Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“There’s nothing here,” said Hilts, swinging the light around. “If there had been it would have disappeared a long time ago.”

Finn checked her dive computer. They’d been down for more than an hour. It was time to go. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “We should still see if we can get to Devereaux’s cabin at least.”

“Okay,” said Hilts. He swung around, his fins sending up a blur of silt from the floor. The beam from his light glinted on something beneath him.

“Wait,” said Finn. She reached blindly down into the haze of newly disturbed muck, hoping that there wasn’t another eel lurking in the dense ooze. Her fingers touched something hard. She grabbed it, pulling upward. Hilts tilted the light onto the object.

“I’ll be damned,” said Hilts’s voice in her ear. “A big gold crucifix.”

“Better than that,” said Finn. “It’s a bishop’s Pectoral Cross. The question is, where’s the bishop?”

“Maybe he left it behind.”

“If I remember correctly, they’re not supposed to take them off.”

“Let’s try Devereaux’s cabin.”

“All right.”

Finn stuffed the six-inch-long gold cross into her dive belt and swam after Hilts, following him out of the submerged cabin. Hilts gathered up the Dive Rite reel and they began retracing their route, moving silently back through the gloomy corridor, rewinding the line as they went in a ritual that dated back to ancient Crete and the silken thread that saved Theseus from being lost in the Labyrinth. Even though their fins had kicked up the ooze to almost zero visibility on their way in, they made their way back to the central staircase and the Main Deck foyer without any difficulty.

Hilts waited, suspended above the stairwell, moving languidly, waiting until Finn rejoined him. They dropped down the tilted stairs, keeping just away from the silt-and-algae covered walls. The farther down they got the worse the visibility became. Somewhere between the time of the fire and the present a whole section of the A Deck area below the Main Deck had collapsed, pushing tons of debris along the canted corridor like garbage down a chute. They reached the A Deck foyer and could go no farther; the stairwell was completely jammed with sections of wall paneling, tangles of pipe, and enormous amounts of unidentifiable debris, all of it made even more dangerous by the choking weed and silt. Even if it had been physically possible to tunnel through the barrier of junk, there was no telling what had taken up residence in the deadly barricade over the years.

“Now what?” said Finn. In front of them were the smashed double doors leading into the main dining salon. On the other side of the foyer it looked as though there had been some large mosaic made of colored tiles, most of which had fallen out over time. On either side of the mosaic were the brass doors of the two elevators serving the amidships section of the ship. Hilts swung the beam of the light into the dining salon. In the pictures, the original Princess Oriana Dining Room, named for the opera, was a lavish, two-story, domed monstrosity complete with an eight-piece orchestra and yellow tufted leather ceiling. There was seating for five hundred at a time, and somewhere with a series of hidden escalators for the stewards to retrieve orders from the kitchens below. Now it was a murky waterlogged cavern, the carpeted floors rotted to soggy, crab-infested destruction, the leather ceilings long decomposed, the remains hanging in long organic strings like the putrid entrails of some massive sea creature’s innards. The tables, all bolted to the floors, were still there, their linen cloths long gone, the padding of the chairs no more than muck. The orchestra balcony hung like an empty eye socket over everything. No ladies in yellow dresses, no officers in dress-white uniforms solicitously lighting politically incorrect cigarettes; the tomb of a vanished era of elegance.

“This place is really starting to give me the creeps,” said Hilts.

Finnlifted her computer and stared through her mask. “We’re running out of time. We can check out Devereaux’s cabin, but we’d better be quick about it.” Both of them could feel the distinct tug of the tidal surge as it swept through the giant wreck. It was much stronger than it had been when they first approached the ship.

“How long?” asked Hilts.

“Fifteen minutes in, ten on-site, fifteen back, no more,” Finn answered.

“Gotcha.”

“How do we go in?”

“The elevator shaft, like we agreed.”

“Can you get the doors open?”

“I can try.” Hilts took the lightweight Dutch Guard titanium diver’s pry bar off his belt and pushed across the lobby, skimming lightly toward the ornate brass doors, now deeply pitted with corrosion and dark with oxidization and plankton slime. Finn followed close behind.

They paused in front of the doors, Finn using her hand light this time, throwing a patch of illumination on the tarnished barrier before them. Hilts used his hand to wipe a small patch clean in the center and fitted the hook end of the bar into the crack. He pulled but the effort simply swung him around in the water, raising a cloud of silt.

“Need to get some kind of purchase,” he muttered, and tried again, this time lifting one leg, slipping off the big Dacor flipper and putting his bare foot against the frame of the doorway. He heaved again and the door separated, a dark split appearing. Finn swam forward, hooking the light back on her buoyancy vest, and helped him pull the doors fully open. She unhooked her light and Hilts switched his on as well, leaning into the shaft and throwing the beams downward. The light showed an empty shaft, thick with floating plankton that seemed almost to have a breathing movement as it rode the invisible surges and currents in the water.

“Looks clear,” said Hilts.

“Don’t forget the reel; that stuff in there looks as thick as soup.”

Hilts nodded, put his flipper back on and retied the safety line to a jutting beam on the side of the elevator shaft. He swam into the shaft proper, reached up, and then adjusted his vest compensator.

“Going down,” he said, grinning through the mask. He sank slowly into the shaft as the deflated vest reduced his buoyancy. Finn waited until he was clear of the doorway, then followed him into the shaft. She hit the yellow punch button on her vest, heard the gargling, bubbling hiss of escaping air, and then began to drop even deeper into the sunken hull of the old wreck.

The A Deck elevator doors slid open with no difficulty, and Hilts and Finn swam easily out into the foyer. This was the first full accommodation deck with no shops or dining facilities. Toward the bow were two corridors, port and starboard, with inside cabins down the center. Devereaux had been down on the passenger list as occupying cabin 305 along the left corridor, which now stood directly in front of them.

They pointed their lights down the dark tunnel and saw nothing but a few weeds and a thin layer of sediment and silt over everything. There was no sign of fire or damage, which made sense since the origin of the disaster lay far astern in the after-boiler area. Trailing the safety line behind him as it spun off the reel on his belt, Hilts eased himself across the lobby and down the dark passage, careful to disturb as little of the silt on the deck as possible. A narrower side passage to the left led to cabins 319, 323, 320, and 324. The doors were all open, the cabins beyond dark and forbidding, cluttered with the ruin of their rotted interiors. Next came three singles in a row, 315, 313, and 309, with matching inside cabins on the other side of the hall. Once again the doorways to all of these were open.

“Almost there,” said Hilts quietly. They swam a little farther. The door to Devereaux’s cabin-305-was firmly closed.