Chapter 1: BON APPETIT

Please forgive if this is a duplication. Originals were only sent to a few subscribers.

Ahh, it just goes on and on, this banquet called eternity… sometimes predictable, sometimes not so much. And that ‘not so much’ part—that’s where we find so much of the fun in life. Imagine believing yourself to be a banquet’s guest of honor, only to discover your real fate was to become that banquet’s main course, or worse, the bowel products of that banquet? Learning to smile into the face of the unknown—that’s a key to life in the round. Fighting it—that’s a lock—one of the more common contributors to eternity’s indigestion.

Yep, there’ll always be lessons and quoteables for those who need the words. Take the last idea, for example, the one reminding us of how circular and full-service our relationship with eternity can be. It came from a collection of ponder-worthy ideas that were taken from the “Riddles of the Dyierulan” (dee‑air’‑u-lon) and shared with The Family.

As for me? I am Veyos, (Vay’-oze). I am the keeper of life’s stories. I know every story and riddle in the Dyierulan collection—quite well—and as such, I get the double pleasure of watching my children bring them to life, and then I get to tell you new stories of how they applied them. This is a story about a love adventure between two children from that Family, and a friendship they shared with the Dyierulan civilization from the farthest fringes of the universe. So, grab yourself a nice warm blankie, and curl up to share this story with me.

* * * * * * * *

Back in the days when The Family still walked the lands and sailed the waters, it was common for them to ransack through the collection of memories left behind by the Dyierulan—digging in to them for any tidbit that might yield a scrap of understanding. One notion they kept returning to was this: eternity is like a banquet.

Conundrous? I should say so.

But then, when the founding voice of the Universe’s earliest community spoke—even so much as a “peep”—they listened. And when they listened, they didn’t just hear… they took it deep, and tried to squeeze out whatever meaning might be hiding inside.

“A banquet… yea…” they’d hum, almost like a chant.

And before long they’d be off and running with it, imagining eternity as something that fed upon itself—renewing itself, over and over… well, forever. Light feeding on the darkness, the world of awakeness giving new life to dreams, all of it circling in the same endless exchange.

With a pleased smile, they would say, “how else are ya gonna keep life movin’?”

Now, they didn’t actually know anything about entropy—or even that thing we call perpetual motion—at least not in any formal sense—and they wouldn’t have had much use for the words even if they did. But the seeds of those ideas were there, planted by the Riddles of the Dyierulan, and that was enough to keep them curious.

So they worked at it in their own way.

They’d clear out their everyday think-spaces, make room where there had once been clutter, and gather themselves together as a true Family—loosening their grips on the day-to-day world until, little by little, that outer noise fell away. When they reached that place, they could join their minds and let the riddles open on their own terms.

Some did so easily.

Others… not so much. Those were the ones that took time—unwinding slowly, like something that had to be digested before it could be understood.

…like this story.

Up until now, it couldn’t seem to resolve it-self. You see, it came to a temporary end thousands of years ago—sorta went into hibernation. But on this very morning, as prophesies foretold, the story reawakened, and resumed its telling, right where it left off.

It was like most mornings in this spring place. The first copper fingers of sunlight stretched out from the port of Nassau, devouring the darkness in their path. In the west a solitary cloud dropped noiselessly into the maw of the horizon beyond Morgan’s Bluff, leaving a clear and glistening canopy of blue.

A fishing trawler named The Coral Mist lay anchored in a tide row of Sargasso weed, and as the sun’s crystalline reflec­tions frolicked over the sleepy Caribbean waters, they painted an Argentine glow across her hull.

From high above the royal blue waters of the Tongue of The Ocean, two sea gulls, followed by a distant third, glided lazily into view. Their heads swayed pendulously while they flew, attention rolling from one side to the other, so they could scan the shallow layers below for their first morsels of the morning.

