by Rick Hautala
Biz’s frown deepened.
“Someone’s down there,” Jeff said.
At first, Biz reacted like he wasn’t quite sure what Jeff meant. Then his eyes widened and he said, “You mean … you found a person?”
Jeff grunted and nodded grimly.
“I wanna mark him so’s we can come back out ‘n find ‘im easily. We gotta report this to the Coasties.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Biz said. He didn’t look at all pleased to be involved in anything like this, but Jeff ignored him as he fumbled to get the regulator back into his mouth and pulled his mask down. After adjusting everything, he tied one end of the rope to his diving marker and uncoiled the rope. With one last look at Biz, he did a quick surface dive. As he dropped back down into the darkening depths, his heart felt like a cold, tight fist was squeezing inside his chest.
* * *
“I’ll betcha I know exactly who it is.”
Like most nights, Jeff was drinking with his buddies down at “The Local.” He had a glass of beer—his fifth so far tonight—raised halfway to his mouth when Jim “Pappy” Sullivan spoke up. He hadn’t even realized Pappy was listening as he told three of his drinking buddies—Ralphie, Johnny, and Flip—about what he’d found this morning. Lowering the glass to the bar, Jeff nudged his Red Sox baseball cap back on his head and scratched the side of his head. Then he turned on his barstool and looked directly at Pappy.
“Was I talkin’ to you?”
Pappy smiled on one side of his face—the other side was paralyzed from a stroke he’d had a couple of years ago that made him slur his words even without beer.
“No, but I couldn’t help but overhear yah.” When Pappy took a sip of his beer, some of it dribbled down the left side of his face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “But I bet yah dollars to donuts I know who it ‘tis you found.”
“Do yah, now?”
“Ay-yuh.”
A wide smile of satisfaction spread across the good side of the old man’s face. Pappy relished being the center of attention even though he had a reputation for being full of shit as often as not. Now that he had Jeff’s and everyone else’s attention, he sat there as though waiting for a cue to continue. When the wait got to be too long to bear, Jeff said, “So … you wanna tell me?”
Pappy’s lopsided grin widened, exposing the row of missing teeth on his bottom jaw.
“I’d bet my left nut-sack it’s Old Man Crowther.”
“I don’t want your fuckin’ left nut-sack,” Jeff said, smirking, “but what makes you so goddamned sure it’s Old Man Crowther?”
“How long’s he been missing?” Pappy said.
“Damned if I know,” Jeff said. “I don’t even know who the fuck he is.”
An unlit cigarette was stuck behind Pappy’s right ear, held in place by a snarl of wiry gray hair. He’d probably bummed it from the barmaid, Shantelle. He reached up and took it, rolling it between his grease-stained fingers as he nodded toward the barroom’s back door.
“Why’unt yah step on outside with me whilst I have a smoke,” he said, sliding off his barstool, “‘n I’ll tell yah.” He paused, cocking his hips to one side as he fished in his jeans pocket for his lighter. “Goddamned fucking law that says I cain’t smoke in a goddamned bar don’t make a lick of sense. Like I come here for my goddamned health!”
While this was going on, Jeff glanced back and forth between his friends. They appeared to have no opinion as to what he should do, so he picked up his beer and followed Pappy out the back door. The Local had a back deck that looked out over the harbor. People came out here to smoke all times of the year. The screen door slammed shut behind them, sounding like a gunshot in the night. The sound made Jeff jump, and he wondered why he was feeling so keyed up. He had enough beer in him to feel convivial, but he was still a little freaked out by what he had found this morning.
By the light of the waxing moon, which was close to full and shining brightly, and the streetlights lining the road leading down to the wharf, Jeff could see the lobster boats at their moorings. The water glittered with flashes of quicksilver. Pappy lit his cigarette and, leaning forward with both elbows resting on the railing, clasped his hands in front of him as though in prayer. The cigarette dangled from his lower lip, sending a thin curl of smoke into his eyes, making him squint. Moths and June bugs buzzed around the single light above the back door, snapping and popping against the screen.
