checked, the needle pointed just below the
The needle on the pressure gauge pointed just above the
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