As they neared the Coral Mist the largest gull’s attention suddenly riveted to a darting motion in the water. With a casual twisting of his wing the gull veered sharply to the left and ascended into a gradual spiraling pattern, studying... method­ically maneuvering his position into peak advantage.

The graceful body of the sea fisher arched forward, and in one fluid motion, the gull tucked his wings to his side and plunged ocean ward, cleanly parting the surface of the transparent waters. A moment later the sea fisher reappeared, bobbing and clutching in his beak a young kingfish that writhed in vain for a freedom it would experience never again.

His two flight partners burst into an envious cacophony of shrieks and squawks as they watched the sea fisher flutter away with the kingfish. He’d spotted the Coral Mist and was winging his way to the trawler’s radar dome, imagining a breakfast in private.

But his gluttonous companions had no plans of losing him and beat their wings furiously to remain aflank of the trophy winner.

The youngest of the gulls fluttered to rest on the chromed ridges that ran bow-ward from the radar dome. Although still brown of feather with slight tufts of chick down, the youngest gull had already become adept at the con-worthy ways of begging, and he stared up at the still wriggling fish with as much of a pathet­ically desperate expression as he could muster, quietly opening and closing his bill in a well-rehearsed plea.

The father gull was pensive as he looked down upon the younger gull. It was a bit early for playing dominance and withholding games, and the older gull was touched by his son’s begging. So, with a grunt of resignation, he chomped tearingly into his catch, until the head of the kingfish separated from its body, and fell down onto the bow, where the younger gull lunged ravenously for it.

The mother gull had been watching from a higher perch on the trawler’s yardarm. She wore a stoic mask over her impatience, but once the youngster had seduced his share of the fish, the mother’s mask dissolved. She hopped from the yardarm down onto the radar dome and raucously attached herself to the tail of the fish. A tug‑of‑war erupted and in seconds the kingfish was devoured from sight.

The trophy winner smirked challengingly at his mate. Okay, he might allow her a few bits of his catch, but he was damned if he was going to share his roost with her, and he instantly raised his wings to flap at her while prancing in a semi‑circle. His scare tactics grew more menacing until his sparring partner at last gave up and returned to her perch on the yardarm.

The victor glared mockingly up at his mate, jeering at her with snickering caws as he pranced on with his little wing-flapping dance.

She was easily provoked though and hurled back her own barrage of squawking insults. The youngest of the gulls looked upon the fracas with pleased familiarity. It was a typical way of spending gull time, and in a wink, he joined in and made a three‑way squabble of the screeching and bawling and flailing of wings.

Down on the deck, dreaming only of silencing the far away bedlam of birds, lay Hansen. He lay semi‑conscious on a make­shift bed of deck cushions that had been hastily thrown together in the midst of last night’s tequila stupor. Hansen jerked his army surplus blanket up above his head, exposing his entire body to the cool morning air.

“Squawk, squawk, squawk!” tormented the gulls.

“Why me?” Hansen struggled in his dream. The mixture of morning chill and gull chaos pulled at him until awakeness was at hand. He tried to burrow his face into the army surplus blanket, but as his body swiveled, the deck cushions skidded too far apart, and his stomach, uncontainable by his double-extra‑large T‑shirt, spilled out onto the damp wooden decking and shocked him into head-splitting consciousness.

“Squawk, Squawk, squawk!”

Hansen twisted onto his side and tugged the blanket down over his face. Then, propped on one elbow, he tried to focus in on the screaming gulls, but snapped his eyelids back together when the sunlight from above the radar dome flooded into them.

With blind anger Hansen bellowed up at the birds: “Say, would you sonza bitches shut that ding blamed racket up!” But the gulls were oblivious to his wants and carried on with their squawking.

Hansen seethed at the gulls’ indifference to him, and he clenched his teeth until his varicose face began to swell. He stretched a hand out spread‑fingered to shield his eyes from the sunlight and squinted up at the gulls. They were about to get a piece of his mind, he cursed, but as he began to inhale deeply for a second outburst, the female on the yardarm extended herself fully, and with a convulsive gesture lifted her tail and shat aft into a sudden gust of wind.

