The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  When he reached bottom, he saw that they had landed in a kind of amphitheater, a bowl on three sides of which coral and rock rose steeply toward the surface. The fourth, the seaward side, was open. There the boat lay placidly on the surface, the anchor line angling down from way forward of Sanders to a spot in the rocks behind him. The only sounds he heard were the soft whistle of his inhalation and the bubbly rattle as he exhaled.

  He looked around, trying to discern shapes in the distance where transparent blue dwindled into dim mist. As always when he had not dived for several months, he felt a tingle of excitement, a mild but thrilling blend of agoraphobia and claustrophobia: he was alone and exposed on a wide plain of sand, certain that he could be seen by creatures he could not see; yet he was encased, too, by thousands of tons of water whose gentle but insistent pressure he could feel on every inch of his body.

  He rose off the bottom and swam to his right, to the end of the line of rocks. Creeping along the rocks, he looked for anything that might signal the presence of a wreck: metal or glass or wood. He swam around the whole bowl and found nothing. Moving to the center of the bowl, toward Gail, he tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked up, he spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, as if to say: Where do you think it is? She shrugged and held up a piece of glass, the bottom of a bottle. He waved a hand contemptuously: Forget it, worthless. He motioned for her to follow.

  Together they swam to the left. At the edge of the bowl, the rocks and coral continued in a fairly straight line. A school of bright blue-and-yellow surgeonfish fluttered by. A streak of sunlight danced over a piece of mustard-colored coral, its surface smooth, inviting touch. Sanders pointed to it and shook his index finger, warning her away. Then he pantomimed the sensation of being burned. Gail nodded: fire coral, whose mucous skin caused terrible pain.

  They kicked their way along the reef, followed by the grouper, which evidently still harbored a primitive hope that something edible would result from their visit. Sanders felt a tug at his ankle. He looked back at Gail. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing much faster than normal. She pointed to the left.

  Sanders followed her hand and saw, hanging motionless, staring at them with a white-rimmed black eye, an enormous barracuda. Its body was as sleek and shiny as a blade, its prognathous lower jaw ajar, showing a row of ragged, needle teeth.

  Sanders took Gail’s left hand, turned her diamond ring so the stone faced her palm, and balled her hand into a fist. For emphasis, he held up his own clenched fist. Gail nodded, tapped herself on the chest, and pointed upward. Sanders shook his head: No. Gail insisted, frowning at him. I’m going up, she was saying; you stay here if you want. She kicked hard for the surface. Sanders blew an annoyed breath and followed.

  “You want to quit?” he said as they boarded the boat.

  “No. I want to rest for a minute. Barracudas give me the creeps.”

  “He was just passing by. But you should have left your ring in the boat. Flashing that stone around is asking for trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll mistake it for prey. The first time I ever dove on a reef, I had a brass buckle on my bathing suit. The instructor told me to cut it off. I said the hell with it; I wasn’t about to ruin a fifteen-dollar bathing suit. So the guy took a knife and tied it to the end of a stick and set it in the sand, blade up. We were five or six feet away from the knife, and the instructor kept wiggling the stick, which made the blade flash in the sunlight. He only had to wiggle it four or five times before a big barracuda came by and stared at the knife. The instructor wiggled it again, and bango! Faster’n you could see, that fish hit the knife. He hit it again and again, cut his mouth to ribbons, but every damn time the blade moved he’d hit it again. And every time he hit it I imagined he was hitting my belt buckle, or right nearby. I never wore that suit again, except in a pool.”

  Gail removed her rings and tucked them in a cubbyhole in the steering console.

  “One more thing,” Sanders said. “When there are just the two of us diving, one of us has to be the leader of the pack.”

  “Why do we need a leader?” Gail thought he was kidding. “Are you on a power trip?”

