Soul Intent

by dennis batchelder

  “Let’s get the gold, and if our nitrogen residuals are low enough, we’ll all go,” Marie said. She looked at George. “How are we pulling down the wall?”

  George smiled. “I’ve got the perfect thing for you—spreader bars.” He opened another green plastic container and pulled out a two-foot sharpened steel rod with a large swivel at its blunt end and six murderous-looking foot-long spikes attached below its point. “It’s like an umbrella.” He pressed a button near the swivel, and the spikes sprung out. “We’ll pound three of these babies through cracks in the wall, attach a cable to each swivel, and spring them open. Then I’ll crank up the winch from the surface and pull the wall down.”

  Rose hefted the spreading bar. “You have an underwater hammer?”

  George nodded. “Right here in the case.” He pulled out a short-handled bright yellow sledge hammer.

  “Give us another hour to flush some more nitrogen,” Marie said. She pointed at me. “This time you and Val can come and help.”

  forty-eight

  Present Day

  Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

  The four of us suited up and slid into the water. George handed the girls the three spreader bars and me the hammer. He held up a harness attached to a spool of steel cable and said, “I’ll drop this down now—latch the three hooks to the swivels.”

  He tossed the harness into the water and fed out fifty feet of cable. Then the four of us slipped under the surface.

  Rose led us through the descent. Val swam next, then me, and Marie came last. The water was clear, there was plenty of illumination from each of our lights, and I had no panic problems.

  It took us a minute to drop down the shaft and reach the bottom of the gallery. The girls attached their spreader bars to the harness, I gripped the cable and pulled some slack, and Rose led us through a short tunnel and over to the wall that Ned had built.

  “You two place yours at the bottom. I’ll put mine at the top,” Marie said.

  The girls chose their locations, and I hammered their bars into the wall. It took a few minutes for each bar, and once I drove their ends through, I pressed the buttons and deployed the spikes. I tested each of them for a firm grip.

  “We’ll have to swim away from the cable,” Rose said. We headed further down the tunnel, into the alcove that Madame Flora claimed held the trap door.

  “George, you can pull it down,” Marie said.

  “Let me take up the slack,” he said.

  We waited, and a minute later he said, “Okay, I’m all set.”

  “Let her rip,” Marie said.

  Ten seconds later I heard a loud squeal. A jarring thud rumbled through my body. A series of loud clicks and pops followed this, then some angry scraping noises.

  After a minute all went quiet. “Are you done?” Marie asked.

  “I’m hauling out the harness and bars now,” George said. “Give me five minutes.”

  Rose motioned to me. “We can look for Grandma’s trap door while we wait.”

  I nodded, and we swam to the center of the alcove and pointed our wrist lights at the floor. I saw a straight edge, and I reached out and brushed away the dirt. Silt bloomed up and clouded the water around me, but I kept brushing, and soon I had an outline of a trap door, maybe two feet square. The girls removed some small rocks scattered on top, and after another minute the entire door lay in view. A large iron ring lay flush in the center of it.

  We floated just above the door, shining our lights down at the ring. “Should we open it?” Val asked.

  Rose shook her head. “We should get back to the wall.” She and Marie turned and swam back the way we had come.

  I looked at Val. “I still want to go down.”

  She nodded. “But not yet.”

  We swam behind Rose and Marie, and soon we reached a wall of murky water. It was impossible to see more than an inch or two in front of our lights.

  “There’s more silt than I thought,” Marie said.

  George’s voice came over the wireless. “Can you show me?”

  Rose had been holding out her arm, pointing the camera at the muddy water. “Aren’t you getting this?” she asked.

  “I see only brown.”

  “That’s all there is,” Rose said. She turned to face us. “Let’s form a chain and head through.”

  “Can’t we wait for it to settle down?” I asked. My heart had already started pounding, and I was struggling to control my breathing.

  “It would take hours, and by then our residual nitrogen would be too high to recover the gold,” she said.