“I said SHU...!...oogh, illeh...ptah!”

Hansen spat gull shit across the deck and glared up in dumfounded disbelief at the pack of brazen birds. “Ptah... ptooie!” he spat again.

Hansen was livid, enough so that the gooey bird shit covering his purple face began to fry like griddlecakes. He mopped his forearm across his mouth and gasped at the river of green and white slime now dripping from the front of his chin and sweat-crusted T‑shirt. Hansen was really pissed now, and his eyes began to bug out in lunatic rage.

“You dirty... sonza...!” he howled again. And with a whip-snap, he flung his army blanket against the instrument panel and staggered to his feet to charge for the opening to the fore cabin. On his second stumble though, he tripped over a near empty tequila bottle and kicked it across the deck, scaring the Hades out of the still feuding sea gulls. The gulls sprang into the air and began beating their wings maddeningly toward the northbound safety of Chub Cay.

Hansen leapt down to the cramped fo’c’sle and stretched across Mac to search for the shark rifle in the starboard gear pocket. Mac groaned in his sleep and muttered something unintel­ligible as Hansen latched onto the gun case and snatched it out. An instant later Hansen was back on deck, peeling the old carbine from its leather case, and hurriedly stripped the bolt back to inspect the shell chamber.

“Loaded...ahh-right!”

With a thump from the butt of his hand, he jammed the bolt back into the carbine and flipped the safety switch to “revenge” position.

Hansen was bleary eyed as he struggled up onto the motor housing to scan for the sea gulls. They were nearly forty yards away and fluttering fast by the time he spotted them. He hoisted the rifle to his shoulder with spring like speed, sighted down the barrel, and squeezed the trigger…

“Boom!” the carbine obeyed.

Hansen jerked the bolt out and back, jettisoning the empty cartridge across the deck.

“Shit!” he scolded himself.

He jammed the bolt back into the rifle, indexing the next round in the chamber, and raised the carbine back to his shoul­der. Once again, Hansen deliberated down the sights of the rifle, much more intensely this time, and squeeeezed...

“Boom!” the gun roared again.

As Hansen slowly lowered the gun from his shoulder a visible sneer formed at the corners of his mouth. He harrumphed trium­phantly as one of the gulls toppled end over end into the ocean. He pulled the bolt back less frantically this time and ejected the spent cartridge across the deck. It landed at the feet of Mac, who was charging angrily up the fo’c’sle stairs.

“What in the hell’s going on out here?” Mac screamed at the now gloating Hansen.

“Sea gulls...hate them damned things!”

The largest of the sea gulls looked back long enough to cast a doleful glance on his brown‑tinted son who lay lifelessly on the water’s surface. But stopping to lament was beyond good sense, and the gulls raced on, reducing their size to mere specks in Hansen’s vision.

Mac stomped across the deck to where Hansen still stood on the motor housing and demanded his rifle. “Asshole!” he snapped, wrenching the gun from Hansen with a quick jerk. “Gimme that thing! You wanna have the marine patrol out here on our asses again?”

“Aw, come on, Mac,” Hansen whined. “The ding-blamed bird shit all over me...whuddam I s’podda do?”

Mac eyeballed the carbine angrily and jammed it back into its leather case, convinced its care could never be entrusted to the likes of Hansen. He glanced warily at his long-johned friend with the torn pooper flap, then trudged back to the overstuffed fore cabin, filling the entire doorway as he stepped through sideways.

Mac, as Hansen called him—actually Jack McKenzie—was still a brute of a man at fifty, hauling around nearly two hundred and sixty pounds on his big-boned frame. His hanging cheeks and drooping eyes likened him much to a rosy-faced bulldog... rosy from years of dedication to rum and tequila. Mac maintained a graying flat top that only approximated horizontal when he sloped his head to the right, which was most of the time.

