The Deep

Hearing a scream, he looked up. The wheel was spinning free, and as he watched, the mate was hurled into the frothy blackness. The captain lurched to his feet and grabbed the wheel.

The ship rose high on another crest, and again he saw the lighthouse. The spanker was still flying; he could make way. If he could reach the lighthouse, he could get into the safety of St. George’s harbor.

The spanker held. Careening into the seas, the ship began to move due north. At the crest of each wave, the captain shielded his eyes against needles of rain and spray. He fixed his bow a few points to starboard of the lighthouse.

Something moved in the darkness amidships.

At first, the captain thought it was flotsam washing aft. Then he saw it was a man, the bosun’s mate, crawling toward him, moving from handhold to handhold, winch to cleat to stay, to keep from being washed overboard.

When he was a few feet from the captain, the bosun’s mate yelled. All the captain heard was the word “David’s.” He nodded and pointed ahead.

The bosun’s mate grimaced and came closer.

“That ain’t Saint David’s light!” he screamed.

“It is that!” the captain called back.

“I tell you, that ain’t Saint David’s! That’s bloody Gibb’s Hill!”

“No!”

“It’s Gibb’s Hill! Look dead ahead!”

The captain peered into the darkness. Beyond the bow, not fifty yards away, he saw what the bosun’s mate was pointing at: a jagged line of surf, marking the reef. Confused, blinded by rain, the captain had let his ship be blown twelve miles off course to the southwest.

He spun the wheel hard to port, and the ship began to bear off the wind. For a moment, the captain thought he had cleared the reef. And then he felt the first sickening crunch of timber cracking on coral. The ship jolted to a stop, then jerked forward. It stopped again, and again moved forward. The bow rose, then seemed suddenly to drop away. The deckhouse amidships heaved up; the stern rolled off to port. The captain stumbled, reached for the wheel, and missed. His arm slipped through the spinning spokes, his wrist jammed against the wheelbox. For a second, his elbow fought the wheel. Then the elbow broke, the arm was cast free, and the captain was pitched into the sea.

By morning, the storm had passed.

A British naval officer was walking his dog on the beach below the high cliffs from which the Orange Grove Club overlooked the ocean. Always after a storm the beach was littered with debris, but this morning’s accumulation was extraordinary. The dog sniffed curiously at pieces of wreck. It started to lift a leg on a piece of wood, then scented something unusual. The dog whined and grew excited, darting forward and back. It stopped at a large hatch cover and dug at the sand beneath it. The navy man followed the dog and, to humor it, lifted the hatch cover.

Underneath, half buried in the sand, was a man, clad only in torn remnants of a pair of shorts.

Water ran from his mouth, and from his ears when his head rolled to the side. The navy man bent down and touched him, and the man emitted a rasping, gurgling sound. Fie moaned, and his eyelids fluttered. The man’s name was Adam Coffin.

II

In sea water more than a few feet deep, blood is green. Water filters the light from above, seeming to consume the colors of the spectrum shade by shade. Red is the first to succumb, to disappear.

Green lasts longer. But then, below 100 feet, green, too, fades away, leaving blue. In the twilight depths—180, 200 feet, and beyond—blood looks black.

David Sanders sat on the sandy bottom and watched green fluid ooze from the back of a wounded fish. It was a big porgy, with long fanglike teeth; it was at least two feet long, and mottled blue and gray. A crescent of flesh had been gouged from its back-by another fish, perhaps-and blood pulsed from the wound in stringy billows that quickly dissipated in the water. The fish swam erratically, apparently confused by pain or by the scent of its own blood.

Sanders pushed off the bottom and swam toward the porgy, expecting it to retreat. But the fish continued to dart back and forth.

He swam to within three feet of the struggling fish; when the fish did not retreat, Sanders decided to try to catch it. With his bare hand, he grabbed for it, just forward of the tail.

His touch triggered panic in the fish. It began to thrash in a flurry of convulsive writhing. Sanders held on.

The fish was a shuddering gray blur. Sanders closed his eyes and tightened his grip. And then suddenly he felt a stab of pain. Shocked, he opened his eyes and tried to release his grip, but now the fish had him: its front teeth sank into the palm of Sanders’ hand.

He yelled into his face mask and yanked his hand downward. The teeth came free, and the fish darted away. Green fluid billowed from two blue puncture marks in his palm.

He looked up, fighting the urge to shoot for the surface. On the surface, twenty-five or thirty feet away, the Boston Whaler bobbed at anchor. He took a deep breath, cursing himself.