That was why she saw the wreck when she was still fifty feet above it.
Her heart fluttered, batted to and fro by a complex set of emotions. Fear, grief, elation, uncertainty – they all battled for control of her soul.
Because the wreck wasn't Deb's boat. There was no question of that.
Even under the thick accretions of coral that had sprung up, and through the layers of fish that teemed through her light, she could see it was a large ship. No doubt at all. From up close it might be hard to tell, but from where she was she could see the gentle sweep of a keel, the broken extrusions that had once been forward and main batteries, pilot house and smokestacks.
The thing looked to be about two hundred feet long. About the size of a frigate or destroyer, and from the general outline she guessed it was old. She wasn't an expert by any means, and the coral and overgrowth was thick, all but obscuring parts of the boat. She thought it possible this was a World War II vessel, though how it had sunk or why it lay here undiscovered she couldn't begin to guess.
All this combined to let her know that she would find no answers about what had happened to Deb in this place. A terrible disappointment, given the almost overwhelming need she felt for some kind of closure. But at the same time, it felt good to see it wasn't Deb's ship. Because no matter how irrational it was, she could still hope for her sister to be alive until someone or something proved the contrary.
She could lie to herself. And knowing it was a lie didn't matter – not until she saw her sister's boat or her sister's body.
Sue let herself fall to where Tim had secured the anchor. She saw two lines leading in different directions: Tim, Geoffrey. She briefly considered following one of the lines in the hopes that it would lead to Tim. Rejected the idea almost as quickly as it came: she had no idea which line went to which person, and the last thing she wanted was to run into Geoffrey down here. She suspected that even without being able to speak he'd still be an insufferable prick.
She decided to surface. She wasn't a wreck diver; she knew this was risky business. And since this wasn't Deb's ship, since it had nothing to do with her there was no reason to –
Sue froze. Even the current seemed to die around her as everything went absolutely still. There was only the drumbeat of her pulse; the raspy, hollow sound of her breathing; the bouncing noise of bubbles rising past her with every exhalation. And then even those sounds disappeared. Faded from her consciousness.
There was only her. Her in the deep. Her in the bright white halo of her dive light.
Her… and it.
She swam as fast as she could to a nearby outcropping. The boat looked like it had settled at a forty-five degree angle, so everything canted madly below her. It was a disquieting feeling, following surfaces that refused to be vertical or horizontal but favored instead diagonal planes.
In the corner of what she assumed was the point where ship's deck met some extrusion – exhaust port, perhaps, or some other part of the ship unknown to her – she had seen something that made her blood run cold. Something that did not belong here. Not on a ship this old, not on a ship so thoroughly claimed by the deep.
She adjusted her buoyancy slightly, drifting down oh-so-slowly. Forcing herself not to touch it until she was practically standing on it.
Then she lifted it. The extra weight drove her down. Standing awkwardly on both deck and that other once-vertical surface. Her flippers touched softly, but even that impact was enough to cause long-dormant sand to billow in a great cloud that reached to her thighs. She suddenly couldn't see below her knees, and had the mad feeling that something would grab her.
Nothing did. Just her panic.
The tank had caught her eye because it was so obviously new. So obviously not right. Not for here.
She hefted it. It felt empty.
She turned it, spinning the cylinder in her hands.
Stopped.
Felt like screaming.
The drumbeat of her pulse came back. The pounding of nitrogen narcosis, the cottony feel that kept her from thinking straight engulfing her full force.
The tank had letters stenciled along the long axis. "NELSON CHEM."
And beside those letters –
(oh no oh please oh please God no please don't let this be real please no no nononononoNO)
– a few more. Smaller. Not stenciled, but written by hand with permanent marker.
"DEBI R."
The tank fell from her nerveless fingers. Disappeared in another cloud of sand that puffed up around it as it hit the bottom.
She looked around. Trying to see something else, anything else, that would help her know what had happened, that would help her understand how Deb had –
(DIED!)
– disappeared.
She saw nothing. Just fish and coral and the ship that ran off in all directions.
She began swimming. Drums pounding louder, louder, louder against the inside of her skull. Her head aching, her eyesight fading at the edges until she looked through a narrow tunnel of her own terror.
She only had one thing in mind. Only thought of finding answers. Finding evidence.
Finding Deb.
But behind that, something lurked. A thought so important it cried out to be noticed even as Sue kicked her way over the ship's deck.
She pushed it down. Not important. Nothing was important.
Only Deb. Only answers.
But the one thing remained. Below consciousness, below her reality. But there nonetheless. A pair of simple facts:
She had tied her line to the anchor line, but had forgotten to connect the other end to herself; she was floating free.
And she was caught in the current.
HATCH
~^~^~^~^~
Haeberle swam along the corner of a "V," two long structures that rose at an angle on either side of him. This thing didn't look much like a ship, didn't look like much of anything but hard and soft coral: a mix of rock-like outcroppings, leathery sheets that spread over as much as several feet, and anemone-like fingers spread into the current, swaying as they captured near-microscopic food and filtered them through some of nature's most rudimentary digestive systems.
