The Deep

by Helen Dunmore

  Elvira won’t be there. She’ll stay at Saldowr’s side, trying to heal him. She hugged us all before we left, one by one. Even me. Elvira has one of those faces that get even more beautiful close up. She put her arms around me as if she really cared what happened to me. I forgot to be jealous of her for at least a minute, until she hugged Conor with her beautiful long Mer arms, and they kept on murmuring to each other until Saldowr had to say that it was time to go.

  Astronauts must be so scared. I suppose they hide their fear because of the TV cameras. No, more likely it’s because the other astronauts would see it. Conor and Faro and I didn’t show one another that we were scared. I wish I were going to be with them all the way down, but it’s impossible. The whale has to dive straight. Three on one side and none on the other would send her crooked. Conor has to be with Faro. It’s Conor’s best chance.

  I open my mind and try to hear Faro’s thoughts, but with the bulk of the whale’s body between us I can’t pick up anything. I hope he and Conor are all right. They don’t know the whale as I do. I hope they can feel her kindness.

  A ripple of energy surges through the whale’s body. Something’s about to happen. I don’t want it! I want to get off. I want to go home.

  You must be brave, Sapphire. Be brave.

  It’s probably my own voice, but it calms me. The hot thudding in my head eases. I relax into the shelter of the whale’s flipper. I make my body melt against her rough skin, just as I made it melt against the dolphin’s back. She’s getting ready. She’s going—

  A rush of power pours through the whale. She holds still for a second, and then I’m head down and sealed between flipper and body as the world turns and everything I’ve ever thought or known rushes away from me.

  The whale dives.

  The Deep. We are in the Deep. There’s no light, and it’s cold and full of echoes. I’m as thin as paper. I can barely move my hands because they are so heavy. I know this place. Fear pours over me as it did the last time I was here, and I fight it down. You can’t panic here. If you let yourself panic, you’re lost.

  The Deep. The Deep. Darkness so thick that you can’t even believe in light. The weight of the whole world pressing down on us. But I’m with the whale, and I’m safe. I hear her echo system as she feels her way forward. She knows where she’s going. The Deep is an open book to her. For the whale this is familiar hunting ground, not a desert of lonely blackness.

  “Keep still, little one. That squid may hurt you. I would eat him, but it would slow our journey.”

  There’s a frenzy of echoes as the giant squid glides past us. I shiver and nestle deeper into the whale’s shelter. I’ve no desire to meet a giant squid.

  “A fine mouthful,” says the whale regretfully. “Do you like squid, little one?”

  “Um, no, I’ve never eaten it,” I lie, in case the giant squid is listening. But the echoes fade, and he rolls away into the darkness.

  There’s no dark like this in the human world. “Conor? Faro?”

  Nobody answers. My voice seems to go nowhere.

  “Where are they?”

  “They don’t speak to me as you do, but I feel that they are there.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “They are warm things in a cold world, little one. Their blood hurts them. But they are living. I feel that they are living.”

  We move through a forest of echoes. Sound is like light here; it’s the only guide there is. I wish I could make sense of all the echoes as the whale does. It hurts my ears when she searches the water with her sonar.

  “Another squid,” she says.

  “Do stop and catch it if you want to.”

  The whale rumbles, “My promise to Saldowr is worth more than that, child. I must take you to the Kraken.”

  “Won’t he—won’t he hurt you?”

  “He has no quarrel with me,” replies the whale calmly. “Now be silent, little one, I must listen with all my power. We are coming closer, and I must find my way between two mountains.”

  We move on slowly, cautiously, sounding for echoes. They bounce furiously. I knew that the Deep had mountains, but not what it would be like to find a way through them, steering through jagged invisible rocks, listening for the echoes to thin out and show clear water ahead. What if the whale gets caught? What if the whale hurts herself?