  Great. And although that was logical, a voice in my head screamed that it was okay to abandon the gold. I didn’t think I could voluntarily swim into that cloud.

  I turned to Val. “I need your help doing this.” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “You’ll be fine. Just hold on tight.” She waved to catch the twins’ attention. “Scott needs me to sing to keep his panic down.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Rose said.

  Val held my hand and grabbed Rose’s belt with her other. Marie grabbed Val’s belt. “Just close your eyes, Scott,” Val said. She started singing her Russian song.

  I shut my eyes right before we entered the cloud of silt, and tried to do nothing but focus on Val’s singing. It took a minute or so to calm my breathing, and just like in the Chesapeake, I let the music carry me through.

  I took a chance and opened my eyes in the murky water. Our wrist lights hardly made a dent; I couldn’t even see my fingers. We inched along the bottom of the cave. But then Rose found the nylon line on the right, and we were able to speed up. After twenty more feet of blind swimming we were back in clear water.

  “Will the silt settle overnight?” I asked.

  “It should,” Rose said. “Let’s go up to fifteen feet and decompress. We can get the gold tomorrow.”

  When we climbed out of the mine, we showed the video to Archie and Madame Flora. When she saw the trap door, Madame Flora shuddered. “What happens to bodies left in cave water?” she asked.

  We all looked at each other and shook our heads. Then George cleared his throat. “You never saw any skeletons when they showed the pictures from the Titanic, did you? Just their shoes were left.”

  “The ocean has lots of scavengers,” Sue said.

  “So do caves.” George looked at Madame Flora. “Anything leather will still be down there. Most of Ned’s bones, too. The rest of him is either eaten or dissolved.”

  Madame Flora sighed.

  I wanted to know our security state. “Are we still being watched?” I asked Sue.

  She nodded. “Six of them, but they’ve stayed quiet.”

  “Did you have any more ideas about a diversion?” George asked me.

  Actually, I had—something that would get us into the opal nest, too. “Vampires,” I said. “Val said the guards were already scaring each other with stories about them.”

  “There are no vampires here,” George said.

  “We have Ned’s skeleton,” I said.

  Rose touched my arm. “Do you really think you can swim through that tiny trap door?” she asked.

  “I can do it.” I had to.

  Val frowned at me. “What’s pushing you so hard?”

  A good question. Although I didn’t believe that I was a reincarnation of Ned, I still felt drawn to find out more about him. Ned had inserted himself into my life, and I had a duty to honor his request for relevancy.

  “Ned’s pushing me,” I said. “How can I resist getting face to face with my previous carrier?”

  She crossed her arms. “But then you’re going to use his bones to trick the local cops. Isn’t that almost sacrilegious?”

  I pointed to Madame Flora. “From what you told us about Ned, I think he’d be tickled to help Raddy’s granddaughter one last time.”

  “He would, Scott,” Madame Flora said softly.

  “I agree,” Archie said. “It is our duty to honor and rememb
er our former carriers. Perhaps you will discover something belonging to Ned which you can add to your soul line collection.”

  George scratched his head. “But how will Ned’s skeleton scare away the cops?”

  “Weren’t they discussing how to defuse a vampire?” I asked Val.

  She nodded. “What was it they said? Drive a nail into their foreheads, cut out their hearts, and put them upside-down in their coffins. You want to do this to Ned?”

  “It could work,” I said. “We’ll show his skeleton to the cops, and then we’ll tell them we need to perform some final rites to make sure the strigoi stay dead.”

  After a minute George said, “I like it. We can’t have the cops watching us pull the gold out of the tunnel, and this bit of superstition just may scare them off.”

  Marie shivered. “I’m not going anywhere near that skeleton.”

  “Me neither,” Rose said. “What if we start hauling out the gold while you two gather his bones?”

  I looked at Val. “I can’t do it without you.”

  She nodded. “I know you want this bad.”

