Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

Ten feet inside the entrance was a pile of debris, rotted wood, metal, and a pile of something that might have been a heap of life preservers, now reduced to a layer of black muck forming an environment for half a dozen kinds of weed and deep-sea undergrowth. In the light from Hilts’s lamp Finn could see that there had once been a set of interior doors that swung on a central hinge in the middle of the entranceway.

Hilts kept moving. Finn followed him into the interior of the midships lobby. A school of small, flashing fish turned and slid quickly away from the searching light. There was a faint haze of hanging algae in the water. On the walls, covered with silt but still clearly visible for what they were, Finn saw a series of aluminum ornaments, each one depicting a different zodiac sign. She’d seen pictures of how they’d once looked in Mills’s photo albums. Once upon a time the walls had been wood-paneled and the deck covered in some sort of nonstick tile, but all of that had long since been eaten away, leaving nothing behind but a dark, unwholesome vegetable skin. On the left the light picked out the open counters of the chief steward’s office and the purser’s office. The night before they’d discussed the possibility of checking the purser’s office, but eventually had decided against checking it out. The purser would no doubt have a safe, but it was unlikely that Devereaux or even his colleague, Bishop Principe, would have kept anything valuable there. They’d check it if they had the time, but only as a last resort.

Above their heads the false ceiling had sagged, revealing a tangle of pipes and electrical conduits. Some of the panels had collapsed and others looked half melted. The heat from the fire if not the fire itself had reached this far. They pushed a little farther, passing what appeared to be Sagittarius. A door sagged. Hilts shone his light. A row of empty dentist’s chairs looked into a row of blank, silt-covered mirrors.

“Barbershops?” Finn guessed.

“Or beauty salon,” Hilts responded, his voice crackling in Finn’s earpiece. Another few feet and they had their answer. A second room and a second row of weedy chairs. A further scattering of armchairs tangled in a heap. Mirrors cracked from side to side, silt and muck inches thick on the floor, visible here and there in patches of black and white geometric tile. A chessboard. There’d been a postcard in one of the souvenir books. This was the men’s barbershop, which meant the first had been the women’s beauty salon.

“Stairway next,” Hilts’s voice murmured in her ear. “I’m going to attach a line if I can find a tie-off.”

“Hey!” Finn yelled, pulling up, a dangerous flash of livid green appearing out of the corner of her eye.

Disturbed by the movement of the divers or perhaps the light, a huge green moray eel surged up out of the ooze and silt beneath one of the barber chairs, huge teeth bared in its beaklike head. A yard long and shaped like a thick, fleshy sword blade, the bright green horror twisted between them, snapping its powerful jaws, then whipped away into the gloom at the edge of the cone of sharp illumination thrown by Hilts’s light. The moray, had it struck, could have easily taken her hand off. Even a small laceration could have led to a vibrio bacterial infection that could cause gangrene within hours.

Finn let out an explosive breath, fogging her mask for a few seconds. Her pounding heart began to slow to something like normal again. She gritted her teeth and kept on swimming, turning toward the wide staircase that opened before her, caught in Hilts’s light. Who knew how many sharp-toothed horrors lay along the path of their explorations.

“Tuesdays with moray,” she muttered, embarrassed by her jerking reaction to the eel.“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” Finn answered. “You had to read the book.” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s keep on going.”

Hilts nodded. He unclipped the Dive Rite primary reel from his vest, attached it to the end of the aluminum stairwell banister, and clipped the no-snag device back onto his vest. It held two hundred and fifty feet of braided nylon line that would guide them back to the main lobby on their return if their visibility was obscured by too much silt.

The stairway had been tilted almost to the vertical by the sinking of the ship. Debris had rained down from above, mostly ceiling panels and small pieces of furniture. The remains of a chandelier were strewn down the steps, barely recognizable in the weeds and muck. There was even more algae here, suspended in the water, caught like gently swirling dust motes in the seeking beam of their lights.

They reached the top of the stairs without incident and eased their way down the narrow corridor to the left. Over time the ceiling tiles, loosened by the collapsed decks above, had torn free, releasing the plumbing pipes and cables running through the narrow space. They swam forward, frog kicking rather than using a flutter stroke, but even so the silt thrown up by their passage soon reduced visibility to almost nothing. Hilts kept his light on the starboard line of doorways, most of which yawned open. Ten minutes brought them to suite seventy-one.

“This is it.” Hilts rubbed at the dark algae that covered the sagging door, revealing an engraved rectangular plaque screwed to the metal surface. The deeply etched lettering was still faintly visible: GELDERLAND. The photographer swung the beam of his light into the entrance. “Looks messy. Careful.” He reached down to his vest, unhooked the reel and looped the nylon line around the straight handle of the door and let the reel fall. He headed into the room with Finn behind him.

A fire, a hurricane, and nearly half a century underwater had taken their toll. In the old photographs Finn had seen an image of what had passed for sophistication in the early 1960s: modern-looking tufted vinyl chairs arranged around a glass-topped circular plastic table and a thin, Mondrian-patterned carpet in vivid colors, king-sized bed with a padded vinyl headboard, long, low Swedish Modern bureaus with long, low matching mirrors, wood-veneer wall covering in burled walnut that was actually printed fiberglass, and a row of four portholes, square rather than round, for no other reason than being different.

The publicity shots showed women wearing yellow cocktail dresses, drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes in holders while their men stood by with smiles on their square-jawed faces, usually holding a modern straight-stemmed pipe in one hand and a cut-glass tumbler of some amber liquid in the other.

Things had changed.

There were no men in tuxedos or women in cocktail dresses; they’d fled the burning vessel a long time ago. Coat hangers, the waterlogged ruins of an old suitcase, and some kind of curtain material hung on a row of plastic hooks in the little foyer inside the entrance. The floor was thick with muck and sediment. Farther in, the room was almost impassable and the visibility virtually nonexistent. Their lights passed over floating pieces of what might have been the old padded headboard; the office-style easy chairs around the table had disintegrated into the thick layer of dark silt on the deck where the Mondrian carpet had rested, and the fiberglass wall paneling had peeled away from the hull plating, heated red-hot in places according to the survivors. Aside from the remnant of the vinyl suitcase, there was no sign that anyone had ever occupied the cabin.

Finn pushed against the inner door frame of the foyer and glided across to the low chest of drawers. She tried to pull open one of the compartments and the entire piece of furniture silently came apart in her hands. There didn’t seem to be any surface not covered with a layer of algae or slime. There was nothing in the drawer except more silt.