INTRODUCTION

This is one of those experience-inspired stories I can trace back to a specific moment in my life.

In October of 1996 I took a trip to Cozumel. Since it just happened to be one of the meccas of the SCUBA world, I took a quickie diving course there to see what it was like. What a rush. How long had this been going on and why hadn’t anyone told me? No number of Jacques Cousteau specials on TV or the big screen can match the experience.

As soon as I got home I signed up for a PADI course to get certified. After that I became a diving fool—reefs, wrecks, walls. You name it, I’d dive it.

While I was in Mexico researching The Fifth Harmonic, I wound up in Zihuatanejo. El Niño was in full swing and the water off Mexico’s southwest coast was the temperature of blood. Someone suggested a night dive. Why not?

A couple of local dive junkies chugged a friend and me around to this little cove south of the harbor. Sheer rock walls rose on three sides, cutting off all light from Zihuatanejo. The moon wasn’t up, and even though the Milky Way was brighter than I’d ever seen it, it was dark…as in dark.

One problem, the guys told us, was some sort of local sea thingies (his English wasn’t great) that sting. They’re attracted to light so you’ve got to leave your dive lamps off during the first fifteen feet of descent. If they see the light they’ll come running and get you. Below fifteen feet you’re home free.

No problem. Or so I thought.

I do not scare. You can startle me, sure, but I never panic, and I’ve never lost my head.

That said, let me tell you, the complete, utter, absolute, unqualified, out-and-out (yes, I’m being redundant, but am I making my point?) all-encompassing, suffocating blackness that engulfed me during the first fifteen feet of that dive damn near unnerved me. I lost all orientation as to up and down—without weight I couldn’t depend on gravity to tell me, without a single visual point of reference (hell, I couldn’t even see my bubbles) I couldn’t depend on my eyes. It was damn near complete sensory deprivation. I felt my pulse and respiration rate jump and knew I’d be hyperventilating soon. I could banish the creeping panic simply by turning on my light. What’s a few stings compared to this. But nobody else was turning on their lights, so I’d be damned if I’d be the first.

Finally, somewhere ahead (or was that below?) one of the local guys flicked on his light because he’d hit the twenty-foot level.

Saved.

The rest of the dive was wonderful—you see creatures that never come out in the day. I did another night dive later off Grand Cayman and all was fine.

But those first fifteen feet off Zihuatanejo—I had to translate those feelings to a story.

Richard Chizmar bought it for his Cemetery Dance magazine.

So…hook your regulator to your tank, slip into your BCD, adjust your mask, and into the water…