  “I do. Thank you,” I said. I stood up. “First thing tomorrow, we’re getting Ned.”

  forty-nine

  Present Day

  Dubnik Mine, Slovakia

  Discussing the recovery of a sixty-four-year-old skeleton sounded a lot less spooky on the surface than it did after we clambered into the mine the next morning. Especially when that skeleton once carried my same soul identity. I wondered if I would experience anything mystical when I encountered Ned Callaghan’s remains.

  But first we had to reach Old Ned. We needed to swim down the shaft and into the gallery, then head past the gold and back to the second alcove. Madame Flora said that under the trap door was a fifty foot ladder to the bottom, where we would pull up a not-quite-sealed plug in the floor. Last time she saw Ned, his body had been jammed in the chute three or four feet below the plug.

  While Val and I recovered Ned’s bones, the twins would use the underwater sled to move the barrels of gold from the near alcove to the base of the main shaft. We’d wait on winching up the gold until Ned’s skeleton and our vampire tales had chased away the cops.

  We checked our equipment and reloaded the rebreathers’ scrubbers. Then we climbed into our suits and filled them with argon. George used the winch to lower the underwater sled, and the four of us descended. I carried a large mesh bag neatly folded into a small pouch dangling from my waist.

  We swam the sled to the first alcove. The water was clear, I was calm, and our wrist lights illuminated the small room. Just as Madame Flora had claimed, we found the twelve small barrels stacked against the far wall. Three wooden boxes sat alongside them. An inch-thick layer of silt covered the tops of the boxes and barrels.

  “That muck is going to fly up when we start shifting things,” Rose said. “You two better go collect your bones—we’ll hang the lights and get the boxes moved first.”

  Val and I swam back to the second alcove. Val attached a battery-powered light in the ceiling above, and I pulled the iron ring upright. I ran two yard-long nylon straps through the ring and when Val swam down, I handed her the ends to one of them.

  “Wrap these around your hands and wrists.” I demonstrated with my strap. I pulled myself into a crouch over the trap door, placing my fins on the sides.

  Val followed suit.

  We pulled together, and the trap door opened with a screech. We folded it over and peered into the hole. A rusting metal ladder, bolted to the side, crawled down the shaft and into the gloom outside the light’s reach.

  “You go first,” Val said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  As I shone my light down the shaft, the same panic rose in me. I spun around and faced Val. “Maybe we don’t need Ned’s bones.”

  She stared at me. “Are you sure?”

  I stared back, feeling the buzzing in my ears. I wasn’t going to be able to do this.

  Then Val started singing her song, and like a restless infant comforted by a lullaby, the panic subsided. I was able to swim headfirst into the shaft. I pulled myself down hand over hand. After thirty or so rungs I glanced at my dive computer and noted we were already at eighty feet. We were going to have to make it quick, or we’d be stuck decompressing for a long time.

  “Let’s check in with the girls,” Val said. “Rose and Marie?”

  No answer.

  “Girls, are you there?” she asked.

  Silence. Then I remembered our communications were ultrasonic, and we needed something close to line-of-sight to communicate. I began breathing hard, and I spun around. We had to get out of this hole.

  Val rapped her knuckles on my faceplate. “Scott, calm down. We can do this.” She sang a bit of her song.

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to listen. I was calmed in less than a minute.

  Val motioned with her hands. “We’d better hurry.”

  We pulled ourselves the rest of the way down. I saw the remains of an old rope tied to the bottom rung.

  Val flashed her wrist light at the bottom and illuminated a large, silt-covered wooden plug about the size of a manhole cover jammed like a cork into a hole in the floor. The rope ran into a crack along one side. That loose seal explained why we were swimming and not walking.

  I slid my fingers into the crack to test the plug’s weight. It shifted, and I used both hands to lift it out of the hole.

  I must have created a little current when I removed the plug, and that current must have sucked at the silt and mixed it up before spitting it back at us. The water grew murky, and we couldn’t see more than a foot in front of us.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We either wait, or we swim into the plume,” Val said.

