For my first dive, both Edward and Forrest were going down with me. As we sat on the side of the boat, preparing ourselves, one or the other of them would keep thinking of some piece of advice that he'd forgotten to tell me; and by the time we were ready to drop, my mind was a jumble of signals and procedures and hints on what to do if my facemask fogged, or my air wasn't coming through, or (the most likely emergency, as far as I was concerned) I started to panic.
Gilly came over, clutching her notepad, and stood beside me, the wind ruffling the fur of her parka.
'Good luck,' she said. 'Stay safe.'
‘I’ll try,' I told her, with a dry mouth. 'I think I'm more scared now than I was when those windows fell in.'
'Windows?' asked Edward. He looked at me, and then at Gilly; but when he saw that neither of us was going to tell him what we were talking about, he shrugged, and said, 'Are you ready? Let's drop.'
I fitted in my mouthpiece, said a silent prayer inside of my head, and then dropped backwards into the sea.
It was cold and chaotic down there: nothing but foggy water and rushing bubbles. But as I started to sink, I glimpsed the whiteness of Edward's suit next to me, and then another white blur as Forrest came dropping in after us, and I began to feel that aqualung diving might not be as terrifying as I had thought it was going to be.
All three of us finned into the tidal stream; Edward and Forrest with balance and grace, me with plenty of enthusiasm but not much in the way of style. The ocean wasn't too deep here, especially at low tide, no more than 20 or 30 feet; but it was quite deep enough for me, and it was murky enough too for me to stay as close to my buddies as I could.
As we descended towards the bottom, I felt myself becoming progressively less buoyant, until, as we skimmed a few feet over the sloping surface of the Granitehead mud bank, I was in a state of neutral buoyancy, although I tended to rise and sink a little as I breathed in and out. I was a good swimmer. I had made the swimming team at school, a bronze for backstroke. But this chilly underwater exploration of the black ooze on the west shore of Granitehead Neck was something different altogether. I felt like a clumsy, over-excited child, inexperienced and only just in control of my body and my movements.
Edward swam into view and made the 'okay, all is well,' hand signal, which was the same hand signal that St Louis cab drivers usually make when they see a tasty-looking girl prancing down the sidewalk. I gave him the same signal back, thinking how drowned and bulgy Edward's eyes looked behind his facemask. I had been told not to make a thumb's-up signal because that meant something different altogether. Forrest, ten or fifteen feet away, beckoned us to start searching. If I was only going to be down here for five minutes, I might just as well help the hunt for the David Dark.
We were planning to make a systematic circular search of the area around the Alexis, swimming in an anti-clockwise spiral and leaving numbered white markers on the bottom to show where we had been. We started off where the boat's anchor was buried in the ooze, and began to fin ourselves around and around, until I had totally lost all sense of direction. As we went, however, Forrest pushed the markers into the mud, one at each completed half-circle, so that we could be sure we weren't covering the same ground twice, or straying way off our search area altogether.
I checked my watch. I had been down for three minutes and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Not only cold, and awkward, but claustrophobic as well. Although I had started off by breathing easily, I was finding it difficult to keep up the regular rhythm, and I recognized that even if my mind wasn't panicking, my lungs were beginning to act catchy and nervous.
I tried to remember the signal for 'something wrong — not an emergency.' A kind of hand-flapping, I think Dan Bass had said, coupled with an indication of what was wrong. How did I explain claustrophobia with a hand-signal? Put my hand around my throat and pretend to be strangling? Squeeze my head in my hands?
Remember not to panic, I told myself. You're perfectly all right. You're swimming without any difficulty; you're still breathing. What's more, you only have a couple of minutes to go and then you'll be back on the surface again. Edward and Forrest will take care of you.
But when I raised my head again, I couldn't see either Edward or Forrest anywhere. All I could see was cloudy water, almost as thick as barley-broth, whirling with mud and debris.
I finned around and looked behind me, to see if they were there: but again, all that I could see was water. A stray flounder darted through the murk like a Dickensian character making his way through a London fog, quick and confident. But where were the white wetsuits and orange head-pieces that were supposed to make my diving buddies visible through ten feet of submarine darkness?
Don't panic, I repeated. They must be around here someplace. If they're not, then all you have to do is follow the markers back to the anchorline, and fin your way up to the surface again. The problem was, there wasn't a marker in sight, and in turning around to look for my companions, I had completely lost my sense of direction. I could feel the chilly tidal stream flowing gently against me, but when we had started diving the tide had been on the turn, and I couldn't work out which direction it was flowing in, or how far it might have carried me while I was just flapping around here thinking about what to do.
My breath came in short, tense gasps. I tried not to think about all the things that Edward and Dan Bass had warned me to watch out for. If you have to surface, even in an emergency, don't come up too fast. You could end up with an air embolism in your bloodstream that could conceivably kill you. Don't come up any faster than your smallest bubbles, that was what Dan Bass had advised; and, if you can, take a decompression stop on the way.
Burst lung was another danger: overinflating the lungs at depth, and coming to the surface with too much pressure inside them, causing them to rupture.
I dog-paddled where I was for a moment or two, calming myself down. There was still no sign of Edward or Forrest, and I couldn't locate any of the search markers, so I guessed that the only thing I could do was to surface. In spite of the tidal stream, I couldn't be too far away from the Alexis.
I was about to start finning my way upwards when I caught a glimpse of something white through the tumbling murk of the water. My facemask was slightly misted, and it was difficult for me to make out exactly how far away it was, but I remembered that, seen through a facemask, all objects underwater appear to be three-quarters nearer than they actually are. It could only be Edward or Forrest. There weren't any other divers in the area, and it looked far too large to be a fish. I thought momentarily of Jaws, but Dan Bass had wryly assured me that the only Great Whites that had ever been seen off the coast of New England had belonged to Universal Pictures.
Swimming steadily, trying to control my breathing so that it was regular and even, I made my way over the ocean floor towards the white shape. It was turning in the water, turning and rolling, as if it were being wafted by the tidal stream; and, as I swam nearer, I realized that it couldn't be Edward or Forrest, it looked more like a piece of yacht-sail that had gotten tangled up in a piece of heavy fishing-equipment, and sunk to the bottom.
It was only when I came very close, no more than two or three feet away, when I realized with a chilling feeling of abject horror and disgust that it was a drowned woman. She pivoted around, just as I approached, and I saw a face that was bloated and eyeless, a mouth that had been half-eaten by fish, hair that rose straight up from the top of her head like seaweed. She was wearing a white nightgown, which billowed and waved as the tide came in and out. Her ankle was loosely wound in a sunken trawl-net — which had prevented her from rising to the surface or drifting away — but her decomposed body was now so inflated with gas that she was standing upright, and dancing a grotesque underwater ballet, all on her own, drowned, beneath the waves of Granitehead Neck.