The Secret in the Lake

by Joseph Grant

part 2 of 3

Upon returning, Mickey leaned into the conversation as he handed out the shot and a beer.

“I have a lot of diving equipment we could use,” Charlie said.

“I don’t know how to dive. I ain’t never dived in my life,” Mickey said.

“It’s easy,” Charlie assured them. “I can teach you guys. I can show you the basics at the pool at the Y. I got a friend who works there. It’ll be all you need to know.”

“I don’t know, Mickey, Whaddya think? You think this guy’s on the level?” Frankie said cautiously. “I... I... don’t even know how to swim.”

“You don’t know how to swim?” Charlie asked in disbelief.

“No, no... not really,” Frankie answered defensively. “Never had a pool growing up. I only went to my cousin’s pool; you know, the kind you sit in.”

“And held onto the sides.” Mickey poked fun at him.

“Shut up, Mickey,” Frankie growled.

“And made out with his cousin, the sick pervert,” he continued.

“I said shut up, Mickey or ya’r gonna be getting’ a fat lip, ya see?”

Throughout the drunken afternoon, a plan was developed. Charlie, with the help of his new-found friend’s somewhat permanent jobs from the Union Hall, compared to his otherwise non-employment, they would all take turns and repair what was left of his rusting underwater salvage and diving equipment down at the Navy yard. Surely, he would receive his check from the VA by that time.

Charlie had already had to sell his diver’s mail box and air lift, and did not desire to sell any more of his equipment. With this plan in place and some income from his new friends, he reasoned he wouldn’t have to. He would be the lead diver, with Mickey as his second if he got stuck below, as he was smaller and less intelligent than Frankie.

Frankie would stay on the shore to be their look out and make certain their equipment operated properly. Charlie did not trust either one of them, but he trusted Frankie even less.

Invigorated, Charlie went down to his storage unit at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He took a long overdue inventory of what was left from his underwater salvage days. Among his possessions, there were a variety of wet-suits, flippers, masks, air tanks, dive bags, buoyancy compensators, diving regulators, metal and plastic backplates, diving reels, decompression tables, buoys, wings, stab jackets, ABLJs, weights and a sundry of other components that made up a successful and safe dive.

Most of the equipment was for deep sea, salt water diving, although he did have some equipment that he used for river diving as well. He wondered if he had kept any of it. His worries abated when he spotted some stationary flags, river sticks, creepers, Y-yokes and Secchi disks tucked away with other equipment in the corner and breathed a sigh of relief.

The next step required restoration of the equipment. It was with a bit of luck he had run into these two union hall workers who actually had their own tools. Many months of preparation were spent in refining the old equipment until it was literally seaworthy.

While they restored the equipment at night, by day they scoured libraries and old records for research. The long forgotten town of Doverstown still existed in the old public records hall in the town of New Fallbrook, a few miles to the west, the closest municipality that had usurped all public information of this long lost town.

Their research was aided by the city layout they discovered online at the New Fallbrook Library. There was just enough information to go on and map out the entire area of the town, its buildings, roads and other landmarks. Charlie wasn’t even sure if the data would be credible, as water had a tendency to change things like concrete and wood-frame structures.

After that brief burst of information, any additional information was found purely by accident. It was certainly enough to get them started. Charlie knew: he had gone on many recovery dives during the war where the information was not available or worse yet, deemed classified. Inconceivably, nearly a year had gone by since their fortuitous meeting in the bar.

After a few inconclusive solo test dives, the big day had come. He would have to be very careful with Mickey. He didn’t need any snafus. Rumor had it there were bodies found floating every once in a while. Could the lake have been an old Mob dumping ground, Charlie wondered?

The air temperature was cool and there had been rain earlier before the day began. This did not bode well for the visibility factor down below the surface. The surface itself was calm and smooth and this was only broken by small insects that skimmed along its topside. Once in a great while from the concrete shore, Charlie could see the surface disturbed by the quick feeding of a trout, but otherwise, the lake was eerily still.

Frankie slowly unpacked the gear from Charlie’s beat to hell pickup truck, and both he and Charlie suited up and readied themselves for the dive.

“I hope we have better luck today than the last few dives,” Mickey said.

Charlie said nothing, instead concentrating on finding his breathing apparatus somewhere in the rolling mess that was Mickey’s car.

Once they suited up, Mickey and Charlie staggered down the concrete walkway to the water. Charlie noticed with a cruel grin how Mickey had the most trouble of the two in getting into the water. As he reached the waterline, he fell, struggled to gain his footing and then stumbled onto his side. He then gave up, crawled the rest of the way until he could wade.

Charlie shook his head and descended past his knees, stomach and torso, finally getting into the depth of his shoulders. The river water was icy cold, having been chilled by the mountain streams and the cool weather overnight.

The water quickly seeped down the back of his wetsuit, giving him a shock of exposure to the wet cold. His teeth chattered against his mouthpiece and he scooped the water in his mask, swirled it around and emptied it to clean his visor. He was going to need all the visibility he could get. He placed the black rubbery mask over his head with a cold snap and plunged into the water.

Charlie’s ears immediately filled with the sound of gurgling water. He always loved that sound. He had missed that sound. He smiled as much as the mouthpiece would let him. He was home once again.