Mac lumbered back onto the deck and plopped down in the navigator’s chair. He cast a look of dill amusement at Hansen, then sighed heavily. He desperately needed to let the morning unfold slow enough so as not to overwhelm his still throbbing, hung-over head.

Mac had been partners in crime with Jack Hansen ever since their navy days. They had become so attuned to each other over the years that there were few differences between them anymore... well... except for one obvious one. It was a police-blotter fact that Jack and Jack weighed within one pound of each other. The quirk was, Mac towered over Hansen by six and three‑quarters inches. But once you got beyond the Laurel and Hardy exteriors, you would see birds of a feather.

Hansen labored to bend over to pick up the army blanket he’d thrown against the control panel but gave up and instead wadded it into one of the deck lockers with his foot. Bending over was for more important things, like the tequila bottle he’d spotted under Mac’s chair. Down he squatted, popping the second button free from the seat of his long johns, and uncapped the bottle. Still stooped, he swigged greedily until his face puckered.

“Last hit... ya want it?”

Mid-yawn, Mac snapped his fingers for the bottle. As Mac reached for the bottle though, his expression came to life from the sight of bird shit still crusted from forehead to chin on his friend’s face, and he began to snicker.

“Friggin’ birds!” Hansen cursed again. He crossed his eyes and made an accordion of his brows, ridiculously trying to see his forehead. Then with a satisfied sneer: “At least that is one bird whose white-washing days are... I’ll guar-awn-tee!”

Mac shook an oily rag at Hansen. “You want this, or are you thinkin’ about startin’ a new fashion trend for the rest of your friends?”

“You mean like you…?”

Hansen glared as Mac harrumphed and sucked down the last swallow of tequila, then lobbed the bottle into the galley, missing the garbage bucket by a couple of feet.

Seagulls were still in control of Hansen’s mind. “Remember all the gulls we used to find caught up in them lobster traps?”

Mac scanned his thoughts for a moment until the memory clicked, and his expression quickly rotted into a prune. “Mm-hm, I remember... too well. That was back in the days when we had our own boat. We barely had that boat paid for when you got it confiscated!”

“Me... eee!”

“Yea, you. You were the one who claimed that the little boat coming at us was just one of your dope running buddies. Buddy—right. It was a ding blamed U.S. Fish n’ Game cop! Us with no license, three thousand undersized crawdads. Yea, I remem­ber... asshole!”

“Hmmph,” Hansen grunted defensively. “You’re all-ways trying to pin that one on me.” Hansen tried to grin in self‑­defense but wasn’t fast enough to escape the playful backhand Mac smacked against his tummy. It caused the fat man to wince.

Hansen needed a change of subject. “My brain still feels like putty from last night.”

“Hmmph...”

“Say, we got any of them aspirins left?”

“Oh, my gifted friend, you know there hasn’t been an aspirin on this boat in over two weeks.”

“Umm.” Next detour: “Think you could handle any food yet? Don’t know ‘bout you, but I’m starving.” Hansen knew food always worked on Mac, and he moved back in to set the hook: “Anything left in the box besides pork and beans?”

“Nah, that’s about it—that and that stale johny bread.”

Hansen disappeared into the hold and returned with the last of their sea rations. He hopped up onto the chair across from Mac and twisted so his fanny could ooze into the cracks and over the edges. Usually, Hansen chuckled whenever he manned the co‑navigator’s chair; he laughed because the co-navigator’s chair hadn’t so much as one control in front of it. Now though, there were no chuckles. Hangover, you know. There was only a silent shoveling in of cold beans and stale johny bread.

“Coral Mist!” shouted a voice from the ship‑to‑shore radio. It startled both men. “This is the Tradewinds...calling the Coral Mist.”

Mac speared the microphone from the receiver and barked into it: “Yea, this is the Coral Mist. Come on back Tradewinds.”

