Far from being haunted, the Box was a kind of tabula rasa.
It had no history, and it held no ghosts . . .
It was a woman who picked up the phone and I said, “Can I speak to Mr. Lavery, please?”
“May I ask what it concerns?” she said.
I gave her my name and said, “I’m calling from Wainfleet Maritime College. I’m his instructor on the helicopter safety course.”
“I thought that was all done with last week.”
“He didn’t complete it.”
“Oh.” I’d surprised her. “Excuse me for one moment. Can you hold on?”
I heard her lay down the phone and move away. Then, after a few moments, there came the indistinct sounds of a far-off conversation. There was her voice and there was a man’s, the two of them faint enough to be in another room. I couldn’t make out anything of what was being said.
After a while, I could hear someone returning.
I was expecting to hear Lavery’s voice, but it was the woman again.
She said, “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t get him to speak to you.” There was a note of exasperation in her tone.
“Can you give me any indication why?”
“He was quite emphatic about it,” she said. The implication was that no, he’d not only given her no reason, but he also hadn’t appreciated being asked. Then she lowered her voice and added, “I wasn’t aware that he hadn’t finished the course. He told me in so many words that he was done with it.”
Which could be taken more than one way. I said, “He does know that without a safety certificate he can’t take up the job?”
“He’s never said anything about that.” She was still keeping her voice down, making it so that Lavery—her husband, I imagined, although the woman hadn’t actually identified herself—wouldn’t overhear. She went on, “He’s been in a bit of a funny mood all week. Did something happen?”
“That’s what I was hoping he might tell me. Just ask him once more for me, will you?”
She did, and this time I heard Lavery shouting.
When she came back to the phone she said, “This is very embarrassing.”
“Thank you for trying,” I said. “I won’t trouble you any further, Mrs. Lavery.”
“It’s Miss Lavery,” she said. “James is my brother.”
In 1950 the first scheduled helicopter service started up in the UK, carrying passengers between Liverpool and Cardiff. Within a few short years helicopter travel had become an expensive, noisy, and exciting part of our lives. No vision of a future city was complete without its heliport. Children would run and dance and wave if they heard one passing over.
The aviation industry had geared up for this new era in freight and passenger transportation, and the need for various kinds of training had brought new life to many a small airfield and flight school. Wainfleet was a maritime college, but it offered new aircrew one facility that the flight schools could not.
At Wainfleet we had the dunker, also known as The Box.
We’d been running the sea rescue and safety course for almost three years, and I’d been on the staff for most of that time. Our completion record was good. I mean, you expect a few people to drop out of any training program, especially the dreamers, but our intake were experienced men with some living under their belts. Most were ex-navy or air force, and any romantic notions had been knocked out of them in a much harder theatre than ours. Our scenarios were as nothing, compared to the situations through which some of them had lived.
And yet, I was thinking as I looked at the various records spread across the desk in my little office, our drop-outs were gradually increasing in their numbers. Could the fault lie with us? There was nothing in any of their personal histories to indicate a common cause.
I went down the corridor to Peter Taylor’s office. Peter Taylor was my boss. He was sitting at his desk signing course certificates.
I said, “Don’t bother signing Lavery’s.”
He looked up at me with eyebrows raised, and I shrugged.
“I’m no closer to explaining it,” I said.
“Couldn’t just be plain old funk, could it?”
“Most of these men are war heroes,” I said. “Funk doesn’t come into it.”
He went back to his signing, but he carried on talking.
“Easy enough to be a hero when you’re a boy without a serious thought in your head,” he said. “Ten years of peacetime and a few responsibilities, and perhaps you get a little bit wiser.”
Then he finished the last one and capped the fountain pen and looked at me. I didn’t quite know what to say. Peter Taylor had a background in the merchant marine but he’d sat out the war right here, in a reserved occupation.
“I’d better be getting on,” I said.