Mickey’s searchlight flickered in the murky green beside Charlie. He stayed close to Charlie, much to Charlie’s annoyance. He wanted Mickey to explore, not to shadow him. This was an expedition, not a friendly dive, he’d told them. Charlie hoped Mickey’s greed would get the better of him and send him some place other than his side.

The two descended down to where Charlie had first spotted the utility pole. The idea was to not waste precious oxygen and find the bank, if it was still there and maybe, just maybe pinch a few homes while down there. As they swam deeper, the visibility was cloudy but it seemed to get clearer the further they went. Charlie had had started his love of diving in lakes such as this one as a teenager, well before the Navy, but this was manmade, replete with unforeseen dangers and not a typical fresh water dive.

There were many elements that kept this water from behaving like any other fresh water channel. In addition to the stories of industrial chemicals being dumped into the water, there were synthetics released from the decomposing houses, the roofing, the tile sheeting, the lead and the asbestos from the deteriorating walls and floors, the carpets, the years of DDT and insect repellent in the lawns and trees and other artificial contaminants and chemicals kept in the home itself breaking down. There were also stories of toxic waste being deposited here, but they were unsubstantiated.

Regarding the trout and bass that had been stocked in the lake, those had only been stocked recently, in the last twenty to twenty-five years. Much like the Hudson River in New York, no one actually ate their catch here. It was just for the sport of fishing that the people came, as it was said that the fish behaved differently on a line than any other fish and that it was due to the chemicals dumped in the lake. Forget the myth of the submerged town, if the chemicals had been dumped, as the stories suggested, their combined toxicities alone could kill him.

After a depth of fifty meters or so had been navigated, the water around them cleared to an almost pristine condition. Charlie deduced that the murkiness was due to the chemicals in the water but could not be sure. His line of sight improved to a greater depth and below them, Charlie and Mickey could both make out the faint outlines of an unnatural formation.

The first things that Charlie could make out were what appeared to be boxes and crates of differing sizes that littered the floor of the lake. At first the boxes mystified him. Horrified, Charlie and Mickey examined these boxes as they swam close. They were coffins, opened and unopened, wrestled free from what had been the ground below when the valley was flooded.

This would explain the bodies rising to the surface, Charlie thought with a shudder. The caskets littered the floor of the lake in what had presumably been the area of the town cemetery. It creeped both of the divers as some of the corpses either lay in their coffins, half open or completely open or floated free as if almost protectively guarding the area. Some of them were in various states of decay while some were bones, no doubt stripped clean by the marine life; and yet others seemed untouched by death.

Charlie wondered if the coffins had been opened by the pressure of the rushing water when the dam was filled. The water made the corpses seem alive, as they moved slightly with every fluctuation in the current. It was eerie, thought Charlie as he hurried past the remains.

It intrigued Charlie why none of the families had them reburied elsewhere; but then remembered the newspaper accounts of the dam bursting unexpectedly. It caused a great flood before everyone and everything could be evacuated. It made sense that the lead-lined coffins would have been moved from their burial spot but not have floated up to the surface during the deluge that swept away other, lesser fabrications.

This was the main reason why the bank, if still intact, must have been left half full. Why after all of this time no one had thought of removing the sunken money and gold bars remained a mystery to Charlie until he looked towards the surface and remembered the four tons of water over his head.

The town looked probably somewhat as it had when not submerged under two hundred feet of water, Charlie deduced. He had seen old photos online and in books at the library at New Fallbrook. While there were obvious signs of devastation and foundation damage and buildings imploding from the immense pressure, he marveled at how little in the way of ruination had descended upon the town.

As he swam along the nearly intact city blocks, he followed the map he had memorized. He had studied all of the old city maps he could find, even going into the vaults at the old city hall in New Fallbrook, in case the downloads he had gotten off the Internet in the library had missed anything. He ate, slept and dreamt the maps of the long-vanished city.

He had had many dreams where he swam the very streets just as he was doing now, he thought with a rush. Except, in dreams he was alone and the war, unlike now, was not very far from his mind. The water was not as clear as it was now and instead of the empty and crumbling buildings, there were ships of every class and size, ripped apart and the bodies of his friends floating lifelessly around him.

The thought brought him back to reality. If one could break out in a cold sweat while diving, Charlie was doing it. Maybe he was having an anxiety attack, he was not sure. He had to concentrate on the maps and clear his mind of the war. It was all about the maps. Without his persistence of memory, he was as lost as the other guy swimming next to him.

He floated along the main street in the town, Citrus Street and along the side street where according to the plans was the police station, the Ford Dealership, a small park in front of it where the townspeople would hold their farmer’s market and the café across the street. He could see the trees, stripped of their bark and leaves, ghostlike. Some of the trees were toppled; some still upright as reaching eternally for the sun and seasons that would never again come their way.

He coasted along College Avenue, which was filled with what had once been one- and two-story colonial houses, some crushed by the inert pressure and others having become a pile of unrecognizable, half-buried remnants of lives displaced.

To his surprise, a few cars remained, upended or placed erratically as one had been placed, floating precariously halfway inside of a church steeple.

A light in one of the small professional buildings eerily flickered on and off and both Mickey and Charlie shot each other a frozen look of shock. It occurred to Charlie for a brief second that they might not be alone.

Proceed to part 3...