“Hang on a minute, Coral Mist,” said the voice from the radio. “I got a call for you. Lemme patch you through.”

“Jack, is that you?” It was Buzz McKenzie, Mac’s brother.

“Yea, Buzz. Go ahead,” Mac shouted.

“Where in the heck are you guys?”

“We’re out on the far edge of the reef.”

“I tried callin’ you all last night but couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“Yea, I know. We decided to stay out here all night. Didn’t think to turn the radio on till it was almost morning.”

“How come?”

“How come we were out here all night or how come we didn’t have the radio on?”

A moment’s silence conveyed Buzz’s impatience. “Why didn’t you just punch the coordinates into the Loran and forget it?”

“Umm...we would’ve, but the Loran’s still broken down.”

“What do you mean...? Still broken down?” There was another moment of silence. “I suppose the head’s still broken down, too?”

“Jeez, Buzz, we’ve been really busy lately.”

“What about the running lights? Ya know, I loaned that trawler to you two jack-offs to go down there and book some charters or something. But all you idiots are doing is bumming around, turning my boat into a floating junk pile! It’s a wonder the radio even works.”

“Look, Buzz, there’s no problem. We’re gonna take care of all-ah them things.” Mac paused a second to flash a silent, open-mouthed grin at Hansen. Hansen pinched his lips together to stifle his own laugh. His belly jiggled like a cement mixer.

“Hey, Buzz,” Mac started again. “Did you get through to that guy yet?”

“Of course. Why do you think I’m calling?”

“Well...?”

“He said to get some pictures of that thing, and he’d show ‘em to some guy at this archive place up here in Miami. Said if they looked legit enough, there’d probably be some kind of a reward in it for us.”

“Did he say how much?”

“No, but they got some pretty big reserves—you know, grants ‘n stuff. I’m sure it’ll be more than you’ve got right now.”

“Yea, you’re probably right,” Mac droned, unconvinced. “Buzz, we took some pictures with that little camera yesterday. I’ll send them up to you as soon as we get back into port.”

“Got anything else?”

“Nah, that’s about it.”

“Say Jack, how about getting my boat fixed, huh?”

“You bet, Buzz. Over and out.”

Mac fumbled the microphone back into place, switched the set off, then leaned back to scratch his stubbled chin problematically; looked sideways at Hansen. “Whaddaya think?”

Hansen hacked out a guileful laugh. “Hmmph. Maybe we’ll make enough to pay off Pops for the fuel; maybe even be able to run a dive ad up on the mainland again. But...” he sniggered, his pirate’s grin coming to life: “It’s like you say: First, we go back down there with that wrecking bar; find out what’s behind that door. If it is some kind of an old tomb or some­thing... if it is... well, you know it’s gotta be filled with all kinds of gold and treasure and shit.”

“Yea, and ol’ Buzz and that archives guy can...well, we’ll just get them their cuts later on. They can trust us.” Mac smacked Hansen on the belly again and both men gyrated into howls.

A plate of beans and two belches later: “Inspired yet?”

“Pertineer...” Hansen stepped from the co‑navigator’s chair to the railing and snaked his way around the windshield to the trawler’s bow. As he held onto the tubular rail with one hand, he opened his fly with the other and began relieving himself. “Hey, Mac...when are ya gonna fix the head anyway?”

Mac hopped down to the deck and plodded aft to the pile of heaped up diving gear.

Hansen crawled back around the windshield, still fumbling with his long-john opening and ruminating on the head issue. “I mean...um, well you know, Mac, it’s always such a drag when you really gotta go...”

“Ya know what you oughta do, Spud? You oughta save up all that shit you’re always bellyachin’ about, and when you get back to port, you can pack it into a bunch of shotgun shells. You could use ‘em to shoot at the sea gulls. Who knows, maybe you could finally get even with ‘em.” Mac beamed with pride over his scatological brilliance.

“Ass‑hole!” Hansen muttered.

