What Lurks Beneath (16 page)

T
he side cavern narrowed further, and she paused. She extended the tip of a long, serpentine arm deeper into the crack, into the increasing flow of water. Here, the particles in the current were dense, overwhelming. Tasting of waste, of life, of food. Elongating further directly into the flow, the arm tip made contact. Something was blocking the source of the outflow, but allowing water to pass through it.

Lightly, the tip of the complex appendage explored the obstruction. It was hard, encrusted in barnacles. But there were uniform openings in the heavy steel lattice, through which the water flowed.

She was intrigued by this concentrated scent of food, which drifted steadily toward her now in the light current. But the impulse that had driven her through life—hunger—had faded some, and was weak at the moment.

She moved farther into the deep crack, into total darkness. She had been here before. Into this side cavern. From the remains outside its opening, far below at the dark bottom of the main fissure, she knew this was a den frequently used in the past by her own kind. Others had dispelled waste material from this space many times over thousands of years, to sink to the bottom of the pit.

This place was not unlike the one she had been raised in, in which she had remained, devouring most of her siblings until she was strong enough to venture out and hunt the deep ocean. The current was ideal here, its steady flow bringing oxygen and freshwater. And the space was just adequate. It narrowed quickly, was compressed laterally, and the lack of extra space would make it easier to protect.

But for now, there was still nothing to protect. For now, she needed to satisfy her other, constant urge.

She manipulated her body, slowly turning it, and squeezed back out the mouth of the broad crack, into the main shaft of the fissure.

Her immense form nearly spanned the entire shaft as she rose toward the light above, snakelike arms trailing many yards behind her, toward the gaping mouth of the submarine pit. Then she emerged quietly from the gloom.

M
ack floated facedown in the water. Watching. Waiting.

Eighty feet below him, a few stories below the shallower coral shelf clearly visible through the lens of his dive mask, the dark, crescent-shaped mouth of a crevasse gaped up at him. A marine fault-line hole. The great fissure opened liked a torn seam in the expanse of rough fabric that was the sea floor, not far from where the edge of the shelf dropped into the abyss. The water above the hole had remained gin-clear for some time, an indication that warm seawater had been draining from the open ocean back into the cavity.

Mack breathed in through his snorkel. Exhaled. Concentrated.

A large spotted eagle ray came into view as it winged languidly past the edge of the hole, keeping its distance. He watched until it disappeared into the blue. Not much farther in that direction was the edge of the island shelf, where long, curly whip-wire corals poked out of the top edge of the vertical wall, like the sparse hairs on the back of some beast, its skin pocked with numerous caverns and recesses. The steep drop-off there ended 6,000 feet below, in a submarine trench.

This marine hole, nicknamed the Bottomless Hole by local dive shops because of its great depths and poor entry access, was located just off the coast from White Sand Cay, and the beach at Oceanus. But guides only brought the most experienced divers here. It was simply too dangerous. The last time he'd been here was years ago, also with John Breck.

Ocean blue holes, unlike the inland holes, underwent massive exchanges of water each time the tides changed. For smaller ocean holes, with larger mouths, the cycling of water wasn't a major concern. But this was a massive feature, reportedly extending into a fissure more than four hundred feet below the ocean floor, and its opening was comparatively small.

The fissure had been formed during the Ice Ages, when water levels had receded. A dome of rock above a huge cavern had collapsed, in the absence of hydrostatic pressure that had been supporting the rock overhead. This collapse had revealed the deep fissure, and created the resulting rubble piled along one side, narrowing the width of its mouth. Mack knew from experience that the exchange of tidal water in a narrow-mouthed feature like this could create deadly rip currents. Even a whirlpool.

A diver caught above the mouth of the hole when it was sucking in seawater would be as helpless as a tiny piece of food swirling into the garbage disposal of a draining kitchen sink.

Mack had heard this hole had claimed a lot of divers. Somewhere down there, stuffed into cracks leading back under the island, Mack knew there were probably a bunch of corpses. A real-life Davy Jones's Locker.

