by Michael West
Ed rose to his feet. “Right behind ya.”
“‘Night, folks,” Canon told them, then left the doorway for the darkness of the hall beyond.
The innkeeper clamped his hospitality tray in his armpit. “Just bring the cups down tomorrow and I’ll take care of ’em.”
Peggy offered him a smile. “Thanks, Ed.”
“You folks rest comfortable now.”
“I don’t think sleep will be all that possible tonight.” Larry’s voice was a distant whisper. He must have seen the worry in Peggy’s eyes, because he offered her his best attempt at a smile.
“No, I s’pose not. You folks take care.”
The old man closed the door. Outside, Peggy heard his footfalls grow distant and sighed with relief that the ordeal was over. When she looked up, Larry stared at her with the same unreadable expression his face had held since his return.
“I’m beginning to feel like one of your paintings.” She set her mug down and rose to her feet. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling.” She felt his ex-girlfriend’s name building momentum behind her lips, and before she could stop herself, it was out. “Are you thinking about Natalie?”
His watery eyes sparkled in the lamplight. “I heard that girl screaming and I...I thought I was still asleep, you know? I looked up at the mirror in the bathroom and...for just a second...it was smashed.”
Peggy’s breath caught in her throat. She looked at his hand to make certain he hadn’t put it through the glass again. No open wounds. No fresh blood. White ridges of scarring were just where they should have been after months of healing. She quietly exhaled.
Larry went on, “I just stood there...staring at a damn mirror while she was out there being eaten alive.”
“Hey, it’s all right.” Peggy ran her fingers down his cheeks, tracing the path she thought tears might travel.
“If I’d only moved...” He shook his head. “I just wanted to help her.”
“I know. But there wasn’t anything you could have done, here or back in New York.” She wrapped her arms around his waist, kissed the nape of his neck. He raised a hand to her arm, rubbed it as she spoke into his ear. “I love you. If you want to go back home, I —”
“Can’t do it.” His eyes still managed to restrain their tears. “Chief Canon might need to talk to me again. Besides, the room’s paid for, and I’d like to do a painting of the local lighthouse.”
“You’re sure?” Larry seemed to be handling things well, but after his recent emotional breakdown, Peggy was unsure about staying. “I’m sure that nice innkeeper would give us a refund under the circumstances, and if Canon really needs you, we can give him our phone number. I mean, how much more can you do for him?”
“I’m positive. You heard the deputy. It was the first attack in six years. Normally, this is a quiet place.”
•••
DeParle was not at all surprised to see Chief Canon waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
Canon lit the cigarette that jutted from his lips. “This is damn serious shit here, Ed.”
“You don’t think it was Chrissy do you?” Ed asked, and with the words came a sudden prickle of gooseflesh on his arms. Christine DeParle, his only child, had been missing for several days.
Canon was quick to respond. “No. No, I don’t.”
Ed still felt chilled. “Was it really a shark?”
“All I know is that girl’s dead, sure as shit. Somebody from somewhere is dead.” He took a drag, the tip of his cigarette glowing brightly, then exhaled.
“Whatcha gonna do, John?”
The chief glared at him. “Shit if I know, Ed. Like I said, for all we know, it might have really been a shark that got ahold o’ that girl tonight.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
Canon pointed at Ed with his cigarette, his head shrouded by a cloud of smoke. “I’ll tell you what I believe, Ed. I believe, since Karl Tellstrom moved out to that shack o’ his, he’s been plantin’ some scary seeds in folks’ heads, startin’ with your little girl, and somethin’s gotta be done about it. I’ll be damned if I know what that is, though. What kinda god puts somethin’ like him on this world anyhow?”
“I’ve asked you before not to say things like that, John.” Ed wiped the sweat from his weathered face, then licked his lips; he wished desperately that the night’s events were just a nightmare. “He can hear.”
Canon threw the smoldering butt of his Camel on the floor, ground it to ash with the tip of his boot. “Don’t give me that religious crap. I get enough of that from your ex-wife.”