  My ears ring. The echoes vibrate, and sound hammers through my skin, my flesh, and down to my bones. I can’t think, I can’t see, and I can’t hear. All I feel is sound. The pain of it batters me until I can’t bear it for another second, and then it gets worse, and I’m still hanging on, praying for it to end. Now the sonar echoes wham my head like slaps from a giant hand. I curl up, trying to find shelter. I’m going to die of sound. It’s going to blow me into atoms. The noise is so loud that I’m dissolving into it. I tunnel deep inside myself, because it’s the only place I can find to hide.

  I don’t know how long it lasts. I come back slowly, throbbing from the noise attack. I shake my head, not daring to believe it. Someone has turned the volume down. The echoes aren’t battering me anymore. The noise is still loud, but it’s finally fading away behind us.

  “We have come through the pass, little one,” booms the whale.

  Through the pass… We’re mountaineering, thousands of meters below the surface. A pass is a narrow way through high crags. No wonder the echoes were so terrible as they thrashed back and forth off the harsh surfaces of the rock. Maybe the sides of the mountain were so close that I could have reached out and touched them. But the spaces are growing wider now. The echoes keep on fading. I picture the whale sailing out into clear water.

  We’re slowing down. Soon we are barely moving. We hang, wrapped in darkness. What’s going to happen now?

  “This is as close as I can come, little one,” says the whale. Her voice barely disturbs the water. Maybe she doesn’t want anyone to hear her.

  “Where are we?”

  “We are close to the Kraken’s lair. There’s little time. I can help you on your way, and then I must rise to breathe.”

  Horror crawls over me. She’s going to abandon us in the Deep. I thought she was going to stay with us. How can we survive down here without the whale? When I was in the Deep without her before, I didn’t even know which way I was moving. And I’m sure we didn’t go so far down then. There was still a tinge of light, just enough for me to see the whale.

  But it’s completely dark now. Darker than it ever gets in the human world. It’s like being wrapped round and round in a cocoon of black cloth that covers your mouth and nose and ears and then getting picked up and turned until your head whirls and you don’t know which way is the surface and which the seabed.

  I fight my panic down. Conor. Faro. I’ve got to think of them. The whale can’t leave us here. We’ll all die, and then no one will ever be able to put the Kraken back to sleep.

  “But, whale, dear whale, if you leave us here, we’ll never find our way home. We’ll be lost in the Deep forever.”

  A faint, cautious chuckle shivers the whale’s sides. “Of course I shall come back for you,” she whispers.

  “But you’ll never find us again.”

  “I am a hunter, little one. You must trust me. I shall find you. Now come out, and swim over my body until you reach your companions. Keep within touch of me.”

  Leaving the shelter of the whale’s flipper is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I want to stay there, curled tight in the only shelter I know. Reluctantly, hesitantly, I feel my way through darkness that is so thick I think I could pick up handfuls of it. There’s the curve of her flipper. There’s the slope of her back. That’s where I must swim up and then down to the flipper on the other side, where Conor and Faro are waiting.

  I cling close to the whale’s rough, pitted skin. My arms and legs can barely move because the water is so thick and the pressure of the Deep so enormous. I’m glad I can’t see myself. It feels as if the Deep has flattened me out to a shadow.r />
  I struggle on, one hand touching her curved back for safety.

  “Can you go faster, little one? I must breathe soon.”

  My heart thumps heavily in my body with the effort of moving. The upward curve of the whale’s back seems to go on forever, and then at last it flattens, and I begin to feel my way down the other side.

  “Forward a little,” whispers the whale.

  The Deep is pushing me away from the whale’s body. I cling to her as I scull my way down her other side, not daring to kick in case it takes me away into the blackness that waits everywhere.

  “Stop. You’re there.”

  My feet find the outward shape of her flipper.

  “Conor?” I whisper. “Faro?”

  No one answers. My heart fills with dread. Perhaps the dive has killed them. Perhaps the whale only thinks they’re still tucked behind her flipper when really they’ve been swept away into the Deep.

