Bending quickly down, swinging the flashlight around fast to see what was going on with his foot, Dortmunder inadvertently slammed the light into yet another stump. It bounced from his hand. It went out.
Darkness. Blackness. Don’t panic. The flashlight’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The boot’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The foot’s down there somewhere, in the dark, caught by roots. Don’t panic!
How long have I been down here? I’ve only got an hour of air! Have I been down here an hour? Does this air taste funny?
Don’t panic? Don’t panic? Why the hell not?
Leaning on the rail of the catwalk, gazing out over the still silent beauty of the reservoir in the increasingly pale bright light of the rising moon, Bob found himself reflecting on the changes that had come so recently into his life, and for the first time he wished he actually had a friend. Not the so-called friends he’d had all his life, in grade school and high school, not those gape-jawed assholes so like the three clowns down in the dam, but a friend, a real friend, someone he could talk to about his innermost thoughts.
For instance. He couldn’t possibly talk to the jerks in the dam about waking up with a woman; they didn’t have the maturity for the subject. And the fact is, although Bob had what he considered plenty of experience in going to bed with women, the whole phenomenon of then waking up with one, waking up in the morning with another person right there, a woman, an entire life-size woman, first thing in the morning, an entire experience to deal with the second you open your eyes, was something he’d thought insufficiently about before it started to happen.
And what was it like? That was the weird thing; it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It sure wasn’t sexy. It was like having some kind of big animal in the room with you, a deer or a sheep, maybe a goat, sometimes more like a horse. There it was, coughing and blowing its nose and scratching itself, moving around the room, opening and closing drawers, looking as pale and bloodless as a vampire victim without its makeup on. It was like—
Sea monster! Bob stared, thrilled and terrified, as the thing broke the surface way out there across the reservoir, a huge saurian head with long laid-back ears, its reptile eye reflecting white from the moon. It was scaly, almost metallic; a definite sea monster, no question.
The thing moved toward shore. Bob panted, staring at it, almost fainting. Here! Here in the Vilburgtown Reservoir! Like Loch Ness! Like, like, like Stephen King! Right here in front of his eyes!
Near shore, the sea monster—lake monster? reservoir monster? — dove again and disappeared, a widening circular ripple left in its wake. Bob stared and stared, but it never came back. And here, he thought, his awe tinged with bitterness, here’s something else I’ll never be able to tell anybody. Not even Tiffany.
Maybe especially not Tiffany.
Hmmm.
Kelp surfaced again, closer to shore, and saw Tiny and Tom watching him from up the bank with the interest of uninvolved spectators. Boy, he thought. Get to know who your friends are.
What a bad few minutes that had been, back down there in the lake. He’d lost contact with John, he was stuck in mud down in among all those tree stumps, and he’d lost every bit of his sense of direction. He didn’t even have the rope linking him to shore; John had that. If he hadn’t remembered the BCD, he might of got really worried down there.
As it happened, though, just as he was considering he might start to get really nervous, he remembered that the B in BCD stood for “buoyancy,” and he even remembered how to operate the son of a gun; you press the button on the side of the control box. Not the one on top.
And what a glorious feeling that was, to rise up and up, out of the muck and mire, up through the crud-filled water, floating upward like a bird, like a balloon, like Superman, then bursting through the skin of water into the air above, to find the moon higher, brighter, whiter, the great water-filled dark bowl of the valley holding him in its comforting dark-green cupped hands, and himself floating safe and serene in the middle of it all, master of his fate!
Over there was the shore. And over there on the shore was the light blur of the Dodge motor home. Kelp was not really a smooth swimmer, not one of your Olympic types, knifing gracefully through the water. What he tended to do was dangle his arms and legs down in the water, agitate them in busy random motion, and gradually move forward. Now, he tried heading for shore via this usual method, but the BCD had him so buoyant that he just bobbed up and down in the water like an abandoned beer can.
Finally, he let some air out of the BCD, enough to drift down just a bit below the surface, and then his usual method regained its usual level of inefficiency. He progressed that way awhile, until one dangling foot hit ground, and after that he walked the rest of the way, emerging from the reservoir like the latest salesman on the staff, the one who’d been given the worst route.
Ridding himself of mouthpiece and goggles, Kelp waded ashore as Tiny came down to meet him, saying, “What’s the story?”
“It’s no good,” Kelp told him. He moved toward the motor home, meaning to rid himself of all this gear. “Can’t see anything. And there’s tree stumps all over the place. You just can’t move down there.”
Tom joined them on their move toward the motor home, looking concerned, saying, “You can’t get to my money?”
“I don’t see how,” Kelp told him. “John and me, we—” He stopped and stared around the clearing. “Where is John?”
Tiny said, “Where’s John? He was with you!”
“Gee,” Kelp said, “I figured he’d get back before me. He had the rope, he had…”
Kelp’s voice faded away to silence. He turned and looked at the silent dark water. Deep as hell out there; he knew that now. Tiny and Tom also looked out over the reservoir, listening, watching, waiting…
“Jeez,” said Tiny.
The winch and its tripod fell over.
They spun around, startled by the noise, to see the winch and tripod sliding toward the water, zipping down the bank in a long shallow ground-hugging dive, determined to go for a moonlight swim.
“He’s pullin the rope!” Tiny cried.
“Stop it!” Kelp yelled, and Tiny ran forward and jumped, to slam both big feet down on the snaking white rope, pinning it to the ground just in front of the suicidal winch, while Kelp flung away his goggles and flashlight and ran to the water’s edge, where he gazed at the taut rope angling straight into the water.
Tiny picked up the slack part of the rope, the part between his imprisoning feet and the winch, and wrapped it around one wrist. “Should I pull it in?”
“Sure!” Kelp told him, excited and relieved. “That’s gotta be John at the other end!”
So Tiny began, hand over hand, to haul in the rope. “Heavy,” he commented, but kept pulling.
Tom approached the taut line of rope and looked along its length to where it disappeared in the dark water. He said, “Do you suppose he got it?”
“Jeepers,” Kelp said. “Do you think so? He just kept going! We lost each other, but he just kept at it, moved right on down in there, and found the box, and now he’s—” But then doubt crossed Kelp’s brow and he shook his head. “I was down there,” he said. “No way.”
“Whatever it is,” Tiny said, “it’s heavy.”
They stood there on the bank, water lapping just beyond their feet, Kelp and Tom tensely waiting while Tiny drew in rope, hand over hand, straining, putting his back into it. Then, all at once, Tiny fell over backward, landing with a major thump, his big legs flipping up into the air to catch a lot of suddenly loose-flying rope, and an instant later Dortmunder, who had let go the rope when he’d finally seen the surface of the water above him, came charging up onto dry land, flinging his remaining equipment left and right.