“You gonna talk to Tellstrom?”
“Yeah, I’ll talk to the bastard, find out what he knows about Chrissy goin’ missin’.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me ’til I bring her home.” Canon scratched his belly through the khaki fabric of his shirt, then turned away and merged with the shadows. Halfway to the Inn’s main entrance, he stopped and craned his head to look at the innkeeper. “They found Atlantis the other day.”
Ed snorted. “Been readin’ that Weekly World News again?”
“Nope, it’s been on the TV,” Canon informed him. “Unless Katie Couric got it outta The Weekly World News. Happened about the time Chrissy up and left.”
“You think Tellstrom saw the news — told her it was a sign or somethin’? You think that’s why she ran off?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
“But you’ve got your suspicions.”
“I’ll talk to him,” the chief said. And then he continued his walk toward the entrance of the inn and the waiting darkness beyond.
THREE
Few people knew true darkness like Carol Miyagi. After all, the dark of night had its stars and moon to provide faint illumination. And, even when she closed her eyes for sleep, she found her own darkness lit by dreams and the memory of light. But here, in the endless depths of the ocean, there was no dawn, no knowledge of brightness, and therefore no recollection of it.
Beyond the sun’s reach, the sea had hidden away secrets — evidence of crimes it had committed against the frail craft and ancient civilizations of Man. Over time, the floor of the abyss had become a museum filled with corroding exhibits shrouded by perpetual night, a private reliquary for the ocean’s inhabitants and a few daring, uninvited guests...like Carol.
She’d spent much of her life swimming through shadow — hoping, searching, and waiting...for Atlantis. And now, her search had come to a dramatic end. The sounds of the surface faded, leaving only the hiss of her regulator and the resulting gurgle of bubbles to break the silence. She aimed the wide beam of her dive light to reveal huge, long-forgotten megaliths. Remnants of the once-great city stood silently in the dim nothingness that surrounded her, patiently abiding the empty centuries.
The marine archeologist paused for a moment to check the levels in her tanks. If her mixture were low, she would need to return to the bright world above, and she hated to leave this shadowy city. Part of her was still afraid it might disappear, like Brigadoon before the dawn.
Carol had discovered the first evidence of Atlantis, a cobblestone road paved across the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, in 2004, but it had taken a little over a year for her to publish her findings. Although she held a doctorate in archeology and a master’s degree in history, she did not fit comfortably into the mold of an academic. She preferred working beneath the waves to working at the keyboard. Still, the paper she wrote, claiming that this had been a trade road to a lost civilization, had made her somewhat of a celebrity, albeit a controversial one, overnight. Her continued assertion that Atlantis was more than myth, however, soon led the scientific community to dismiss her as a lunatic whose work was unworthy of serious consideration. Everyone accepted that she’d found proof of something, but no one knew what. Many believed Greeks or Romans had constructed the road. Others doubted it was a road at all. It didn’t matter. Her newfound fame allowed her to obtain a sizable grant from
the Hays Foundation, and her search continued.
Last month, she found another section of road off the coast of the Azores and followed it, finding the ancient city at a depth of just 300 feet. Rapidly cooling lava had formed a bubble around it, encapsulating the ruins in a vast underwater cavern. It might have remained there, undiscovered for another millennium, if not for a recent quake. The rocky eggshell had cracked and crumbled, revealing the object of Carol’s long quest hidden within.
At first, she knew her nay-saying peers would not admit this was Atlantis, as if the mere utterance of the word would cause them physical pain, but that would change after she completed her initial survey. The archeological community would embrace her and all would be forgiven. As if she needed forgiveness. Carol did not care about fame or adulation. What she wanted was respect. She wanted the old men who dominated her field to admit that she was not a crackpot. She wanted them to say that she was right and they had always been wrong. Carol had the feeling that she would need to find frozen shards of Hell before that would happen.
She swam on.
