Free Deeper by Moore-JamesA

reflected off the eyes seemed to bounce back at me
from too wide a surface.
    The thing
twisted in the air with all the skill of an Olympic diver and dove back into
the waters, barely even making a splash.   I saw the body cut through the waves and then the feet and legs kick as
they drove the entire form deeper below the surface.
    The feet
looked almost like a diver's oversized floppy fins, but not quite.   Most of the diving equipment I've seen
doesn’t fit.   "What was it?   Did you get a good look?"
    I shook my
head, utterly speechless for a moment.
    "I have
no idea, and I don't think I want to know."
    A few minutes
later the fog started to lift and Mary Parsons went off to see her husband and
find out if he'd gotten anything useful.
    I stayed where
I was instead, wondering about what I'd seen and
whether or not my mind was going soft in my head.

     
    *           *           *           *           *

     
    How do you
sleep after that?
    Not well.
    After the
Parsonses had retired, I went to my cabin and got myself undressed and flopped
on the bed, exhausted.   My mind decided
to start replaying everything I'd seen again and again.
    The damnedest
thing is it's easy to fool yourself if you want to.   I caught myself trying to talk my way out of
what I'd seen out there, both the ship and whatever it was that dove down into
the waters.   I hadn't really seen a ship,
exactly, just the shadows of one.   And the shadows of her crew.   Perhaps atmospheric conditions were just right and what I'd actually
seen was some sort of distorted reflection of my own vessel, or even another
yacht somewhere out of normal visual range.   The fog could have done it.   This
wasn't a light fog, but a heavy blanket over the whole damned area.   And if I was having a little more trouble
convincing myself that the thing I saw going underwater was a log, or even a
guy in scuba gear, well, I just tried all that much harder.
    It was
midnight before I finally got back out of bed, got dressed, and headed for the
bar in the main cabin.   When in doubt,
there's always anesthesia.   I poured
myself three fingers of brandy and nursed it down slowly for a couple of
minutes in the nearly complete darkness.   The fog was back and thick enough to blind me to the world outside.
    I walked out
onto the deck and shivered in the cold.   All I could see was the murky darkness followed by the occasional blast
of light from the lighthouse.   The night
was so silent I could hear my own breathing and the faint sound of water
lapping at the sides of the dock and the Isabella .
    And then I
heard a sound that was completely foreign to me, a deep thrumming noise that
came from where I knew the marshes were, just to the north of the cove.   It sounded almost like someone had recorded
thunder and then slowed down the noise, stretching it out and distorting it
completely.   It wasn't nearly as loud as
it sounds, and I think some of it might actually have been below the human
hearing range.
    The sound was
answered several times from different areas.
    I felt an
additional chill run through me as I listened.
    What I didn't
hear, however, left me nervous.   There
were no sounds coming from the shore after that unusual racket.   Nothing, when I knew there should have been a
lot of noise.   Have you ever been to a
place where the local dogs don't bark when something unusual happens?   Except when I was in the Navy and so far
offshore that hearing them was physically impossible, I've never run across
that dilemma.   Dogs bark; it's what they
do.   It struck me at that moment that I
hadn't heard a dog bark in the last two days.   Not even once.   Granted, I was on
a boat the entire time, but even so, I should have heard a few barks, or even a
yip, especially when you consider I was docking in the harbor every night.
    Nothing.   Not a damned
thing.
    I went back
inside and killed off my brandy.
    This time
around, sleep came