Deep Shadow df-17

by Randy Wayne White

  He stopped breathing, as he’d been told, and watched Tomlinson use the flashlight to explain. The light threw a circle of white that moved from the ceiling to the floor . . . from the ceiling to the floor . . . then to the ceiling again, but more slowly.

  It took Will a moment to understand. Air bubbles, that’s what Tomlinson wanted him to see. Air bubbles were seeping out of the rocks beneath them, ascending until they collided with the top of the cavern. There, the bubbles congregated briefly, but then continued moving, tracing silver tracks toward what might have been a tiny opening in the highest part of the cave.

  What did it mean? Was Ford somewhere beneath them? That had to be it. Where else could air be coming from?

  As if on cue, Will heard a grinding, clanking noise from outside—faint, but it was the unmistakable sound of the biologist doing something, digging again possibly. Tomlinson held a palm up—Stop—and then attempted to signal Ford, but there was no response.

  Seconds later, though, Will was startled by a muted roaring, a mechanized sound, like a cross between a leaf blower and heavy rain. It seemed to be coming from above them but far away.

  Tomlinson explained the noise by scribbling Jet dredge on his slate.

  Will nodded.

  Less than a minute later, though, the thing stopped, and they heard Ford signaling. The hippie responded, banging his flashlight against his tank in a deliberate three-beat rhythm. An SOS maybe?

  Possibly so, or maybe it meant nothing, but Will suspected it did because when the jet dredge started again Tomlinson grabbed his dive slate and wrote, Got to move now!

  Move? There was nowhere to go!

  Tomlinson made his case by shining the light on the ceiling, reminding Will about the stalagmites or the stalactites hanging down, their points sharpened by a couple thousand years of dripping water.

  Crap!

  If the ceiling collapsed on them, getting crushed was the least of their worries. Those stone stilettos could skewer them both.

  Will nodded his head rapidly, saying, “Esss eely ’ucks.”

  Yes, it did really suck. The cavern ceiling was covered with stone daggers. Where the hell could they go?

  Up, as it turned out. Stay close to the ceiling, the stalactites couldn’t build up speed if they fell. Which was smart, Will had to admit.

  Tomlinson was writing again and then held the slate up for him to read. Do what I do!

  Will nodded.

  Holding the flashlight in his left hand, Tomlinson let the dive slate swing to his side, then exaggerated his movements as he opened the weight pockets on his BC vest. He removed four rubber-covered chunks of lead and dropped them, one by one, at his feet, then pantomimed how to inflate his vest manually instead of using the valve connected to his tank.

  Conserving air. That made sense, too. And they sure as hell didn’t need a bunch of lead to keep them on the bottom now.

  Up. That’s where they wanted to go. Damn right, that’s where they wanted to go. The vibration of the jet dredge could cause those stone daggers to fall at any moment.

  After Will had jettisoned his weights, Tomlinson used his thumb to signal toward the ceiling, then began inflating his own vest for real. The man became weightless, drifting upward as if levitating, and Will followed, allowing the image of astronauts to come into his head, lights piercing the blackness. It was the same tableau that had filled his mind while traveling I-75 with Hayes, in the backseat of the Lincoln.

  Will remembered wondering, Why? It was a sensation so powerful that he had lost himself in the fantasy of being in a submerged cave, darkness all around. Now here he was, and it was all too real.

  Outside, the leaf-blower sound of the dredge stopped once again. By then, though, Tomlinson was using one hand to fend off the rocky ceiling of the cavern while using the light to follow the path of their own bubbles.

  Will gave the man room to work, first trying to steady himself by clinging to a spike of limestone—the thing broke off in his hand—then by purging air from his vest until he was less buoyant. He hovered below and behind the hippie, eight feet above the cavern floor, reminding himself, Stay calm, breathe slo-o-owly, as he watched Tomlinson move to the highest part of the cave.

  Will was thinking Where the hell is Ford? when the sound of the jet dredge began again, then stopped seconds later. From beneath them came a random clanking noise, as if something was being dragged along the rocks under them, followed by a momentary silence.

