All American Horror of the 21st Century

Night Dive. F. Paul Wilson-1

NIGHT DIVE

by F. Paul Wilson

What is wrong? Silvio wondered as he cast his little net again.

He stood waist deep in the clear warm water near the big coral head. He held his thin brown arms high and squinted into the glare of the morning sun as gentle Caribbean swells lapped at his ribcage. Every morning for two years now, since he’d turned six, Silvio had waded offshore to net bait fish for his grandfather. A simple task. The shallows were alive with silversides, and one or two casts usually netted more than enough.

But not lately. Every day for the past week or so Silvio had found fewer fish wriggling in the fine mesh, and needed more and more casts to fill Granpa’s bait bucket. Today was the worst—eleven casts and nothing.

Granpa too was having bad luck in the deeper waters around the island. Usually he had no trouble bringing home enough snapper, barjack, and grouper to keep everyone well fed, but lately his catches had been falling off.

Silvio pulled on the string and hauled in his net for the twelfth time. It felt heavier. Success at last.

But when he lifted the net out of the water, instead of silversides he found a six-inch squirrel fish. He grinned. Never before had he caught anything this size in his little net. But his excitement faded as he took a closer look at the feebly flapping fish. The scales seemed to be sloughing from its red-and-white flanks, and its huge black eyes looked dull and blind. As he watched, it stretched its gills wide, then lay still.

Silvio lowered his net back into the water but the squirrel fish remained immobile. It looked dead. He reached into the net to examine it, but as he lifted the body it broke in half, releasing a sickening stink. Silvio cried out in shock and quickly washed off the putrid goo that coated his hand.

He was afraid now. Something was terribly wrong. Holding his net at arm’s length, he splashed toward shore. He had to show Granpa. Granpa would know what to do. This was Granpa’s island. He knew everything about the sandy land and the sea that enclosed it.

* * *

Michael Stover ascended along the mooring rope to a depth of about fifteen feet, then shut off his light and hung in the inky water. He waved his free arm back and forth in figure eights, watching bioluminescent plankton flash in its wake like a mini Fourth of July.

Cool.

He hadn’t been deep—fifty feet, max—so he didn’t need much of a safety stop. The water was warm and he was comfortable in his nylon bodysuit. He wished he could stay here all night, but the 300psi reading on his pressure gauge was a reality he couldn’t ignore. Reluctantly he released the rope and followed his bubbles to the surface.

Time to face the music.

Cries of relief and concern greeted his arrival on the surface. He lowered his mask and blinked his eyes. A moonless night, with bright stars glittering above, and the bars and hotels glowing along Seven Mile beach far to his right. The voices came from the dive boat looming over him.

“Are you okay?” ... “Need any help?” ... “Thank God! We’ve been worried sick about you!”

“I’m fine,” Stover said.

He shot a little more air into his BCD and stroked to the platform at the rear of the boat. He clung to the ladder as he removed his fins, then climbed aboard.

“s**t, man!”

Stover looked up and saw his assigned dive buddy—Lawson or Dawson or something like that—a bearded, balding, overweight talker. Like Stover he’d booked as a single and the dive master had paired them up.

“What happened? We hit bottom, you give me the O-K, we start toward the others, then a minute later I look around and you’re gone!”

He and the half-dozen other divers on board were crowded around him now.

“I got lost,” Stover said, seating himself on a side bench and sliding his tank into an empty slot. “I got disoriented down there in the dark. I didn’t know where everyone—”

“Bullshit!” said another voice.

Stover saw the divemaster pushing through the semicircle.

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

His name was Jim—or was it Tim?—late 20s like Stover, blond, deeply tanned, with one of those thorny freeform tattoos encircling each of his considerable biceps. An affable dude on the trip out, but thoroughly pissed at the moment.

“Pardon?”

“You heard me,” Jim-Tim said. “You weren’t lost. Our lights were visible from a hundred-fifty feet down there.”

“Then why didn’t you see mine?”

“We should have ... unless you were hiding behind a coral head. Anyway, if you were lost you would’ve surfaced and come back to the boat. But you never came up. What the f**k’s your problem, man?”

Michael Stover’s problem was that he preferred to dive alone, a preference that broke one of the sacred rules of diving. No, he wasn’t stupid—the buddy system made tons of safety sense—and no, he wasn’t a loser loner—he sort of liked the crowded dive boats and the après-dive sharing of wonders seen below.

But during a dive ...

Once he was under, Stover had his own priorities. First off, he loved the silence. Once below, all you heard was your own breath bubbling through the regulator. And tagging along with the silence was this wonderful sense of solitude. He loved to imagine he was the only person on the planet with a scuba rig, and that his were the first human eyes to gorge on the wonders of a Caribbean reef. But having a dive buddy—or worse, being part of an excursion group—shattered that illusion. Plus you had to go where someone else wanted to go.

So Stover tended to sneak off on his own as soon as he hit target depth.

In the world of scuba, this was sacrilege, anathema, the ultimate no-no. And Stover couldn’t blame them, really: The divemaster descends with eight divers; a few minutes later he looks around and counts only seven. He raps on his tank with his knife handle, but no answering clang comes back. He goes back to the surface and no one on the boat has seen the missing diver. That’s when his wetsuit tends to acquire a brown stain.

Thirty minutes later, when Stover surfaces, there’s the all-too-brief joyous celebration, followed quickly by anger: Where the hell did you go? Don’t you know better than ... blah-blah-blah ... yadda-yadda-yadda ...

