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Diana stopped the spin before her third revolution. A Keeper spinning three times counter-clockwise near an open accident site could have unpleasant– or, at the very least unlikely – consequences.

“How can you have a sea serpent in a lake?” Sam snorted in a tone that said very clearly,I wasn’t scared, so don’t think for a moment I was.

Diana shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess because lake serpent sounds dumb.”

“What’s that?”

She turned the beam of the flashlight. A small piece of metal glinted on a narrow shelf of rock. “We should check it out.”

“Is it part of the Summons?”

“Yes… No…” She started to swim. “Maybe.” Feeling the faint tug of a current nearer the rocks, she half turned. “Stay close. I don’t want you swept away.”

He paddled a little faster and tucked up against her side. “Good. I don’t want tobe swept away.”

“We’re lucky it’s so calm today. On a rough day with high waves, there’s probably a powerful undertow through here.”

“Don’t want to be eaten by an under-toad,” Sam muttered.

“Not under-toad. Undertow.”

“You sure of that?”

Glancing down into the dark depths of the lake, Diana wasn’t, so, to be on the safe side, she stopped thinking about it. The older Keepers got unnecessarily shirty about the accidental creation of creatures from folklore. As a general rule, the creatures weren’t too happy about it either.

“It’s the clasp off a change purse.” The leather purse itself had long rotted away. “Hang on…” Slipping two fingers down into a crack in the rock, she pulled out a copper coin, too corroded to be identified further.

“You should put that back.”

A second coin. She tucked them both into the front pocket of her jeans.

“Okay, fine. Don’t listen to the cat.”

“I need them.”

“What for?”

Good question. “I don’t know yet. Come on.”

“Come on?” Sam repeated, paddling with all four feet to keep up. “You say that like I was the one who paused to do a little grave robbing.”

“First of all, that wasn’t a grave, and second,” she continued before Sam could argue, “I haven’t actually robbed anything since the coins are still here. In the water.”

“In your pocket.”

“That only counts if I take them away with me.”

“So you’ve borrowed them?”

“More or less.”

“Less,” the cat snorted.

Diana let him have the last word. It was pretty much the only way to shut him up.

By the time they reached the bottom, the only illumination came from the flashlight. The water was a greenish-yellow, small particulates drifting through the path of the beam.

“Are we there yet?”

“A little further west.”

The bottom was still mostly rock, but there were patches of dirt supporting a few small weeds in spite of the depth. They followed a low ridge for close to half a kilometre, stopping when it rose suddenly to within a few metres of the surface.

“This is the place,” Diana said, sweeping the light over the rock. “Somewhere close and… Sam, what are you doing?”

He was floating motionless, nose-to-nose with a good-sized herring. “Staring contest.”

“You can’t win.”

“Cats always win.”

“I don’t think fish have eyelids.”

Sam’s tail started to lash, propelling him forward. “You cheater!”

Diana couldn’t be sure, but she thought the fish looked slightly sheepish as it turned and darted away. “Never mind that!” she yelled, as Sam took off in pursuit. “We’re right on top of the Summons, so I’m thinking– given where we are – that we’ve got to find a wreck.”

“In a minute!” Sam disappeared around the edge of the shoal. “I’m just gonna teach that cheating fish a…”

“Sam?”

“Found it.”

“Found what?” Diana demanded as she swam after the cat. “Oh.”

Much like Main Duck Island itself, the shoal rose to become a nearly-vertical underwater cliff on the north side, but fell off in layers to the south. On one layer, about a meter and a half up from the bottom, the skeletal prow of an old, wooden ship jutted out from the ridge, huge timbers held in place in the narrow angle between two slabs of canted rock and preserved by the cold of the water.

“Well, this is…”

“Obvious,” snorted Sam. “Big hunk of rock rising toward the surface. Exposed wreck. Probably been a hundred divers down here every summer.”

“Probably,” Diana agreed, swimming closer. “But this is where the hole is, I’m sure of it. Somebody did something sometime recently.”

“Oh, that’s definitive,” Sam sighed, following her in.

The hole she’d been Summoned to close was not part of the wreck, but in the rock beside it, where a narrow crevice cut down into the lake bed.

“Isn’t the word hole usually more of a metaphorical description,” Sam wondered as Diana floated head down and feet up, peering into the crevice.

“Usually. Still is, mostly.” The actual opening between this world and the nastier end of the Possibilities stretched out on both sides of the crevice, but it was centred over the dark, triangular crack in the rock. “There’s something down here.”

“I’m guessing fish poo.”

“And you’d be right.”

“Eww.”

“But something else, too.” Tucking the flashlight under her chin, Diana grabbed onto a rock with her left hand and snaked her right down into the crack. “Almost…”