The Deep 2015.06.23 Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Michaelbrent Collings

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. For information send request to [email protected].

  website: http://www.michaelbrentcollings.com

  email: [email protected]

  cover and interior art elements © Polly Dawson

  used under license from Shutterstock.com

  cover design by Michaelbrent Collings

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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  PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF

  MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

  "… prepare to be creeped out." – San Francisco Book Review

  "Move over Stephen King... Clive Barker.... Michaelbrent Collings is taking over as the new king of the horror book genre." – Media Mikes

  "[Crime Seen] will keep you guessing until the end…. 5/5. " – Horror Novel Reviews

  "It's rare to find an ending to a novel that is clever, thought-provoking and surprising, yet here Collings nails all three…." – Ravenous Reads

  "Crime Seen by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those rare books that deserves more than five stars." – Top of the Heap Reviews

  "I barely had time to buckle my mental seatbelt before the pedal hit the metal...." – The Horror Fiction Review

  "Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good." – Only Five Star Book Reviews

  "A proficient and pedagogical author, Collings’ works should be studied to see what makes his writing resonate with such vividness of detail…." – Hellnotes

  "[H]auntingly reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock." – horrornews.net

  "The Haunted is a terrific read with some great scares and a shock of an ending!" – Rick Hautala, international bestselling author; Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement winner

  "[G]ritty, compelling and will leave you on the edge of your seat.... " – horrornews.net

  "[W]ill scare even the most jaded horror hounds. " – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead

  "Apparition is a hard core supernatural horror novel that is going to scare the hell out of you.... This book has everything that you would want in a horror novel.... it is a roller coaster ride right up to a shocking ending." – horroraddicts.net

  "What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended." – Midwest Book Review

  "Collings has a way with words that pulls you into every moment of the story, absorbing every scene with all of your senses." – Clean Romance Reviews

  Dedication

  To...

  The people who didn't believe in me,

  because sometimes idiots are necessary paths to

  finding people who really do believe in you,

  to Devin, who was nice to me before it was cool,

  to Mindy, who taught me how to hug,

  and to Laura, FTAAE.

  Contents

  BENT

  FISHED

  CAUGHT

  IMPACT

  FIND

  MOTIONS

  DEPTH

  DAMAGED

  WOUNDED

  SCHOOL

  BUBBLE

  SOON

  START

  BEGINNING

  FALL

  MARK

  ENGULFED

  UNDERSTANDING

  TOUCHDOWN

  GRACE

  TANKED

  HATCH

  SHARK

  DANGERDANGERDANGER

  DIAMOND

  QUESTIONS

  TREASURES

  ALIEN

  CURRENT

  AIR

  BAILOUT

  CARESSED

  FLOAT

  NOTHING

  ONE

  HOPE

  SHELL

  BODY

  SURFACED

  HELD

  FASTER

  BC

  AFFECTIONS

  CALLED

  SHIFT

  GOD

  TOGETHER

  TARP

  HISTORY

  BREAKAGE

  CORRUPTION

  GONE

  BLAME

  FIGHT

  DOC

  CARGO

  SPLASH

  SEIZE

  DARK

  MESS

  RADIO

  TANGLE

  CONTAGION

  CENTER

  BONES

  TRUST

  FUN

  EYES

  RAFT

  BETRAYAL

  DESPAIR

  MOVEMENT

  YOU

  BREATH

  GLAD

  UNKNOWN

  ANCIENT

  CHILD

  PLANNING

  HAEBERLE

  GAMBLES

  ENOUGH

  UNDERSTANDING

  FLASH

  DEAD

  SWING

  LOOKING

  SEAT

  PLEASE

  PRESENT

  TRY

  AGONY

  EYES

  DOWN

  CLOUD

  NOTHING

  FOREVER

  "Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time."

  - H. P. Lovecraft

  “What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”

  - Werner Herzog

  “Below the ocean lies the last great undiscovered wilderness on Earth. And the greatest dangers yet unknown to mankind.”

  - Unknown

  BENT

  ~^~^~^~^~

  The world is called Earth. Which is strange when you consider that over seventy percent of it is covered by water. But it is named for the place humanity lives, the places we walk and eat and sleep and defecate and fornicate.

  Still, we can die anywhere. And the ocean provides an easier death than almost anywhere else. After all, though we descend from water, we long ago lost our gills, our fins, our ability to do more than stumble about in the dark rivers of the deep.

