Sightless

The darkness is total and all-consuming. Goose flesh rises on my skin as the temperature drops, though I could swear we’ve descended deep enough into the earth that we should be able to feel magma churning around us. I find myself waiting for my eyes to adjust, but I know the only light down here will come from our head lamps, and we’re saving those until we’re in the water.

I can hear it lapping against the walls of the cave, tiny waves crashing against a shore I can’t see. My heart rate spikes as my feet hit something solid. I yank my knees up to my chest and bite back a yelp. But when I lower them back down, I mutter a curse.

It’s just the ground.

“I’m down,” I call up. Bryce says nothing, but I can hear the ropes pulling through their clips as he rappels down after me.

Freezing water is already lapping at my toes. I suck in air, expanding my lungs and emptying them again quickly. I can hold my breath for two and a half minutes. We have oxygen tanks, of course, but you never know. After all, no one has been able to measure the depth of this lake, though plenty have tried. We have no idea how long we’ll be down there—how deep we’ll be diving.

Bryce lands next to me, his feet crunching in the gravel, and I have to disguise another yelp as a cough. This time, he laughs.

“What’s the matter, Cal, afraid of the dark?”

“Can you try to be a professional, just this once?” I bite back. Nothing Bryce can say will scare me enough to turn back now.

Because there's something waiting for me at the bottom of this lake, and I’m not leaving without it. But he isn’t wrong. Before we entered this cavern, I would have said the darkness didn’t frighten me. Only I’d never seen darkness like this. I didn’t know it existed.

I try not to think about the creatures that could be lurking in this hole in the earth, waiting for us in the water. But of course, the more I tell myself not to imagine them, the clearer I can see them. Milky eyes, razor teeth, pale skin, crooked limbs.

Shaking the images out of my head, I take a step into the water, the cold biting at my ankles even through my wetsuit.

“You know, a lot of people have tried this before,” Bryce says.

“I’m aware.”

“And they’ve all failed.”

“If you’ve had a change of heart, feel free to wait for me up here.” I pull my mask over my face and sink lower into the water, up to my waist, acclimating my body to the cold.

“I’m just saying,” he continues, and I can hear the smirk on his face. “Hope you’re prepared to see a lot of dead bodies at the bottom.”

Suddenly I’m blinded by an explosion of white light, and my heart flies into my throat as I stumble backward, right into a pair of hands that squeeze my waist.

“Don’t worry! I’ll protect you,” Bryce’s deep voice is suddenly right in my ear.

I spin around, shoving him away from me, and I take a tiny bit of satisfaction from the sound of his feet stumbling back on the gravel and into the water.

What Bryce doesn’t know is that I’m counting on seeing those bodies. He doesn’t know that I’m not here to measure the depth of this lake, like he is. Like the others who came before us and failed. I’m not afraid of the bodies at the bottom. The bodies are what I’m here for.

I squeeze my eyes shut, grateful that Bryce can’t see my face, because I’m fairly certain it’s turned a sickly shade of pale green.

“Get your ass in the water, Bryce, or I’ll see to it that you join them.” I bite down on my mouthpiece, making sure the oxygen tank is functioning, and slip below the surface before Bryce can say another word.

I can hear him wade into the water after me, but I don’t bother looking over my shoulder to see whether he’s following. I reach up and flick on my head lamp for the first time, and my heart sinks a bit when it only lights up a small swath of water ahead of me. The water is murkier than I anticipated, and the beam doesn’t make it very far before fading away. But it’s better than nothing, so I start swimming.

Quiet envelops us as we make our way into the depths. I can no longer hear the lapping of the waves on the gravelly shore or Bryce moving behind me. The silence soothes my nerves. Every few strokes, I have to let out a little air so I can watch the bubbles dance to the surface and make sure I’m still swimming straight down.

But then the silence is shattered by a shriek—high pitched and mournful. I spin around in the water to face Bryce, whose eyes have gone as wide as mine feel. The sound fades as we tread water, staring at each other, both too petrified to turn and keep going.

The quiet that felt like a protective blanket wrapping itself around us just moments ago now feels like a warning. A trap, and we’re swimming right into it.

Bryce is the first one to finally move. He takes me by the shoulders and spins me around, gesturing for me to keep going. His hands are shaking, and I can’t tell if that makes me feel better or much, much worse. I try to calm my racing heart and slow my frantic breath. The last thing I need is to run through all my oxygen now, before we’ve even gotten deeper than the deep end of a public pool.