He thought about turning back. But he didn't want to deal with that. He wasn't afraid of what Raven would do – he wasn't afraid of anything, anything at all, in this world of his own making – but he didn't want to deal with the hassle of it. Sometimes his id, or ego, or whatever part of his brain was responsible for all this, could be a whiny little bitch.
Thinking about his id and subconscious made him think of Cheyenne Shellabarger. She had been the first one to recognize the greatness in him. To understand how unique he was. That was the term she used when he was at the home, "unique." Scribbling away on her pad, furiously recording the presence of a God in her midst.
She had screamed when he took her, which he didn't understand. She had been so fascinated by him, all those hours talking to her, reclined on her comfortable couch, talking about his hopes and dreams – hopes and dreams which would inevitably come true.
But the screams stopped eventually. They always did.
He walked from her silent form, sated physically and mentally. Id, ego, super-ego… marvelous new places that had opened his eyes to his greatest power.
But the fact that those parts of him were in charge sometimes irritated him. Just a bit – not too smart to get mad at yourself – but still…. He really wasn't sure where he came up with people like Raven.
It would be fun when that man went silent. The way they all did, either because Haeberle left sight of them and they ceased to exist, or because he had the pleasure of making them be silent under the power of his own two hands.
He realized that he was drifting. Not in a current, but in the pleasant euphoria of his own thoughts. A small part of him remembered the words of warning that Tim –
(bastard, idiot, imaginary unfriend)
– had doled out. Remembered him talking about nitrogen narc
osis and wondered if this might be what it felt like. He felt something pounding through him, sounding in time with his heartbeat.
Power. It must be.
At that moment, as if to confirm his thought, the glow of his dive light illuminated something. A twisted sheet, overgrown like everything else, but still recognizable as a door or a hatch of some kind. Twisted, rolled in on itself by some kind of impact.
And beside it: a dark space. A doorway.
Treasure.
He dropped toward it….
Reached toward the darkness….
Treasure. Buried in the deep, caught in a dark coffin hundreds of feet long.
The drum-sound of thunder and lightning and power boomed louder in his ears, his mind, behind his eyes.
He felt the side of the doorway. Began orienting himself.
And paused.
Did something move in there?
He tried to pierce the blackness beyond the doorway, but could not. His light seemed to fail at the threshold, the line between teeming life and the black halls of a doomed ship.
His thoughts muddled. The beating in his head became louder, almost painful.
And something floated in front of him. Something big.
The shape terrified Haeberle. More so when it turned a single bright eye on him. The thing's gaze seared him, burned through his corneas and punched blazing holes in his mind.
A dark appendage reached out from behind that glowing gaze. Reached for him.
Haeberle screamed, a blast of bubbles escaping his regulator, looking like silvered jellyfish as they ran up and over his mask, obscuring his view.
There was only that bright eye. Only the silver of his screams.
Then the thing touched him.
Shook him.
Haeberle blinked. He was hearing a sound. Not him, something else.
He stopped the panic-screams, the terrified shaking of his head.
Focused on the monster.
Only it wasn't a monster –
(why did I think it was a monster what's happening down here everything's strange Cheyenne nothing makes sense when I look hard enough so I just don't look)
– it was that meddling sonofabitch, Tim.
The other diver had dropped between Haeberle and the hatch and was now calling around his regulator. A sound like "On't Oh" which Haeberle gradually realized was him screaming "Don't go."
As soon as Haeberle stopped moving, Tim held up his arm. There was an underwater slate on his forearm, a small piece of plastic with a pen that could write on it – the dry-erase board of the deep.
On the slate: "2 DANGEROUS INSIDE."
Haeberle stared at the slate in surprise. Shock.
Wrath.
How dare he?
How dare anyone tell him what to do? You did not tell the God of the world what to do. You just sat back and waited for him to work his wonders, his miracles, his givings and takings of pleasant agonies and final release.
Haeberle forgot about the writhing darkness. Forgot about the single moment when he had nearly admitted fear.
Because what was in there?
He decided to put Tim in his place. Not his final place – though that would come soon enough. Just his place in the order of commandment and obedience.
Haeberle gave orders. He did not take them.
He pounded with his fins. Two hard thrusts that pushed him past Tim, moving so suddenly the other man was left to gape in surprise.
In awe.
Haeberle was brave.
Haeberle feared nothing.
Haeberle swam into the ship.
SHARK
~^~^~^~^~
Mercedes had gone in a different direction. Not just in this place, but in her life. Her mother had told her it wouldn't end well, wouldn't end in dreams but in nightmares.
Mother had been right.