  Will thought, Why is Ford under us now?

  Jesus Christ, what was the man doing? Didn’t he realize that they were almost out of air?

  Tomlinson was tapping on his tank to get Will’s attention, waving for him to move closer, when they both heard a shuddering rumble that sounded like distant thunder. The sound grew progressively louder, vibrating through the cave walls. Soon, stalactites began dropping to the floor, the sharp stones clanking hard when they hit. The rumbling sound peaked, then faded, as if a train were passing. Then the rumbling stopped.

  Scary.

  A minute later, it got scarier. Tomlinson was using his flashlight to show Will what appeared to be a vent in the highest section of the cavern when a chunk of ceiling above them collapsed, brushing past Tomlinson’s shoulder as it fell. In that same instant, Will ran out of air.

  It wasn’t gradual, as Will had expected. One second, he was breathing normally. The next second, the mouthpiece of his regulator felt as if it had been abruptly sealed shut. Will continued trying to suck air from the thing as his hands found the pony canister inside his BC. Use the largest bottle first, that seemed like the smart thing to do—and, besides, Tomlinson’s Spare Air bottle was clipped to a D ring, which would require more time to free.

  Will was thinking, Stay calm . . . don’t rush . . . that’s how people screw up.

  As he tried to remove the little tank, though, the knob caught inside his vest. Fumbling in the darkness, Will tried to free the thing, but he yanked too hard. The tank went spinning out of his hands before he could take a breath . . .

  TWELVE

  WHEN THE LIMESTONE OVERHANG COLLAPSED, I LET go of the jet dredge hose and tried to swim free of the chaos, but there was no escaping what followed.

  Water, displaced by tons of rock, pushed a descending ridge of pressure that was stronger than any squall I had ever experienced. I felt like a seed being ejected from a grape. The shock wave hit me, tumbled me, then jettisoned me downward but also toward the concave wall of the lake and out of the path of the largest limestone slabs.

  Smaller rocks caught me as I descended. I covered my head with my arms and kicked hard, riding the expanding pressure away from the worst of it, surfing the shock wave toward what I hoped was safety. The hiss of my regulator added a rhythmic counterbeat to the random clatter of rock colliding with rock and clanking off my air bottle. I continued swimming hard until the noise had ceased.

  When I was safe within the great hollowed convexity of the lake’s northern wall, I stopped and turned, straining to see through the silt. I hadn’t intended to bring the entire overhang crashing down, only the midsection, but maybe the strategy had worked. Will and Tomlinson had been trapped somewhere inside the porous outcrop. It seemed likely that now, for better or worse, they were free. But where?

  I checked my gauges. I was at forty-five feet and still had three-quarters of a tank of air. I had plenty of time to wait for visibility to improve, but my partners did not. They had now been underwater for one hour and seven minutes. If the collapse hadn’t freed them, and if they were not already swimming toward the surface, it seemed probable that Will was dead. And Tomlinson . . . ?

  The possibility of Tomlinson being dead—actually dead—was beyond my grasp. It refused to take root in my brain. The man had the sensibilities and instincts of a cat—the morals, too—which added credibility, however perverse, to the expectation that he was entitled to more than just one life. Even our history argued against the inevitability that Tomlinson would in fact one day
die.

  “There are ghosts at this marina,” he was fond of saying, particularly after blending some illegal stew of weed and fungi, then chasing it with state-licensed rum.

  Ghosts—ghosts at the marina, ghosts at home in Dinkin’s Bay. He spoke of the things fondly as if they actually existed. I didn’t believe it, of course, but at least the setting was acceptable. The marina was home. His boat and my lab were simply extensions of Dinkin’s Bay, familiar outposts that would be suitable places for our haunted specters to reside, if such things were real.

  Not here at the bottom of a lake, though. Not in a place so far from the sea—and not linked to a random series of events that had been catalyzed by two equally random losers, King and Perry.

  I began kicking toward the surface, left hand extended as a bumper, the silt so thick that my mind had nothing to process but internal data as I calculated my friend’s chances.