Hansen struggled into his still wet swim trunks, then wrestled with his wetsuit top. The job of stuffing his entire stomach inside the zippered flap was agonizing, and he groaned under the labor of it. Finally, stuffed, and winded, he plopped onto the motor housing to count the two remaining tanks.

“Whaddawe got left...one tank each?”

Mac smiled artfully at his friend’s math skills. “Here ya go,” he grunted, and jerked Hansen’s tank onto the motor housing.

Hansen buckled the air tank to his buoyancy control vest, then slipped his arm into the vest’s left arm hole.

“Help me get this other arm in here, will ya, Mac?”

“How many times do I have to show you? Just do it like this.” Mac stood facing his buoyancy control unit and slid both arms through the vest. Then he flipped the entire unit over his head until it dropped neatly into place on his back. “Like so.”

“You know I can’t do that. This wet suit is too damned tight. If I had one my size...”

“I don’t think they make one in your size. You need to get moving on that diet you’re always bellyachin’ about?” Mac grabbed his buddy’s arm and twisted it back through the buoyancy control vest’s other arm hole.

Hansen cinched the vest tight around his stomach and stood beside his towering friend, tap jabbed Mac twice on his stomach. “Keep it up. You still have me by a good pound.”

But for the zillionth time, Hansen’s weight joke didn’t raise a smile, and Mac deadpanned: “How about gettin’ your whale ass over the side. We got treash-ah to haul.”

“Hmmph...” Hansen finished gearing up and dropped onto the side rail to adjust his mask before flipping backwards into the water. A second later he bobbed back to the surface and fumbled his mask up onto his forehead.

Mac dangled a wrecking bar over the rail. “Better blow that thing up a little more or you’re gonna sink like a rock when you grab this bar.”

Hansen grunted, “Uh‑huh” through his mouthpiece, then pressed the air valve on his vest to inflate it like a balloon. Mac handed the pry bar down, then hurdled the rail, trouncing Hansen’s face with a small tidal wave as he splashed in.

Both men released the air from their buoyancy control regulators and slowly submerged into the blue depths. Within seconds Mac appeared face to face with Hansen and held up a questioning circle with his thumb and index finger to ask if all was right. Hansen nodded, returned the signal.

Fifteen feet down, the world of coral brains burst into a rainbow of soft roses, blues, yellows, and greens. Patches of brilliant red fire coral grew here and there, decorating the brains and the proud antlers of staghorn coral.

A sandy trench ran along the bottom, like a canyon winding through cliffs of coral, and Hansen settled into it. As always, there was need to stop for a moment so his senses could adjust to the breathtaking grandeur of the reef. Parrot fish in bright reds, yellows and blues swam lazily through a garden of yellow and violet sea fans, while shimmering peacock flounders co-vegetated with the trumpet fish. Finger-sized blue tang fish and African pompano ornamented the ledges and hollows throughout the canyon.

From the bases of the brain coral masses, dozens of whip-like lobster antennae waved from their pocketed hiding places. Bundles of black and purple sea urchins, with their razor-sharp spines, lay on the sands around the bases of the coral heads, serving as unwitting sentries for the pocketed lobsters. A small ray wing-dipped into the canyon and then glided out across the myriad of formations.

Mac eased down beside his friend and grinned at the sur­roundings. This was their retreat, their womb. It was the one place left where they could feel safe enough to let down their guards, the one place left where there were no warrants out for them. It was home. Mac gestured to the wrecking bar his partner was carrying, then tapped himself on the chest while shrugging his shoulders. Hansen nodded yes and foisted the bar onto Mac.

Out through the coral canyon they swam for nearly five minutes. As they rounded a wide curve they came upon a large grouper ruffling its scales so a group of yellow gobies could groom it of its dead skin and micro-cooties. Another time the two Jacks might have rousted the bathing fish, but this time adventure lay ahead, and so they finned wide of the grouper and passed it undisturbed.