  “No, dammit,” Sanders said, more sharply than he had intended. “It’s just that underwater we have to do things together. We have to know where each other is, all the time. Like then: if that had been a shark instead of a barracuda, and you wouldn’t listen to me and shot for the surface, we’d be in a hell of a mess.”

  “A shark! Around here?”

  “Sure. Chances are they won’t bother you, but they’re around. And if one does come along, you don’t want to do something stupid.”

  “Like?”

  “Like panicking and rushing for the surface. As long as you have air, the best thing to do is stay on the bottom and find shelter in the reef. As soon as you start for the surface—especially if you’re scared and swimming in a hurry—you become prey. And on the surface, you’re lunch.”

  “Suppose I ran out of air?”

  “You share my air and we wait for a chance to come up together. Unless he’s a real monster, we’d have a pretty good chance of making it to the boat.” Sanders saw that the talk of sharks was making Gail nervous. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just don’t do anything without checking with me.”

  Gail looked at him and drew a deep breath. “Okay.” She put her face over the side and looked through her mask into the water. “You think that barracuda’s gone?”

  “Probably.”

  She continued to look underwater for a moment more, scanning the bottom. She was about to take the mask out of the water when she saw something big and brown behind the boat. “Hey, what’s that?” she said, passing the mask to Sanders.

  “Where?” He leaned over the side.

  “Behind us. About as far as you can see.”

  “It’s a timber. I’ll be damned. There it is.”

  Sanders uncleated the anchor line and let the boat drift backward a few more yards. “Let’s have a look.”

  “What did the bell captain say it was called? Goliath?”

  “Yes. Goliath.”

  They went overboard together, and as soon as their bubbles had risen away, they could see debris on the bottom. A long thick timber lay at right angles to the reef. Rotten wooden planks littered the white sand. Sanders touched Gail’s shoulder and she looked at him. He grinned and put thumb and index finger together in the “okay” sign. She responded with the same sign.

  They swam along the bottom at the base of the reef. Gail found a rusted can, its seams burst and jagged. From a crevice in the rocks Sanders pulled a Coke bottle, intact. Gail lay on the bottom and dug beneath the near end of the big timber. She found a fork and part of a plate. Sanders saw something sticking out of the sand at the far end of the timber. He dug around it until he discovered what it was: the fluke of a huge anchor. Gail motioned that she was going up. He followed her.

  Treading water on the surface, Gail spat out her mouthpiece and said, “Let’s go over the reef.”

  “Why?”

  “It looks like this is just the last bit of the bow. There’s got to be more of her on the other side.”

  “Okay. But be careful of the surge as you’re going over, and once you start to run out of air, don’t screw around. Head for the boat.”

  Seaward of the reef, the bottom looked like a trash heap. Pieces of wood, rusted iron, and coral-covered metal were scattered everywhere. From the sand Gail plucked a pewter cup. One side was caved in, and the handle was rippled with dents, but otherwise the cup was undamaged. At the foot of the reef, Sanders saw an impossibly round ring of coral. He picked it up, held it to his face, and smiled at Gail. It was the remains of a brass porthole. Gail dug in the area where she had found the cup, and soon she had amassed a small pile of flatware—forks and spoons and knives, all gnarled and scarred.

  She swam over to Sanders, who was poking in the crannies of the reef. Near the bottom of the reef there was
a coral overhang: the coral stopped two or three feet from the sand, and there seemed to be a small cave underneath. She tapped Sanders and pointed to the overhang. He shook his head—no—and held one hand with the other, telling her that something might be living in the cave, something that would grab a probing hand.

  They separated. Gail swam back to the area where she had found the forks and spoons; Sanders continued to poke in the reef. He came to another cave, slightly larger than the one he had warned Gail away from. He bent down and peered beneath the coral overhang. It was forbiddingly dark inside, and he was about to turn away and look elsewhere when a glint, a tiny flicker of reflection, made him look again.