Somehow, the water seems to be getting even darker the deeper we go. The beam from my head lamp grows shorter and shorter with every second, until it barely even illuminates my hand when I hold it up in front of my eyes.

Just as I reach up to tap it, it flickers. I freeze, hoping it’s just adjusting to the depth, but then it goes out. A second later, I see Bryce’s light fade in my peripherals as well. My heart rate, having just calmed back to a normal pace, picks up speed again. I can feel fear grip at my throat, like a fist closing around it no matter how hard I try to push it away.

Then something scaly wraps around my ankle and yanks me through the water so fast I lose my mouthpiece. I have the presence of mind not to open my mouth to scream, but still water forces its way up my nose and down my throat. My chest convulses, pushing the water out of my lungs and taking the breath I had held with it.

My flight through the water is stopped abruptly when my ribs crash painfully into some kind of rock formation. The scaly thing lets go of my ankle, but still my body moves erratically through the water. It takes a moment for me to realize that whatever I collided with must have punctured my oxygen tank. I reach back and feel the strong, steady stream of air escaping from a hole in the tank. I try to block the flow with my palm, but it’s no use.

With great effort, I untangle myself from the straps of the tank, finally getting myself free only for the tank to knock me in the chin before the jet stream of escaping air takes it away, into the depths—thankfully without me.

Panic still grips my throat as I breathe into my hands and feel the bubbles pool against my left palm. I turn and kick that way, swimming frantically toward what I hope is the surface.

After a few seconds that pass far too slowly, I surface gasping and coughing, and I know if I could see, blackness would be crowding the edges of my vision. I suck in air, trying to shake the lightheadedness that’s overtaken me.

“Cal?”

Relief floods through me at the sound of Bryce’s voice.

“Bryce?” I cough.

“Are you alright?”

“No, I’m not alright,” I spit.

“What the hell happened?” The tremble in his voice betrays his own panic.

“Something grabbed me.”

“I… what?” he asks stupidly.

“There’s something down there,” I repeat myself as I find my feet and wade to the shore.

“Nothing lives down here, Cal. We’ve looked.”

“Nothing we’ve found,” I hiss, losing my patience. “We’ve looked for fish. Maybe we should have been looking for something bigger.”

“How big?” he asks, and I can hear him take a couple steps away from the water’s edge.

“Big enough to drag me through the water and break my tank against the rocks.” I finally feel like I’ve caught my breath, so I reach up and try my head lamp again. It flickers on, illuminating Bryce, who’s pushed his back as far as he can against the cave wall, away from the water. “I’m thinking maybe there’s a reason nobody’s made it to the bottom, and it’s not the depth or the darkness.”

I can see Bryce’s throat constrict as he swallows hard. I reach my hand out, stepping toward him. “Give me your tank.”

“You can’t go back in there,” he sputters, his voice higher-pitched than either of us would like.

“I’m not leaving until I see the bottom.” Until I see her.

“But if there’s really something down there—”

“Your tank, Bryce.”

He unclips his oxygen tank and shrugs it off his shoulders, clearly having decided it's not worth arguing with me. And for the first time since we started our descent into this place, he's right.

I have the tank secured on my back in no time, and before I turn my back on him, I snag his head lamp from his brow, leaving his wet hair standing up at strange angles, casting warped shadows on the rock behind him. I wrap the lamp's band around my wrist and wade back into the water, the image of Bryce's face, confused and afraid, seared into my memory.

I pick up the pace this time, huffing in air by the time I reach what feels like the same depth at which I got slammed into the cave walls. The bruise at my rips pulses. I don't falter when my head lamp flickers, and I prepare myself to keep swimming in utter darkness. But the darkness doesn't come.

The lamp continues flickering, but never goes out. My skin crawls as I wait for that scaly feeling wrapped around my ankle or my arm or my throat, but that never comes, either. If I wasn't working my limbs as hard as I could, I would feel jumpy in this darkness, waiting for something to grab me. But I keep my eyes on the thin beam of light streaming out ahead of me, trying to focus both my eyes and my mind on the specks of algae clouding up the water in front of me.

My ears pop painfully as I kick deeper into the dark. I know I should slow down—it’s getting harder to breathe, harder to see, harder to think. But none of that seems to matter. All I have to think about now is her. All I want to see is her face.

