The Deep

Gail climbed onto the dock and opened the lid of the wooden box. The smell of fish made her step backward and hold her breath.

“Pick a big one,” Treece called. “Want to keep him occupied so he doesn’t take a shine to us.”

“What’s Percy?” Sanders asked.

“A frightful big moray eel, a green. He’s lived in that cave long as I can remember.

We get along all right, but he’s a hungry bastard, and I like to keep on his good side by giving him dinner now and again.”

Gail reached into the fish box and grabbed the largest tail she saw. She swallowed, to keep from gagging.

“Don’t you keep ice?”

“No need. Salt keeps ’em fine.” Treece took the fish from her. “That ought to keep him busy for a while.” He said to Sanders, “Let me go in first.

I want to see him, make sure he knows what’s going on. Let a bastard like that blind-side you, it’ll be a nasty evening. And don’t go sticking your hands in any holes. For all I know, he’s got relatives in there sharing the rent with him.” He lowered his mask over his face, rolled off the gunwale, resurfaced, and reached for bag, fish, and light.

Sanders followed immediately and found, as Treece had said, that the extra weight and the air trapped in the plastic bags roughly counterbalanced each other, so he sank without effort.

The cove was not deep-fifteen or, at most, twenty feet, Sanders estimated as he watched the beam from his light move between the sandy bottom and the boat above. The canvas bag was cumbersome: it tugged at his left arm, so Sanders pressed it against his stomach and followed Treece’s receding light.

Treece waited at the entrance to the cave-a dark hole, taller than a man, in the craggy face of the cliff. When Sanders joined him, Treece shined his light into the cave and swung it from side to side.

At first, the cave seemed to be empty-pocked gray limestone walls extending thirty feet into the darkness. Then Treece fixed his light on a back corner of the cave and pointed with his finger, and Sanders saw something move.

Slowly, Treece swam into the cave, holding the fish in front of him. Sanders trailed a few feet behind.

At the base of one wall there was a heap of rocks, the result of a partial collapse of the wall ages ago. Treece held the fish up to the wall.

The snout of the moray emerged from a crevice between the rocks and the wall. Sanders had seen morays in aquariums, but never anything to rival the size of the green body that now slithered out of the crevice. It was more than a foot thick, top to bottom, and at least six inches wide.

The moray writhed and twisted until it had extricated as much of itself-about four feet-as it intended to. Then it hung suspended from the rocks, glancing, with its cold pig eyes, at Sanders, at Treece, at the fish. The mouth opened and closed rhythmically, exposing the long needle teeth joined by viscid, mucous strands that glittered in the light.

The head tilted slightly and-so quickly that, afterward, Sanders would not recall having seen it move-seized the fish.

Treece did not let go; he held the fish just forward of the tail. The moray pulled, then stopped, then suddenly began to spin its body, like a rug unrolling, until a chunk of fish belly tore away. The eel backed off, swallowing, its teeth forcing the flesh back into its throat, green skin rippling with the effort. Then it struck again, this time grabbing the fish’s backbone, and yanked the fish from Treece’s grasp. It tried to retreat into its hole, but the fish was too big to fit sideways through the crevice, so the moray contented itself with jamming its prey into the narrow opening and dismembering it from below.

Treece motioned for Sanders to follow him, and, reluctant as he was to turn his back, in darkness, on the moray, Sanders obeyed.

The roof of the cave was about eight feet high, and Sanders saw the beam from Treece’s light shine on it, then saw Treece’s canvas bag floating upward to it. The bag nudged the roof and rested against it. Sanders reached up and placed his own bag next to Treece’s, then joined Treece on the bottom.

They dug a wide, deep hole in the sand and dumped the bags of ampules into it. They leveled off the hole with sand, to keep the bags from floating free, then returned to the boat.

They made three more trips, each time digging a new hole. When they left the cave at the end of the last trip, the moray had devoured all but the last few inches of the fish: the tail still protruded from the crevice, quivering as it was bitten from beneath.

“How big is that thing?” Sanders asked when they were aboard the boat.

“Percy? Never seen the whole of him, but I bet he’s all of ten feet. Soon as it gets full dark, he’ll come out and prowl around. Some night we can go down and see him when he comes out.”

“No, thanks. He looks mean enough in his hole. I don’t want to meet him in the open.”

“What? I thought you shark killers didn’t know the meaning of fear.”