The trick to diving a hole like this was simple timing. The best time—the only time, really—to enter was after the hole had just sucked in warm seawater, but before it began to expel cold, cloudy subterranean water regurgitated from the underbelly of the island. Timing dives properly could mean the difference between life and death.

Dive too soon, and you got swallowed up. Too late, and you wouldn't be able to see a damn thing, which also was very dangerous if you were hundreds of feet underwater and inside a narrow fissure.

Peering into the dark crescent, Mack decided it was time. He swam over to the boat, unable to kick without a prosthesis, instead pulling with his arms.

He struggled up the slippery, rounded steps of the aluminum swim ladder. The rented pontoon boat, a twenty-five-foot outboard with a blue-painted double hull, was anchored to the reef. The vessel had come cheap, owned by a diver he knew. Mack nodded at his niece.

“Is it time?” Val said.

“Now or never. Besides, wind's picking up.”

The red-and-white dive flag flapping in the breeze over the stern had begun to stiffen. Along the reef crest stretching in both directions on their landward side, just offshore of numerous smaller cays poking above the barrier wall, the waves had begun to break more violently.

Next to Val, Eric was tinkering with DORA on the deck. The kid was obsessed with the thing. Like some stupid pet. But Mack had to admit, the submersible's 3-D renderings of the inland holes were pretty amazing. He was looking forward to seeing what this hole really looked like inside, after DORA got a good look, and finding out how deep it really was.

“Your girlfriend ready?” he asked Eric.

Eric glared at him. “Yes. Val, let's get her in.”

She helped Eric lower DORA into the water.

“This the same umbilical we've been using?” Mack said. “Same length?”

Eric nodded. “Stop questioning me. It's four hundred feet. And it should be easier to prevent snags in this hole.”

Val sat next to Mack, and he helped her strap on a scuba tank, and then pushed his shoulders into the vest affixed to his own tank. Finally, he strapped on the special prosthesis he'd created for diving, which was connected to a fin, and slid the other fin onto his remaining foot.

Nodding at Val, he rolled back into the water. She followed.

 

 

They sank toward the hole like deadweight, not kicking. They needed to relax to conserve air.

Mack felt good about their timing. He couldn't detect any suction of water into the hole. They dropped like stones, quickly passing by large coral heads growing like giant sores on the mouth of the depression, on a ledge forty feet above the dark crescent of the hole.

Near the coral heads, large schools of grunts and sergeant majors gathered. He also spied a trio of lionfish, one much larger than the others. The damn things were everywhere now. Native to the Indo-Pacific, the invasive fish had established themselves in the Bahamas and Caribbean after the release from some aquarium in Florida. They were good to eat, but their spines were deadly and they killed off a lot of native marine life.

Mack had to admit, he was as puzzled as the others by DORA's data from within the big inland hole. They had gone back the next day to confirm the ROV's earlier findings. The readings had been the same. But there was no way to know if something about the cavern had indeed been different when DORA had first entered the hole, or why she had somehow not detected what was obviously a large recess off one side of the cavern.

Mack listened to the loud hiss of compressed air passing through his regulator as they sank past the three-story vertical wall and passed into the maw of the hole. Although there were fish all over the reef, nothing was moving in the blackness below them.

As his eyes adjusted, he could see the crack begin to widen. In the powerful beam of his dive light, the curved, pale walls sank under the island and into blackness. Something moved within it. Four ghostly jacks, each a yard long, emerged and swam in formation beneath the curved wall, barely discernible in the gloom before disappearing back into it.

He looked up. The fissure's opening, brightly lit from above, shrank into a slit as they sank deeper. He glanced at his gauges. The water temperature remained constant, about seventy-five degrees. No thermocline here.

He thought he felt a light current flutter past, from a dark opening in the side of the cavern. He'd heard that the main outflow pipe for the resort aquariums was concealed somewhere back in there. The builders had ingeniously utilized the natural caverns below the island to minimize the length of pipe necessary to extend the facility's outflow away from the beaches. He continued to sink, and after a moment the current was gone.

