He was a man who would not bleed if he were cut or make a sound if he were on fire. I wanted to be him; I wanted not to be him. I knew that he did not want to be me.
Out of the silence he began speaking.
“You have heard about Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici?”
“The what?”
He continued, not missing a beat. “Perhaps you have knowledge of the Knights Templar?”
I affirmed that I did.
As if I had to put myself between his words, I tried hard to concentrate.
He continued, “Since Friday, October 13, 1307—or Friday the Thirteenth—the planet has been chasing the Holy Grail.”
“What! You think that you have found the Holy Grail. You! You! The Grail! What the—!”
He did not respond in any fashion. He continued: “The Holy Grail. I did not say I found the Grail—did I?”
I motioned that he had not spoken of finding the Grail.
“The Grail is a myth,” he said.
I agreed with a nod.
“The Templars found the greatest artifact. They were looking for mysterious enchantment and found the bitten fruit. They discovered it. That was the close-held secret. Not a gold falcon encrusted with jewels, not the Holy Grail, not the Book of the Dead.”
He stopped as if eternity were to be rent if he ever spoke again. Then he looked into J-14A. His eyes were the starting point.
I followed his laser gaze into J-14A and the view chilled me. It was not on a mindful level but on the level of pre-thought that I reacted. I responded reflexively. The reality was primordial. It was as cold and dark as the abysmal black deep’s bottom. It, the reflex, had been instilled in me when my genes were in the creature, Protopterus leviathanus. It, a perfect slime of perfect clarity, of perfect ooze, perfectly without friction and of perfect consistency was there in J-14A.
The slime had killed the specimens in the tank and the slime had fogged Manta’s pictures. I was ready for the answer and spun toward what I thought was going to be the Deacon’s face for the resolution. He was gone.
17
“Manta, what about that U-Boat and old slave ship?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you. A while back it was an easy dive to the old slave ship and as matter of fact it was in free-dive range. The U-Boat sits directly on top of it and that was well into free-dive range too. For a while it was an attraction for people but not so much anymore, nowadays. Once in a while a dive magazine recycles the 411, but that’s about all. The data is kinda old and the dive network knows the truth of the ships.”
“But the Deacon—what and why?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you the truth and—true or false—it is the truth. I have not been in the U-Boat or the slaver since they fell and I suspect that only the Deacon has been in them. Before they sunk lower down the shelf, you could swim through the U-Boat and go into the slaver and then simply swim out again. It was kind of a fun dive. The dive was not hard but it was complicated. You had to be conservative with your air and know where you were at all times in the black. It was like cave diving but it was fun. Now, it is too deep for me or anybody with good sense and that is why only the Deacon dives it,” Manta concluded.
“Why does he dive it?” was my question.
It was John Henry who answered. “The hole,” she said. “Once he told me about the hole. I don’t know why.”
“The hole—which hole? You have been through both ships. What is the deal about a hole?” I needed to know.
“The third hole,” she said
“The third hole. What third hole and what difference would it matter if there were fifty holes?” Manta asked.
“I asked the Deacon once about his dives and he said, ‘One hole leads to two and two leads to three and then there is he and me.’ Then he laughed out loud. Imagine, the Deacon, laughing.”
There was a terror in her eyes.
“I thought he had gone instantly crazy. I was scared.”
Manta practiced slow breathing.
I took a deep breath. Then I reminded myself.Just keep breathing.
John Henry continued.
“The Deacon is instantly perceptive. He saw my fear. The third hole leads into the sea floor,” she said.
Manta, grasping for reason, said, “There must be a swim-through or cave under the slaver.”
“No,” she said slowly and seriously, “it is the abyss of perdition, the open entrance gate of the nether sea,” she corrected him as though reciting the arcane.
Manta practiced deep breathing.
I kept repeating to myself, Just keep breathing.
“He, the Deacon, is as trustworthy as the Gospels.” She was too terrified to continue and wanted to cease but the climax had not yet been reached.
Manta and I were in a heightened state of anxiety.
“Beneath the U-Boat and beneath the slaver and in the final hole in the Deep he saw—he saw his buddy, alive.”
“What the—!” I yelled.
Manta breathed ever deeper.
I was glad that I was against a solid object. John Henry became weak-kneed and Manta put his massive head between his enormous legs to suck in gallons of air.
“But it was not his friend as he knew him; his form had changed. It was only his buddy’s head. His buddy’s body was that of a Sarcopterygiin,” she concluded.
Manta fell to his knees. He was not praying to his island gods. He was trying to breathe.
John Henry concluded. “The head of his buddy but the body of a coelacanth!”
The words just hung in the air in neutral buoyancy as if never uttered.
18
It was too weird and too fantastic to be true but it was also too fantastic to be an untruth. It had to be one or the other for there was simply not ground for compromise. A hybrid reality could not exist and to believe in such a mutation of reality was impossible.
Back at the LION, there he was, the Deacon. He was always particular about specifics but as time passed he became ever more specific about this particular or that particular.
“You know that you can never get your specifications one hundred percent perfect.” I did speak very boldly.
“This ain’t no weak-minded mind game into the uncertainty of the uncertainty principle.” He coldly spoke without a glance. Then he continued, “One hundred percent, I am not trying for one hundred percent. I am going for absolute control. That is, from here to gone, past one hundred percent. One hundred percent; that is weak-mindedness derived from some line of a science book written by some scientist that was never near one hundred percent and quoted by some weak-minded student hoping to get a one hundred percent on a test paper.”
He still did not look at me and continued his conversation with himself.
“I am not part of that chaos of nature out there. No, sir. Not on your Aunt Nellie, no sirree-bobcat. I am here to stake my claim on the heart of that mess, out there.”
He continued in silence, super-perfect in his cell of nature.
He did not seem to know that I had exited, even though he was too aware not to know that I had, and he must have been aware of the heat of my anger even though he was as cool as the water, steel, and glass of his tank.
19
Manta, John Henry, and the Capt’n were looking out to sea and all three were focused on a moving point in the water. The point became a dot. The dot became a dingy. It was Ol’ Joe’s dingy and soon enough Ol’ Joe could be seen steering the craft straight and true. Ol’ Joe never utilized any navigational charts or maps for a number of good reasons: he did not require any maps for he knew the oceans, he did not have any maps, and lastly he could not read navigational literature.