I left the teaching block and went over to the building that housed our sea tank. It was a short walk and the sun was shining, but the wind from the ocean always cut through the gap between the structures. The wind smelled and tasted of sand and salt, and of something unpleasant that the new factories up the coast had started to dump into the estuary.
Back in its early days, Wainfleet had been a sanatorium for TB cases. Staffed by nuns, as I understood it; there were some old photographs in the mess hall. Then it had become a convalescent home for mine workers and then, finally, the maritime college it now was. We had two hundred boarding cadets for whom we had dormitories, a parade ground, and a rugby field that had a pronounced downward slope toward the cliffs. But I wasn’t part of the cadet teaching staff. I was concerned only with the commercial training arm.
Our team of four safety divers was clearing up after the day’s session. The tank had once been an ordinary swimming pool, added during the convalescent-home era but then deepened and re-equipped for our purposes. The seawater was filtered, and in the winter it was heated by a boiler. Although if you’d been splashing around in there in December, you’d never have guessed it.
Their head diver was George “Buster” Brown. A compact and powerful-looking man, he’d lost most of his hair and had all but shaved off the rest, American GI-style. With his barrel chest and his bullet head, he looked like a human missile in his dive suit. In fact, he’d actually trained on those two-man torpedoes toward the end of the war.
I said to him, “Cast your mind back to last week. Remember a trainee name of Lavery?”
“What did he look like?”
I described him, and added, “Something went wrong and he didn’t complete.”
“I think I know the one,” Buster said. “Had a panic during the exercise and we had to extract him. He was almost throwing a fit down there. Caught Jacky Jackson a right boff on the nose.”
“What was he like after you got him out?”
“Embarrassed, I think. Wouldn’t explain his problem. Stamped off and we didn’t see him again.”
Buster couldn’t think of any reason why Lavery might have reacted as he did. As far as he and his team were concerned, the exercise had gone normally in every way.
I left him to finish stowing the training gear, and went over to inspect the Box.
The Box was a stripped-down facsimile of a helicopter cabin, made of riveted aluminium panels and suspended by cable from a lifeboat davit. The davit swung the Box out and over the water before lowering it. The cabin seated four. Once immersed, an ingenious chain-belt system rotated the entire cabin until it was upside down. It was as realistic a ditching as we could make it, while retaining complete control of the situation. The safety course consisted of a morning in the classroom, followed by the afternoon spent practising escape drill from underwater.
The Box was in its rest position at the side of the pool. It hung with its floor about six inches clear of the tiles. I climbed aboard, and grabbed at something to keep my balance as the cabin swung around under my weight.
There had been no attempt to dress up the interior to look like the real thing; upside-down and six feet under, only the internal geography needed to be accurate. The bucket seats and harnesses were genuine, but that was as far as it went. The rest was just the bare metal, braced with aluminium struts and with open holes cut for the windows. In appearance it was like a tin Wendy House, suspended from a crane.
I’m not sure what I thought I was looking for. I put my hand on one of the seats and tugged, but the bolts were firm. I lifted part of the harness and let the webbing slide through my fingers. It was wet and heavy. Steadying myself, I used both hands to close the buckle and then tested the snap-release one-handed.
“I check those myself,” Buster Brown said through the window. “Every session.”
“No criticism intended, Buster,” I said.
“I should hope not,” he said, and then he was gone.
It happened again the very next session, only three days later.
I’d taken the files home and I’d studied all the past cases, but I’d reached no firm conclusions. If we were doing something wrong, I couldn’t see what it was.
These were not inexperienced men. Most were in their thirties and, as I’d pointed out to Peter Taylor, had seen service under wartime conditions. Some had been ground crew, but many had been flyers who’d made the switch to peacetime commercial aviation. Occasionally we’d get students whose notes came marked with a particular code, and whose records had blank spaces where personal details should have been; these individuals, it was acknowledged but never said, were sent to us as part of a wider MI5 training.
In short, no sissies. Some of them were as tough as you could ask, but it wasn’t meant to be a tough course. It wasn’t a trial, it wasn’t a test. The war was long over.