  I looked at my dive computer. We were down one hundred feet, only three minutes before we had to head up. I took a steadying breath. “I’ll do it.”

  Val tethered me to her by tying a cord between the loops on each of our suit’s hips.

  “Wish me luck,” I said. I swam blind toward the hole, stroking in sync to Val’s song. My wrist light illuminated the silt particles, but I couldn’t see ahead. I moved my arms to the sides and realized two things: My head and shoulders were at the top of a narrow tube, and the silt I stirred up made it even murkier.

  I kicked my fins and propelled myself into the hole and down the chute. I kept my gloved hands in front of me and along the sides. Another foot in and I bumped into a blockage that felt a little squishy. Could this be what remained of Ned? It was hard to tell just by feel.

  I unsnapped my mesh bag and slipped one of its handles onto my left wrist. I used both hands to pull at the lumpy object. After a minute of wiggling, parts of it broke off. I shoved the pieces into the mesh bag, then patted my hands on the floor of the chute and felt for more.

  I grabbed quite a few pieces—whatever wasn’t stuck. Then I propelled myself forward another foot and grabbed even more. Pretty soon my mesh bag was almost as wide as the chute, and it was blocking my forward progress.

  “I’ve picked up all the loose pieces,” I said.

  “We’re just about out of time,” Val said. “Let’s go.”

  I couldn’t turn around because the chute was too narrow—my rebreather scraped along the top. And I couldn’t seem to back out while carrying the mesh net.

  “I’m stuck,” I said. “Can you pull me loose?”

  “Stop kicking,” she said. I felt her hands on my legs. She pulled, and I pushed with my free arm, and after a minute I was floating free.

  The water remained filled with silt. I brought my dive computer close to my face. The recovery had taken too long; we’d have to decompress at fifty feet for an hour before getting out of the cave. Good thing the twins were there—we could help them move the rest of the gold.

  I felt around for the plug and sat it back on top of the chute’s opening. Then I followed Val up the ladder. The mesh bag was ponderous, but I kept it from scraping too m
uch silt off the walls.

  We took our time ascending the fifty feet back to the alcove, resting each time our dive computers buzzed our arms to remind us to slow down. After ten minutes we reached the alcove and the light, and Val helped me fold back the trap door.

  I took a quick look at the bag, but I couldn’t recognize anything under all the silt. “Can you hear us, girls?” I called.

  “We’re here, Scott,” Rose said. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got Ned’s bones, and we’re heading your way. How’s the gold moving coming along?”

  “We’ve sledded all three boxes and eight of the twelve barrels over to the winching area,” Marie said. She sounded out of breath.

  “George has already winched up the boxes,” Rose said.

  George came on the intercom. “Do you want to send up the gold?” he asked.

  “If the cops crawled down to the gallery, we’d have a hard time explaining it,” I said.

  “Good point,” he said.

  Val untethered me and turned off the light dangling from the alcove’s ceiling. Then we swam toward the first alcove.

  When we reached the twins, Rose pointed at the bag. “So that’s Ned?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” I said. I held up the bag so everybody could see it under the light. Some of the silt had begun to flake off; I could make out a boot and what might have been a leg bone.

  “That’s just gross,” Marie said.

  I thought it was cool, but I let it go. I pointed to my dive computer. “We’ve got an hour of decompression—how can we help?”

  “Let’s get the rest of the gold moved,” Marie said.

  We joined the remaining four barrels with the other eight at the base of the main shaft. When we finished, George winched up the sled and my mesh bag. Then the twins headed up for the final fifteen foot decompression while Val and I waited the rest of our decompression hour.

  Val pointed back at the rocks strewn on the floor in front of the first alcove. “What will the Slovak divers say when they see this?”

  “That the vampires got frisky and made a mess,” I said. “Let’s start our ascent.”