Mac pulled his air gauge to his mask—still nearly forty minutes of air remaining.

Around two more turns they came to the end of the canyon, as well as the edge of the coral reef. Beyond lay a vast blue eternity known as the Tongue of the Ocean, an ocean void that dropped more than a mile down into the watery depths. They stared hypnotically into the abyss, awed for a moment by the thrill of adventure that lay ahead, then turned to each other. Mac floated his hand out horizontally and then curved it down­wards to the right to map out the path they would be taking. Hansen gave the nod of a semi‑willing conspirator, and the journey beyond the edge of the reef began.

Twenty feet down from the reef’s edge they came upon an immense sheet of rock that extended awning-like from the face of the wall. And below the awning... easily the oldest mystery Hansen and Mac would ever see in their lives. It was a door—a large oval door made entirely out of stone, and leading away from it in a semi-circular sweep was a trio of steps that had been carved into the bedrock. The steps were all covered in silt that came from thousands of years of neglect, and at the bottom they emptied out into the blue abyss.

This was the structure they had come back to explore!

A series of frightening chills shuddered through both men as they looked up the stairs to the oval door, as though this door of stone might be hiding more spooks behind it than any haunted house door they could ever dare to imagine.

It gave Mac the willies, and he shook himself to ward off the fear, and then swam to the oval stone to begin studying it. Somewhere on its outer ring there had to be a crack or a groove or something, a place where he could jam his wrecking bar.

While Mac studied, Hansen floated motionlessly, staring at the door with frightened lust, trying to imagine what might lay beyond. ‘It’s got to be an old tomb or something,’ he dreamed, ‘or an ancient pirate’s cave, or...’

Meanwhile, Mac finally hatched a plan, but one he alone would not be able to pull off. He needed a little extra oomph, a little extra ballast to force the pry bar into a crack along the left side of the stone, and he waved at Hansen until he snapped out of his daydream. Soon the two were grunting against the pry bar with all their summonable strength, until alas, they gave up. It was the stairs; they were simply too slick to get enough pushing traction on.

Something about opening this door was feeling more and more forbidding. Perhaps a few more shakes and a bit more studying. Mac focused on the three steps sweeping out from the door and began scraping some of the sediment from them. It appeared as though the stairs had been pieced together, mosaic-like, and Mac scraped until he exposed a series of narrow grooves in them, enough to make his next strategy obvious. It seemed reasonable to pound a couple of the lead rectangles from their weight belts into the grooves and use them to get a bit more traction. And that’s just what they did. A moment later the wrecking bar was jammed back into the door crack, and together again they strained on the pry bar until, at last, the oval stone began inching its way out of its recess in the wall. When enough space appeared behind the oval door, Mac jimmied the pry bar above the top of the door, searching for its leverage peak, and began nudging away at the door. At first the door only lay there like any obstinate rock might, barely teetering at all. But gradually its rocking grew greater, and the door finally fell forward, skating down the stairs until it struck a boulder, careened to the right, and then tumbled out of sight down the cliff-like decline.

Fantasies flared as the two divers raced for the doorway. The opening was narrow and disappeared quickly into darkness, scarcely even wide enough for even one of them to enter. So, Mac snatched the flashlight from Hansen’s waist kit and elbowed his way into the lead exploring position. Once in though, he quickly came upon another obstacle to the passage. It was a second door, oval like the first, but made entirely out of a bronze-like metal. Some sort of inscription was embossed onto the door, and Mac scraped away at it until it became visible—visible but totally alien to him. He puzzled over the inscription for about a minute, and then finally shrugged in resignation. Whatever it was, it was stumping the hell out of him, and he backed out of the hole so Hansen could come have a look.

By the time Hansen backed out of the opening, he was equally as baffled by the metal door and its inscription. He hadn’t a clue of how to deal with it.

Mac did though. He’d already cooked up a scheme for breaking through the door and was anxious to pantomime the gist of it to his friend. He made a series of pounding lunges with an imaginary wrecking bar and then pointed menacing­ly into the opening.

