What Lurks Beneath

by Ryan Lockwood

  “Eric?”

  “I really need to go, Ashley,” he said.

  She regarded him with a puzzled expression. “Are you sure?”

  A young father was holding the elevator doors open, looking at them.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Thanks for the offer.”

  She looked disappointed. “No problem. Will I see you again soon?”

  “I’ll come back.” He smiled weakly.

  She stepped into the elevator and turned to face him, smiling at him as the doors began to shut between them. Then she was gone. He took a deep breath, at once relieved and ashamed.

  He hurried back toward the lobby and headed outside to hail a taxi.

  CHAPTER 32

  Val exhaled and sank farther into the massive freshwater hole. Now past a gently sloping, silty bottom that started thirty feet down, she neared a distinct halo-cline between freshwater and saltwater above a dark shaft that plummeted into the center of the hole. The red-tinged layer was quite thin in this particular hole, perhaps due to its great width. But the shimmering barrier and its refraction of light made her feel like she was on shore, standing next to a swimming pool and looking down at its mirrored surface.

  Beneath her, Mack had already descended through the cloudy layer of hydrogen sulfide at the juncture, and down into the darker shaft. She looked past his blurred visage toward the unseen bottom. A few small sunfish, which looked to her like bluegills, moved lazily across the edge of the hole.

  They were finally exploring the inland blue hole where the kid had disappeared two weeks ago. It was no wonder nobody ever dove this hole. The access was terrible. It had been a terrific pain in the butt to get DORA and the gear all the way out here on an overgrown, narrow path through what the locals called “the bush.” The deceptively flat ground, hidden under waist-high ferns and other brush, was an ankle-twisting mess of jagged rock outcrops. She and Eric had together hauled the heavy ROV short distances, stopping for breaks, as Mack lugged the hundreds of feet of coiled umbilical cable. But they didn’t stop long, because back here, without an ocean breeze, the minuscule biting midges locals referred to as “no-see-ums” would swarm their exposed skin.

  When they crossed a marshy spot that sucked at their sandals, it had nearly pulled Mack’s leg off. Eric offered to help him, and Val knew it was a good thing her uncle’s leg had still been stuck. The man wouldn’t accept what he thought was pity.

  Rain was in the forecast yet again, so they didn’t have the luxury of time. If they got stuck back here in a downpour, it would be a miserable return trip.

  Her biggest anxiety today was that that they would find the boy’s body down below, well-rotted from resting in the microbe-rich water for weeks, its flesh calving off in hunks. But she knew they probably wouldn’t. Rescue divers had already been in here, and found no corpse. No evidence at all. Like the other missing divers, the teenage boy had simply vanished.

  She looked over her shoulder, squinting at the bright lights on the nose of the ROV. Eric was on the surface, piloting her.

  Val wondered what the hell they were doing here anyway. She had come to the Bahamas to try to find a new species of cephalopod. Not to chase down monster sightings. What the girl had described here was impossible. Nothing that large could live in here, and there was no evidence of the physical passage of anything sizeable around the hole, either. But she knew there was one other possibility.

  Something could have come from below.

  As she descended through the toxic, red-tinged sulfide layer into clear salt water, she thought about the newspaper article Eric had shown her. Many of the inland holes here had extensive tunnels that ran all the way out to the Tongue of the Ocean, where in the article the reporter claimed a missing yacht had supposedly encountered some sort of kraken. Val had initially been as stunned by the article as Eric—and excited. While they scoffed publicly, every cephalopod biologist secretly drooled at the mention of the legendary sea monster, and every sighting was investigated to determine if there was any authenticity. Could the yacht have encountered a giant squid? As implausible as the story sounded, the animals had been theorized to have been responsible for mariners’ legends.

  Yet there was no physical evidence at all to support their claim. No boat, and no pictures. It was intriguing, but highly implausible.

  She checked her air, and then looked back down at Mack. The walls of the hole continued to close in on them as it narrowed even more, farther from the surface. Mack stopped descending where the bottom of the hole became a narrow, black maw. A sweep of her dive light revealed no other obvious side passages. Mack pointed at the opening, nodded at her. She couldn’t see the start of a previously laid safety line. Either nobody had been in there before, or the line started farther in, away from where amateur divers might find it and foolishly follow.

  The black tunnel appeared sufficiently large for a diver to enter, but would surely narrow. She kicked over to DORA and found the keypad on its side. And began to type Eric a message.

  YOURE ON

  Eric nodded as Val’s message came through. He typed back:

  OK. BACK IN 20. WATCH CABLE.

  He waited, watching the text box. Wind whispered through the third-growth overstory of Bahamian pines overhead, and a lone bird sang.

  ONE TUNNEL ONLY. DONT GET LOST

  Eric smiled. On the laptop monitor, he could see Val as she appeared in front of the camera, and gave the okay signal.

  “All right then. Showtime.”

  Eric nosed DORA around Val, toward the black opening beneath her swim fins. The darkness immediately swallowed the light emitted from the vehicle’s panel of LEDs. He eased DORA forward, and as her propeller engaged, she entered the opening.