  That being said, there are worse things than dying. Worse things than going into an ocean or a sea and feeling your lungs fill with water and knowing a wet and lonely death has come for you.

  No, the worst thing that can happen to any diver isn't drowning. It's not simply dying.

  It's getting bent.

&n
bsp; Every serious diver knows this. Every careful diver takes measures to avoid this.

  Normal air is nearly eighty percent nitrogen. And when breathed on the surface, that nitrogen is inert. In and out, and nothing in our bodies is the wiser. When breathed in the deep, in the blues and then grays and blacks of the world below, the nitrogen gathers in a diver's blood stream. It isn't let out through breaths, but through the skin. If a diver rises too quickly, molecules of nitrogen gather together and form large bubbles in the body. Depending on where the bubbles choose to form – around nerves, near joints… in the brain – those bubbles can cause pain, seizures. Not just death, but agonizing death.

  This is decompression sickness. The bends, as it's more commonly called.

  All this pounded through Debi Richardson's mind as she swam to the surface. Not much of a swim, actually. She was clawing at the water, yanking panicked handfuls of liquid toward herself, kicking the lopsided kick of a diver who has lost one fin.

  Don't get bent. Gotta stop. Gotta wait.

  The way to keep from getting bent is to wait. To simply and quietly hang at predetermined spots in the deep, letting the nitrogen leave your body in bubbles so small they will cause no pain, no damage. Debi's dive computer had readouts that told her how long she should wait, and at what depths. It was a tool that was nearly as important as the tanks on her back and slung from her sides.

  Stop. Stop. Gotta stop.

  Debi Richardson didn't. She couldn't.

  She knew she was past the first deco waypoint. Knew she should stop. Knew she was risking it all.

  She kept kicking. Kept clawing at the water, kicking up, up.

  The water was lightening around her. Going from the black –

  (why couldn't it have stayed dark why did I have to see?)

  – to the gray to the dark blue.

  I'm too high. I'm too fast.

  She kept climbing. Kept grabbing those handfuls of water and yanking them down, yanking herself up in the process.

  Her pulse thundered in her ears, blasting through her mind. Another symptom of deep diving: nitrogen narcosis, the rapture of the deep. That damn nitrogen again, getting into cells, causing them to expand and short-circuiting the signals between brain and body. It was like being drunk – loss of mental acuity, vision problems, inability to problem solve, motor skills impaired, euphoria, inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time.

  It's coming it's coming it's coming.

  Darkness gathered in the corners of Debi's vision, even as the water around her lightened. She was narced out of her gourd, but that went away when you ascended. She just had to get high enough, get –

  (AWAY!)

  – to the boat.

  But there's no one left on the boat. They're all dead.

  She kept climbing. Clawing. Didn't matter. Didn't matter that they were all dead above. All that mattered was what lay below. What was coming.

  She pulled up.

  Something touched her foot.

  She didn't look down. Didn't have to. She knew what it was, what it had to be. The touch was light, almost friendly. It tickled a bit. A feather-touch on the foot that had no fin, like a friend had found her and was playing a trick.

  But this was no friend.

  Debi screamed. The regulator popped out of her mouth, bubbles escaping along with a shriek that momentarily overcame the jackhammer sound of her own heartbeat.

  She didn't bother trying to get the regulator back in her mouth. She clamped her mouth shut. Managed to remember that much, at least, managed to avoid sucking in great gasps of water and ending it all right there.

  The tickle became a caress. The caress became a touch.

  She screamed again. This time she did suck water.

  She inhaled. Gagged. Vomited. The water around her clouded with bile.

  She climbed. Pulled her way up.

  One of her hands found the inflation button on her buoyancy compensator.

  Why didn't I think of that before?

  'Cause you're narced, Debi, baby. You're whacked outta your nut.

  SHUT UP, IT'S COMING!

  The vest-like apparatus on her back and sides began inflating. Suddenly she was no longer clawing at the water. It felt like she was actually gaining purchase, climbing with purpose as the buoyancy compensator did its job and pulled her higher. She yanked open a pair of pockets on the vest, and two sets of weights dropped out. Now she wasn't just floating up, she was flying.

  You'll bend.

  Maybe not.

  Yes.

  She didn't care.

  The touch hadn't repeated. She hadn't felt… it. Maybe she had gotten away.

  She managed to get the regulator back in her mouth. Gagged out a last hard chunk of water, then sucked deeply at her air.