Val's plan now was to simply get 3-D scans of as many holes as possible, including those in the ocean. They would start with this one. A week later, they would go back to each for a second scan, to see if they could once again detect a significant change in shape or volume. It seemed like a good idea. And if they detected the same thing again . . .

He gazed down into the blackness, suddenly feeling like something might be down there. He looked over at his niece, and she gave him the okay signal with thumb and forefinger. She not only had guts. She had a big heart.

He couldn't let anything happen to her.

 

 

A hundred and thirty feet down, about fifty feet into the gaping maw, Mack and Val had finally stopped and watched the ROV whir past, nose down, dwarfed by the rough, curved walls of the hole as it disappeared into blackness. That had been ten minutes ago, and still its transmission cable continued to sink past Mack. But he was growing restless.

He tapped Val on the shoulder and pointed to where he was headed, and then turned and swam toward the side of the expansive cavity. She remained behind, hovering and watching the cable.

He neared the rough wall, but it lacked anything interesting. There was virtually no coral living inside here, and there were few fish. Despite the tidal fluxes, water circulation in the holes was usually poor. The water often became anoxic deeper down, and deadly to most sea life other than bacteria. He wondered what on earth the jacks had been doing in the darkness, or if he had merely imagined them.

On the vertical wall of the fissure, twenty feet to one side, he spied an odd-looking object resting on a ledge. A length of something, encrusted in barnacles. A pipe? He kicked over to it, and it became apparent what he was looking at. Some sort of bone.

He picked it up. Was it human? He couldn't be sure, as it was badly decomposed and encrusted in barnacles. It looked like it had been here a very long time. But it looked like it could be a femur. Mack thought about Breck. His body was rotting in that other, godforsaken inland hole. It wasn't right. He'd been a good man, and a hell of a diver. A friend.

He needed to know what the hell had happened to him.

Maybe Valerie would know what kind of bone this was. He turned away from the cavern wall. And stopped.

In front of him in the dark, semicircular shaft of water, running vertically down from the opening in the hole above, was the cable, which had now ceased moving. But his niece wasn't there.

He kicked forward, searching. His field of view was limited by the dive mask, and he had to twist his head in all directions. But he saw nothing. She was gone.

He began to feel a hint of panic. He looked down the length of the cable, to where it faded into the gloom maybe seventy feet below him. She wouldn't have gone down there. They hadn't planned on going that deep, and she wouldn't go alone. She wasn't that stupid.

His eyes caught movement on the wall directly below him. Bubbles. He exhaled in relief.

She was directly beneath him, maybe thirty feet deeper, against the cavern wall. In the dim light, without any color at this depth besides drab blues and grays, he had simply been unable to see her. He swore into his regulator. She was too far down, using different mixed gasses than they had in the inland holes. She'd take on a lot of nitrogen. And she was too far from him, her dive buddy, if anything went wrong.

Detecting movement, he looked back at the cable. It had twisted. Mack watched as it continued to turn. It was moving, but it wasn't headed down. Was the ROV already coming back up?

Below him, Valerie began her ascent. She was through with whatever had lured her down there, or else she too figured DORA was headed back up. Viewed from above, her face and shoulders stood out in bright contrast to the black void below her. As she gradually rose, just as he began to make out her eyes in the mask, something moved in the darkness behind her. It wasn't the jacks.

Mack's heart jumped. He squinted into the void.
Nonsense.
He had to be just seeing things, letting his imagination—

The bone dropped out of his hand, and sank toward Valerie.

Beneath her, the entire curve of blackness was changing, beginning to take shape, rising rapidly upward from the depths and toward her. He shouted into his regulator, even though he knew she couldn't hear him. Still twenty feet below him, she was focused on the bone sinking slowly past her. She had no idea what was beneath her.

The shape began to take on form as it caught the light from above. It was something pale, sinuous.

Something huge.