Of course, she didn't live to see it, to say "I told you so." Died of a sudden brain aneurysm, her skull filling so fast and full that she just slumped in the middle of Christmas dinner and when the doctors told Mercedes about the findings of the autopsy they shuddered and she pictured blood spewing out of her mother's eyes and ears as they cut in.
The children had nightmares for months. Waking up screaming in their small beds, clutching for Mother; shouting for Gramma Paula, please send her back, God, please send her back.
Mercedes held them. Held them close and felt at once incredibly loved and incredibly alone. She was a mother; she had children who called to her in the night. But she was a daughter now without parents of her own. Her father had died when she was only eight.
She was now the matriarch, the only remaining woman in the family.
And soon after, as though waiting for the passing of Mercedes' mother, Bill started screwing around.
Don't lie, Mercedes. That's when you found out about it. When he started is anyone's guess.
She pushed back the rest of the story. Thinking about how bad it had gotten after that was a good way to dissolve into tears. Not a good idea at one-hundred-fifty feet below sea level.
She concentrated on just swimming. Pumping her legs in slow, even motions that would maximize forward thrust while minimizing effort. She also pulled herself along on outcroppings below her, scaling a horizontal wall that she sensed was something special. She had dived reefs before – back when things were good she dove all the time – and this didn't feel like a natural growth.
Of course it's not natural. It wasn't even here two days ago. This was open ocean.
Another thing not to think about. No answers to what had happened here, no answers to how or why – just like every single yesterday she had experienced in the last months. No rhyme, no reason, just unrelenting attacks.
She pulled herself forward.
The motion disturbed the sand that had settled between corals. She tried not to disturb anything, tried not to touch the coral. Not only could it damage the coral itself, but there was no telling what lay below it – a bad cut was no fun when diving. Especially not when you couldn't surface until over an hour of decompression.
She shuddered as a chill swept over her. It had nothing to do with the cold of the water seeping into her wetsuit, chilling her to the bone. But the sudden realization of how far down she was, how far away – in time and space – she was from help… that chilled her soul.
Her hand plunged down. Pulled. She swam. Forward.
Move forward. Just move forward. Don't think about what's around you, don't think about the danger.
Move forward.
Blind motion. Her mantra in the last months.
She realized that her vision had darkened around the edges. One of the signs of the narcotic effect of nitrogen at this depth. The entire body reacting to a gas that grew poisonous below the ocean's surface. But she couldn't bring herself to worry about it. It just was. A part of her pointed out that this lack of worry was also a sign of narcosis – maybe a much worse one – but it was a small, faraway part.
Forward. Forward. Forward.
Flashes moved in and out of her field of vision. Fish, shimmering and bright in the lance of her dive light. Big ones, too – parrots and puffers and a few she had never seen and had no names for. Big, then bigger as she pulled along –
(Forward. Forward.)
– and got farther and farther from where she had tied onto the anchor line.
Something flashed into her sight. Grey, white on the bottom. A sleek body with a torpedo head. A shark.
It wasn't big – maybe only as big as her arm. But that was big enough for a nasty bite if it chose to take an interest in her.
Then it was gone.
Forward.
Another flashed into view. This one as big as her leg.
And another.
This one was nearly as big as she was. It would weigh far more than her. And as a predator in its element it could move faster, do more damage.
Gone.
Forward, Mercedes. Keep moving forward.
/> The next gray-white shape was huge. Coming right at her. It veered away at the last second, but the wake from its fin was enough to bat her back, to send her scrabbling for a grip on the coral below. She slipped.
Another shark came. Rushed her. Turned. Another blast of wake, a directed current that slammed her back. Then another shark. So many she couldn't see past them. A solid wall of gray and white.
She couldn't see anything but them. Coming at her, slashing through the water with teeth gaping, mouths so wide she could see into the dark maws beyond.
They kept circling. Their combined power creating whirlpools around her, pummeling her, pushing her. She clutched vainly for something to hold, looked vainly for somewhere to hide.
She knew what this was. They were testing her. Checking her out. Curious gazes, "flybys" to see if she was interesting.
One of the way sharks checked out what was interesting was by taking a bite of it.
If any of these sharks bit her, it would be a death sentence. She would have a choice between bleeding to death in the cold dark of the deep or surfacing so fast her blood would boil with the nitrogen bubbles.
Her fingers brushed against something. Clenched.
A hole. A sudden pit between coral, a dark ring that could only have been some kind of large porthole or window.
Was it large enough? It would be close.
Did she really want to go in there?
Another shark came. This one bumped into her.
She pulled herself into the dark. She would have to trust on her "go-home" line – the line that trailed from her to the anchor line – to lead her back. And hope that none of the sharks came in here after her.
She kicked her way in. But halfway through the hole, she bumped into something that stopped her. Not ahead, this was… behind? Her mind, fogged by depth and blanketed by terror, struggled to understand what was going on.
She felt fins batting against her legs. Bumps against her feet.
The Deep 2015.06.23 Page 11