Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 42

The new light was in the tunnel.

And in short order a diver materialized in the tunnel, silhouetted in the light zone, following his torch light into the floodlighted cavern.

Coming our way.

He swam sleekly and strongly, even his controlled frog-kick a confident thing.

He entered the front room of the cavern and without pause angled himself toward the left-hand wall, toward the panel that Lanny had abandoned when he fled into the fenced-off room.

The diver appeared to give no notice to me at the gate, floodlit.

He studied the keypad a moment.

Then he finned over to the fence and put his torch light against the mesh and it filtered through enough to catch the three men at the inner control panel. Lanny pinioned by Walter and Tolliver.

And then the diver turned back to study me at the open gate.

He was an unnerving sight. Big, a slab of a man. Face a mask. A mask behind the dive mask — slick black Neoprene skin from chin to hood, sealed around the mouth where the regulator fitted, leaving only eyes and nose visible behind the dive mask. His eyes were dark as the abyss and, I swore, steeped in venom.

The eyes, if nothing else, identified him.

He hung there slowly finning, holding himself in place.

My breathing took off. I willed myself to chill and somehow located a nugget of outrage and that steadied me. I grew the nerve to feel affronted that he'd come — why had he sent Lanny down here to do the job, and then come himself? I felt misled.

No no no, you've got that wrong, lady. You and Tolliver and Walter misled yourselves. You wanted to believe that it was going to be just a question of stopping Lanny and hauling his ass out of here.

Not a question of confronting Oscar Flynn.

For a moment I thought, what if it's just the boss coming to check up on the hireling — Flynn sending Lanny to fix what he'd broken and wasn't that a big-hearted gesture to trust in Lanny, to give him the chance to redeem himself? And even to follow him on the chance that he might need some help?

I wanted to buy that.

I didn't want to be here with this masked man between us and the exit to the open sea and so I hoped that he would simply shoo us all away so he could fix whatever still needed fixing.

One giant Lanny-sized blooper took down the acoustic link to remotely operate these keypads. Was that it?

So far, Flynn had made no move to engage with us.

We were free as fish to swim away.

And leave him to do what he came to do.

I just couldn't do that.

I looked into the fenced room and saw Walter and Tolliver struggling to move Lanny toward the gate. Lanny was not on our side. Still the hireling in employ of the boss. Not just the boss — the man who had saved Lanny's life.

I shot another glance at Flynn, still at the fence.

Assessing.

Waiting.

Who knew?

And then something changed.

I felt my legs moving. I had a firm hold on the frame of the gate but my legs floated outward, into the front room. The current had changed. It was no longer inflowing into the cavern as it had been when we entered. It was now outflowing, reversing course. I glanced up at the chimney holes and saw the particulates in the light shafts, flowing outward now. It was a whisper of a current urging the particulates and me and everybody else in here out. It was a sweet current that could carry us out through the tunnel and into the open sea.

That is, once Walter and Tolliver had wrestled Lanny over here to the open gate.

And then we could turn our attention to Oscar Flynn.

But Flynn turned his attention to me, first.

He left the wall and slowly finned my way.

I thought, he's going to try to shove me inside and then he's going to shut the gate, shut us all inside, and I thought the hell, that's the unbreachable rule, don't get stuck on the wrong side of the fence, and I grabbed hold with both hands and braced myself but I was going to need some help and I looked to Walter and Tolliver, to shout hurry up and get here. My kingdom for a voice in this airless world.

But Walter and Tolliver were paying me no attention.

Nor was Lanny. He wasn't even struggling any more.

The three of them had disentangled, linked only by limp handholds, facing into the depths of the fenced room.

Something changed.

I looked to Flynn, who had reached the open gate, who was a lunge away from me, but he too had shifted focus, away from me, staring inside the fenced room.

I turned to see what they were all looking at, back there in the dark reaches of the cavern.

Ghosts.