Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

With a control that both surprised and reassured her, Anna pressed down. The lever didn’t move. Control slipping, she jerked the metal handle upward. It was ungiving, jammed in place. A desperate moment passed as she struggled with iron forged to withstand storms a thousand thousand times greater than any human arms could foment.

Exertion at depth began to take its toll. The darkness without was becoming a darkness within. Anna felt her hands drifting from the lever, her mind receding as a light would vanish in the night. She was falling back, her flippered feet losing touch with the reality of the decking. Strength born of desperation closed her fingers and she clung to the metal lever. Still she drifted, still she fell away into mud-blanketed darkness, the lamp at her feet kicked aside by a trailing flipper.

As from a great distance, Anna found herself staring at the tumbling light. The beam was losing the gray-brown dullness of the silt fog, gaining clarity, sharpness. She blinked, breathed, fought to stay awake and so alive. Her back bumped gently against something and her fall was stopped. Against all logic, she was still clinging to the door handle.

As the mud fog cleared, so did Anna’s brain. The lever had been welded in the open position by more than half a century of immersion in Superior’s waters. Patience had closed the door but been unable to lock it. Had Anna died, her corpse would have been found floating against an unlocked door, forever mysterious: the woman who had chosen death behind an open portal.

A kick brought Anna back to the relative freedom of the lake bottom. What fragile light there had been in Michigan’s fog-ridden skies was gone. The surface of the lake no longer showed lighter. But for the lamp she’d retrieved, there was a total absence of light. It was as if she swam in India ink.

Anna looked at the time. Six minutes had elapsed since she had entered the Kamloops‘ engine room; fifteen since she had toppled out of her patrol boat. Ten was the maximum bottom time for a bounce dive, for surfacing with minimal decompression stops.

Vague and fumbling in mind and body, Anna looked for the lifeline, the line that would lead her back up, time her stops. It had been withdrawn: Patience banking on the fact there would be no one left alive needing a road home. Without light from the surface, the water was as directionless as deep space. To swim could be death if one was swimming in the wrong direction.

Anna pushed a button on her low-pressure inflator hose. Slowly she began to ascend. Like Winnie-the-Pooh with his balloon, she thought with the closest approximation to optimism she had felt since tumbling off the Belle Isle’s stern.

The small circle of light her lamp cast on the Kamloops‘ deck dwindled. Finally it no longer touched the dead ship. Anna lost all sense of movement. Try as she might, the effort of watching both timepiece and depth gauge proved too much. She lost count, forgot her numbers. All concept of how fast she was ascending, how long she’d been down, was lost.

From below, where her finger of light poked into the blackness came a white amorphous shape. Anna tried to train the light on it but it moved in and out of the beam as if it chose to be seen only for a second, then to hide in the black recesses. Fear of the known evil of bends or an embolism with blood frothing from her lungs kept Anna from kicking into sudden flight. Then it was upon her; a corpse from the Kamloops . Pale. Dead.

Not dead: hands trailing ribbons of saponified flesh reached for her. Before the fingers could close, the body drifted away into the dark. Denny Castle replaced it. He floated near her; not a corpse but alive and clad only in the captain’s uniform.

In and out of dreams, Anna was carried upward. Ralph swam by, looking at her and tapping on the face of a watch she couldn’t read. Formal, a maitre d‘ in gossamer silks that shimmered around her, Patience offered wine for Anna’s approval. Molly was there but Anna was unsurprised. Always, when she was in trouble, Molly had been there.

Then Anna dreamed fishes were flapping wet tails in her face. Whether she opened her eyes or regained consciousness she was unsure, but the darkness was no longer absolute. The fish tails were waves. She had reached the surface and she was alive. Fog still clamped down on the lake. She began to swim but faltered; not knowing if she swam to or away from the safety of land. And the cold had worked its way through the layers of her dry suit, sapping the vitality from her muscles, wrapping deadening fingers around her already slow-moving thoughts.

To lie back, to sleep, to stop struggling, would be heaven but Molly was nagging at her, something about staying in the game. After she had rested, Anna thought, she would figure out what her sister was babbling about. The fishes flapped their tails and cigar smoke wafted across the water.

Cigar smoke and fishes: the note was jarring. Anna forced herself awake. Fish tails turned back into waves. Cigar smoke remained cigar smoke; sweet and fruity. To shake the hallucination, Anna forced her arms to stroke, her legs to kick. The lake felt as if it had turned to concrete and was setting, heavy and rock-hard around her limbs.

The strange smoke, clear as a beacon, stayed in the air. Blind and deaf and aching in every joint, she floundered on, kicking away the cold, kicking away death for one more minute.

Her mind narrowed to the odor of exotic tobacco and the need to keep moving.

Stay in the game.

Finally death, tired of waiting for life’s leftovers, overtook her. Her leaden arms were pinioned, dragged forward. “No!” she screamed around the mouthpiece that choked her.

Voices were burbling in her ears again. “We’ve got you. Don’t fight. We’ve got you,” they were saying. The voices of the dead in the engine room. Anna fought to come out of the dreams.

Her regulator, the breath of life, was pulled from her numbed lips. She stopped breathing to cheat death another few seconds. Her face mask was ripped away.

“Anna!” came a surprised cry. The sound of her own name startled the hard-won breath from her lungs. She gulped cold living air. “Anna, it’s us.”

Fight faded. Anna’s mind opened. Without her mask, she could see. Tinker Coggins-Clarke was bending over her. She held fast to one arm. Damien clasped the other.

“Don’t flop,” Tinker said gently. “You’ll overturn us. Come into the boat. Death can’t follow you into the boat.”

Anna willed the wood that was her legs to some semblance of action and Damien and Tinker dragged her over the gunwale of the aluminum runabout.

“What’re you doing out in the fog?” Anna demanded faintly, a half-formed idea of citing them for running without lights dissolving unspoken into weary laughter.

“An experiment in sensory deprivation,” Damien told her seriously.

“And Oscar was stinking up the tent,” Tinker added. “I told him if he had to smoke his smelly old cigars, he could brave the elements.”

Anna looked to the bow. Wearing a tiny yellow slicker and lashed to the bow with what looked like a hair ribbon was the brown-eyed teddy bear.

“I’m buying you a case of Havanas,” Anna promised. “And a red sports car.”

The Coggins-Clarkes had been floating in darkness and silence-feeling the lake breathe, they said- several miles off Kamloops Point. Near as Anna could figure, she had swum just over a mile.

Free of tanks, mask, and flippers, but still swaddled in the dry suit, she lay like a landed fish amidships of the little runabout. At his own request-transmitted via Tinker- Oscar had been zipped inside her suit. Not without great risk of wetting his fur, as the little bear had pointed out.