Whatever sense of civic responsibility Hansen might have had to preserve this potentially invaluable artifact, it was quickly overruled by his lust to discover the inevitable treasures that lay beyond. He nodded an anxious yes to his friend and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

Mac checked his air gauge again; held up ten fingers first, then five. Hansen eyed his own gauge and nodded back, agreeing on the fifteen minutes of remaining air.

Mac waved Hansen out of the way and disappeared into the opening with the wrecking bar and flashlight and began hammering away at the door. Mac’s hammering was loud—piercingly loud, and Hansen tried moving down the stairs to escape the sharp ring, but it wasn’t far enough away. Finally, he swam up onto the lip of the awning rock and covered his ears to block out the shrill ringing.

Soon the clanging of the wrecking bar came to an end, and with new dreams of treasure, Hansen pushed free of his awning perch. As he moved though, he sensed a sudden shifting motion in the rock awning, and as he backed away to study the overhanging structure, he could see a crack developing at one end where the rock awning interfaced with the vertical wall, and it was spreading rapidly across the awning’s full length.

Horrified, Hansen pivoted downward. Mac was still headlong in the cave opening, and he kicked savagely to reach him. But just as he came almost to within a body length of the opening, the entire overhanging rock broke free from the wall and plunged straight down. It rumbled with a loud though water-muffled explo­sion as it fell and triggered an avalanche of tumbling rocks that thundered down through a mushroom cloud of silt into the blue depths.

The sudden crash of the rock awning generated such a sudden and violent current, it threw Hansen backwards like a rag doll, and nearly shocked him unconscious. And as he floated, trembling in numb, uncontrollable terror, he stared dumbly into the cloudy depths below. It had been a wipeout, a total wipeout. The crash of the awning had leveled virtually everything below it, leveled it even with the top of the now demolished stairs: The bronze door, the cave structure, the works... Mac! Hansen suddenly panicked. Mac could not possibly have survived the avalanche, and tears began to gush from the fat man. No... not his Mac! His Mac had been essentially every-thing to him: His father and mother, his brother, his friend, his savior... his most bestest partner in crime of all times.

Now what? Somehow in the midst of his anguish, Hansen happened to notice his air gauge and gasped. His air was nearly at zero, and if he didn’t get moving for the trawler at once he would be up shit’s creek just like... His mind began turning cloudier than the silt below.

‘What about Mac? What am I going to tell Buzz?’ he sobbed irrepressibly to himself. ‘Aw fuck Buzz! What am I going to do with myself? What am I going to do?’

Tears were still streaming out of Hansen when he reached the anchor site and began pulling himself up the nylon cable to the boat. He was not more than a few pulls up the anchor line though, when a queer sort of buzzing noise began to rattle in his head, a buzzing noise that moved down his body and made him twitch all over with tingly spasms. The buzzing grew stronger and stronger, and began to shake and pull at him, pull as though he was being sucked in a deadly undertow current. The current grew so strong that Hansen had to hold desperately onto the anchor line lest he be swept into the jaws of...

And then it happened. A quick, prophetic communi­cation spoke to Hansen in his next to last moment among the living, and it somehow brought a calm sense of peace and sur­render to him. It said: ‘This force, this current that is pulling at you so relentlessly... this force cannot even begin to convey the smallest hint of the monster that is about to come!’

Hansen gulped futilely, and his life passed before him in one little firefly-sized flash.

And as the next titanic shock wave surged through the waters, it tossed the abandoned trawler about with such an uncompassionate vengeance, that in a solitary snap, it tore the harpoon like anchor free from its mooring, and speared those deadly anchor points up through the chest of Hansen, then dragged his lifeless body along in the wake of the Coral Mist—a scene too reminiscent of Captain Ahab’s final accursed sleigh ride to Nantucket.

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END OF CHAPTER

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