Suspense Magazine July 2013

ippling water. It came from their left, from the other side of a steep rock isthmus jutting out over the quarry. They eyed each
other, shaking their heads. So be it, they seemed to say, kids will be kids.
“Guess we’ll have company,” said Kal with resignation.
They dropped down on their backsides like a pair of penguins, sliding along the slick smoothness of Monolith Rock, air
tanks dragging behind them. When their feet found water, they adjusted their gear and came into their fins.
Kal peered at his student one last time, questioning his bravery and intent. The kid was solid, he thought, unfazed, cool
as ice. Seemed like the perfect candidate—the type of guy that didn’t let much get to him. Levelheaded. Stolid, in both his
manner and demeanor. Yes, he reckoned, he picked the right guy. The right guy, indeed.
When both were ready, they gave each other the thumbs up sign and donned their masks. They sucked in their
mouthpieces, and without such as a wave, slid into the quarry.
Deep onyx enveloped around them, disappearing their body parts inch-by-inch. In accordance with their dive plan,
they descended slowly at first, progressing past tepid shallow waters and acclimating to the changing pressures and dropping
temperatures. Ultimately, they reached the zones of depth that have never felt the warmth of the world.
Kal motioned for Sepi to stop with a signal of his hand. They held their position level, and checked their gages under their
bright flashlights. Fifty-plus feet. Kal threw out an O.K. signal and Sepi reciprocated in kind.
They hovered there a moment, surveying the surroundings, adjusting to the blackness and to their beams of light that
penetrated into it. As well to the shocking cold.
Sepi could almost feel the trauma of the water through his wetsuit, and on top of that, he felt the ethereal openness of the
space beginning to alter the connections of his brain. The water at this depth was almost incapacitating; his entire body felt
like it was being subjected to a brain-freeze. A three-millimeter wetsuit Maybe that was too conservative, he realized. He’d
have to tough it out, but that was nothing new of a task for Sepi. Block out the pain, he said to himself, allow enough time
for the body to heat up the suit. Stay relaxed, and keep breathing. Then rational thought would move in and counteract the
benumbing shock of the deep quarry waters.
If there was any consolation to Sepi’s burgeoning terror, it was in the luminosity of his flashlight. It spread wide and bright,
capturing small particles floating through the water, bringing them into relief against the endlessness spread out before him.
He gave his beam a sweeping arc across the void. It was a way to reassure himself that the black beyond was indeed capable of
taking in his rays and wasn’t a realm of the complete unknown; that he wasn’t submerged within some underwater purgatory
to which his final fate was waiting. He gave a downward tilt to his flashlight. The sobering light captured the jagged remains
of rock left behind by excavation crews working many years ago, giving proof, more than anything, that he was in fact within
a pocket of the earth, and not some other place. This reality became more evident as he illuminated the scattered debris—
bottles, cans, sheaths of plastic—that clung to rock shards or were tucked into their crevices.
True, if Sepi’s flashlight did provide a feeble sense of security to a liquid world shown as vaguely surreal and hallucinatory,
it was still enough of a crutch to allow him to steal away from Kal—if only temporarily. He was an independent type, and
the sense of aloneness often intrigued him, pulled him into vicinities that even he couldn’t foresee. It’s what his mother
complained about on many occasions—”your carefree meandering”—and his grade school teachers were right on board
with this assessment. He was always the last to enter the class from recess, preferring to wander the woods alone during these
breaks, exploring and discovering the new and foreign.
His affliction, if you could call it that, was a bad case of wanderlust. It was an unshakable condition, and naturally, this
became his identifying persona, and one that would stay with him to this day. “You’re such a rogue,” he would often hear them
say, “an aimless vagabond.” In turn, Sepi became (and was thought of as) a sober-minded fellow, earnest and introverted, who
typically denied the fool-hearty their due and refused to take lightly the bullying ways of the world.
Gradually, Sepi found himself favoring the direction of deeper and away, loosening with each graduated stroke the
emotional bonds that attached him to his instructor. The emptiness around him drew him further into his beam of light,
inescapably and inexorably, like a marble drawn into the nozzle of a vacuum.
Up ahead, a large abandoned hunk of quarried stone stood on end like a wreck at sea that never correctly settled to the
floor. It was a behemoth that resisted the journey earthward with the determination of its massive weight. Drawn by its shape
and magnitude, Sepi headed in its direction. Kal noticed Sepi’s drift and gave casual pursuit, pausing briefly to assume the task
of reading his instrumentation gages. Time, depth, compass, oxygen levels. All was going according to plan, he determined.
Sepi figured the face of the off-kilter slab—gray, cold, and immovable—to be about seven feet across, nine high. He
cornered its left; Kal its right; their beams splitting around it like divergent tracks of rail.
Another sound penetrated downward, echoing against the face of the stone. Distinctive and telling—a heavy splash. Very
heavy, coming from the left. Even at fifty feet below, they could tell as much.
Sepi buoyed himself higher and headed in the direction of the splash. He couldn’t help himself, curiosity and impulsivity
being a natural part of his constitution. Whoever the kid was, he needed to be seen, his body needed to be tinseled with
a spectrum of light to verify his existence. Besides, there’d be nothing like shocking some punk kid braving his ability and
temerity in the late summer hours of a darkened quarry. Nothing like assaulting his fragile nerves with a blast of light from
76  Suspense Magazine July 2013 / Vol. 049