  They had a simple plan. Mack and Val would explore the main shaft of the blue hole while DORA checked out any tunnels below. This blue hole, which the locals simply called the “Big Hole,” was large and broad, and beneath the surface apparently shaped like a funnel. More than a football field across on the surface, its sides closed in quickly farther down, to where it was much narrower at the bottom and ended in this opening. There didn’t appear to be any other side tunnels.

  On the monitor, Eric watched as the smooth walls of the passage slid past. He glanced at a level indicator on the corner of the screen. Merely looking at the image before him, it was impossible to tell which way was up, so he had built in the indicator. DORA was headed almost straight down now.

  Ideally, they would have sent DORA into the inland cave as far as the tunnel went, to see if she could reach the open ocean, but there were too many limitations: the cord length, her power supply, the increasing risk of snag and impossible retrieval. So they would just get what they could.

  He glanced at another readout, where a green light confirmed that in addition to the video he was using to steer her now, DORA was also gathering three-dimensional sonar imagery so he could map the hole later.

  Suddenly, the passageway appeared to end, and Eric reversed DORA’s thrusters. He pivoted the ROV upward, back toward a horizontal plane, and saw that the passage continued. He nudged her forward, and she entered a chamber studded with ancient mineral speleothems, like the teeth of some prehistoric beast. There were stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws. Several spanned from floor to ceiling, long, slender columns attempting to support the tons of rock above them. They had formed on the limestone here a long time ago, when this cavern had been above sea level, over a very long period of time.

  Eric had read that the fragile-looking mineral formations grew at a steady rate of no more than five centimeters every thousand years. Thus they could hold records of the past, of climate change. He sighed, wishing DORA could take a sample.

  As the ROV proceeded, he noticed that, curiously, none of the speleothems on the monitor grew in the middle of the tunnel to obstruct DORA’s passage. He paused to take a long video shot of debris from broken-off speleothems on the bottom of the tunnel. At some point, something, perhaps before the
sea had flooded the cavern, had broken these off. But there was something odd about the rubble. It appeared not where it had fallen, but in small piles, gathered in depressions. Drifts. And the floor almost looked scoured, as though a massive piece of mining equipment had bored through here, grinding down the rubble and shoving it aside.

  He guided the ROV farther into the shaft, which again began to narrow. The compass indicator on his monitor showed that DORA was now headed east. Toward the ocean.

  She had sensed the foreign presence some time ago, the light it cast bouncing down the tunnel alongside the quiet, steady vibration it emitted. Now the source of the stimulation had almost arrived.

  After crushing part of the large, pale object floating on the ocean surface three nights ago, causing it to fill with water, she had left, frustrated. She had found a few edible things within it, but not enough to sustain her. When it finally sank, she had not followed it into the depths, but had moved on. Just before dawn, as she returned to the island, she had managed to ensnare an adult member of her favorite prey species. The animal had been unusually easy to capture, seemingly disoriented, swimming in slow circles near the surface. Her bite hadn’t even been necessary to subdue it, although it had struggled. Its flesh had helped to fill her stomach.

  But that was three nights ago. So she had returned to this familiar passage, where she had recently found a meal. Not just to feed, or because of a familiar impulse to retreat to the sluggish environment under the island to rest. There had also been another urge.

  The urge to build a den.

  She had spent much of the day clearing out a large chamber, piling rubble in a crude wall along the opening of the chamber, but there wasn’t enough material to sufficiently close off the space. Despite the safe distance from the predators of the open ocean, it was too exposed. She had finally ceased her effort. She would need to build her nest elsewhere. But she had remained, to rest. And digest.

  A bright light appeared now, a powerful beam striking the ceiling. The whirring vibration intensified in her skin.

  She calmly flattened her body against the bottom, her flesh smoothing out to match the rock, the pattern on her thick skin becoming that of the drab limestone. Her eyes became slits. Moments later, a bright yellow entity appeared. The colorful object moved steadily over her head, crossing the chamber, then stopped, hovering. It spun in a slow circle. Then it continued on its course.

  As it turned away from her, she slowly released the grip of the suckers lining one arm and lifted it quietly toward the object, dwarfing it. The tip of the tentacle paused behind the object, tasting. But it shed few organic chemicals, no real evidence of life. It was not food.

  Slowly, she retracted her appendage.

  She watched the yellow entity disappear through a large opening in the cavern. As its sound faded, she filled her body with seawater, expanding to her full size, and released her grip on the cavern floor. Turning in the darkness, she felt for the small opening through which she had entered.

  CHAPTER 33

  Val stumbled into the kitchen to find Eric already sitting at the chipped Formica table, shirtless and in running shorts. In front of him was his laptop. On the screen appeared to be a news article with the word “Iraq” in the headline. She frowned.

  “What are you doing up?” she asked.

  He quickly closed the window on his screen, and glanced toward her. “Nothing. I just couldn’t sleep.”

  “That damn clunking AC?”

  He nodded. “It keeps waking me up too. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Almost three o’clock.”