  I feel my way cautiously around the flipper. My foot kicks something, and I almost scream aloud, and then a voice says furiously, “That’s my tail, fool.”

  “Faro?”

  “Sapphire, is it you? I thought you were a creature of the Deep.”

  “Didn’t you hear me call your names?”

  “Our heads are ringing.”

  “Where’s Conor? Is he all right?”

  Conor’s voice comes so faintly that I can’t hear the words.

  “Oh, Faro, he’s hurt!”

  “No, it’s just that we can’t tell if we’re shouting or whispering. We’re deafened.”

  “Conor!” I find his hand and clutch it. I’d recognize the feel of Conor’s hand anywhere, even here at the bottom of the world. He squeezes it back, and my heart fills with relief. He’s alive.

  “Hurry, little one. All of you, come forward. I will make a wave to take you to the Kraken’s lair.”

  I feel the boys slowly easing their way out. The whale’s voice follows me. “Are you all right, little one? Did my dive hurt you?”

  “Not the dive,” I whisper. “It was the noise.”

  I still can’t hear my own voice clearly. It’s muffled, as if I’m talking inside my own head. The weight of the Deep presses on me. Mustn’t think of it. Mustn’t think of the heaviness of the water or how far away the surface is. Even if it weren’t dark, to see it would be like staring up from the bottom of the tallest skyscraper in the world.

  No, farther than that. How far can whales dive? Sperm whales are one of the deepest divers; I do remember that.

  Don’t think of it.

  I drag my mind away, the way I’d drag a baby from the edge of a cliff.

  We work our way forward along the whale’s body in slow motion, as if we’ve got heavy weights pulling on our arms and legs. I keep hold of Conor’s hand. As long as we’re together, as long as we hold on tight to each other, we’ll survive. Faro must be on the other side of Conor, holding his wrist and giving him strength and oxygen.

  We’re moving along her broad flank. I try to remember what the shape of a sperm whale’s jaw is like, because we’ll need to negotiate our way around it. She’s dead still, hanging there in the water, waiting for us.

  Her head’s like a box; I know that. Sperm whales look like the kind of whale children draw. I wonder if her jaw is open. What if her teeth mistake us for food?

  Don’t be stupid, Sapphire. She’s got much more knowledge than you, down here in the Deep. Her sound system knows where we are and what shape we are. Everything’s clear to her, although we humans are like prisoners who’ve been bound and hooded and then told to identify objects wrapped in a black velvet bag.

  But she’s going to leave us. We’re going to be on our own. She says she’ll come back for us, but maybe there won’t be any “us” to come back for by the time she returns to the Deep.

  The whale’s voice comes like the sough of the wind. So big a creature can’t really whisper, but she’s doing her best. “Move forward. Move forward. You must leave my shelter now.”

  “But how will we know when we’ve reached the Kraken’s lair? It’s so dark. You can’t see anything.”

  “You will know. He makes lairlight. We whales don’t speak of it in the higher world.”

  We must be directly in front of the whale now. Inky dark stretches ahead of us. We’ve got to push off from her protecting bulk and survive alone in the Deep.

  “Move forward, and then I can help you on your way.”

  We edge forward. Conor’s hand grips mine reassuringly, and suddenly, for the first time since we entered the Deep, I hear his voice.

  “Saph?”

  “Conor!”

  His voice is squeezed by the pressure of the Deep, but it’s unmistakably my brother’s voice.

  “Are you okay, Saph?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “My ears have stopped ringing. I couldn’t hear anything before.”

  The whale is behind us now. If I stretched out, I wouldn’t be able to touch her. Don’t go, I plead silently. Don’t leave us alone in the Deep.

  Maybe the whale picks up my thoughts. Her voice curls into my ear in a murmur that’s so low, it’s almost inaudible. “If you want, little barelegs, you can come back with me.”

  I want to so much. It’s like being about five years old and rushing out of school to throw your arms round your mum and hide your face in her skirt. I want to hide in the whale’s safety and blot out the memory of the Deep. If only I could go with her and never, ever come back again.