All I want is to take her back to where she belongs.

Her face superimposes itself over the murky black water in my mind, and I'm marveling as I always do at her ice-blue eyes when I feel scaly fingers wrap around my wrist.

I yank my arm back, trying to kick out of the creature's grasp and back to safety, but its grip is iron and all I do is bruise my own skin. That same high-pitched shriek rings out through the water, echoing off the cavern walls even down here in the depths of the underground lake. I want to cover my ears, but as I reach up with my free hand, more slimy fingers snag the crook of my elbow.

I scream though I know I shouldn't, and frantic bubbles zig zag past my face, rushing to the surface as if they too can feel the danger I'm in. If I was up on the gravel shore, with Bryce, tears might be streaming down my cheeks. But down here, even I can’t tell if I'm crying. All I feel is adrenaline, prickling my skin as it courses through my veins, leaving me cold and panicked.

My headlamp finally flickers out again, and I contort my body as far as I can, bringing my head down to my left hand, where Bryce's lamp is wrapped around my wrist. I feel a muscle in my neck pull as I get my teeth around the band and pull, and my heart drops into my stomach as I lose my grip on it just as it slips free of my arm.

My feet kick blindly, trying to make contact with the creature pulling me into the depths. I hear bone crack as my heel strikes the creature’s limb, and my right arm is freed for a brief second. Brief, but long enough for me to swing my hand through the water and find the lamp floating just within reach—long enough for me to fumble for the switch, long enough for me to get the light on in time to see the creature that seems so intent on my death at the bottom of this lake.

And when my mind makes sense of the image in front of me, this time there's no doubt in my mind that my tears are mixing with the cursed water around me.

Her face is exactly as I remember it. Exactly as it was nearly a year ago, the last time I saw her. Before she came here, to this godforsaken place. Her deep auburn hair floats in a halo around her delicate face. I expected it to be bloated by time in the water, for her features to be harsh and distorted. But her lips still look soft and pink, her cheekbones still cut high angles into her glowing skin, and her eyes are the same piercing, icy blue I remember, even in the darkness, even through the murk.

It's her hands that have changed. Slimy scales cover her arms, growing in thick layers at her fingers and fading into a delicate fish scale pattern at her biceps. Her hands are the ones gripping my arms.

My sister—my beautiful, dead sister—is the creature in the lake.

Oxygen is still flowing, and my mouthpiece is still secure between my teeth, but suddenly I can't breathe. Because as I look around, I find that my sister isn't the only one. Dozens of people—if they can still be called people—stand on the rocky floor of the lake. My sister must be one of the more recent ones to die here. If they’re even dead. Many of the others have scales that extend past their arms. A few are unidentifiable behind the iridescent scales that cover them—even their eyes are hidden.

Others’ faces remain seemingly unchanged by the water, except for their eyes. The darkness has made them milky, and they stare into nothingness, their features expressionless. The same is true for my sister—though her eyes haven’t yet been changed by this place, they have no focus, and I want to pull away from her and hold her close at the same time.

I plant my feet on the slippery lake floor and try to pull my sister toward me, but it’s as if her feet are cemented into the ground itself.

Desperate, I spit out my mouthpiece.

“Dory,” I plead my sister’s name, taking her shoulders in my hands even as her own tighten around my bruised wrists. I shake her. “Dory!” My voice breaks, muffled through the water and garbled by the air that escapes my lungs in dizzy bubbles.

I take her face in my hands, searching her eyes for any sign of life. And even though she’s holding me with her own hands, and standing on her own feet, I find none.

My lungs scream for air now, and I know that if I’m going to make it back to the surface alive, I need to free myself from my sister’s grip. I need to leave her down here in the dark. I need to save myself.

But I can’t.

If she's doomed to remain in the depths of this black lake forever, maybe I should be, too. At least we'd be together again.

I stop fighting her—this scaly creature so intent on keeping me here with her in the deep. And I let her. Maybe Bryce will find us. Maybe he’ll wait for me until he knows he can’t any longer, and he’ll come back with another crew, with better equipment, and he’ll find me here, my sister’s hand in mine, scales growing up my own arms as my eyes stare sightlessly into the dark. Maybe he’ll even figure out why all these people are down here, waiting, staring, drowning.

Or maybe I’ll reach up and take his wrists in my own iron grip and hold him as he struggles, until he’s one of us.

With my free hand, I reach up and switch my head lamp off.