I wrote the nightmare sequence for American Graveyards in a single piece, then spliced it throughout the story so that it would carry the reader along to the end. Here it is as a single piece:
I drop over the side and for a moment I seem to be suspended in the air, the sun reflecting off the glass of the helmet, reproducing itself in the water droplets on the glass. I see my hand outstretched toward the sun, enclosed in the metal of the glove. Then the splash, muted through the metal and glass of the helmet, and the water closes aquamarine over me, the sun becomes a hazy golden ball, going away. I see the dark snake of the air hose winding above me through the water, small and large globes of air that float up past me, their delicate surfaces shimmering. It is growing darker, dull green above me now and black below. In one of my hands is a large diving flashlight, of corroded copper. I turn it on. The beam of the flashlight is just a haze around my hand, through which air bubbles disturbed by my descent rise. I can hear the hollow sound of my breathing in the helmet, and the burble and coo of the inky water around me. Above me, the water is midnight blue, and I can just barely make out the coiling drop of the air hose. I seem to be falling faster now. Even through the metal of the suit and the thick quilting of the undersuit I can feel the cold of the water. My breathing is a steady rasp. I move the flashlight back and forth through the water, but everywhere it is the same. Black and lifeless. But not lifeless! A dim shape moves along the side of the beam as I swing it around—just the impression of pale scales, the curve of a fin. I try to swing the light back, catch it again, but it is gone. The first shock of panic hits me, like freezing water bursting through the glass of the helmet.
My breathing quickens. My breath catches. I choke and sputter. It occurs to me that something could have happened up top—maybe there isn’t any more air coming down the hose. That’s why it seems hard to breathe! I choked because that was the last of the good air. Now it’s getting thin, dirty with my exhales. How much time. The beam of the flashlight is just a ball of light, dim. It seems separate from me, like it is falling near me. It is falling fast, the light—I can tell by the bubbles that rush upwards through its ball. There is still air in the helmet. I catch my breath.
Then . . . a piece of the light cut off. Just a slice, near the edge, gone for a moment behind a white blur, and then back. The smallest suggestion of a fin against the dim yellow globe. It could be nothing. Just a trick my mind is playing. Just my fear making ghosts for my eyes. Just . . . Something rasps across the side of my helmet. I twist my head desperately. I swing the flashlight wildly. My heart jumps at the sight of the dark cord of air-tube just above me. I reach my arm down, trying to see my feet in the dim glow, but they are too far away . . . the flashlight will not reach. They are somewhere down there in the perfect dark. I can feel them, but I cannot see them. Cannot see if something is . . . Something thumps heavily against the side of the suit. I can feel the trajectory of my fall shift, ever so slightly. And now cold panic washes over me. I wish that I could see my feet. I grope into the blackness with my eyes, but cannot make them out.
That is when I see it—a small green glow, perfectly round . . . so tiny that I blink, thinking it must be an illusion, a spot on the back of my iris, a hallucination from the pressure—I can feel the pressure now, pushing ever so slightly on me, a little more now that . . . how long ago was it. A minute, an hour? How far have I fallen? How long have I been rushing down through the tar-black water?
The green pinhead grows to the size of a marble, the marble to the size of a quarter. It is not an illusion. I hear a tiny hiss, and look in horror. At the joint where the helmet meets the suit, a small drop of water has found its way in to the suit . . . the hiss must have been the suit, losing its watertight seal. Air escaping. The end is near . . . or it could be my own sweat, water that I have carried into the suit with me . . . anything. I may have only been falling for thirty seconds, a minute.
Or an hour.
The green circle, now the size of a baseball, winks out for a second. I feel something press upwards on the bottom of my boot, just the slightest sense of pressure, carried to me through the metal, as If I had struck something in my descent. Then the feeling is gone. The green light is back, growing and growing, filling the dark water with an eerie phosphorescence, the barest aquamarine sheen to the oily blackness. The bubbles rising through my lamplight catch the color. It turns them into liquid turquoise marbles. My breathing is a steely hiss in the helmet, and my falling seems faster and faster. I am rocketing down to that green light, growing like a deep-sea sun. In the green-sheening darkness time loses meaning. I might have been falling for minutes or days. It is all the same; the terror is the same. Something comes between me and the light again, reminding me that I am not alone. This time I see it a little clearer. I can make out more of it against the algae glow below, and as it flashes by I see a skeletal flipper or hand—translucent flesh that glows emerald . . . and . . . there is a face. A human face, but not human, a floating, grinning skull layered under crystalline flesh, throbbing veins like spun-glass across the bones, weaving filaments of hair that catch the green in their see-through stalks and draw it out pooling. I scream inside my copper fishbowl, but the sound doesn’t go anywhere. It just falls with me, sucked down toward the light, as if the light has an aweing, unearthly gravity that draws even sound to its center.
And now the light is shifting, details appearing inside it, irregularities in its globular surface. Shapes, forms, that resolve themselves into turrets and spires. Crumbling gloamy boulevards full of shapes like dust-motes floating. A vast, underwater city pulsing with light, drawing me downward toward the delicate scallops of its towers and the spidery loft of its buttresses. Shapes float up toward me, deep-sea plankton that, as they approach, take skeletal human form—long, serpentine fish-flared tails swell to uncanny feminine hips—the stark white cage of ribs, the translucent swell of breasts. A pulsing vein along the inside of a slender arm, the chiseled line of a skull beneath near-invisible flesh, floating among the hollow glowing stalks of hair. She floats up to me and presses herself against the metal of my suit, her cheek pressed up against the glass of the helmet, her skeletal grin inches from my open, gasping mouth.
Others circle around us, spiraling through the dark and glowing water. The towers grow and then I am down among them, falling past their loamy sunken walls, slowing down.
My feet touch bottom.