Halfway down the steps, the blind Mayan stepped out and grabbed William’s wrist with surprising strength for a man of his years. The Mayan’s stare was blank-his glazed white eyes not quite aimed in the right direction. “Tu'ux ka biin?” he asked in Yucatec-Maya.
William paused, his eyes darting while his brain scrambled to switch languages. “To the lake,” he said, tugging to free his arm. “I’m going to the lake.”
The old Mayan wrenched at his arm, urging him back up the steps, with fear in his voice. William could barely make out what the man was saying-something about the cenote being hungry? He wasn’t making sense. Yet there was no time to figure out what the crazed man wanted. Yucatec-Maya was a language William required at a slower pace, but he couldn’t waste another second. “Let me go! K’ p’aat in biin!” William said, prying the bony fingers from his arm and pushing the man aside.
The blind Mayan stumbled, but regained his balance by grabbing hold of the stairway railing. “Bik xi’ikech! Bik xi’ikech!” he said, begging William to return.
Everyone in the restaurant spoke in hushed tones, gawking at William with big eyes as he raced by, his gauges and tubes clanging against the tank on his back. His six-foot-two frame plowed through clusters of people on his way to the cenote. He bumped over a few empty chairs while he focused on getting his mask and fins out from the dive bag he carried.
Betty’s husband watched William with a renewed sense of hope in his eyes.
A thin man wearing a suit stepped in front of William, raising his hands in a halting gesture, blocking the path to the lake. “Help is on the way. We must wait. I have told you before that you cannot dive from the restaurant,” he said, his voice cracking when William’s large stature overshadowed him.
“Get out of my way!” William said, barging past the restaurant manager. He pulled on his mask, shot some air through the regulator with a couple taps on the purge valve, and bit down on the mouthpiece.
“Diving is not permitted,” the manager said, pointing to a faded sign nailed to a tree to reaffirm his declaration.
Ignoring the manager, William took a few last steps and plunged into the cenote. He could hear the crowd cheering in a rowdy manner. While positioning his deflator hose over his head, he saw the manager stomp his foot and storm off, jerking a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He knew he would be in some kind of trouble when he came out of the water.
William released the air from his vest and pulled his fins on. While sinking beneath the surface, he flipped over and kicked his way down to accelerate his descent. He surveyed the area beneath him and spotted Betty caught in some branches along the edge of the cenote. William shivered from the chilly water; it became colder the deeper he went. He cracked his jaw every few feet to equalize the pressure in his ears-deeper and deeper-zoning in on the yellow of Betty’s shirt, a color that stood out like the moon in the night sky, amidst the dark shades at those depths.
The increased atmospheric pressure forced a large belch from his lungs in the form of bubbles that made their way back to the surface; William regretted drinking so much soda just before.
Upon nearing Betty, it looked like her arms and legs were greenish-brown. He realized that it was only her shirt that he had seen from above. The rest of her… wasn’t there. William deduced that the snarl of branches had ripped off her shirt when she sank.
He pulled Betty’s shirt loose, stirring up a cloud of decayed particles all around him, and he tucked it into a pocket on his vest. After detaching a small flashlight from a clip on his buoyancy vest, he beamed the light in all directions, hoping to spot her body nearby. However, he only found a school of tiny fish attracted to the light. He aimed his flashlight into the depths of the cenote, unable to see the bottom. No way would he risk descending any deeper just to find the body of a dead woman. Yet William felt terrible that he would have to return to the surface with nothing more than Betty’s shirt. So he remained at the same depth, surveying an area of about fifty feet in either direction, lighting up the algae-covered branches and roots with his flashlight.
Had he retrieved her immediately, there may have been time for resuscitation. Now it was hopeless-too much time had elapsed. He decided to begin his ascent, but paused when he noticed how the sediment drifted to the center of the cenote. While watching the clumps of muck moving away from him, he discovered that he too had drifted away from the cenote’s edge. He wondered how such a strong current could be in a cenote. It occurred to him that Betty’s body had likely floated off in the same direction.
William checked his pressure gauge-just over eleven hundred pounds; still plenty of air for a final search. He shot a burst of air into his vest to adjust his buoyancy and allowed himself to be carried by the drift. He scanned the area with his flashlight, expecting to be startled any moment by the sudden vision of a dead woman hovering before him.
The current intensified as he went along, reminding him of his drift dives off the shores of Cancun with his dad the year before. Tears formed in his eyes as images of his father flooded past. He still missed him so much. William grimaced, remembering the time he promised his dad that he would never dive alone. His mom was going to be so angry with him. For sure she would find out about his diving stunt from that restaurant manager. He shook his head, wondering what kind of punishment he would be facing.
William began kicking his way to the surface, but he couldn’t break free from the current. He repositioned himself and kicked in the opposite direction to slow his progress. An image began to take shape ahead amidst the dark-blue of the cenote. He could not believe his eyes, and he cleared his mask to make sure his vision wasn’t obscured in some way. With long powerful strokes, he kicked hard to maintain distance from it. Ahead of him, a gigantic frothy whirlpool swayed from side to side, occasionally reaching closer to the surface, sucking down anything in its path. He watched in amazement as a large tree trunk slipped down the funnel.
The blind Mayan’s words snapped into place in his mind-something about the cenote being hungry-that it needed to eat. A shot of adrenaline raced through William’s veins. That’s what had pulled Betty under! He kicked with his fins to back away, but the suction still held him. He pressed the low pressure inflator button, filling his buoyancy vest to capacity, feeling it tighten around his chest. Trying to break free, he kicked with the force of a seal running from a great white shark. Yet he continued to descend.
The whirlpool had him-snared him in a tornado of bubbles. He couldn’t tell up from down, but felt himself spinning to the center of the whirlpool. His stomach rose with the sensation of falling. Darkness enveloped him. He plunged down into the depths and lost consciousness.
William snapped awake, coughing from the water that he had swallowed. The sharp pain behind his eyes explained the clouded view from his mask; his sinuses had burst during the rapid descent. He tipped up the edge of the mask to flood and clear it, but no water entered. A steady breeze drifted across his face, so he pulled his mask down and wiped the water and blood from his eyes. Although he had dropped his flashlight somewhere along the journey, the green florescent algae that clung to the slippery rocks provided a little light for William to see his surroundings-a narrow underground river propelling him along.
The darkness consumed him as the tunnel twisted and turned. The river veered to the right, slamming him hard against the wall, popping the regulator from his mouth. William grasped and clawed at the sides of the tunnel, but the walls were too smooth and his fingers slipped off the slimy algae. With no other recourse, he gave in to the ride.
The sounds of crashing water intensified just as the source of the noise became apparent. William slipped off the top of a waterfall, falling feet-first, with a big splash into an underground cenote. Resurfacing a moment later due to his inflated vest, he paddled to the shore like a half-dead dog. Upon reaching a rocky beach, he dragged his battered body out, grunting and moaning all the way. He unbuckled his scuba equipment and allowed it to fall to the ground with a loud ‘clunk’ that echoed through the cavern around him.
Exhausted, William flopped on his back, threw his mask to the ground, and lied motionless, listening to the cascading sounds of the waterfall. Pinholes of sunlight from the cavern’s ceiling provided just enough light to see the giant stalactites above him; they looked like claws reaching down.
“So you decided to go for a swim after all,” said a familiar voice.
William jumped. “Betty? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m over here.”
He spotted her approaching along the shore of the underground lake. “You’re alive!” he said, and blushed upon noticing her exposed breasts. He retrieved the yellow shirt that he had stuffed into his vest pocket earlier.
“Yeah, I’m alive… unfortunately… because I don’t figure there’s any way out of this place.”