  Tomlinson is never easy to assess or predict, and it was no different now, particularly after this chain of disasters. Tomlinson’s idea of a tough workout was swimming a case of beer out to his boat. To him, hangovers were the only variety of endurance sport worthy of his participation. And, up until the last week, he’d been a habitual ganja smoker.

  Could he still be alive?

  Possibly, I told myself, because it was also true that the man was a meditation guru, a master of breathing techniques. Living aboard a sailboat kept him fit, all leather and sinew, despite his devotion to excess and debauchery. Because of this, he might have another five or ten minutes of air left.

  Tomlinson dead? No, it couldn’t happen. Bad enough was the probability that Will Chaser was gone, a tough teenage kid who, for no rational reason, seemed targeted by bad luck and fated to die young.

  At twenty-eight feet, the water began to clear, although debris was still raining down—kept in suspension by the aftershock possibly or the result of miniature landslides from the last remaining truncated section of the overhang.

  Beneath me, I could see a jumbled darkness that was a small mountain of rock. I decided that I would do another bounce dive if I didn’t find Will and Tomlinson somewhere above me, but it would be the last place I looked because if they were on the bottom they were dead. There was no way they could have survived a collapse so massive. It was possible that even the plane wreckage was now buried. Not that it mattered. The plane, the prospect of finding more gold, were meaningless to me now.

  I continued swimming toward the surface.

  Above me, striations of light showed that the northern section of limestone bridge was gone. All that remained was a cavernous space from which silt boiled—the same dark silt that earlier had reminded me of volcanic ash.

  Fluttering down through the ash, I noticed, were several glittering objects. They were bright as fireflies. The particles formed a sparkling, descending pointillism that spun through the silt, raining down on me. Still swimming, I held out a hand and caught one.

  It was a gold coin.

  I looked at it for a moment, then caught another. There were dozens of the things. They appeared to gain speed as they fell.

  I pocketed two of the coins but ignored the others. I didn’t need the flashlight to identify them. I knew what they were. They were more hundred-peso coins, stolen from the Cuban treasury.

  Arlis had been right. He had found Batista’s gold plane.

  Looking up, rays of late sunlight pierced the murk, I could make out the silhouette of the tractor-sized inner tube and King’s idle swim fins. The man was still up there, waiting to see if I was alive or dead and if I had found more gold.

  But his were the only fins visible, which told me that Will and Tomlinson hadn’t made it to the surface. It gave me a sickening feeling seeing only King, and I slowed my ascent as I reassessed. If Tomlinson and the boy weren’t above me, then they were somewhere below me. Either that or they had disappeared into the porous limestone wall of the lake.

  Thinking that gave me hope—but not much.

  A jagged indentation marked where the overhang had broken free. It was a vertical crater the size of a closet. It looked as if a giant molar had been extracted from a limestone jaw. I knew I was in the right area because, surprisingly, the coiled ivory mammoth tusk appeared through the swirl of silt. It rested only a few yards from the crater, undisturbed, on a platform of rock that now constituted the edge of the lake’s shallow rim. The extra tank was gone, though, freed by the tremor, and had to be somewhere on the bottom.

  There was no need to go looking for it now.

  Probing ahead with my flashlight, I swam through black detritus, my hand extended. Visibility was so bad I had to find the inside wall of the crater by touch. If I pressed my face mask within a foot of the wall, I could make out coral patterns on gray limestone and dinosaur-sized oyster shells.

  High on an inside corner, I discovered an opening. It was a karst vent less than two feet wide. I poked my head inside, feeling the limestone hard against the back of my neck. It took me several seconds to figure out that the vent angled downward, an incline as steep as a child’s slide.

  I considered pulling myself into the hole to see where it led, but an act so risky demanded some thought. Entering an overhead environment underwater is almost always a bad idea and often fatal. I knew from reading, and from friends, that more than a hundred divers had been killed in Florida’s caves in recent years and an unsettling percentage of the victims had been cave trained and well equipped. I was neither, so the decision wasn’t an easy one.