  Holding a rock to steady himself, he stared at the shimmering object, trying to guess what it could be. He looked at his rag-wrapped hand, and an image came to mind: a photograph he had seen of a man’s hand soon after it had been bitten by a moray eel. The flesh had been tattered, and the bone showed sickly white. He hesitated, hearing the pulse thumping in his temples, and he knew he was breathing too fast. He felt fear; he detested the feeling. He stared at his hand and willed it toward the mouth of the cave.

  Taking a deep breath, he shot his hand forward to the glitter. His fingers closed on something small, fragile; he snapped his hand back out of the darkness.

  In his palm was a glass container about three inches long, tapered at both ends. It was full of a clear, yellowish liquid.

  As he backed away from the cave, Sanders noticed that drawing breath was becoming difficult. He swam over to Gail—stopping briefly to collect a few relics he had left at the base of the reef—and touched her. When she looked up, he drew a finger across his throat. She nodded and repeated the gesture.

  Sanders rose toward the surface. Gail lingered long enough to gather a handful of forks and spoons—already, after only a few minutes, the gentle current had covered one spoon with a patina of sand—then followed him. Together they crossed over the reef and swam to the boat.

  “Beautiful!” Gail said, as she removed her weight belt and flippers. “That is fantastic.”

  In the bottom of the boat, next to Gail’s forks, spoons, and pewter cup, were the items Sanders had collected: a chipped, but whole, butter plate; a rusted, dented flare pistol; a straight razor; and what looked like a pebbly lump of coal.

  “What’s that?” she said, pointing to the lump.

  “There could be metal in it. When they stay in sea water for a long time, some metals develop this black stuff around them. Later on, we’ll bang it open with a hammer and see if there’s anything inside.” Sanders opened his right hand and withdrew the ampule from beneath the rag wrapped around it. “Look,” he said, and passed it to Gail.

  “What is it?”

  “Medicine, I guess. It looks like the ends were meant to be broken off so a syringe could be stuck in to draw off the liquid.”

  “I wonder if it’s still good.”

  “Should be. It’s airtight, God knows.”

  Sanders looked over the stern. “Tomorrow let’s bring a bag. I think there’s a lot more stuff down there.”

  When they reached the beach, the lifeguard—blond, deeply tanned, wearing a white T-shirt with a red cross on the back—was waiting for them in hip-deep water. He grabbed the bow, eased the boat up onto the sand, and helped them unload their gear. “See you got some goodies,” he said to Gail as he watched her pile their finds on a towel and twist the ends of the towel together, fashioning a sack.

  “Some,” Sanders answered. The lifeguard had annoyed him at their first meeting that morning, when Sanders had rented the Whaler from him. He was cocky and young, and Sanders was sure he was closer to Gail’s twenty-six years than to his own thirty-seven. And when the lifeguard spoke—even in answer to a question asked by Sanders—he looked at Gail. Sanders was convinced that the lifeguard was more interested in the sway of Gail’s breasts as she bent over than in any relics they had brought from the wreck.

  Sensing Sanders’ pique, the lifeguard said to him, “You find any shells?”

  “Shells?”

  “Artillery shells. Depth charges. You know. Explosives.”

  “Live explosives?”

  “I’ve always heard Goliath had a bunch of munitions on board. Maybe it’s all talk.”

  Sanders said, “We’ll look tomorrow. We’d like to use the boat again.”

  “Sure, as long as the wind doesn’t go around to the south and start blowing. You don’t want to be on that reef in a strong south wind.”

  “No. Neither did Goliath.”

  Carrying their gear, Gail and David trudged up the beach. The sand was pink—tinted by millions of tiny hard-shelled sea animals, called Foraminifera—and so fine that walking in it was like shuffling through talc.

  By the time they reached the base of the cliff, Sanders was sweating. His palms were wet, and he had difficulty holding the necks of the scuba tanks. He looked up at the cliff, one hundred feet of sheer coral and limestone. To the right was a narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top. To the left was an elevator—a four-foot-square cage that rode up and down on a steel pole embedded in a concrete base—installed decades earlier in a crevasse cut in the cliff.