As I’ve said, we began every training day in the classroom. Inevitably, some of it involved telling them things they already knew. But you can’t skip safety, even though some of them would have loved to; no grown man ever looks comfortable in a classroom situation.
First I talked them through the forms they had to complete. Then I collected the forms in.
And then, when they were all settled again, I started the talk.
I said, “We’re not here to punish anybody. We’re here to take you through a scenario so that hopefully, if you ever do need to ditch, you’ll have a much greater chance of survival. Most fatalities don’t take place when the helicopter comes down. They happen afterwards, in the water.”
I asked if anyone in the room had been sent to us for re-breather training, and a couple of hands were raised. This gave me a chance to note their faces.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to go over a few points and then after the break we’ll head for the pool.”
I ran through the routine about the various designs of flight suits and harnesses and life vests. Then the last-moment checks; glasses if you wore them, false teeth if you had them, loose objects in the cabin. Hold onto some part of the structure for orientation. Brace for impact.
One or two had questions. Two men couldn’t swim. That was nothing unusual.
After tea break in the college canteen, we all went over together. Buster Brown and his men were already in the water, setting up a dinghy for the lifeboat drill that would follow the ditch. The students each found themselves a suit from the rail before disappearing into the changing room, and I went over to ready the Box.
When they came out, they lined up along the poolside. One of the divers steadied the Box and I stayed by the controls and called out, “Numbers one to four, step forward.”
The Box jiggled around on its cable as the first four men climbed aboard and strapped themselves into the bucket seats. Buster Brown checked everyone’s harness from the doorway, and then signalled to me before climbing in with them and securing the door from the inside. I sounded the warning klaxon and then eased back the lever to raise the Box into the air.
In the confines of the sea tank building, the noise of the crane’s motor could be deafening. Once I’d raised the payload about twelve feet in the air, I swung the crane around on its turntable to place the Box directly over the pool. It swung there, turning on its cable, and I could see the men inside through the raw holes that represented aircraft windows.
Two divers with masks and air bottles were already under the water, standing by to collect the escapees and guide them up to the surface. Buster would stay inside. This was routine for him. He’d hold his breath for the minute or so that each exercise took, and then he’d ride the Box back to the poolside to pick up the next four.
Right now he was giving everyone a quick recap of what I’d told them in the classroom. Then it was, Brace, brace, brace for impact! and I released the Box to drop into the water.
It was a controlled drop, not a sudden plummet, although to a first-timer it was always an adrenalin moment. The Box hit the water and then started to settle, and I could hear Buster giving out a few final reminders in the rapidly filling cabin.
Then it went under, and everything took on a kind of slow-motion tranquility as the action transferred to below the surface. Shapes flitted from the submerged Box in all directions, like wraiths fleeing a haunted castle. They were out in seconds. As each broke the surface, a number was shouted. When all four were out, I raised the Box.
It was as fast and as straightforward as that.
The exercise was repeated until every student had been through a straightforward dunk. Then the line reformed and we did it all again, this time with the added refinement of a cabin rotation as the Box went under. It made for a more realistic simulation, as a real helicopter was liable to invert with the weight of its engine. To take some of the anxiety out of it, I’d tell the students that I considered escape from the inverted cabin to be easier—you came out through the window opening facing the surface, which made it a lot easier to strike out for.
Again, we had no problems. The safety divers were aware of the non-swimmers and gave them some extra assistance. The Box functioned with no problems. No one panicked, no one got stuck. Within the hour, everyone was done.
At that point, we divided the party. The two men on rebreather training stayed with Buster Brown, and everyone else went to the other end of the pool for lifeboat practice. I ran the Box through its paces empty yet again, as Buster stood at the poolside with them and ran through his piece on the use of the rebreather unit.