“So tell me … Who the fuck is Old Man Crowther, and why’re you so sure it’s him?”
Pappy inhaled deeply and then blew a billow of smoke from his nostrils without taking the cigarette from his mouth.
“Got to be ‘im,” he said. The glowing tip of the cigarette bobbed up and down like a firefly in the darkness.
“This sinker I found—he had a length of chain wrapped around his waist. You’re saying Old Man Crowther tossed himself overboard, that he killed himself?”
“Sure as shit seems so, don’t it?” Pappy puffed some more on his cigarette as though lost in thought.
“Well, we’ll find out tomorrow when we bring ‘im up, but how long’s this Old Man Crowther been missing?”
Pappy tilted his head to one side and scratched the white beard stubble on his jowls. His fingernails made a loud rasping sound.
“Oh, I’d say must’a been … thirty years or more since he disappeared.”
“Thirty years ago … I was still in grade school,” Jeff said. “A body can’t last that long down under.”
“May’ve been even longer’n that, now that I think of it.” Pappy turned to Jeff, scowling as threads of smoke rose into his face. “T’was back in the early Seventies, as I recall. My mind ain’t as sharp as it used ta’ be.”
Jeff considered for a long, silent moment. Pappy finally took the cigarette from his mouth after taking another deep drag and exhaling. Her head was wreathed with a gray haze of smoke.
Jeff pursed his lips, considering, and then shook his head.
“Nope. No way,” he said. “Can’t be him. Someone been down there that long, their body’d be long gone. Lucky to find the chains, they’d be so buried with silt and such. He’d a’ been ‘et by scavengers long ago.”
Pappy chuckled and shook his head as he took one last drag of the cigarette before snapping the butt out into the darkness. Jeff watched it fly, the red tip spinning end over end until it hit the dirt driveway in a small shower of sparks.
“I seen the body down there,” Jeff said. “’N there’s no fuckin’ way anyone’d be in that good a condition after thirty or more years.”
“You never knew Old Man Crowther … That old cocksucker had a hide on him ‘s tough as nails.”
“Sorry, Pappy, but it’s gotta be someone else …”
Jeff finally noticed how dry his throat was and realized he was still holding onto his beer. When he raised it and took a swallow, his throat made a funny little gulping sound.
“You was a kid back when it happened,” Pappy said, “So’s probably you don’t ‘member.”
There was something in the old man’s tone of voice that fixed Jeff’s attention.
“Remember what?”
“It.”
“What do you me … ‘it!’”
Pappy sniffed and shook his head from side to side as though amused by some private joke. He reached up to his ear as if to grab another cigarette, then started scratching his head.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“I was born in sixty-six,” Jeff said.
“Okay, so you would’a been—” Pappy did some quick calculations on his fingers. “You’d ‘a been maybe four or five when it happened.”
Jeff was starting to lose his patience. Pappy had a reputation for being full of shit, and he cursed himself for letting himself be suckered into another one of his bullshit stories. He was positive the old man was just looking for someone to talk to. There was no way Old Man Crowther’s body could still be down there since the Seventies.
/> From behind him, there came the faint strains of laughter from inside The Local. Even though the evening was warm and pleasant, Jeff wanted to get back inside where there were friends and laughter and aimless conversation. But as his gaze drifted down to the harbor and out to sea, he couldn’t stop thinking about the corpse he had found and how strange it had looked, sitting there on the ocean floor. A shiver like invisible fingers ran up his spine.
“So you don’t remember anythin’ ‘bout the plague we had back then?” Pappy asked.
Jeff started to ask, What plague? but a faint childhood memory stirred within him.
He’d only been a kid at the time, maybe five or six years old, but there had been a period of time—it might have been a few months, but it could have been much longer … or shorter, memory being the tricky thing it is—when his mother wouldn’t let him play outside after dark with his friends like he usually did. As big a deal as it had been at the time, it was only a faint memory now, but Jeff recalled hearing talk about how there was something wrong … something weird going on in the town. He remembered his parents and maybe some other adults using words like disease and infection to describe what was going on. He had always assumed there was some type of flu bug going around they wanted to protect him from.