  On a control panel in the cage there were two buttons, marked “up” and “down.” If the elevator malfunctioned, there was no alarm bell, no emergency button: the passengers (three, at most) had no choice but to wait until someone spotted them and called for help. At breakfast the Sanderses had been told a story about an elderly couple who were trapped in the elevator as they rode up from the beach at twilight. They were the last to leave the beach, so there was no one below to see them. During the night, the wind swung around to the southwest and freshened into a moderate gale. The pole quivered in the wind, shaking the cage and the couple within, like a pocketful of loose change. When in the morning they were finally found, the woman (so went the story) was dead from fright and exposure, and the man had gone mad. He babbled to his rescuers about devils who had called to him in the darkness, about birds that had tried to peck out his eyes.

  On their way down to the beach, Gail had refused to ride in the elevator. “I get claustrophobia in office-building elevators,” she had said. “I’d be a basket case before I reached the bottom in that thing.”

  Sanders had not argued, but he insisted on sending their air tanks down in the elevator, for, as he pointed out, “If we let one of them bong into the rocks and rupture, we’ll go up like a Roman candle.”

  Now he had no intention of walking up the staircase. He turned left, toward the elevator. Gail turned right.

  “You’re not going to walk up those stairs,” he said.

  “I sure am. What about you? I thought you were afraid of heights.”

  “I’m not afraid of heights, any more than I’m afraid of airplanes. I don’t like either one, but I’m not about to let them ruin my life.”

  “Well, I’m still not getting in that bird cage. Come on. It’s good for your legs.”

  Sanders shook his head. “I’ll see you up there.” He loaded the gear into the elevator, closed the gate, and pushed the “up” button. There was a click, then the motor whirred, whined, and lifted the cage off the ground. Sanders stood facing the cliff, staring at the gray rock as it moved slowly by. When he had seen enough of the cliff, he turned around and faced the sea, forcing himself to look down. He saw the lifeguard wheeling the Whaler up the beach on a light dolly, and a couple lying on colored beach towels arranged next to each other in perfect symmetry—looking, as they receded, like a postage stamp stuck to the pink sand.

  His mind barely registered the change in the pitch of the electric motor, rising from a whine to a complaint.

  When the cage bucked once, then stopped, he was not afraid; he assumed that someone, somewhere, had pushed a “stop” button, and soon that same someone would push a “go” button. He waited.

  The motor was still racing, like an automobile engine in neutral with the accelerator pushed to the floo
r. Sanders pressed the “down” button. There was a click, but no change in the sound. He pushed the “up” button. Another click. The elevator did not move. He looked up. There was no roof to the cage, and he could see the top of the cliff, perhaps fifteen feet away.

  When Gail got to the top of the stairs, she was breathing hard, and her thighs ached. She walked along the path for a few yards and was surprised to see that the elevator wasn’t there. Her first thought made her smile: David chickened out and was following her up the stairs. She returned to the staircase and looked down; it was empty. Her next thought made beads of sweat break out on her forehead. She ran to where the elevator should have been and, supporting herself on a guardrail, leaned over the edge of the cliff. She was relieved: the cage was still there—at least it hadn’t pulled away from the pole and crashed to the bottom. Sanders had reached his hands through the bars in the cage and was gripping the pole.

  “Are you all right?” she called.

  “It just stopped.”

  Gail looked at the machinery by the top of the elevator shaft. Two steel arms extended from concrete bases and encircled the pole. There was a large metal box, containing, she presumed, the motor. But there were no obvious controls, no buttons. “Don’t move!” she said. “I’ll get help.”

  She ran into the lobby of the Orange Grove Club, ignoring sternly worded signs prohibiting “bathing costumes and bare feet” in the public rooms of the club.

  “The elevator’s stuck!” she shouted as she approached the front desk. “My husband’s caught inside.”