Contract Null & Void

Walpurgisnacht II

As he and his smashed bicycle were sent arching out into the night, he knew he was facing in toward the cliff: for one flashing instant, he could see the headlights of the car that had sent him and his machine spinning off the road. Then he was separated from the bike, plummeting downward, all orientation lost in the black rush of icy air. He didn’t even know how far he had to fall, whether he would hit rocks or water.

Jackknife. His only chance. Like Roy Woods, who went off the lower deck of the Bay Bridge in 1937 just about the way he had gone off the cliff. Only Woods had wanted to go off, had been a professional diver wearing a football helmet and a steel corset under his swimming suit. It had been a publicity stunt to get a job with the ’39 Golden Gate International Exposition.

He touched his toes, brought his feet up, was diving head-down. He hoped. Huge roar of wind all around him. Had to enter the upcoming water in a dive, not hit it feet-first so his legbones would be driven up into his pelvis. If it was water that he would hit.

Woods fell 185 feet. How far from him? He didn’t know. Woods got caught in a cross-blast of wind halfway down, hit the water on his shoulders and back with his legs spread.

He had been left paralyzed from the waist down for life.

Was the same thing going to happen to him? Or was he just going to thunk into hard granite and...

He speared the water at sixty miles an hour. Water, not rock! Shot down so fast his hands were jammed into the sand bottom, his elbows smashed agonizing on the sloping shelf.

Pain in his ears; he’d gone very deep with no chance to clear his eustachian tubes. Thank God for the quick shelving of the bottom into deep water here.

In the utter blackness he started pulling himself upward. But now the sea felt he belonged to it; ghastly clinging fingers of dead seamen wrapped around his limbs, tried to hold him in the shifting depths. He twisted and fought, panicked, lost half his air in a single silent scream.

Training took over. Just kelp.

Fighting with every fiber to stay calm, he made himself gently drift upward, so the clinging fronds of seaweed opened easily for his passage, slipped off him as he went by.

His lungs were screaming for air but he kept exhaling the spent air as it kept expanding under the lessening pressure. Autrement you could rupture your lungs. He did the last five yards to the surface in a clawing upward scramble, burst out with a huge whoosh! of carbon dioxide, turned in the water, seeking orientation.

Yes! The cliffs were that way. Find a way to snake in between the rocks and...

And a massive wave smashed down on him, energy that probably had come all the way from Japan to commit seppuku on these black rocks. Then the next wave picked up his stunned form to hurl it like driftwood against the cliff face.

Terrible pain in a wrist, an ankle, a crashing blow across his rib cage. Another stunning blow, this one against the side of his head.

Nothing else.