Against his better judgment, instead of going back into the bar, Jeff said, “You gonna tell me about it, or are you gonna just flap your gums?”
Pappy stared at him with a long, vacant look. His brow wrinkled, and one side of his face twitched. One white eyebrow was cocked so high it looked like an albino caterpillar had curled up on his forehead.
“Far’s we know, Old Man Crowther was the last one to be infected,” Pappy said. His voice was edged with tension. It sounded hollow in the night. “Them was bad times … bad times, I tell yah. But you know what folks is like ‘round these parts. We ain’t gonna talk ‘bout it much, and we sure as shit didn’t want any outsiders talkin’ about it. We could handle it ourselves.”
“But you said Old Man Crowther was infected,” Jeff said, surprised at the impatience in his voice. “Infected by what?”
He couldn’t put out of his mind how much finding that corpse today was bothering him. It was unlike any other body he had ever found.
“You’re saying Old Man Crowther got sick with … with somethin’ so bad he wrapped a length of chain around his waist, tied it to a cement block, and heaved himself overboard?”
“We figure he did it to spare the town more misery … to end the situation.”
Pappy sighed and then was silent for a long moment as he stared down at the harbor. Finally, he nodded.
“Ay-yuh. That’s ‘bout the size of it. They found his dory washed up on Black Horse Beach, so everyone figured he must’a done somethin’ like that.” He turned and looked directly at Jeff with intensity in his eyes that bordered on crazed.
“But you don’t know for sure he did that.”
“Nope,” Pappy said with a snort. “And if’n I wuz you, I’d do the smart thing and leave ‘im down there. We don’t need ta’ have that whole friggin’ situation startin’ up again. T’was hard enough containin’ it back in the day. Now-a-days— Key-rist!” Pappy hocked up a wad of mucous and spit it out into the darkness. It landed with a wet plop. “With them Christless cell phones ‘n the Internet ‘n all, the whole friggin’ world’ll know ‘bout it. Then … who knows what’ll happen?”
Jeff was struggling to phrase a question from the cascade of thoughts that filled his head, but he was drawing a blank. He wanted to believe that Pappy—as always—was talking out of his ass, but thinking about that corpse’s eyes made him wonder if there might not be something to what the old man was saying.
Before he could get out his first question, Pappy straightened up and said, “Well, I’ll be damned, but a powerful thirst has taken ahold ‘a me. Nice chattin’ with’cha, boy-o.”
Without another word, he turned and walked back into The Local, the screen door slamming shut behind him. Jeff realized Pappy didn’t really know if that was Old Man Crowther he’d found or if he’d had done what he said. He decided that the old man had just been speculating … spit-ballin’.
Jeff stayed on the back deck for a while longer, staring down at the harbor and trying not to let his gaze shift further out to sea. Silver splinters of moonlight glittered on the dark water. It was a beautiful view, but all he could picture was the dead man—whoever the hell he is!—sitting down there on the ocean floor in the total darkness.
* * *
The moment he opened his eyes and saw the sunlight streaming through the bedroom window, Jeff winced. A hot, needle-sharp pain slipped behind his eyes as he rolled over in bed. Disengaging himself from Marcie, who was still sound asleep, he moaned softly, bringing both hands to his forehead as he swung his feet from under the covers and onto the floor. Marcie’s eyelids fluttered for a moment, but then she rolled over onto her side away from him and the morning sunlight, and heaved a sigh.
“Do you really have to go?” she said, addressing the wall.
“Yeah.”
“This early?”
“Gotta … I have to work.”
“On a freakin’ Sunday?”
“Uh-huh … even on a freakin’ Sunday.”
Marcie sighed and then was silent for a long stretch as Jeff leveraged himself off the bed and scooped up the jeans and socks he’d worn the day before that were lying in a crumpled heap on the floor beside the bed. After he finished getting dressed without a shower—he’d need one for sure after today’s dive—he leaned over Marcie and kissed her on the shoulder.
