Well, it was time to move on. With some difficulty, Dortmunder got his feet under himself once more, but he didn’t stand up all the way. He remained crouched to keep his body underwater, and looked back at the shore, where Tiny and Tom were visible against the lighter mass of the motor home—Tiny leaning on the winch on its tripod, Tom just standing there to one side, like the evil spirit of the lake.
Tiny can handle him, Dortmunder told himself. Tiny can take care of himself. Sure he can. Tiny’s a big guy, he’s alert, he’ll keep control of the situation. Telling himself this stuff, Dortmunder turned away and started duck-walking deeper into the lake.
The ground underfoot underwater was very muddy and very kind of squidgy. As Dortmunder moved deeper, the bottom began to tug at his boots, trying to pull them off, so he had to move more and more carefully, drawing his heel out of the muck every time, while invisible fingers down there clutched at the back of his boot.
Then cold water touched his bare chin, beneath the mouthpiece. I’m gonna go underwater! Now! I’m gonna go underwater now! He turned and stared wildly shoreward one last time, but he was too far out over the water now and could no longer make out anything clearly. Tiny and Tom and the motor home were all in the darkness under the trees.
Everything’s fine. I’m gonna go underwater now. And he did.
Flashlight. How the hell do you turn on the flashlight? There’s gotta be a button, there’s—
A faint glow off to his right: Kelp’s flashlight. So it’s possible, no reason to panic, just look down in the darkness and try to figure out where the flashlight button is. Concentrating on the problem at hand, he forgot to breathe through his mouth, tried to breathe through his nose, and his nostrils pinched shut as the edges of the mask pressed painfully against his cheeks and forehead.
I’m strangling! Terrified, he gulped air through his mouth, discovered he was breathing, found the flashlight button, clicked the damn thing, and he still couldn’t see much of anything.
This was very dirty water. A lot dirtier than the stuff that comes out of faucets down in New York City. This water was brown. It had millions of tiny hairy dirt atoms floating in it, bouncing the flashlight glow back in a sepia halo.
He couldn’t even see the bottom. He angled the flashlight straight down, and he could just make out his own knees, but no deeper. His boot-clad feet were lost in the brown murk. Behind him, the thick white rope angled upward, buoyant enough to hover just a few inches below the surface, its braided white line disappearing no more than two feet away.
The original idea was, if they just kept moving forward, they’d come to the old road that used to go from Dudson Park to Putkin’s Corners; downhill to the right would be the direction they wanted. According to Wally Knurr’s computer, the old blacktop should still be there, though it might be partly covered with drifting mud. Of course, if they couldn’t see the bottom at all, that was gonna make it a little tougher to find the road. Except that blacktop, even underwater blacktop, wouldn’t try to pull his boot off at every step, so that would be a clue.
So the thing to do was stick together and move forward. Stick together. Dortmunder looked around, and couldn’t see Kelp’s flashlight anymore. Was it because of the glow of his own light? Finding the damn button again—why do they make it so hard to find the button? — he switched off his light, then turned in a slow circle, staring through the goggles at nothing at all. Pitch-black darkness. No light. Darkness. Blackness. Cold wet blackness, pressing in, pressing down, pressing against his chest and his forehead and the flimsy glass between his eyes and—
Button!
The hazy tan glow came back, re-creating the narrow round tube of dim light in which he stood, this murky closet surrounded by all that black.
Where was Kelp? Jeez, he could get lost down here. I hope he doesn’t panic, Dortmunder told himself, afraid that Kelp might not have his own nerves of steel, and knowing for certain that Kelp didn’t have the long white braid of rope that, no matter what else might happen, still linked Dortmunder’s waist to the winch and Tiny and the shore and the whole upper world of air and light.
Move forward, that was the thing to do. Move forward. Keep the flashlight on as a guide to Kelp, keep tight hold of the rope, that absolute lifeline, and move forward, feeling one’s way, waiting for that goddamn road.
Why am I doing this?
His foot hit something, hard. The something was hard, and his foot hit it hard. Damn! Now what?
Dortmunder bent low, sticking the flashlight down into the murk, and saw a tree stump there, right in front of him. Most of its bark had rotted away, the interior was rusty-looking and crumbly, and some of its roots had been exposed by the shifting mud. Roots as bent and dark as witches’ fingers, they were all around his feet.
Dortmunder moved to his right, and bumped into something else. It was another stump, about a foot high, a little thicker than the first one. He remained bent over to swing the flashlight in an arc, and more and more of them appeared out of the darkness; a squat army of tree stumps, some thick, some thin, all frayed and crumbling, standing at grubby attention in uneven rows, none more than a foot high. He moved the flashlight in a wider arc, half turning, and they were behind him, too, thousands of them, crowded together, roots overlapping as though they lolled at their ease here, just waiting for him, waiting all these years, biding their time, in no hurry, knowing some black night Dortmunder would descend among them and…
All right, all right. They aren’t alive, okay? They’re tree stumps, that’s all. Get hold of yourself, goddammit.
Then he remembered one of the items factored into Wally Knurr’s computer model of the valley when it was flooded. Most of the trees had been cut down before the water was put in. Yes, and most of the buildings had been towed away, except for totally useless ones or some overly large stone or brick ones like a couple of churches and firehouses and the library Tom had buried his goddamn stash behind. And those had been stripped of doors and windows and floors and anything else that might be of use.
He hadn’t thought before about what all that meant. He hadn’t stopped to think how difficult it was going to be to walk downhill through a forest of short tree stumps. On the other hand, even if he’d thought about tree stumps, he still wouldn’t have known about the murky darkness, the complete inability to see anything more than a few feet in front of a flashlight. And he hadn’t known just how difficult this mud was going to be to move around in.
Bent over, the rope and the weight belt digging into his waist, Dortmunder tried to find a path through the tree stumps. Shuffling forward, bumping into roots and stones—now there’s rocks in here, too—having to turn this way and that to make any progress at all, he soon realized he’d lost all idea which way was forward.
Well, forward is downhill, right? But which way was downhill? With just this narrow tiny area of light for reference, with all the crud floating around in the water, it was impossible to tell which was uphill, which was downhill, which was crosshill.
Which way is forward? More importantly, which way is back? He aimed the flashlight at the floating rope trailing him, but it weaved and drifted with tiny currents, forming half loops, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
Still gazing upward, trying to peer farther back along the line of rope, Dortmunder moved, bumped into something else, lost his balance briefly, compensated fast, and stepped out of his right boot.
Oh, hell! His bare foot was down now in cold wet slimy mud, sinking into it. He tugged upward, and felt a thick root pressed across the top of his instep. Clutching at him!