Was it worth it? he asked himself as the red-faced Jim-Tim rattled on.

Yeah. Especially on a night dive when you chance upon a coral head as spectacular as the one he’d found tonight. The colors alone are worth the grief. Water leaches the sunlight as it filters down from the surface, so even in the extraordinarily clear waters of the Caymans, you get down to a hundred feet and the brightest gobies and hydroids look faded. But at night, when you shine your torch from six inches away, the colors leap out at you. Tonight he’d found diamondback blennies among the anemones, and brilliant Christmas tree worms jutting from a brain coral formation, and he’d spent a good ten minutes watching two bright red hermit crabs battling over an empty shell.

But colors were only part of the story. Lots of things that stay hidden during the day come out when it’s dark—octopus, squid, eels, snakes—and they’re all hungry. The waters are alive with death. And Stover liked to participate in the feeding frenzy—not by eating, but by playing maestro with the eaters and the eaten.

Hold your flash still and the beam will fill with teeny wriggling filament worms. When the cone of light gets crowded, slowly lower the beam to a sea anemone and watch it gorge until it’s so full it hauls in its tentacles and shuts down for the night.

Diving in the dark—the best, man.

But then the grief.

Stover remained properly contrite during the lecture until Jim-Tim finally ran out of steam, then he promised never to do it again. But Jim-Tim was still mad as he stomped to the helm to steer them back to George Town ... where Jim-Tim would no doubt hit the bars and blow-off the rest of that steam.

And that was where Stover’s real problems began. These divemasters all know each other, all hang out at the same bars. Jim-Tim starts talking about the asshole who almost gave him a heart attack tonight, and another says, Hey, I had a guy like that, and pretty soon they find out they’re all talking about the same guy.

The result was like major deodorant failure. Worse. If scuba were the Catholic Church, Michael Stover was excommunicated. If scuba were Hinduism, he became a member of the untouchable caste. He could offer double and triple the going rate for a dive—something his trust fund allowed without a second thought—and exhaust his charm and Jason Patric looks on the female bookers, but the answer was the same all over: Dive with someone else, Michael Stover.

Stover was already blacklisted in Cozumel, Belize, and had been edging toward that status here in the Caymans. And he couldn’t book a dive under a different name because the certified outfits wanted a look at your C-card. Once they saw his name, that was it. And as for the uncertified fly-by-night dive shops, that was like playing Russian roulette. Stover had tried one of those, but a test whiff from one of their tanks smelled like midpoint in the Lincoln Tunnel, and he’d canceled out.

He’d approached the Caymans with a game plan, starting on the smaller out islands—deep dives at the Blacktip Tunnels on Little Cayman, and Cemetery Wall on Cayman Brac—before moving here to the main island. He’d done only two Grand Cayman dives—hundred-footers at Twisted Sister on the south wall and Main Street on the north wall—and already word was out. But the dive shop he’d booked tonight apparently hadn’t heard about him. After this run, though, his name would be mud all the way out to Rum Point.

Ah, well. He hadn’t been to Bon Aire yet. And all of Micronesia waited.

* * *

Stover took his wetsuit off the hanger and checked for moisture: dry. Should be. He’d rinsed it out two days ago and hadn’t had it on since. Just as he’d expected, the dive shops had shut him out. Time to move on.

Only when in transit did he miss having a buddy. Soloing in an airport or on a plane was a whole different breed of isolation from soloing on a reef. He loathed it. But he’d yet to find a sympatico companion—a diver rich enough to have unlimited free time but who’d go his own way once they were underwater.

Maybe someday.

A knock on the door. Stover glanced at his watch. He’d told the front desk to send the porter by at nine; it was only 8:30. He pulled open the door.

“Look, I’m not packed yet so—”

He stopped. This dude was no porter.

“You dey man who dive alone?” said an old black guy who looked like a cross between Nelson Mandela and Redd Foxx, dressed by Dumpsters ‘R’ Us. A featherstar of a man, bright eyes with black-hole centers set in sun-blasted furrows of brain-coral skin, a ghost of a beard clinging to his jaws like Spanish moss.

“Who wants to know?”

The old man thrust out a spidery hand. “I am Ernesto.”

Stover shook it with no enthusiasm, then began to close the door. “Great. Look, I’m packing to leave, so if you’ll—”

“Oh, you do not want to be packed so soon,” he said with that melodic island cadence. “Not until you have had the chat with Ernesto.”

“Really? And just what is it you want, Ernesto?”

Ernesto stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind him. Stover didn’t see how he’d had enough room to manage that, but suddenly he was in. He wasn’t afraid of the old man. Hardly enough muscle on those matchstick arms to break, well, a matchstick. But still ... the guy had an urgency about him...

“It be not what Ernesto want. It be what dey man who dive alone want. Do he want to be diving dey Atalaya Wall?”

Stover widened his eyes. “The Atalaya Wall? Ooooh, neeeeat! And how about we swing by the Seven Gold Cities of Cibola along the way?”

“Ernesto not be following dis talk.”

“Come on, old man. You don’t really think I’m going to fall for that, do you? What do I look like?”

“You look like dey man who want to be diving dey Atalaya Wall.”

“And next you’ll tell me you can take me there.”

A shrug. “Ernesto lives on Atalaya.”

Stover stared at him. No guile in those bottomless eyes. Could it be ...

Naw. The Atalaya Wall was a Caribbean myth.