First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

Mackay nodded in agreement; the two police divers looked unsure of themselves. Mackay picked up his pressure gauge and then had everyone hold up their gauge so he could verify readings, then the group took off, swimming along the bottom into deeper, darker, and suddenly very much colder water.

The thrumming sound grew deeper and Bullitt sensed it was coming nearer, and when he looked up he saw the huge silhouette of an outbound freighter heading for the Golden Gate, its single cavitating screw leaving a raucous swishing sound as it passed overhead -- and he also noted the arcing silhouette of a large shark following along behind the freighter, perhaps hoping for some scraps of food from the ship's galley.

He checked his depth gauge again and found they were approaching sixty feet, and his tank pressure was down to fifteen hundred pounds -- and at this depth it would start to fall rapidly. He wished he could pee again because the layer of water in his wetsuit was getting cooler the deeper they went, but he shook his head and kicked onward...

...until just ahead Frank saw a faint cobalt blue glow...

Mackay and O'Malley stopped, then Callahan and the other diver did as well.

Bullitt, however, did not. He kept swimming towards the glow, so Callahan followed, then the other three fell in behind Callahan.

The source of the glow wasn't far away now, though Bullitt was the first to arrive.

From about fifty feet away he could just make out the top half of a huge blue sphere, and as he swam closer he saw that the structure was more than half buried in the muddy bottom.

From thirty feet away he could tell that the sphere was completely translucent.

And as he swam closer he saw movement inside the sphere. Closer still and he could make out individual figures moving about, almost as if they too were floating in a liquid medium.

He felt someone by his side and turned to see Harry's wide-eyed look of astonishment and feel Mackay's growing trepidation...

...when one of the creatures inside the sphere noticed the divers...

...it swam -- or flew -- or glided -- across to the curved wall of the sphere...

...and Callahan could see it's pale blue body was birdlike, almost completely covered in feathers, and it's face was owl-like, with massive amber eyes staring into his own...

...then several more of the creatures came to the edge of their orb; some blue, others green, but only one was pink -- and this pink one, androgynously female, pushed aside the others as 'she' came to the wall of the sphere and looked at Bullitt for a moment, before her eyes settled on Callahan's...

...then she turned and motioned at one of the others...

...and in the next instant the group was standing in the knee deep waters adjacent to the yacht club...

...and Callahan could see Devlin and Jimmy, the first boy that had responded to her screams, the first to be murdered by the impossible black creature, and then Callahan realized that Devlin was screaming at him as he walked out of the water -- along with Frank and the other divers...

'That doesn't make sense,' he thought. 'Why is she screaming?'

And when she realized her mistake, when she realized she was watching Scuba divers walking out of the black water, she turned to Jimmy and watched as he walked back to the parking lot to wait for his ride home.

And beneath instinct, Callahan and Bullitt each intuited the impossible: what could not happen, what was a complete impossibility, had just happened. This was the scene as it had been almost a month before, only now they emerged from the water and into a world that had never known the earlier outcome.

"It was wrong," Bullitt whispered, suddenly remembering what the pink creature had said to him. "It wasn't supposed to happen that way."

"What are you talking about?" Callahan said, now staring at the girl up on the sidewalk.

"Harry," Bullitt sighed, his voice now a bewildered whisper, "what are we doing out here?"

"I have no idea," Callahan muttered as he slipped out of his gear. He stopped once and tried to remember what day it was and what they were doing, then he walked up to the girl under the street light -- because he couldn't stop staring at her.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, every last word of it...