Although several of the structures had toppled, the city remained in excellent condition, showing a lack of coral growth and barnacle infestation. The ruins also exhibited a magnetic anomaly that rendered the team’s compasses and some electronic equipment useless, including their dive computers. When they entered the boundaries of the city, their display screens went berserk and their digital readouts flashed 88,888 — denying any further computation of the mixture within their tanks. Luckily, they had stocked their vessel — the Ambrosia — with old-fashioned air gauges whose needles fell as the air supply dwindled. They were crude, and did not offer any decompression information, but at least they worked.
No big conundrum. You’re floating in the middle of Atlantis, she considered, and then scolded herself for such nonsense.
There were so many myths and theories surrounding the lost continent. She’d never seen a portal to another dimension, however, and while she believed in the existence of extraterrestrials, Carol thought they had better things to do than play with compass needles. Based on the water temperature, the change in local currents, and recent seismic disturbances, she knew the same volcanic activity that had claimed the city so long ago was still at work. Undersea volcanoes were notorious for creating electromagnetic surges and wreaking havoc on equipment.
Her team of ten archeologists and graduate students were busying themselves with the preliminaries of the expedition, chief among their tasks being to map the overall city. It appeared that only two-thirds of the city had been sealed within the cavern. The missing portion was probably rubble strewn across the floor of the Atlantic, at a depth beyond the capacity of their current equipment.
Concentrate on what we have, she told herself. Chase the rest when the next check from the Hays Foundation hits the bank.
She’d already spent the money in her mind. Atlantis was an immense archaeological vault that contained far too many relics for her meager crew to excavate on its own. Without more manpower, it would take decades. With new financing, Carol would hire a much larger staff, purchase a mini-sub, more underwater cameras, and so on.
The city appeared to be comprised of a series of rings orbiting a large Greco-Roman temple. The “rings” contained walkways, dwellings, and monolithic obelisks made of black and red stone. Bridges connected these sections to one another and, in turn, to the central plaza. It was safe to assume that the circlets once rose above the surface, the sea filling the areas in between to form canals. Many of the stone surfaces were rich with exciting glyphs. Carol had done her best to translate them, poring over pictures of the etchings in her cabin at night and writing what she could decipher in her journal. The language of Atlantis was oddly familiar and yet quite alien. It seemed to borrow in equal measure from Egyptian, Greek, and Mayan — or, as a more logical and exciting prospect, they had stolen from it.
She swam deeper into the city, mindful of the short time allowed to her at this depth. The area teemed with mystery, and she knew there were treasures waiting for her in the dark.
•••
Petty Officer Earl L. Preston Jr. looked out at the ocean off the shores of New Hampshire, his white Coast Guard uniform contrasting handsomely with his ebony skin. The sun shone down on his cap, making his shaved head bead with sweat beneath. He removed his hat and wiped the perspiration away with his sleeve.
He’d joined the Coast Guard the day after his eighteenth birthday for reasons of which even he was not fully aware. His love of the ocean had surely been a contributing factor, but his love for his father, a father he’d never really known, had been the greater push. Earl Senior — everyone called him by his middle name of Lincoln, Link for short — had been a marine, a decorated hero. The man died in Desert Storm and was awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously. Earl had been all of six at the time. What he remembered of the man was that Link had the largest hands. Those hands could pick up a basketball in one palm, the fingers draping over it like the legs of a powerful, oversized spider. Earl recalled how his own tiny hand, when slipped into his father’s, had become lost and yet also felt so secure. Those were the only real memories Earl had of the man. Still, there were some days, when the ocean was calm and the air quiet, that Earl could sense his father’s presence. And it was then that he hoped he’d made the right choices, choices that had made Link Preston a happy soul.
The wind blew harder against his face. Earl glanced down to check the boat’s tachometer needle. It had risen from 1,200 to 2,200 rpms. He glared at his partner, a young man fresh out of the academy. “Goin’ a little fast, aren’tcha, seaman? It’s a patrol, not a race.”
