The three of them edged forward in file, using only the slightest intake or exhalation of breath to modify their relative plane, careful to stir up as little sediment as possible. In the midst of the criss-cross beams of three flashlights illuminating their surroundings, Miranda felt disoriented as she tried to distinguish between ceilings and floors. Structural angles were askew but up and down were more certain, since debris was gathered beneath them and their bubbles rose overhead.
Rachel motioned with her light and they followed her through a door that opened at a crazy slant into a passageway. In file they progressed toward a doorway gaping open at the far end. Rachel veered off and entered as if she knew where she was going. For a moment she was out of sight. Miranda felt reassured as Alexander’s light beam cast her shadow into the gloom ahead and a surge of relief when she turned through the doorway and discovered Rachel at the far end of a large cabin with three portholes that previous divers had scraped clear.
The three of them gently manoeuvred until they were close enough to touch. They began breathing in unison, suspended in the middle of this alien world, their bubbles roaring. Miranda could still hear the drumming of her heart against the inside of her skull but the beat was slower, now, and regular. Rachel signalled to extinguish their lights by pressing the beams against their stomachs. Instead of the absolute darkness that Miranda expected, she was astonished by the illumination assaulting the portholes from the ambient light in the water outside, and surprised at how little of that light actually passed into the ship’s interior, where she could just barely make out Rachel and Alexander as phantom shapes beside her.
To be reassured it was them, she drew her flashlight away from her body and scanned the beam across their torsos, careful to keep it away from their eyes. Rachel gave the “okay” sign and signalled for a return to darkness. It was as if this room were Rachel’s gift and needed to be appreciated in natural light.
Profound gloom, Miranda thought. Still, she pressed the light beam into her stomach and was a little surprised when Rachel reached over and switched it off. She felt she had been admonished, until she saw her do the same with Alexander’s. Okay, she thought, it’s your show.
Miranda swung slowly on an imaginary axis below her rising column of bubbles and gazed around. The distorted angles of a room out of kilter sorted themselves out as her mind assimilated their defiance of logic. It was an oddly liberating experience and while her heart was slowly subsiding to no more than a murmur she looked for Rachel, wanting to signal her appreciation.
The other two had drifted to the lower side of the room. As Miranda peered at them through eddies of darkness, she was suddenly blinded by a flashlight flaring erratically, filling the chamber with shards of lightning before it went out. Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, veining the absolute blackness with strings of red, then opened them again to gaze through increasing swirls of silt at her friends hovering near the frame of what must have been a built-in bed. Miranda could see their bubbles intertwining in a weird configuration and, for an instant, she felt overwhelmingly lonely. She could hear voices through the water — that strange muffled parody of human speech when divers try to talk inside their mouthpieces. Then she saw one of them, the smaller, break free and move slowly toward her, coming up from beneath. Alexander on the far side was gesticulating in broad movements but the dark water, laden with particles of sediment, obscured whatever he was trying to express, and his voice seemed to come in disembodied fragments, almost like laughter.
Miranda’s renewed apprehension was immediately quelled when she felt Rachel’s touch on her ankle, then felt her hand slowly move along her leg as her friend rose up beside her. For a moment they were face to face but the dim opalescence from the portholes made mirrors of their masks and all Miranda could see was the reflection of her own mask, mirroring Rachel’s. Rachel pulled away, as if she were trying to find a better angle of light, then took one of Miranda’s arms in both hands and give it a reassuring squeeze as she drew closer again, until their merged air bubbles obscured their vision entirely.
Rachel slid her grip to Miranda’s wrist to stabilize herself while she adjusted her gear, reaching around and then straightening. To maintain equilibrium, Miranda pushed her friend gently away. She felt her wrist caught and tugged to break free. Whatever the entanglement, it was not an air hose or a BCD strap. She pulled hard and a narrow shackle of metal bit into her flesh through the shank of her glove and there was a slight give, as if she were pulling against a dead weight. She tried to turn on her flashlight but could not do it with only one hand; she tucked it into an armpit and managed to flick the switch so that the beam flared in a haphazard pattern across the upper reaches of the room.
Carefully retrieving the light with her free hand, she shone it down on the manacle around her wrist. She and Rachel were handcuffed together. Bewildered, Miranda followed the beam up Rachel’s arm to her face. Rachel’s face, even in the glare of Miranda’s light, revealed nothing. Miranda shone her light down and across at Alexander. He was handcuffed to a metal bed rail. He did not appear to be struggling, but clouds of bubbles surged from his mouthpiece, making it seem like his head was exploding in slow motion.
Miranda brought the light back to Rachel, tracing down her body until she saw that Rachel’s ankle was shackled to another iron rail, effectively enchaining them both to the ship. A series of throttled spasms caught at her throat, yet Miranda’s mind seemed clear, as if she were an observer, a sympathetic witness to her own imponderable predicament. She shook her manacled arm and felt a strange surge of affection as she realized Rachel was dying.
Suddenly, her gut seized in a series of lacerating convulsions; a maelstrom of razor-sharp images raked the inside of her head. She too was dying. Survival instinct kicked in and panic gave way to shock and then she felt almost disengaged, again, as if it were all happening to someone else. And again reality took hold and her blood turned to ice, a jagged shaft of pain fibrillated between her lungs and her throat, her jaw and teeth, behind her eyes and into her temples. The pain helped her focus. She let the light zigzag across the bulkhead beneath them and discovered, close together, the other two flashlights, both turned off. Rachel must have intentionally dropped hers, then borrowed Alexander’s to retrieve it and, instead, secured him to the wall in the darkness. Miranda had the only light. Clearly, whatever was happening, it was not important to Rachel that they see each other. If this was a tableau of death, it was to be enacted in murky obscurity.
Rachel hovered beside her, very still. Miranda looked again at her face through her mask. There was a flicker of recognition, but neither terror nor pleasure. When Rachel turned to spill the glare from the glass, Miranda could see what might have been tears, and yet her features appeared oddly serene, as if her face were slowly turning into a death mask, changing from flesh into sculptured stone.
Miranda reached for the hose with her gauges attached. Their dive had been almost thirty minutes to this point. More than half her air was gone. She would breathe slowly and eke out the rest as best she could. Then she would die. She was surprised by her own composure. There was nothing to do, there were no options. She was cold. The icy tremor along her spine was a reassuring reminder that she was still alive. She breathed slowly, inhaling long deep drafts, releasing short bursts, a bit at a time until she was depleted, and then again, slowly, and again, and again. She turned out her light. To save the batteries. She thought she would like to have light at the end.
Morgan and Peter Singh stormed into the dive shop. A chill ran through Morgan’s entire body when the young man told them three cops had gone out on their own. Grave doubts about Miranda’s safety turned to gut-wrenching fear. Without understanding the urgency, the young man scrambled to get Morgan outfitted with dive gear, not even bothering to ask for his certification, while Peter Singh, flashing his Owen Sound Police identification, commandeered a boat from a couple of startled American tourists setting out to go fishing.