Deep Shadow (18 page)

The needle on the pressure gauge pointed just above the
900 psi
mark. The needle of the depth gauge pointed at
20 ft.

Damn.
Not good. He was a novice diver, but the written exam was still fresh in Will’s mind and he knew that
1000 psi
was dangerously low. Even if he had forgotten, that portion of the pressure gauge was colored red to remind him. When the needle touched red, it meant it was time to surface, no dawdling.

The fact that they were now twenty feet underwater, instead of at fifteen feet, also told Will that the lake floor had indeed been dropping them into progressively deeper pockets. Thirty-three feet was another important boundary, the entry into three atmospheres of pressure, which required the use of decompression tables and also caused a faster drain on the air supply.

Depthwise, at least, he and the hippie were in safe territory. They might drown, but there was no chance of them dying from the bends, which was almost funny if it wasn’t so damn true.

Will had confidence in what he had learned. He had aced the NAUI Open Water written test, much to the surprise of everyone but himself. A scuba class wasn’t like school. Learning something useful, information that could save his life—or even lure a pretty girl into bed if a willing female scuba enthusiast appeared—was worth the effort.

Getting Will scuba certified was the idea of his court-appointed therapist, a woman who wore loud, clanking Indian jewelry and was a closet smoker—Will could smell it on her clothes and in her hair. She had discussed the subject with his probation officer, then the Minnesota couple that was trying to adopt him and, finally with Barbara Hayes before offering Will a choice. He could take a dive course at the Seminole County Rec Center—Oklahoma, not Florida—or he could agree to more therapy sessions specially designed by her to deal with patients who had unusual gifts—Will being among the few who qualified, she said.

It was the therapist’s secret hope that Will would finally be forced to admit his claustrophobic anxieties and decline the dive course.

Fat chance.

“I’m immune,” Will had told the shrink, referring to claustrophobia. “Being buried alive in a box has cured me for life.”

The scuba course lasted three weeks, which had left Will’s hair stinking of chlorine and also delayed his plans to run away from the court-appointed “boarding school,” which is what they called reform schools in Oklahoma. It was worth it, though, because Will enjoyed diving.

He liked being underwater, in the silence of his own skull, even in an indoor swimming pool. Diving a coral reef, though, was a hundred times better, as he had discovered the day they had spent on Key Largo. Will had never experienced anything like it in his life, and it was something good to think about just before going to sleep.

That first dive was as clear in his mind as the water of the Florida Keys.

He could picture himself dropping down through a luminous blue gel, all those waxen coral shapes assuming definition as he descended, colors brightening in his brain even as they were dulled by filtered light. Fish, as they moved among coral canyons, were as animated as wildflowers, whole schools of fish that appeared wind-tumbled by tidal current yet were as symmetrical as geese in flight.

Tomlinson had just now written that on his dive slate, then surprised Will by nudging him before putting the slate in Will’s face and using his flashlight.

Will had to lean closer to see the words, then he asked,
Look at what?,
speaking through his regulator, so it sounded like “Ook uh-hh utt?”

His eyes were already following Tomlinson’s flashlight to the narrowest part of the chamber, where there was a bowling ball-sized hole into which silt and sand created a small whirlpool as they were drawn downward by current.

Will had already seen the hole. In the last four minutes, he and Tomlinson had probed every inch of the chamber with their lights.

Tomlinson rubbed the dive slate clean and wrote,
We have to move. Agree?

Will nodded. No doubt about it, they had to do something before their air ran out. It had been nine minutes since they had last heard Ford above them, once digging so frantically that Tomlinson had had to bang a warning on his tank—the biologist was causing more rock to collapse on them.

Next, Tomlinson wrote,
Can’t go up. Agree?

Will shook his head. The idea of being crushed by the unstable ceiling scared the hell out of him. “Nooo ’uckin ’ay,” he responded.

Once again, Tomlinson used the flashlight to point at the bowling ball-sized hole. He wrote,
You stay. Conserve air!,
then banged a fist against his own chest, the gesture communicating
Leave it to me.

The light went out. It was like being immersed in a barrel of oil—that kind of blackness. Aside from an occasional flicker of firefly green—Tomlinson’s dive watch, as Will had already figured out—the only respite from the darkness were the thought patterns flowing behind Will’s eyes. They created pulsing yellow blossoms, and a linear red thatching that streamed and throbbed in his brain.

The colors signaled frustration. Impatience, too. Will was getting angry again.

He spent a full minute listening in darkness as Tomlinson worked at the hole. He could hear the random clank of the hippie’s air bottle against rock; a digging sound, then a grunt followed by more digging. Finally, Will had to look. He pointed his flashlight at his fins before touching the switch, then shined the light toward the hole.

He saw that Tomlinson had removed his BC and air bottle. The man was on his knees, pulling away chunks of rock, widening the hole, but the regulator was still in his mouth. He had made a startling amount of progress in a short time. The hole was a couple of feet wide now but still too narrow to enter, Will decided. Tomlinson was scarecrow thin, but he had a wide bony rack of shoulders.

Will grunted to get Tomlinson’s attention and wrote on his dive slate,
U—R—2 big. Me first.

Tomlinson responded with an emphatic shake of his head. “Nohh ’ay, Ohhh-zay.”

Maybe so, because seconds later Will watched Tomlinson wiggle his head and shoulders down into the hole, pushing his bottle and BC ahead of him. He had to scrabble hard with his toes to force his body through, but he did it. A moment later, the man disappeared into a blooming cloud of silt that was suggestive of a magic trick.

Will gave it a few seconds before crawling over and pointing his flashlight into the darkness. There wasn’t much to see: boiling silt and blackness. But the hole did appear to widen as it angled downward, about the same steep angle as a slide at a playground.

