our predicament.
'I confess the thought crossed my mind that I could cut out of there, and come back for them later with Victor, but this was playing a rather iffy game with someone else's lives. And if they were truly unaware, it would be fairly rotten to take off without even warning them. So I went after Ann again-my god, I can still see that blue tail and the white limbs and black feet and hair with the light getting worse every minute and the bottom now gone really rotten again. And as bad luck would have it she was going in just the worst line-north-north-west.
'Well, I swam and I swam and I swam. You know how a chase takes you, and somehow being unable to overtake a mere girl made it worse. But I was gaining, age and all, until just as I got close enough to sense something was wrong, she turned sidewise above two automobile tires-and I saw it wasn't a girl at all.
'I had been following a goddamned great fish-a fish with a bright blue-and-orange band around its belly, and a thin white body ending in a black flipperlike tail. Even its head and nape were black, like her hair and mask. It had a repulsive catfishlike mouth, with barbels.
'The thing goggled at me and then swam awkwardly away, just as the light went worse yet. But there was enough for me to see that it was no normal fish, either, but a queer archaic thing that looked more tacked together than grown. This I can't swear to, because I was looking elsewhere by then, but it was my strong impression that as it went out of my line of sight its whole tail broke off.
'But as I say, I was looking elsewhere. I had turned my light on, although I was not deep but only dim, because I had to ready my watch and compass. It had just dawned on me that I was very probably a dead man. My only chance, if you can call it that, was to swim east as long as I could, hoping for that eddy and Victor. And when my light came on, the first thing I saw was the girl, stark naked and obviously stone cold dead, lying in a tangle of nets and horrid stuff on the bottom ahead.
'Of Harry or anything human there was no sign at all. But there was a kind of shining, like a pool of moonlight, around her, which was so much stronger than my lamp that I clicked it off and swam slowly toward her, through the nastiest mess of basura I had yet seen. The very water seemed vile. It took longer to reach her than I had expected, and soon I saw why.
'They speak of one's blood running cold with horror, y'know. Or people becoming numb with horror piled on horrors. I believe I experienced both those effects. It isn't pleasant, even now.' He lit a third Caporal, and I could see that the smoke column trembled. Twilight had fallen while he'd been speaking. A lone mercury lamp came on at the shore end of the pier; the one near us was apparently out, but we sat in what would ordinarily have been a pleasant tropic evening, sparkling with many moving lights-whites, reds, and green, of late-moving incomers, and the rainbow lighting from the jewel-lit cruise ship ahead, all cheerfully reflected in the unusually calm waters.
'Again I was mistaken, you see. It wasn't Ann at all; but the rather more distant figure of a young woman, of truly enormous size. All in this great ridge of graveyard luminosity, of garbage in phosphorescent decay. The current was carrying me slowly, inexorably, right toward her-as it had carried all that was there now. And perhaps I was also a bit hypnotized. She grew in my sight meter by meter as I neared her. I think six meters-eighteen feet-was about it, at the end… I make that guess later, you understand, as an exercise in containing the unbearable-by recalling the size of known items in the junkpile she lay on. One knee, for example, lay alongside an oil drum. At the time she simply filled my world. I had no doubt she was dead, and very beautiful. One of her legs seemed to writhe gently.
'The next stage of horror came when I realized that she was not a gigantic woman at all-or rather, like the fish, she was a woman-shaped construction. The realization came to me first, I think, when I could no longer fail to recognize that her 'breasts' were two of those great net buoys with their blue knobs for nipples.
'After that it all came with a rush-that she was a made-up body-all sorts of pieces of plastic, rope, styrofoam, netting, crates, and bolts-much of it clothed with that torn translucent white polyethylene for skin. Her hair was a dreadful tangle of something, and her crotch was explicit and unspeakable. One hand was a torn, inflated rubber glove, and her face-well, I won't go into it except that one eye was a traffic reflector and her mouth was partly a rusted can.