The rebreather does pretty much what its name suggests. Consisting of an airbag incorporated into the flotation jacket with a mouthpiece and a valve, it allows you to conserve and re-use your own air. There’s more unused oxygen in an expelled breath than you’d think. It’s never going to replace the aqualung, but the device can extend your underwater survival time by a vital minute or two.
Both men looked as if they might be old hands at this. Their names were Charnley and Briggs. Even in the borrowed flight suit, Charnley had that sleek, officer-material look. He had an Errol Flynn moustache and hair so heavily brilliantined that two dunks in the tank had barely disturbed it. Briggs, on the other hand, looked the non-commissioned man to his fingertips. His accent was broad and his hair looked as if his wife had cut it for him, probably not when in the best of moods.
Buster left them practicing with the mouthpieces and came over to pick up his mask and air bottle. I was guiding the empty Box, water cascading from every seam, back to the poolside.
“Just a thought, Buster,” I said, raising my voice to be heard as I lowered the cabin to the side. “Wasn’t Lavery on the rebreather when he had his little episode?”
“Now that you mention it, yes he was.”
“How many were in the Box with him?”
“Two others. Neither of them had any problem.”
I didn’t take it any further than that. None of our other non-finishers had been on the rebreather when they chose to opt out, so this was hardly a pattern in the making.
The rebreather exercise was always conducted in three stages. Firstly, the Box was lowered to sit in the water so that the level inside the cabin was around chest-height. The student would practice by leaning forward into the water, knowing that in the event of difficulty he need do no more than sit back. This confidence-building exercise would then be followed by a total immersion, spending a full minute under the water and breathing on the apparatus. Assuming all went well, the exercise would end with a complete dunk, rotate and escape.
All went well. Until that final stage.
The others had all completed the lifeboat drill and left the pool by then. The Box hit the water and rolled over with the spectacular grinding noise that the chain belt always made. It sounded like a drawbridge coming down, and worked on a similar principle.
Then the boomy silence of the pool as the water lapped and the Box stayed under.
The minute passed, and then came the escape. One fleeting figure could be seen under the water. But only one. He broke surface and his number was called. It was Briggs. I looked toward the Box and saw Buster going in through one of the window openings. My hand was on the lever, but I waited; some injury might result if I hauled the Box out in the middle of an extraction. But then Buster came up and made an urgent signal and so I brought the cabin up out of the water, rotating it back upright as it came. Tank water came out of the window openings in gushers.
Buster came out of the pool and we reached the Box together. Charnley was still in his harness, the rebreather mouthpiece still pushing his cheeks out. He was making weak-looking gestures with his hands. I reached in to relieve him of the mouthpiece, but he swatted me aside and then spat it out.
Fending his hands away, Buster got in with him and released his harness. By then, Charnley was starting to recognize his surroundings and to act a little more rationally. He didn’t calm down, though. He shoved both of us aside and clambered out.
He stood at the poolside, spitting water and tearing himself out of the flotation jacket.
“What was the problem?” I asked him.
“You want to get that bloody thing looked at,” Charnley gasped.
Buster, who had a surprisingly puritan streak, said in a warning tone, “Language,” and I shot him a not-now look.
“Looked at for what?” I said, but Charnley just hurled all his gear onto the deck as if it had been wrestling him and he’d finally just beaten it.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said, “I feel foul.” And he stalked off to the changing room.
The two of us got the Box secure, and while we were doing it I asked Buster what happened. Buster could only shrug.
“I tapped his arm to tell him it was time to come out, but he didn’t move,” Buster said. “Just stayed there. I thought he might have passed out, but when I went in he started to thrash around and push me away.”
So, what was Charnley’s problem? I went to find him in the changing room. Briggs had dressed in a hurry in order to be sure of getting out in time for his bus. As he passed me in the doorway he said, “Your man’s been wasting a good shepherd’s pie in there.”
Shepherd’s pie or whatever, I could smell vomit hanging in the air around the cubicles at the back of the changing room. Charnley was out. He was standing in front of the mirror, pale as watered milk, knotting his tie. An RAF tie, I noted.
