I backed off, trying to suppress my horror and my half-regurgitated Wheaties. For Christ's sake, I told myself, you can't be sick. If you're sick, you'll choke, and if you choke, you'll end up like Ophelia here, with your eyeballs eaten out by bluefish. So calm down. Look the other way, forget about Ophelia, there's nothing you can do for her anyway. Calm down. And slowly fin your way up to the surface, and call for help.
I began swimming upwards, watching my bubbles carefully to make sure that I didn't come up too fast. I was only about 30 feet under the water, but it felt like 100. I slowed myself down when I thought I was about halfway up, and exhaled, making sure that my lungs wouldn't burst or anything disastrous like that. The water became lighter, and clearer, and I began to feel the pull of the tide more strongly, and the disturbance of the waves.
'John,' whispered a woman's voice. I felt a chill go through me that was far more intense than the chill of the seawater. The voice seemed close, and very clear, as if she were speaking right in my ear.
I finned up more quickly, keeping down the first surges of real panic. 'John,' whispered the voice, more loudly now, more urgently, as if she were pleading. 'Don't leave me, John. Don't leave me. Please, John.'
I was nearly at the surface. I could see the cross-hatching of the choppy morning waves only a few feet above me. But then something wrapped itself around my left ankle, and as I tried to kick myself free I suddenly found myself turned right over, upside down, and a sharp flood of cold water poured into my ears. I lost my mouthpiece, too, in a blurt of bubbles, and the next thing I knew I was threshing and struggling and trying desperately to twist myself free. I thrust one hand up towards the surface, hoping that I was near enough to make a signal that the Alexis might see, but it was useless. I was at least 10 feet below the waves, and whatever had snared my leg was dragging me rapidly deeper.
It was then that I really panicked. I was overwhelmed by the pounding feeling of suffocation, and the realization that unless I struggled myself free, I was going to drown. I've heard people say that drowning is the most peaceful way to die, far more genteel than burning or crushing or shooting; but whoever said that hasn't been under the North Atlantic ocean on a cold March morning with a lost mouthpiece and some tenacious entanglement around their leg. I think I shouted out loud, in a rush of bubbles, and before I could stop myself, I was swallowing water. Freezing, salty, and harsh, pouring into my stomach like liquid fire. I puked some of it back up again, and I was lucky not to choke, because my lungs were almost empty of air.
All I could think of was: Don't breathe seawater. Don't breathe seawater. Dan Bass had told me that once you've breathed in seawater, you're dead. There's hardly any chance of saving you.
Eyes popping, head thundering, I twisted myself around in a last desperate effort to see what had caught my ankle. To my horror, I saw it was the drowned woman's nightdress, in which the body itself still bobbed and floated in its own hideous jig. When I had first swum past her, my finning movements must have dislodged her from the trawl net, and she must have risen after me, blown up with bacterial gases, like a buoy. Once her gown had entwined itself around my leg, however, and I had kicked and struggled against her, she must have turned around so that the gas in her ribcage had bubbled out, leaving her heavier, so that now she was dragging me down.
I bent myself double and tore at the nightgown with my hands, but the sodden fabric refused to rip, and it was wrapped around my foot and my ankle as tightly as wet rawhide. I reached down to my thigh, and wrestled out my diver's knife, but the body kept rolling and sinking in the tide and it was almost impossible for me to cut the nightgown without cutting my own foot.
Two, three, four slashes, and I knew that I didn't have enough oxygen left in my lungs to do anything but strike out for the surface. But I gave the nightgown one last slice, and like a miracle, the fabric parted. The woman's body sank down again into the darkness, back through the clouds of mud and murky water.
I released my weight-belt, which I should have done earlier, and gave two or three kicks of my fins to get me to the surface. My rise to the top seemed to be agonizingly slow, but I was strangely calm now, my panic had dispersed, and I was quite sure that I was going to survive. At last my head broke through the waves, and there was wind and sunshine and fresh air, and almost a half-mile away, the Alexis.
I waved frantically. I didn't know whether I was giving the right signal or not, but the simple fact was that I wasn't going to be able to keep myself afloat for very much longer, especially with the waves slapping and swamping me, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Dan Bass had been right when he had said that 'aqualung diving is just as much a mental sport as it is a physical sport. It's not a pastime for panickers, or latent hysterics.'
I heard the Alexis starting up her engine with a distant growl, and at last she came circling around toward me, and Dan Bass dived into the sea to hold me up. He towed me in to the side of the boat, and then he and Jimmy together managed to boost me up on to the deck. I lay flat against the planks like a landed shark, coughing and retching and spurting up water through my nose. My sinuses felt as if they had been meticulously scrubbed with a pan-scourer.
Gilly knelt beside me. 'What happened?' she said. 'We thought we'd lost you. Edward and Forrest came up and said that you'd disappeared.'
I coughed and coughed until I thought I was going to vomit. But at last I managed to control my breathing, and with Dan's help, I sat up.
'Let's get you out of that suit,' he said. 'Gilly, there's a flask of hot coffee in my rucksack, you want to go get it?'
'I guess it's my responsibility,' said Dan, hunkering down beside me and looking at me closely to make sure that I was all right. 'You should have practised in a pool first, before you dived in the open water. I just thought you looked like the kind of guy who could handle himself.'
I blew my nose loudly, and nodded. 'I lost sight of them, that's all. I don't know how it happened.'
'It happens easily,' said Dan. 'When you're wearing a facemask, you're like a blinkered horse, you can only see forwards. And in water like that, your buddies can disappear in a couple of seconds. It's their fault, too, they should have kept an eye on you. Maybe we should have used a buddy-line. I don't particularly like them, they can sometimes be more of a problem than they're worth, but maybe we'll consider it the next time down.'
'Don't talk to me about the next time.'
There has to be a next time. If you don't go down again soon, you never will.'
'It's not the diving I'm worried about,' I said. 'I think I can handle the diving. I panicked down there, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but I think anybody would have lost their nerve if they'd discovered what I discovered.'
'You found something?' asked Jimmy. 'Something to do with the David Dark?'
'Unh-hunh. I found a drowned woman. Not too badly decomposed. Her foot was caught in a fishing-net down there, and she was spinning around in the tide, standing up, like she was alive. Her gown got itself caught around my leg, and nearly drowned me.'
'A drowned woman? Where is she now?'
'She sank again, right after I'd managed to cut her loose. But I guess the tide should bring her into the shore, now she's free of the fishing-net.'
Dan Bass shaded his eyes against the sunlight, and looked around the boat, but there was nothing to be seen. He said, 'I guess we'd better get Edward and Forrest back up here. They're still searching for you.' He went to the stern of the boat, where there was an aluminum diving-ladder, and banged it five times with a wrench. That was the signal for Edward and Forrest to surface, a signal that would have carried well over a half-mile underwater.