  But I’m not five years old. And I’m not alone. There’s Conor and Faro. They trust me. I was the one who agreed with Ervys that I’d go back to the Deep. They came because I did.

  “No, dear whale. I can’t come with you. I have to stay here.”

  “Stay here…,” echoes the whale. “I keep forgetting that you are not mine. But if you were mine, you would never have left the surface—

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she adds in a hurried, guilty whisper. “I don’t know what came over me…. But you won’t tell Saldowr?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How I wish I could remember a good joke, to send you on your way.”

  “Never mind,” I say gently. “Perhaps next time.”

  The others don’t seem to have heard our conversation. It’s as if the whale and I have got a private wavelength. Just as well. What if Conor had heard her tempting me to leave him and Faro behind in the Deep?

  “I must rise,” says the whale in a faint voice that would be a sigh if there were any air in the Deep. “Whatever happens, I will come back for you. And now hold tight and wait for your wave.”

  A stir begins in the dark water. She’s turning. We clutch hands. It’s the wave coming. The wave the whale’s making for us. I peer behind me but can’t see anything. I think I know what she’s doing. Her vast tail is moving up and down, lashing the water. The wave will rise and race, growing in height and power as it rushes at us and lifts us and throws us with the speed of an arrow toward…

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THERE’S LIGHT AHEAD OF US. It’s a dead, numb light, like neon filtered through nylon. It pushes out greedy fingers into the Deep, searching, reaching out for us.

  Now the darkness of the Deep feels like a friend. This is the kind of light someone would make out of nightmares and evil thoughts.

  “It’s lairlight,” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “Lairlight. That’s what the whale called it. Light where there shouldn’t be any light. The Kraken makes it.”

  The whale’s wave was much too powerful. It’s brought us straight to the Kraken’s lair. I turn, and for the first time since we left the Groves of Aleph I can see Faro’s and Conor’s faces. They look as if they’ve been hit by an enormous force that bruises from the inside without leaving marks on the skin. Faro’s face is drained by exhaustion. Conor looks battered but determined.

  “Do you think he’s there?” I whisper.

  “Of course he’s
—”

  “Of course of course of course,” says another voice, light as a feather and silky smooth but with the same greed in it that shines through the light. “Of course I am here to welcome you, myrgh kerenza.” The voice gives a sycophantic giggle. “Isn’t that what they call you? Have I got it right?”

  “How do you—?”

  “Oh, I have my messengers. You think the Kraken has no friends? You think everybody hates me? No no no no no no no. That’s not how it is at all. And you’ve brought your friends to play with me. How nice.”

  His voice noses its way toward us like an octopus’s tentacle. I press close to Conor, but Conor pushes me gently away and swims forward a stroke.

  “Show yourself then,” he says calmly. “How can you be our friend if we can’t see you?”

  “Oh, no no no no no no no no. It doesn’t work like that. You have to come and see me.”

  Faro has moved to Conor’s side, and I swim forward too, through the leaden water. Every instinct in my body is telling me to turn and flee as far as I can.

  “You only have to come toward the light. It’s not difficult,” says the Kraken.

  The Kraken’s lairlight fingers flicker and make sudden darts at us, but the force of the Deep thrusts them back before they touch us. The Deep seems to be on our side now, protecting us. As long as we stay clear of the lairlight, maybe the Kraken can’t hurt us.

  But in that case, little sister, what have we come here for? I’m so close to Faro that even the Deep itself can’t block his thoughts from me, and they come alive in my head. Why have we risked the Deep if we’re not going to fight? We can’t put the Kraken back to sleep by hiding from him. Saldowr gave us a mission.

  Faro’s fighting spirit gives me courage. He’s right; we mustn’t forget why we’ve come. Remember the white stones and the red stone. The little Mer children who don’t know anything about the Kraken yet. We’re here because we want to make sure that they never will.