If they couldn't find the corpse, they had to assume that the creature was still alive, and proceed from there. That meant traps, a doubled guard and a continuously activated minefield around the camp. And constant worry until we know it's dead.

The walls widened out again. Cadmann surfaced cautiously. He held the handlamp up to shine the beam around in the smoke-filled chamber.

There was another mild splash beside him, and Jerry surfaced, spear gun at the ready.

"Peaceful in here."

"But not silent. Hear that?"

Cadmann was about to ask. What?, then heard the distant gurgle.

The other twelve were up now. Their lamp beams pinked the darkness and smoke, running pale disks across bare cave walls.

"Let's go with the current for a while."

Their flippers barely moved as they let the current carry them toward the exit. Half the team watched underwater. The others stayed at the surface, with only their heads and lamps above the oily water. They swam in a V formation, each close enough to see two others. Sometimes the swirling smoke parted to show stalactites lancing down at them like yellowed fangs.

The current grew stronger. Cadmann surfaced. "Louder, I think."

"Rog," Andy answered.

"Stay together and head toward the shore!" Cadmann's arms and legs lashed powerfully at the water. Most of the others were right behind him. They were holding steady. He heard their regular breathing in his earphones.

Then a sudden anguished cry, and he saw someone disappear over the lip of a falls. Moments later Cadmann heard the splash.

"Who was that?"

A short pause, and then, "Kokubun, here. Wow! What a ride! Safe—only about a dozen meters. But it's lonely in here."

"Could you climb out. Mits?"

"No sweat. Come on down."

Cadmann considered for a moment. "All right. By twos."

His men swam toward the lip of the waterfall. A pair of snaggled, broken rocks divided the water flow, like the grinning mouth of a jack-o'-lantern as seen by the glare of the torches. The first two men tumbled down. There was silence for a moment, then laughter. "Piece of cake," one shouted.

Cadmann played his light behind him through the outer chamber. No disturbance, no movement. The yellowish smoke still swirled, but it was noticeably lighter even in the few minutes he had been there.

"Go by twos." Finally only Cadmann and Carlos were left, and together they swam for the lip. The pull of the current was strong, but not impossible to fight near the shoreline. When Cadmann let himself go there was a momentary sensation of weightlessness, then a ramp of water-polished stone to reach up from beneath them, and he slid the rest of the way into the water.

It took all of his discipline to restrain a whoop.

"Well." He shook his head, grinning under his mask. "That was refreshing. What have we here?"

The smoke was even deeper, and it looked sulphurous. The water was a little warmer than in the antechamber. Their lamp beams ate through the smoke to the blackened ceiling. Patches of steaming scum still floated on the water. It looked like something out of the inferno.

"If it was in here," Andy said positively, "it's dead now."

"I'll go with that." A grainy column of light stabbed out. The chamber was smaller than Cadmann had thought, and it was empty. His flash showed three jaggedly framed black exits.

"Now what. Coach?" Jerry asked.

"It was your soup. What do you think?"

"I think there was more than enough."

"Yeah. We don't have any real choices, do we? Divide into three teams and look into each of those exits. How is everyone fixed? Anyone need to change yet?"

There was a quick chorus of negatives, and Cadmann checked his own supply. Still almost a third left on his first cartridge. Good enough.

Jerry headed one team, Carlos another, and Cadmann took the third.

There was something about that middle tunnel...

"If the tunnels split again, that's it. Wait at the junction and signal. Under no circumstances divide the team, do you understand? When you're ten minutes into the second cartridge, turn around and start making your way back. If the radios start giving out, turn around and head back to this chamber. We don't want any heroes. If you spot the corpse, call for the rest of us. All right. Be safe."

Jerry and Andy swam with slow, even strokes. The engineer was rather clumsy on the land, but in the water his extra girth was less of a liability. A trail of tiny silvery bubbles escaping from Andy's re-breather reflected in Jerry's lamp beam.

Behind them, the other members of their team kept pace.

Something brushed Jerry, and he nervously followed it with the light.

It was almost a meter long, and looked more like a snake than a fish.

"I'm surprised to see anything alive down here," Andy said.

"Water breather," Jerry answered. "It's probably blind. Even in the deepest caves on Earth, you can find blind salamanders and insects."

When this is over, I'm coming back with a net and a sample case, he promised himself.

"Think it's dead?"

"Sure. We still have to know."

"Gotcha. I'm checking topside."

Andy headed up toward the surface, and by Jerry's light it was as if the man disappeared above the shoulders. "We're through into another chamber. The air looks clear."

"Don't take off your mask. Not all of the fumes are going to be visible."

"No problem."

Jerry surfaced next to him, shone his light around in the cave. This chamber was a little larger than the last, but still not more than thirty meters long. He directed his light straight up, and Andy whistled.

Directly above, the ceiling opened in a circular orifice about three meters across. "Will you look at this pothole?"

"What's that?"

"A dry chimney, in spelunking terms. Vertical channels formed by water flow. Water dried up, so we don't call it a chimney anymore. Look over there." To the left were a series of rounded steps, as flat as fish scales, each a half-dozen meters across, like a badly skewed stack of silver dollars or a stage for a Vegas musical.

"Called ‘gours.' Formed as carbonate is precipitated from turbulent water. Miskatonic must have been higher... more likely, it gets higher later in the year. Come on." Andy waved his light towards a widely arched opening. "I want to take a look back in the shadows. It might have crawled up there to die."

"Or get well."

"Come on, Jerry. No confidence in your soup? Hell, that stuff would have killed a dozen monsters."

Jerry followed Andy's lead. The side chamber was larger than the main cave they'd been in. Onyx and sparkling rocks glittered in the light of his flash. It was almost peaceful down here, and Jerry brought himself up short: that kind of thinking could easily get them both killed.

Another of the blind fish brushed past him. This one's eyes were pasty white, staring lifelessly in a broad face. Its mouth was crowded with needlelike teeth, and it nosed in for an experimental nip.

He knocked it away with the tip of his speargun.

"Looks like a dead end," Andy said. "I'll check out the far side." He kicked his bulky frame through the murk with surprising grace.

Andy went up, and up. He said, "Hey—"

And then his entire body just levitated from the water, whipped out as if vacuumed up with a suction pump.

What? Had he climbed out? Or pulled himself out?

"Andy?"

Andy's body smashed down into the water almost atop Jerry. Just his body: the head was gone. Black clouds jetted from the raggedly torn stump on his neck. They fogged the light. Hordes of blind fish streaked into the cloud, tussling and snapping at each other.

Jerry's chest froze, and he backpedaled frantically. There would come a lethal moment of water pressure, the single instant of warning before horror swooped out of the cloud of blood. In that instant he might have to trigger the spear gun into its grinning, gaping mouth...