I dreamed I was trying to write a story and I knew what I wanted to write but every time I tried to type into Keep another app opened on my phone and stole my keyboard input. The writing equivalent of dreaming you can’t find a toilet. When I woke up I could still remember what I’d been trying to type so I typed it for real. I’ve refrained from “fixing” anything to conform to waking logic. I’m sure I’ll reuse some of these elements in real stories sometime (I’m immediately fond of this bizarrely dysfunctional little town) but I don’t currently plan to try to make anything out of this narrative as it is.
I know now what happened to those night divers a few years back. The one who was found floating unconscious the next morning and never woke up, and the other who was never found.
In the aftermath the whole town developed an obsession with suspended animation. Everyone from the doctor to the mailman had an opinion on what to do with the coma patient, but of course it was only the doctor and the family whose opinions mattered, and they settled on hooking up the machine that pumps your blood out, puts oxygen in it, chills it to just above freezing and pumps it back in. This is different than true cryogenic freezing, as people in the diner and the shops and the streets explained back and forth to each other over and over.
Dozens of divers went into the lake all that next day looking for the missing diver, and for a few days after, until they had searched every accessible corner and found neither body nor explanation. Of course it’s not a lake you can explore every corner of, any more than you could explore every corner of the Mandelbrot set, if the Mandelbrot set were three dimensional and made of treacherous limestone caves.
The consensus in town, and for some reason this occasioned a great deal less conversation than the cryogenic question, was that something large lives in the underwater caves, comes out at night, and eats people. It was a few weeks before anyone went night diving again but ultimately the entertainments available in a small town are few and far between, and the bioluminescence is too pretty to stay away from for long.
As I said, I know now what happened to them. I found the missing diver’s watch, and the depths it recorded are incredible. But I think maybe the watch was bait because now I can’t see anything else and the water is getting so cold.
Peregrine Cross 