  “No shit. Why are you up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep either. Too much on my mind, and it’s too easy for me to get restless. I spent years staying up all night studying squid in Mexico.” She filled a glass with water and sat down at the table beside him. Still half-asleep, she tried to figure out what he might have actually been doing. “What were you looking at when I came in?”

  “Just some other research I’m working on.”

  “Oh?” When he didn’t reply, she decided to drop it. “You’re not up e-mailing Ashley?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Seriously. If you’re still thinking about what happened at Oceanus, let it go. There’ll be other chances.”

  “I know. You’re probably right.”

  After dinner, he’d told her about his fear of entering the elevator at the resort. About how it had triggered the recent earthquake episode.

  On the computer, he expanded another window and turned the monitor toward her. “Since I was up anyway, I thought I’d create a visual file of the 3-D imagery we got today. I found something very interesting.”

  Val studied the image on the screen. Eric had shown her images like this before, most recently after they explored The Staircase. A cross section of the tunnels under an inland hole, gathered by DORA’s sonar device. Lighter shading within the yellow coloration gave the appearance of depth. This time, they were clearly looking at the tunnels under the funnel-like hole where the boy had gone missing.

  Rendered on a flat screen, the yellow silhouette of the hole and caverns below reminded her of looking at an MRI image of the anatomy of a gigantic eyeball: widest just below the surface lens of freshwater, then tapering as depth increased. At the bottom, a narrow squiggle of tunnel angled downward, the optical nerve sending signals back to the island’s brain.

  “I love these things,” she said. “But to me, this one looks like all the others.”

  “Right. But hang on. Let me explain. When I piloted DORA back out of the tunnels today, I came across a larger, more open cavern. One I didn’t remember passing on the way in.” He pointed at the image. “Take a good look. At this spot, right here. That’s the scan from the way in”—he clicked a button, and another window appeared—“and here’s the scan from the way out.”

  In the second window appeared a similar yellow shape.

  “It looks about the same to me,” she said.

  “But not exactly the same. Granted, they never are. For an out-and-back like this, when DORA passes the same points twice, it’s like proofreading my work. I use the second dataset, taken from different angles, to validate the first dataset. I usually blend the two images for the best representation, since they don’t ever match exactly.”

  “Yeah. You’ve explained this to me before. The blue-colored areas on the second image are the variations. The spaces that don’t match up between the two scans.”

  He nodded. “There are always anomalies. But not like this. And they’re never this big. Here, let me zoom in.” He enlarged a portion of the second image, the one scanned on DORA’s return trip. On the screen was a large, blue bulge on the bottom of the winding yellow ribbon, just past where it curved toward the horizontal—a tumor growing on the optical nerve.

  “That’s significant?”

  “It’s more than significant. I can’t explain it. Do you know how large that area is?”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know the exact volume of that one particular variation. I can calculate a rough one. But I do know the overall volume difference between DORA’s first and second pass.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Well, according to the program’s calculations, on the second pass the volume of the chamber grew by about 120 cubic meters.”

  “And that’s significant?”

  “Very,” he said. “For reference, in a cavern like this, I’d expect the overall ‘blue area,’ as you call it, to depict a difference of no more than about ten cubic meters.”

  She frowned.

  “It means that this one blue area alone”—he rotated the image so it could be viewed from another angle—“is the volume of, say, one entire level of a three-bedroom house.”

  Val leaned in to look at the blue, three-dimensional volume swelling out from the bottom of the tunnel. It was oddly shaped, curved on the bottom, a thick blob pressed agains
t the bottom of the cavern, filling in a side chamber like some piece of chewing gum smoothing over the uneven tread of a shoe. But along a few of its upper edges, there was an oddly symmetrical quality. Val thought she could make out circular masses curving out and back into the blob in several locations.

  “What the hell is this, Eric?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe DORA’s sensor malfunctioned, but it appears to be working fine. So I wondered if the bottom of the chamber somehow collapsed right after DORA passed, as unlikely as that may seem. But there’s very little rubble apparent in that blue area. If there had been a cave-in, I’d expect to see a very jagged bottom to that shape, where detritus accumulated. And we would have seen huge clouds of sediment when DORA returned through here.”

  “But what else could account for this?” Val fought to remain rational, but in her mind raced thoughts about the missing yacht; the local girl’s claim that she had seen something dwelling in this hole. Something that had pulled a boy under.

  Eric shrugged. “The only other rational explanation is that DORA’s 3-D scanners aren’t working properly, and that I’m not able to recognize it. We should probably go back for a third and fourth scan to see what we find.”

  Val continued to stare at the image. “All right,” she finally said.

  “There’s one more thing, Val.”

  She squinted at him. “Uh-huh . . .”

  Eric zoomed in even farther on the blue blob’s upper edge. Zoomed in so far, Val could now see that the top of the image was broken up by a series of uneven horizontal lines, both blue and yellow, where the blob met the main tunnel.

  “What are those lines?” she said.

  “They indicate a poor reading. DORA was unable to clearly scan the bottom of the cavern here on her first pass.”

  “What would cause that?”