  She looked at her dive computer. It seemed hazy. Wavy in the brightening water. It danced before her, seemed to change color.

  Narced.

  It said she was thirty-two feet down.

  Debi started to think she might make it.

  Then the first pain hit.

  She let go of the readout on her dive computer as her fingers suddenly felt like someone had bent them in half. The regulator fell from her mouth again as she screamed – this time not in surprise and terror, but sheerest agony.

  The pain traveled up her hands, to her arms. Writhing paths of electricity that told the dim part of her brain that was still functioning that the bubbles had found their way to her spinal cord, maybe even her brain.

  Her feet started kicking a different kind of kick. No longer pushing the water, but thrashing back and forth in uncoordinated motions, seizure-spasms wracking and wrenching them so hard that she felt her right knee pop out of its socket.

  She was still screaming. Still a single exhale.

  She broke the surface. Shrieking. Sucked air. It hurt. It was agony.

  Her body curled in on itself, the protective posture in which we first know life in our mothers' wombs and in which so many of us take our last breaths.

  I'm dying. Going to die. Going to die PLEASE GOD PLEASE DEAR JESUS PLEASE MOMMY AND DADDY LET ME DIE!

  The buoyancy compensator kept her face-up on the surface. She wasn't going to drown. She wished she would.

  She felt something pop, and half her world went dark. Whether that was because her eye had a bubble or because one had found its way to another part of her brain, she couldn't say.

  Does it matter?

  She was still screaming.

  A thought inserted itself. Managed to slip through the cracks of her agony, to find its way to the bits of her brain that could still cobble together rational thoughts.

  She thought of Sue. Her sister, so much the same, and at the same time so very different. Light of hair where Debi was dark, laughing and bubbly where Debi was introverted and could be downright moody at times.

  But both curious. Both driven by needs to know.

  Sue would have gone down with her. Would have looked. Would have seen.

  And so Debi was suddenly glad. Even in her agony, her searing pain, she found a spot of brightness. A white slightly lighter than the white pain that had enveloped her. She was glad her sister wasn't here. Glad she would die alone.

  Another pop. Her world went completely dark. Nothing to see, only pain to feel. The drumbeat of her pulse still slamming through her skull.

  And something touched her again. Her foot. Then her leg.

  She couldn't see. But she could feel.

  And in the next moment, Debi found out how wrong divers really were. The worst thing wasn't drowning. It wasn't dying.

  And it wasn't even getting bent.

  The touch wrapped itself up, around, and through her.

  Debi wouldn't die alone after all.

  She had time for one more scream. Then it pulled her down. Down to the deep, down to the dark.

  And then she was gone. The surface was an unbroken mirror in the day. A calm blue sheet that showed nothing of what
hid beneath.

  FISHED

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Sue Richardson looked over the blue and wondered – for the thousandth time – what she was doing here.

  She knew she was hoping to find Debi; at the same time knew there was no possible way she could do that. Hoping to find Debi by going out on a dive boat in the general area she had been headed when she disappeared… it would be like finding a molecule in a haystack.

  No, she wasn't here to find her sister.

  So what was she doing here?

  "What's up?"

  The voice sent a pleasant tingle through her, and on the heels of that came a vague guilt. The tingle was because she recognized the voice of Tim Palmer. He was five-ten, slightly balding, and he had a body that was far from the kind that you would see on the average underwear commercial. But there was something about him that made Sue's blood race a bit faster when he was around.

  Maybe it's because he's not an underwear model.

  Sue herself was beautiful. Not as stunning as Debi – her sister had an exotic look that had men tripping over themselves to get to her – but she had never had trouble filling up her dance card. Usually with men who were attracted to her face and her athletic figure – then got quickly turned off when they discovered there was an actual mind behind them.

  And that was it. Tim was aware she was beautiful – she had seen him check her out covertly once or twice – but he wasn't creepy or lecherous about it. And once he got those few looks out of his system, he had just treated her as… what?

  A friend.

  Tim was one of those people who bring others into his orbit, who make them part of his family. Sue got the feeling he would gladly invite her over to Christmas dinner if he found out she was alone for the holidays… but what made that matter was the sense she got that he would invite anyone over for the feast, rich or poor, smart or stupid, beautiful or ugly.

  "Are you trying to hypnotize me?" he said.

  Sue realized she had fogged out a bit. She had been staring at him, and now she blushed. Which was totally unlike her: another pleasant effect of being around Tim.