Maren Hill

I dove Maren Hill on a slack tide with my partner Sefa on the tender line. The blocks were as bad as I'd remembered, half-collapsed, the kind of place the silt has been working on for forty years. I found the house from the photograph. It matched, the door, the railing, the number plate still legible under the growth. And here is where the dive stopped being ordinary. The front door of that house had been opened recently. Not forty years ago. Recently. The silt that covers everything down there, the patient silt, had been disturbed at the threshold, a clean swept arc, the kind of mark a door makes when it swings through settled mud. Someone had been inside this drowned house, and not long ago, and the man in the grey coat had paid me eleven years of income to go to a basement that somebody else had already visited. I floated at that doorway for a while. Sefa's voice came down the line asking if I was alright. I said I was. I was not sure it was true.