“Captain Charnley?” I said.
“What about it?”
“I just wondered if you were ready to talk about what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” he said.
I waited.
After a good thirty seconds or more he said, “I’m telling you nothing happened. Must have got a bad egg for breakfast. Serves me right for trusting your canteen.”
I said, “I’ll put you back on the list for tomorrow. You can skip the classroom session.”
“Don’t bother,” he said, reaching for his blazer.
“Captain Charnley . . . ”
He turned to me then, and fixed me with a look so stern and so urgent that it was almost threatening.
“I didn’t see anything in there,” he said. “Nothing. Do you understand me? I don’t want you telling anyone I did.”
Even though I hadn’t suggested any such thing.
There was a bus stop outside the gates, but Captain Charnley had his own transport. It was a low, noisy, open-topped sports car with a Racing Green paint job, all dash and Castrol fumes. Off he went, scaring the birds out of the trees, swinging out onto the road and roaring away.
I went back to my office and reviewed his form. According to his record, he’d flown Hurricanes with 249 Squadron in Yorkshire. After the war he’d entered the glass business, but he’d planned a return to flying with BEA.
Hadn’t seen anything? What exactly did that mean? What was there to see anyway?
I have to admit that in a fanciful moment, when we’d first started to suspect that there might be some kind of a problem on the course, I’d investigated the Box’s history. But it had none. Far from being the salvaged cabin of a wrecked machine, haunted by the ghosts of those who’d died in it, the Box had been purpose-built as an exercise by apprentices at the local aircraft factory.
It was no older than its three-and-a-half years, and there was nothing more to it than met the eye. The bucket seats were from scrap, but they’d been salvaged from training aircraft that had been decommissioned without ever having seen combat or disaster.
When I went back to the sea tank, Buster Brown was out of his diving gear and dressed in a jacket and tie, collecting the men’s clocking-off cards prior to locking up the building. The other divers had cleared away the last of their equipment and gone.
I said, “Can I ask a favor?”
He said, “As long as it doesn’t involve borrowing my motor bike, my missus, or my money, ask away.”
I think he knew what I was going to say. “Stay on a few minutes and operate the dunker for me? I want to sit in and see if I can work out what all the fuss is about.”
“I can tell you what the fuss is about,” he said. “Some can take it and some can’t.”
“That doesn’t add up, Buster,” I said. “These have all been men of proven courage.”
Suddenly it was as if we were back in the Forces and he was the experienced NCO politely setting the greenhorn officer straight.
“With respect, sir,” he said, “You’re missing the point. Being tested doesn’t diminish a man’s regard for danger. I think you’ll find it’s rather the opposite.”
We proceeded with the trial. I found a suit that fit me and changed into it. I put on a flotation jacket and rebreather gear. No safety divers, just me and Buster. Like the tattooed boys who ride the backs of dodgems at the fairground, you feel entitled to get a little cavalier with the rules you’re supposed to enforce.
I strapped myself in, and signaled my readiness to Buster. Then I tensed involuntarily as the cable started moving with a jerk. As the Box rose into the air and swung out over the pool, I looked all around the interior for anything untoward. I saw nothing.
Buster followed the normal routine, lowering me straight into the water. The box landed with a slap, and immediately began to rock from side to side as it filled up and sank. It was cold and noisy when the seawater flooded into the cabin, but once you got over that first moment’s shock it was bearable. I’ve swum in colder seas on Welsh holidays.
Just as it reached my chin, I took a deep breath and ducked under the surface. Fully submerged, I looked and felt all around me as far as I could reach, checking for anything unusual. There was nothing. I wasn’t using the rebreather at this point. I touched the belt release, lifting the lever plate, and it opened easily. There was the usual slight awkwardness as I wriggled free of the harness, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. I took a few more moments to explore the cabin, again finding nothing, and then I went out through a window opening without touching the sides.
