Waking Nightmares by Christopher Golden

days, when his mom had called him Punkin. Dead mother or not, sappy shit like that could haunt a guy forever if his friends got wind of it. His father knew it, too, and had never breathed a word.
    “What was it, Dad?” Tommy asked, moving next to his father and grabbing the line to help him pull up the net.
    His father didn’t answer. Tommy wondered what he’d found down there that would make him so weirdly happy. He thought of Gregg McKeown, a friend of his father’s who had found an old cannon while scuba diving and spent the last three years recovering bits and pieces of a sunken Spanish galleon. Surely they hadn’t found something like that; they were much too close to shore. If there was a shipwreck here, someone would have found it already.
    Then again, the net had snagged on something. Tommy had cast it himself. It had gone down just as it was supposed to, ballooning like a parachute as the weights around it dragged the edges down. Cast-netters weren’t supposed to drag the bottom, and that hadn’t been his intention, but a lot of times the weights hit bottom before the net could be drawn taut, cinching it closed around whatever had been caught inside. They’d caught it on something, that was for sure.
    Tommy and his father hauled on the line, but the resistance was still there.
    “Dad, it’s still caught.”
    Norm gave him that lopsided grin, the scar tugging at the left side of his face. “It’s not caught. We’ve just got something heavy in the net.”
    Tommy knew that look. His father had always enjoyed secrets and surprises, and he had one now. Okay, Dad, he thought. It’s your net.
    They pulled, muscles straining. Tommy felt the sun baking the back of his neck. The water seemed so quiet, a silence broken only by their grunting efforts and the radio that played low in the small cabin. They swayed, keeping their balance as the boat rocked on the gentle waves.
    “Jesus, Dad,” Tommy said through gritted teeth. “Is it a friggin’ anchor?”
    They heaved, dragging it up, and then the net was there. Whatever weighted it down was still in the water. The Dunne men thrust their hands into the mesh of the net to get a better grip and pulled even harder. It came out of the water like a cork from a bottle, the splash of its emergence like a sigh. They staggered back, both men swearing, and Tommy nearly fell. He felt certain his father had been wrong. It had to have been caught on something, because it had weighed hundreds of pounds a second ago, and now the dark shape inside the net was a hell of a lot lighter than their usual catch.
    It clanked to the deck, and Tommy frowned, peering at it. His father peeled the net away, and at last he could see what it was they had dredged up from the bottom.
    An iron box, maybe eighteen inches long and nine high. Once upon a time it had had leather strapping, but now only the tiniest vestiges of that remained. The lid of the chest had a sort of trapezoidal shape, and two heavy locks kept it sealed up tight. The construction was strong but crude enough that the box had to be hundreds of years old. The iron should have been pitted and corroded by salt, but it seemed strangely smooth.
    Tommy glanced over to see his father watching him expectantly.
    “Come on, Dad,” he said. “Tell me you don’t think this is some kind of pirate treasure. That shit only happens in The Goonies .”
    “It doesn’t need to be treasure to be worth a fortune to us, bud,” Norm replied. “You’ve gotta ask yourself how it got here.”
    They stood back and stared at the chest, the net spread out around it like discarded wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Is that what this is? Tommy thought. A gift?
    “You’re thinking of Gregg McKeown,” he said.
    Norm nodded, his smile gone. His thoughts had turned serious as he regarded the trunk. “If we can establish that this thing came from a wreck, we could make a claim and . . .”
    Tommy looked at him. “Dad?”
    “Don’t want to get