  Unless the bodies of Will and Tomlinson lay under a ton of rubble on the bottom, there was still a chance that they had been trapped in and protected by a similar vent. Even though visibility was poor, I could see that the area was a catacomb of holes and crevices.

  With so many conduits available, it was possible that they had clawed and dug their way into adjoining chambers and were now far from the site of the first landslide. If so, those chambers might be linked to the vent I had just discovered. In fact, considering the location, it could have been the very place where they had been trapped to begin with.

  I made a low pass over the sandy plateau. There were now no bubbles to be seen. That should have been enough to convince me, but I couldn’t let go of the hope that Tomlinson and the boy had followed one of the limestone corridors to safety.

  The opening to the vent I had found, though, was so damn small. Would they have risked it? I tried to squeeze my shoulders into the hole, but the pillar valve on my tank stopped me, clanking against the rocks. Even if I had removed my tank, the space would have been too tight. But Tomlinson and the boy were both smaller than me. If they were desperate— and they were desperate—they could have forced their way into the thing and followed it.

  I backed out of the hole and tapped my flashlight on my tank, hoping for a response. Several times I signaled, but there was no reply.

  It was as telling as the absence of exhaust bubbles, but I refused to accept that silence as proof, either.

  If they had followed the tunnel, I reasoned, they might be too far away to hear me. It was possible. If the vent actually did connect to a series of other tunnels and adjoining chambers, they could be a hundred yards or more from where they’d originally been trapped. In this part of Florida, there were underground labyrinths that traveled for miles before they dead-ended.

  Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely. But I wanted to believe it, so I became even more determined to search the tunnel.

  If I’d had my knife, it would have been easier to widen the opening, but Perry had grabbed it soon after I’d taken the thing off. Instead, I clipped the flashlight to my BC, light on, and used my hands to rip away chunks of limestone. It wasn’t easy work, and I knew too well that I was inviting another landslide.

  After a couple of minutes, I tried signaling again, then used the silence as additional proof that I was making the right decision. My partners weren’t dead, they had traveled too far to hear me. I had to get closer before signalin
g again.

  The human mind is at its inventive best when misinterpreting data to support a specific hope.

  I flipped the air bottle over my head, pushed it into the hole and followed, feeling the jagged limestone tear at my skin and wet suit. The vent widened, briefly, then narrowed as I traveled downward, walking on my fingers and not using my fins, which was the best way to avoid disturbing the silt.

  The vent wasn’t much wider than a drainpipe. With the flashlight on, the rock walls were orange, encrusted with oxidized sediment. Exhaust bubbles, percolating around my faceplate, loosened the sediment, staining the water with a bloody tint. With the light off, the walls seemed to expand around me as if the shock of illumination had caused them to spasm tight around my body. I preferred the illusion of space so progressed in darkness.

  Ten yards into the vent, though, I stopped, finally admitting to myself, This is pointless.

  I didn’t want to believe that, either. Intellectually, I knew it was true, but my brain had latched on to a fanciful thread. It was the irrational conviction that Will Chaser had indeed recently been here in this same dark space. It was an intangible sensation . . . a feeling, not a thought. Tomlinson had been here, too, presumably, but it was the image of the boy that was strongest in my mind.

  I told myself, That’s ridiculous. Absurd—you’re imagining things, Ford.

  I knew that was true, too. Tomlinson was my closest friend. I barely knew the boy—why would I feel some sensory connection with him? Plus, there is no validity to a perception that has been catalyzed by hope alone—or by fear. That variety of skewed thinking was the source of all superstition.

  After another ten yards, I stopped again and tried the flashlight. Its beam created a milky tunnel through the silt. Was there an opening ahead? I couldn’t be sure. I pressed ahead a few more feet before deciding that I was wrong. It was another illusion spawned by wishful thinking.

  The vent was so cramped, I couldn’t move my elbows, but I could move my right wrist. Eight times, I tapped the flashlight against my tank. Not hard—I didn’t want to risk disturbing the rocks overhead. The possibility of being crushed was too real and the thought of being trapped here unable to move, biding my time until I ran out of air, was terrifying.