She didn’t respond.
He knew she couldn’t have fallen back asleep that fast, but he wasn’t going to stir things up just now. She could be mad at him all she wanted. It wasn’t just that he had a job to do today. He had to go back down so he could find out exactly who that man was and how he’d come to be at the bottom of the sea.
By the time he arrived at the dock, the place was already a media circus. Reporters, TV camera crews, and assorted rubberneckers lined the stone wharf and dock, making it all but impossible for Jeff to make his way with his diving equipment down the gangplank to the waiting Coast Guard patrol boat. A couple of reporters shouted out questions to him, but he pushed past them, staring straight ahead, ignoring their questions.
“Word got out quick, huh?” Jeff said as he heaved his air tanks onto the boat.
Mark Curtis, one of the Coast Guardsmen, frowned and shook his head.
“Wouldn’t be so bad,” he said, “if someone had kept his goddamned mouth shut at The Local last night.”
“I didn’t talk to no reporters last night.”
“You talked to Pappy … Same thing.”
Chastened, Jeff climbed aboard.
The captain—a guy from Belfast named Harvey Thompson—revved the engine. Mark and the other crewmen cast off, and the boat started out, leaving behind a heavy, curling wake that rocked the floating docks.
* * *
After they got to the diver’s marker Jeff had left yesterday, he made one final check of his equipment in preparation for going overboard. His diving partner today—as usual when he was on the job—was Wesley Evans. Wes was married and lived in Tenant’s Harbor. He and Jeff had dived together for more than ten years, now. Perhaps because they were so used to communicating with each other by hand gestures below water, they hardly ever spoke above water. But they trusted that each of them knew intuitively what the other was thinking or going to do underwater. They were a good team even though it struck Jeff as peculiar that they didn’t hang out together when they were off duty.
Once he and Wes were ready, after nodding to each other, they plunged overboard. Even in June, the ocean water was chilly, but Jeff’s drysuit protected him from the initial cold shock. A wave splashed him full in the face, sending a bracing chill through him. After making sure his regulator was working properly, he swam out to the diver’s marker and grasped the rope he’d tied of
f yesterday. Running it through one rubber-gloved hand, he kicked and went under, sinking into the embracing darkness with Wes not far behind. The daylight shimmering above them quickly collapsed, plunging them into a preternatural gloom that gradually blended into an inky darkness below. Jeff and Wes switched on their flashlights, illuminating the water below with a diffused glow.
Down … down they went, and the deeper they went, the more a nameless apprehension filled Jeff. He knew what he was going to see when he got to the end of the rope, and he was dreading it. He was wondering if he could handle seeing the dead man’s empty gaze again. Overnight—especially after talking to Pappy—his memory of what he had found had gotten magnified by his imagination. He was surprised he hadn’t had nightmares. Now, he was trying to prepare himself mentally for what he was about to see, but he still wasn’t ready for it when the drowned man’s figure came into view.
Jeff hesitated, treading water several feet above the ocean floor. Wes stopped swimming, too, and they looked at each other for a lengthening moment, neither one of them indicating what they should do next. Jeff saw a cloud of confusion in his diving partner’s eyes, and he experienced a sudden, urgent desire to go back to the surface and talk to Wes about this before they proceeded. He wished he had more fully prepared Wes for what they were dealing with.
The moment passed without any communication between them, and they continued on down to the ocean floor. Their movements raised silt from the seabed, causing swirls of sand to rise like billowing clouds that shimmered with flakes of silica in the beams of their flashlights.
Jeff willed his pulse to slow down as he swept his light over the drowned man until it came to rest on the chain wrapped around the man’s waist. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the man’s eyes.
Not yet.
With a nod and a quick hand gesture, Jeff indicated to Wes that removing the chain from the block should be their first order of business, but for some reason, Jeff couldn’t force himself to move any closer to the corpse. He couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that the man’s dead eyes were staring at him.