I popped up no more than a couple of seconds later. When Buster saw that I was out in open water, he lifted the dunker. As I swam to the side it passed over me, streaming like a raincloud onto the heaving surface of the pool.
By the time I’d climbed up the ladder, the Box was back in its start position and ready for reboarding. I said to Buster, “So which seat was Charnley in? Wasn’t it the left rear?”
“Aft seat on the port side,” he said.
So that was the one I took, this second time. Might as well try to recreate the experience as closely as possible, I thought. Not that any of this seemed to be telling me anything useful. I strapped myself in and gave Buster the wave, and we were off again.
I had to run through the whole routine, just so that I could say to Peter Taylor that the check had been complete. It was second nature. In all walks of life, the survivors are the people who never assume. This time I inflated the rebreather bag while the cabin was in midair, and had the mouthpiece in by the time I hit the water. Again it came flooding in as the cabin settled, but this time there was a difference. Almost instantly the chain belt jerked into action and the cabin began to turn.
It feels strange to invert and submerge at the same time. You’re falling, you’re floating . . . . of course people get disoriented, especially if they’ve never done it before. This time I determined to give myself the full minute under. Without a diver on hand to tap me when the time was up, I’d have to estimate it. But that was no big problem.
The cabin completed its turn, and stopped. All sound ended as well, apart from boomy echoes from the building above, pushing their way through several tons of water. I hung there in the harness, not breathing yet. I felt all but weightless in the straps. The seawater was beginning to make my eyes sting.
I’d forgotten how dark the cabin went when it was upside down. The tank was gloomy at this depth anyway. I’d heard that the American military went a stage further than we did, and conducted a final exercise with everyone wearing blacked-out goggles to simulate a night-time ditching. That seemed a little extreme to me; as I’d indicated to the men in the classroom, the Box was never intended as a test of endurance. It was more a foretaste of something we hoped they’d never have to deal with.
I found myself wondering if Buster had meant anything by that remark. The one about men who’d been tested. As if he was suggesting that I wouldn’t know.
I’d been too young to fight at the very beginning of the war, but I joined up when I could and in the summer of 1940 I was selected for Bomber Command. In training I’d shown aptitude as a navigator. I flew twelve missions over heavily defended Channel ports, bombing the German invasion barges being readied along the so-called ‘Blackpool Front.’
Then Headquarters took me out and made me an instructor. My crew was peeved. It wasn’t just a matter of losing their navigator; most crews were superstitious, and mine felt that their luck was being messed with. But you could understand Bomber Command’s thinking. Our planes were ill equipped for night navigation, and there was a knack to dead reckoning in a blackout. I seemed to have it, and I suppose they thought I’d be of more value passing it on to others.
My replacement was a boy of no more than my own age, also straight out of training. His name was Terriss. He, the plane, and its entire crew were lost on the next mission. I fretted out the rest of the war in one classroom or another.
And was still doing that, I supposed.
How long now? Thirty seconds, perhaps. I breathed out, and then drew warm air back in from the bag.
It tasted of rubber and canvas. A stale taste. The rebreather air was oddly unsatisfying, but its recirculation relieved the aching pressure that had been building up in my lungs.
I looked across at one of the empty seats, and the shadows in the harness looked back.
That’s how it was. I’m not saying I saw an actual shape there. But the shadows fell as if playing over one. I turned my head to look at the other empty seat on that side of the cabin, and the figure in it raised its head to return my gaze.
The blood was pounding in my ears. I was forgetting the drill with the rebreather. Light glinted on the figure’s flying goggles. On the edge of my vision, which was beginning to close in as the oxygen ran down, I was aware of someone in the third and last seat in the cabin right alongside me.
That was enough. I didn’t stop to think. I admit it, I just panicked. All procedure was gone from my head. I just wanted to get out of there and back up to the surface. I was not in control of the situation. I wondered if I was hallucinating, much as you can know when you’re in a nightmare and not have it help.