'Now you might think this discovery would have brought some relief, but quite the opposite. Because simultaneously I had realized the very worst thing of all-
'She was alive.'
He took a long drag on his cigarette.
'You know how things are moved passively in water? Plants waving, a board seesawing and so on? Sometimes enough almost to give an illusion of mobile life. What I saw was nothing of this short.
'It wasn't merely that as I floated over, her horrible eyes 'opened' and looked at me and her rusted-can mouth smiled. Oh, no.
'What I mean is that as she smiled, first one whole arm, shed-ding junk, stretched up and reached for me against the current, and then the other did the same.
'And when I proved to be out of reach, this terrifying figure, or creature, or unliving life, actually sat up, again against the current, and reached up toward me with both arms at full extension.
'And as she did so, one of her 'breasts'-the right one-came loose and dangled by some tenuous thready stuff.
'All this seemed to pass in slow motion-I even had time to see that there were other unalive yet living things moving near her on the pile. Not fish, but more what I should have taken, on land, for rats or vermin-and I distinctly recall the paper-flat skeleton of something like a chicken, running and pecking. And other moving things like nothing in this world. I have remembered all this very carefully, y'see, from what must have been quick glimpses, because in actual fact I was apparently kicking like mad in a frenzied effort to get away from those dreadful reaching arms.
'It was not till I shot to the surface with a mighty splash that I came somewhere near my senses. Below and behind me I could still see faint cold light. Above was twilight and the darkness of an oncoming small storm.
'At that moment the air in my last tank gave out-or rather that splendid Yank warning buzz, which means you have just time to get out of your harness, sounded off.
'I had, thank god, practiced the drill. Despite being a terror-paralysed madman, habit got me out of the harness before the tanks turned into lethal deadweight. In my panic, of course, the headlight went down too. I was left unencumbered in the night, free to swim toward Cuba, or Cozumel, and to drown as slow or fast as fate willed.
'The little storm had left the horizon stars free. I recall that pure habit made me take a sight on what seemed to be Canopus, which should be over Cozumel. I began to swim in that direction. I was appallingly tired, and as the adrenalin of terror which had brought me this far began to fade out of my system, I realized I could soon be merely drifting, and would surely die in the next day's sun if I survived till then. Nevertheless it seemed best to swim whilst I could.
'I rather resented it when some time after a boat motor passed nearby. It forced me to attempt to yell and wave, nearly sinking myself. I was perfectly content when the boat passed on. But someone had seen-a spotlight wheeled blindingly, motors reversed, I was forcibly pulled from my grave and voices from what I take to be your Texas demanded, roaring with laughter,'-here he gave quite a creditable imitation-' 'Whacha doin' out hyar, boy, this time of night? Ain't no pussy out hyar, less'n ya'all got a date with a mermaid.' They had been trolling for god knows what, mostly beer.
'The driver of that boat claimed me as a friend and later took me home for the night, where I told him-and to him alone-the whole story. He was Jorge Chuc.
'Next day I found that the young couple, Harry and Ann, had taken only a brief look at the charming unspoiled area, and then started east, exactly according to plan, with me-or something very much like me-following behind them all the way. They had been a trifle surprised at my passivity and uncommunicativeness, and more so when, on meeting Victor, I was no longer to be found. But they had taken immediate action, even set a full-scale search in progress-approximately seventy kilometers from where I then was. As soon as I came to myself I had to concoct a wild series of lies about cramps and heart trouble to get them in the clear and set their minds at ease. Needless to say, my version included no mention of diver-imitating fish-life.'
He tossed the spark of his cigarette over the rail before us.
'So now, my friend, you know the whole story of all I know of what is to be found beyond the Dead Reef. It may be that others know of other happenings and developments there. Or of similar traps elsewhere. The sea is large… Or it may be that the whole yarn comes from neuroses long abused by stuff like this.'