Seaman Peck nodded and eased up on the throttle.
Earl saw a lot of his younger self in this skinny white kid from Chicago. There was the same hunger for adventure in this boy’s eyes that had been vanquished from his own some time ago. When he received his first assignment, Earl thought every day would bring the search of vessels for drugs, the rescue of drowning women, the kind of excitement he’d seen on television. What he quickly discovered was that for every hour of thrills there were countless days of nothing but the endless stretch of the open sea. Peck would learn this, too.
A crackling voice, almost lost to the sound of the wind, came over the boat’s radio. “Coast Guard 38942... Coast Guard 38942... This is Huey Four.”
Preston picked up the microphone. “Huey Four...This is Coast Guard 38942. Go ahead.”
“We just passed over a yacht drifting about four miles southeast from your position. It matches the description of the FantaSea, the Hoff’s boat.”
The news had been abuzz with two major stories over the last week. Earl had paid attention to both only because they had some connection to the sea. One was about an archeological find in the middle of the Atlantic...
“Is this Atlantis?” 20/20 asked.
...the other was the disappearance of Jerry Hoff and his wife, Karen. Mr. Hoff was an entrepreneur with his hands in everything from the sale of speedboats in Durham to the partial ownership of the Patriots. They had taken their yacht, a Hatteras sailboat, down the coast to a vacation home in Florida. Now they were several days overdue and their daughter, Virginia Hoff, a spoiled rich girl if he’d ever seen one, was making the rounds of all the television stations and crying for the cameras.
Earl thought the couple had taken off for an extended cruise. He assumed they would return red-faced at all the attention, smacking themselves for not calling their daughter about the change of plans.
Mama says, “You know what happens when you assume?”
“Roger that. Four miles southeast.”
“I’d check it out myself, but I’ve got to get back to Portsmouth. I’m flying on vapor as it is.”
“Understood...Coast Guard 38924 out.” He put the microphone back into its cradle and looked at Peck, noticing that the boy’s hand was already on the throttle. “Now you can open her up.”
A mome
nt later, the fifty-foot yacht came into view.
Its sail was down and neatly secured to the boom with bungee cord. No billowing smoke. No sign of damage to its exterior. No one visible on deck, but the owners could’ve been below, sleeping or having breakfast in the cabin. As they pulled alongside, however, Earl found the yacht unanchored, its diesel engine quiet, at the mercy of the tide.
Peck maneuvered their patrol boat around to the ship’s stern, and they saw FantaSea stenciled across its transom. Earl grabbed the coil of neon-yellow nylon rope at his feet. He tied one end to the metal cleat beside him before turning to Peck. “Get us closer, and I’ll tie us up.”
The seaman nodded and turned his wheel, bringing the Coast Guard cruiser within inches of the yacht.
Earl reached over to the FantaSea’s guardrail, tied the rope securely around the aluminum support, and pulled himself onto its deck. Peck began to walk toward the railing, but Earl waved him off. “Stay there. I may need you to radio for help.”
“Sure.”
He could see the look of disappointment on Peck’s face. Earl hated to deprive the boy of his first real adventure, but experience had taught him that you did not blindly leap into the unknown. He had no idea what he was going to find, and if things went bad, the last thing he wanted was a still-wet-behind-the-ears kid getting himself killed.
Earl looked down into the FantaSea’s cockpit. The area was lined with shiny red cushions, reflecting the glare of the sun. The steering wheel turned slightly to the right, then back to the left, as if waving for someone to take hold and give it guidance. Earl scanned the remainder of the deck, saw nothing out of the ordinary, then ducked down beneath the boom, moving toward the hatch that led below.
His stomach rolled.
•••
Carol Miyagi felt her stomach flutter with anticipation. She swam inside the cavernous temple, the centerpiece of these ruins. Liquid shadows shied away from her dive light; they raced across stone walls, across marbled floors and a domed ceiling, ancient surfaces immune to the march of centuries.