Now I was gripping the sides of the bucket seat and trying to heave myself out of it but, of course, the harness held me in. My reaction was a stupid one. It was to try harder, over and over, slamming against resistance until the webbing cut into my shoulders and thighs. I was like a small child, angrily trying to pound a wooden peg through the wrong shape of hole.
Panic was burning up my oxygen. Lack of oxygen was making my panic worse. Somewhere in all of this I managed the one clear thought that I was never going to get out of the Box if I didn’t unbuckle my harness first.
It was at this point that the non-existent figure in the seat opposite leaned forward. In a smooth, slow move, it reached out and placed its hand over my harness release. The goggled face looked into my own. Between the flat glass lenses and the mask, no part of its flesh could be seen. For a moment I believed that it had reached over to help me out. But it kept its hand there, covering the buckle. Far from helping me, it seemed intent on preventing my escape.
I felt its touch. It wore no gloves. I’d thought that my own hand might pass through it as through a shadow, but it was as solid as yours or mine. When I tried to push it aside, it moved beneath my own as if all the bones in it had been broken. They shifted and grated like gravel inside a gelid bag.
When I tried to grab it and wrench it away, I felt its fingers dig in. I was trying with both hands now, but there was no breaking that grip. I somehow lost the rebreather mouthpiece as I blew out, and saw my precious breath go boiling away in a gout of bubbles. I wondered if Buster would see them break the surface but of course they wouldn’t, they’d just collect and slide around inside the floorpan of the Box until it was righted again.
I had a fight not to suck water back into my emptied lungs. Some dead hand was on my elbow. It had to be one of the others. It felt like a solicitous touch, but it was meant to hamper me. Something else took a firm grip on my ankle. Darkness was overwhelming me now. I was being drawn downward into an unknown place.
And then, without sign or warning, it was over. The Box was revolving up into the light, and all the water was emptying out through every space and opening. As the level fell, I could see all around me. I could see the other seats, and they were as empty as when the session had begun.
I was still deaf and disoriented for a few seconds, and it lasted until I tilted my head and shook the water out of my ears. I had to blow some of it out of my nose as well, and it left me with a sensation like an ice cream headache.
My harness opened easily, but once I’d undone it I didn’t try to rise. I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength. I gripped the seat arms and hung on as the Box was lowered.
I was still holding on when Buster Brown looked in though one of the window holes and said, “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
He was not impressed. “Oh, yes?”
“Had a bit of a problem releasing the buckle. Something seemed to get in the way.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at the unsecured harness and said, “Well, it seems to be working well enough now.”
I’d thought I could brazen it through, but my patience went all at once. “Just leave it, will you?” I exploded, and shoved him aside as I climbed out.
I never did tell Buster what I’d seen. That lost me his friendship, such as it was. I went on sick leave for three weeks, and during that time I applied for a transfer to another department. My application was successful, and they moved me onto the firefighting course. If they hadn’t, I would have resigned altogether. There was no force or duty on earth that could compel me into the tank or anywhere near the Box again.
The reason, which I gave to no one, was simple enough. I knew that if I ever went back, they would be waiting. Terriss, and all the others in my crew. Though the choice had not been mine, I had taken away their luck. Now they kept a place for me amongst them, there below the sea.
Wherever the sea might be found. Far from being haunted, the Box was a kind of tabula rasa. It had no history, and it held no ghosts. Each man brought his own.
My days are not so different now. As before they begin in the classroom, with forms and briefings and breathing apparatus drill. Then we go out into the grounds, first to where a soot-stained, mocked-up tube of metal stands in for a burning aircraft, and then on to a maze of connected rooms which we pump full of smoke before sending our students in to grope and stumble their way to the far exit.
They call these rooms the Rat Trap, and they are a fair approximation of the hazard they portray. Some of the men emerge looking frightened and subdued. When pressed, they speak of presences in the smoke, of unseen hands that catch at their sleeves and seem to entreat them to remain.
I listen to their stories. I tell them that this is common.
And then I sign their certificates and let them go.