was starting to feel like as we rode the back-eddy: swimming with closed eyes. The stain grew thicker, the water murkier.

  Ahead, Tolliver and then Walter seemed to slow and I thought, that's strange.

  And then I too slowed, no longer certain where I was, where the off-ramp on this eddy was, where we needed to exit in order to find our tunnel.

  The murk was thick as soup. The dying plankton, caught in my light beam, fell like stars.

  The current whispered me along.

  Tolliver and Walter were ghostly shapes, just ahead, riding the current.

  Shouldn’t we exit now?

  And then something came into my light, something so otherworldly that for a moment I forgot to breathe.

  It drifted along with me.

  It was the size of my fist and the shape of a walnut and I could see through it.

  It was outlined in rows of sparklers.

  The rows looked like combs, bent along its curves like curved combs holding up a woman’s hair.

  The combs were vibrating, propelling the creature through the water, a gentle assist to the current.

  And as I shifted my light the sparklers went out and I realized that my light had diffracted off the combs.

  It was the damnedest jellyfish I had ever seen.

  The creature was so transparent I could see tiny shrimp inside its body. It was a hunter and I guessed it had hunted out there beyond the stain, out where the upwelling brought food, and then it had got caught in this trickster of an eddy.

  Like us.

  And as we drifted along, another little jelly jewel appeared.

  And then another.

  And then either I drifted into their bloom or they bloomed around me.

  I thought hey Tolliver maybe we should get the hell out of this current, but Tolliver and Walter were just dark shapes in the jelly soup.

  Even then I was entranced, even then I was dazzled by sparklers everywhere as I moved my light to and fro—until the bloom thickened and coated me with little jellies, jellies sparkling on my wetsuit, on my mask, on my face.

  On my bare face.

  I thrashed.

  And even as I brought my gloved hands to my face to wipe it clean of jellyfish I was thinking holy shit it’s too late they’re already stinging.

  But there was no sting. There was no pain. There was only tickling as jellies brushed my skin.

  I focused in on a jelly right in front of my mask and I took note of the obvious. There were no tentacles.

  I was coated with jellyfish that did not sting.

  I was the luckiest diver in the world.

  And then I saw that I was the only diver in this world because Tolliver and Walter were gone and the thousands of tiny jewel jellies that were my companions were engulfing me, smothering me.

  I could not even see my own bubbles.

  ***

  Sometime later—an eternity, surely—a hand grasped my hand.

  I crushed the hand in a death grip.

  It tugged me.

  It brought me close to Tolliver, who turned his mask my way and then jerked his head in a move-it signal because
he had no hands free for hand signals because Walter was holding his other hand.

  The three of us kicked as one, moved forward as one, hands locked, finning through the soupy current that wanted to carry us forever.

  No way.

  We cut out.

  We emerged from the soup to the normal murk and it was like going from deepest night to just before dawn.

  Straight ahead by the light of our glove torches I could see the mouth of the tunnel.

  I would have wept in relief but I was already immersed in water.

  ***

  Tolliver and then Walter entered the tunnel.

  As for me, I could not resist a look back. If I'd had a camera I would have snapped a selfie. Look where I've been.

  The jeweled jelly bloom had passed by.

  The murk seemed to have thinned or I'd just gotten used to it or perhaps it was a different angle of view.

  But I could see farther than I had before.

  I could see the canyon arms, the rims reaching out to the edges of Target Red, and as I took in the view I saw at the far reach of the ghostly kelp forest a new shape.

  Something different.

  Something big.

  Or was it just skewed perception?

  No, it was big. Huge. It was something altogether mammoth out there at the edge of this world.

  I blinked.

  It had to be a jellyfish because it trailed long tentacles.

  A purple-stripe, I thought. Bigger than the big one I’d seen from the Sea Spray, it was the kind of jellyfish that stung the diver Joao Silva nearly to death.

  I blinked again.

  The tentacles were stalks of kelp.

  Or no.

  Not stalks. Tentacles after all.

  A Humboldt. The squid that Robbie Donie hunted, the squid that inked the Outcast.

  Or no.

  It moved.

  A shadow.

  This murk.

  I could not see.

  Had I seen something?

  Shadows of the mind.

  ***

  We swam like fish through the tunnel, through the healthy kelp forest to intersect the yellow anchor line.

  As we began to ascend I looked up toward the brilliant blue sun-splashed surface and I saw a big shadow.