Dave had been SCUBA diving since he was thirteen, but he'd never been in a decompression chamber. This one was cramped and- though it bored the eye with cleanliness- smelled like what metal would smell like if metal could mold. The clock on the wall said forty-two minutes until relative freedom.
Shannon sat knee-to-knee with him, wearing a pair of very short board shorts and what appeared to be the entire contents of a tube of liquid eyeliner. Her frame was lithe and delicate; not designed for the cold, dark, sterile environment she endured as part of her would-be career, but at the same time tough in a way Dave wasn't used to thinking of.
He shifted his legs to be polite.
Her pencil paused over the Cosmo quiz it was filling out. "Don't worry. There's no escaping it."
He wanted to ask why she was so keen on escaping it, but kept his mouth shut.
She turned a page, circled a C, flipped back, flipped forward again. Then she rolled her eyes. "Well, whaddya know."
"Hmm?"
"I am apparently more practical than romantic."
"Didn't realize the two were mutually exclusive."
She snorted and tossed the magazine aside. "So? Do I have to be the one to bring it up, or what?"
"Bring what up?" His whole world appeared to him framed in eyeliner.
"You think I'm fucking nuts, don't you?"
"Of course not. Why would I be here if I thought you were?"
"But I mean, now that you've heard it... It's just like any other sound. I mean, it must not sound like anything to a reporter. And here we are, our first month on this project, calling you out here... crying wolf... I bet that's what you're thinking."
"I wasn't thinking that at all."
"Then tell me what you were thinking."
Dave was thinking about the startling stripe of pinkish-white thigh just beneath the cuff of her shorts, and he let a couple blinks go by before deflecting the question. "You're right. I've heard all kinds of crazy shit. But I gotta tell you, what I heard down there just about took the cheesecake."
She leaned forward. There was vitality in her eyes, he realized, not just in her eye makeup. He stared back, probing the mind that was concealed between those pixie ears; behind that pale, smooth, mermaid-esque skin... "What do you think it could be?" she asked.
"You would know better than I would... Dr. Tuttle tells me he thinks it's something alive."
Shannon and her thesis advisor Dr. Tuttle had by no means been first to contact Dave's publication about the "bloop", an unidentified sound originating from deep in a Pacific trench. But they had been first to provide a means of investigation. Dr. Tuttle was a professor of bioacoustics who primarily researched whales' echolocation. He and Shannon had heard the bloop firsthand after the U.S. military called on them to arrange an exploratory expedition. The military was notoriously allergic to reporters, but Dave was not a reporter in any sense they would have cared about. His story about the bloop would run on page four between a Chex Mix Virgin Mary and a body-building ferret. So Dr. Tuttle had managed to score him a press pass; and Dave had spent forty-eight hours in a tin can where no ray of sunlight could ever penetrate, listening to a surreal and extremely frightening bloop. Now Shannon was escorting him back to the aircraft carrier that waited at top-secret coordinates on the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
"It's definitely alive," Shannon confirmed. She turned her head as if to look out a window. Dave mused to himself that she ought to have broken that habit long ago. As if she could hear his thoughts, she snapped her head back abruptly. She was one of those people who made no bones about soliciting direct eye contact even when she had nothing to say.
"Don't worry." He reached out to pat her knee and then stopped himself.
She caught his hand in midair and held it, her gaze never leaving his. "I just hope to God it's not dangerous."
Her hand was small and cold. Automatically, Dave rubbed it. He lowered it so that it was between them, but she clung to his fingers and drew them back, past her knee to a spot about halfway up her femur. He had to lean forward in order to comply. After two days without masturbation, Dave was certain he could smell her pussy from here.
"Oh, I don't know about dangerous," he said. "It hasn't done anything yet."
"Do you read Lovecraft?"
"Beg your pardon?"
"H.P. Lovecraft. I would think you'd have at least heard of him, in your line of work."
Dave had in fact read two collections of Lovecraft short stories; but the smell of pussy and the feeling of leg nearly overpowered his concentration. "Oh... yeah, of course. Thought you were talking about something else there for a minute."
"Well, in one of his stories he mentions Chthulu lives under the ocean at almost these exact coordinates. Isn't that weird?"
Dave took a deep breath and focused. "Lovecraft was never out this way. It was probably just a coincidence."
"He thought he could see through a portal to another dimension."
"I don't think he really did. From what I've heard, it was kind of a marketing gimmick."
She dropped his hand and leaned back suddenly. Dave leaned back too, knowing that to keep his body inclined toward hers would be outstaying his welcome. "You must get nutters calling you up about that kind of thing all the time," she continued apologetically. "But..."
"But?"
"I'm just scared. It gets to you, you know? At the bottom of the ocean, you start thinking crazy thoughts and no one's there to reassure you."