After a scary several seconds, though, Tomlinson did signal, and the three dull flashes seemed to originate from someplace far below. The light echoed in the darkness, illuminating the murk, but there was no single beam to mark the man’s location. Will flashed his light three times in reply, his heart pounding.

Apparently so. Silt was clearing, siphoning down the hole as if a plug had been pulled, sucking water into a space beneath him. The hole, jagged-edged, looked smaller now for some reason.

Will was getting angry again, pissed off at what he was now forced to do. What he’d told his therapist about being immune to claustrophobia wasn’t exactly true. Since what had happened to him, being packed tight in a crate and buried, Will sometimes awoke at night in a choking, sweaty fever. He felt like darkness was suffocating him, seeping in through his pores.

Even so, Will had never admitted the truth to anyone or even risked providing some sign that he was afraid, such as sleeping with a light on. Leaving a light on at night was tempting, but Will refused to indulge in that sort of weakness. Make even a small concession to what had happened and there was no telling where it might lead to. He could end up a drunk, passed out in a ditch like too many other Skins he’d seen on the Rez.

Besides, being scared was his business, nobody else’s.

As Will studied the hole, he realized that he was breathing faster, burning up air. He waited until he had flipped his BC and tank over his head and pushed them halfway down into the hole before checking his pressure gauge one final time.

The needle pointed close to
700 psi,
although it was hard to be sure because the needle wasn’t as exact as a digital gauge.

How did
700 psi
translate timewise? He might have ten minutes of air left, fifteen at most, plus he had the reserve bottle. Will didn’t own a dive watch and now he was almost glad. It was better not to know how long they’d been down.

What Will was sure of, though, was this: He wasn’t going to die, boxed in by rocks, without doing whatever he could to escape—not alone in darkness, no goddamn way!

Will switched off his light and secured it under the sleeve of his wet suit, aware that his entire body was shaking.
Goddamn, it’s dark!
After thinking about it for a moment, Will looped the flashlight’s lanyard over his wrist so it would be right there when he needed it. Just the thought of losing the little flashlight gave him a sick feeling in his abdomen.

Tomlinson had removed his fins to get better footing, and now Will did the same. It was easier without the fins. Tomlinson’s fins were sinkers, but Will’s were floaters, and they had made it difficult to neutralize buoyancy. When he took the fins off, they floated past his ears and attached themselves like magnets to the limestone overhead.

Once again, Will shined his light down into the hole and flashed it three times. Tomlinson responded by swinging his flashlight back and forth, an invitation.

Will forced his head, then his shoulders, down into blackness, pushing his tank ahead of him. He dug his toes into the limestone and used the tank to bulldoze a path.

He thought,
I’m in a cave. I knew this was going to happen. A week ago, I knew it. Now here I am, goddamn it!

Sometimes, Will knew things. He didn’t know how and he’d never really wondered why, but now here he was. It was happening just as he’d known it would.

 

 

A week before,
on his way to Sanibel, riding in the rear seat of a Lincoln Town Car, Will hadn’t paid much attention to the woman beside him until she got on the subject of Florida’s underwater caves.

“We might be driving over a cave system right now,” Barbara Hayes had told Will, then nodded, studying a map as a road sign blurred past.

ORLANDO/DISNEY WORLD 146 MILES
.

“There are miles of caves in this area, according to this,” the woman continued. “Natural tunnels with chambers big enough to drive a truck. This is the right area”—she had glanced at the map for confirmation—“caves with branches that run beneath shopping malls, highways, even this interstate. There could be scuba divers under our car right now.
Seriously.
It doesn’t matter that the sun’s setting. What does sunlight matter to a cave diver? They dress like astronauts—you know what I mean, they wear helmets with built-in lights and breathing hoses. They use battery-powered scooters so they can travel faster. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

A moment later, Hayes didn’t appear too sure but sounded hopeful as she had added, “I thought you’d find that interesting.”

Will did. He had leaned his face near the window, picturing a semi they were passing, its lights on, far beneath the road in an underwater cave that was more like a city in outer space, scuba divers soaring through the darkness, their helmets shooting laser beams, milky white.

It was weird to hear the woman talking about caves because the countryside along the interstate was so flat. But she was right. There was a cave beneath them—no scuba divers, but the cave was there. Will could feel it. He had a sense for such things. Images came into his head less like pictures than as overlapping impressions that communicated colors, spatial volume, odors. He wasn’t always right, but he was right often enough.

“Synesthesia,” the shrinks back in Oklahoma called it. Synesthesia was a special gift, according to his government-appointed counselor. She had told him it was a complex neurological condition that caused a heightened sensitivity to all sorts of things.

The boy had touched his nose to the car window and allowed his mind to fill with the scent of algae, salted rock, empty space, and he also sensed a conduit of flowing water beneath them. It was down there, a cave, far below the six lanes of asphalt where billboards were frozen, solitary and bright, among palm trees that caught the windy sunset light.

Beside him, Hayes had interrupted, saying, “It’s hard to picture, I know.”

Will had replied, “Yeah.”

“Wait . . . I just realized maybe the idea of cave diving doesn’t appeal to you. Or does it?” Her tone asked
Did I say something wrong?

Will said, “Naw, it does. I’d like to try it if I ever get the chance. I think it would be fun.”

Barbara said, “I forget sometimes. Not about what happened to you. God knows, I could never forget that. But that you might be sensitive . . . that it might make you uncomfortable, the thought of being in a cave. Good Lord!—now I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

The sophisticated woman wasn’t sounding so sophisticated now, which was typical of childless women who tried too hard to relate to him. Will had experienced it often enough to know.