The Deep

Taking a deep breath, he shot his hand forward to the glitter. His fingers closed on something small, fragile; he snapped his hand back out of the darkness.

In his palm was a glass container about three inches long, tapered at both ends. It was full of a clear, yellowish liquid.

As he backed away from the cave, Sanders noticed that drawing breath was becoming difficult. He swam over to Gail-stopping briefly to collect a few relics he had left at the base of the reef-and touched her. When she looked up, he drew a ringer across his throat. She nodded and repeated the gesture.

Sanders rose toward the surface. Gail lingered long enough to gather a handful of forks and spoons-already, after only a few minutes, the gentle current had covered one spoon with a patina of sand-then followed him. Together they crossed over the reef and swam to the boat.

“Beautiful!” Gail said, as she removed her weight belt and flippers. “That is fantastic.”

In the bottom of the boat, next to Gail’s forks, spoons, and pewter cup, were the items Sanders had collected: a chipped, but whole, butter plate; a rusted, dented flare pistol; a straight razor; and what looked like a pebbly lump of coal.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the lump.

“There could be metal in it. When they stay in sea water for a long time, some metals develop this black stuff around them. Later on, we’ll bang it open with a hammer and see if there’s anything inside.” Sanders opened his right hand and withdrew the ampule from beneath the rag wrapped around it. “Look,” he said, and passed it to Gail.

“What is it?”

“Medicine, I guess. It looks like the ends were meant to be broken off so a syringe could be stuck in to draw off the liquid.”

“I wonder if it’s still good.”

“Should be. It’s airtight, God knows.”

Sanders looked over the stern. “Tomorrow let’s bring a bag. I think there’s a lot more stuff down there.”

When they reached the beach, the lifeguard-blond, deeply tanned, wearing a white T-shirt with a red cross on the backwas waiting for them in hip-deep water. He grabbed the bow, eased the boat up onto the sand, and helped them unload their gear. “See you got some goodies,” he said to Gail as he watched her pile their finds on a towel and twist the ends of the towel together, fashioning a sack.

“Some,” Sanders answered. The lifeguard had annoyed him at their first meeting that morning, when Sanders had rented the Whaler from him. He was cocky and young, and Sanders was sure he was closer to Gail’s twenty-six years than to his own thirty-seven.

And when the lifeguard spoke-even in answer to a question asked by Sanders-he looked at Gail. Sanders was convinced that the lifeguard was more interested in the sway of Gail’s breasts as she bent over than in any relics they had brought from the wreck.

Sensing Sanders” pique, the lifeguard said to him, “You find any shells?”

“Shells?”

“Artillery shells. Depth charges. You know. Explosives.”

“Live explosives?”

“I’ve always heard Goliath had a bunch of munitions on board. Maybe it’s all talk.”

Sanders said, “We’ll look tomorrow. We’d like to use the boat again.”

“Sure, as long as the wind doesn’t go around to the south and start blowing. You don’t want to be on that reef in a strong south wind.”

“No. Neither did Goliath.”

Carrying their gear, Gail and David trudged up the beach. The sand was pink-tinted by millions of tiny hard-shelled sea animals, called Foraminifera-and so fine that walking in it was like shuffling through talc.

By the time they reached the base of the cliff, Sanders was sweating. His palms were wet, and he had difficulty holding the necks of the scuba tanks. He looked up at the cliff, one hundred feet of sheer coral and limestone. To the right was a narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top. To the left was an elevator-a four-foot-square cage that rode up and down on a steel pole embedded in a concrete base-installed decades earlier in a crevasse cut in the cliff.

On a control panel in the cage there were two buttons, marked “up” and “down.” If the elevator malfunctioned, there was no alarm bell, no emergency button: the passengers (three, at most) had no choice but to wait until someone spotted them and called for help. At breakfast the Sanderses had been told a story about an elderly couple who were trapped in the elevator as they rode up from the beach at twilight. They were the last to leave the beach, so there was no one below to see them. During the night, the wind swung around to the southwest and freshened into a moderate gale. The pole quivered in the wind, shaking the cage and the couple within, like a pocketful of loose change.

When in the morning they were finally found, the woman (so went the story) was dead from fright and ex-posure, and the man had gone mad. He babbled to his rescuers about devils who had called to him in the darkness, about birds that had tried to peck out his eyes.