The Legend of the Rift

by Peter Lerangis

  I swam toward it. The buzzing noise in my ears seemed to get louder. I tried to ignore that and concentrate on my breath. In . . . out. In . . . out. Slow . . .

  The sliver sank, and right away the muck began swallowing it up greedily. Just before it disappeared, I grabbed a corner of it and pulled.

  It was about a foot long, an almost perfect crescent-moon shape. I turned toward the other three, but they were huddled around the wreckage, their backs to me. I could feel myself drifting away from them and kicked hard to get back. Be very careful of the underwater currents, Farouk had said. They can be strong.

  Finally I grabbed onto Marco and pulled myself into their huddle. Spread out before them on the seabed were now four objects, including the section of column. But it was a simple, cracked building stone that made my breath quicken.

  I reached down and lifted it out of the sand. A lobsterlike creature scurried away. This stone had to be part of the Lighthouse. Maybe when the island moved, it dropped pieces on the way. I looked over my shoulder to the place where we’d seen the dark blotch.

  When I looked back, the others were at least fifteen feet away. I had drifted in some kind of current, moving fast. I angled my body back toward them and kicked hard, making sure to hold on to the crescent-shaped relic with one hand and the lambda stone with the other.

  But no matter how hard I tried, the others were growing smaller and smaller. Why weren’t they caught in this current?

  I turned to look over my shoulder. The water on the sea floor seemed to be darkening.

  No. Only a section of it. It seemed to be growing larger, a thick oval shape that sat on the ocean floor. Somehow, Massarym had managed to create a floating mass about the size of a baseball diamond that was now stuck down here. And the current was pulling me directly toward it.

  I was gaining speed, and I noticed that I’d flipped around. My hands were extended forward, toward the sunken island. It wasn’t the current bearing me along. Those grungy pieces of rock, the two relics—they were pulling me. Like magnets.

  Four divers went down to the site, Farouk had said. When they came back up, they were in pieces. As the shadow moved closer, I wondered if those divers were pulled into the island, like I was, by some weird underwater riptide. Did they smash into some deadly sharp coral?

  I tried to let go. I opened my fingers. But my palms were pressed against the relics, jammed tight. I was moving fast enough that I could feel the water pushing against my air tanks, hard. The straps were straining against my shoulder. If they broke, I was dead in the water. Literally.

  With every ounce of strength, I yanked my hands downward. They slid off the two relics. I braced myself for them to hit me in the face.

  But the relics continued to jettison forward, into the light. And I began to slow down.

  Light? My brain finally registered the strength of the eerie glow. Where had that come from? My headlamp wasn’t strong enough to create the pulsating yellow-white blob directly ahead of me. I thrust hard with my flippers to spin away. I took a quick look over my shoulders, but the others were nowhere in sight.

  The buzzing sound was deafening now. It felt like it was in my bloodstream. I knew that if you didn’t adjust to the pressure, bubbles could form in your blood. You could die from the bends. Maybe that was what this noise was. I couldn’t survive down here. None of us could.

  But the light was mesmerizing. From all sides, schools of fish began swarming into it, like moths circling a flame. As I floated closer, I realized they didn’t look like fish. No fins, no sleek shapes. They were pieces of rock, chunks of marble, twisted shards of metal, all gathering.

  Despite the muffling of the water, the sound of their collision was deep and bone shaking. I could hear the thump-thump-thump-thump of stones shooting into place, forming a shape. It was thick and square, rising upward in a spiraling swirl of debris. Some of the chunks were enormous. If one of one of them hit me, even underwater, I’d be toast.

  I felt something grab me from behind, and I nearly jumped out of my wet suit. Turning around, I saw Marco’s grinning face through his mask. Cass and Eloise were behind him, looking scared out of their wits.

  I held on to his arm and Eloise’s. Marco towed us farther away from the rock cyclone. When I turned back around, the column of light had risen to a tapered shape, its top obscured by the dark, murky water. Fewer stones were shooting toward it now, and the light intensified.

  Slowly the brightness rose up from the base. As it climbed, it illuminated what looked to me like a soaring skyscraper with a grid of windows and marble sides.

  The light finally emerged at the top, sending a beacon that blazed through a wide opening. I’ve seen Empire State Building and it was awesome, but this staggered me. I had to force each intake of breath. Triumphant music blasted like some weird underwater orchestra of crabs and bottom feeders.

  It took me a moment to realize it was the Song of the Heptakiklos.

  Just below the beacon of light was the stone I had lifted up from the sand.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

  “WHERE IS FAROUK?” I mouthed to Cass.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I looked back into the murk. Farouk had warned us about getting close to the sunken island. She was probably too afraid to follow us. Or too smart. Were we in danger? Had we gone too deep too quickly?

  I wanted her to see this. Someday, I wanted the whole world to know about the Seven Wonders and why they existed. I looked at the watch Farouk gave me—3:01. We had eighteen minutes.

  “We should go back,” Eloise mouthed.

  Cass didn’t say a thing, but the look on his face was definitely Are you nuts?

  I began swimming toward the Lighthouse. The light that we’d followed had floated to the top, and the base of the thing was a lot darker. Still, I could make out the shape. The base was a superwide structure about the size of a city block and maybe four stories tall. The tower’s tall shaft rested on top of it.

  I headed for an arched doorway in the base’s center. If the Loculus was inside, we had to start somewhere. The others followed. I waited at the door, floating.

  My watch read 3:03. Sixteen minutes.

  Marco pressed down on the door’s latch and pushed it open. A small school of fish swarmed upward around our masks as if we’d interrupted class. Cautiously we swam in.

  The Song of the Heptakiklos was loud and clear. I expected to see a Loculus any moment, but the room was pitch-dark. The Lighthouse’s beam was high overhead, at the top of the shaft—but down here in the base, the ceiling was thick, blocking all light. As we swung our headlamps around, we could see rows and rows of stout columns, once straight but now thickened and warped by crusts of barnacles and coral. They seemed to move and dance in the crisscrossing beams, like awkward old men, and I made sure to avoid them as I trained my lamp on the floor.

  I saw a sharklike fish, lazily flapping its tail. A gigantic crab. A couple of gallon plastic jugs. A splayed-out creature that was either a drowned pig or a dropped kid’s toy.

  No Loculus.

  We met at the other end. Eloise gave me a shrug. See anything?

  I shook my head.

  Cass pointed to his ear. Hearing the Song of the Heptakiklos?

  I nodded. I was hearing it all right. And, believe me, when it’s jangling and twanging away at your nerves and bloodstream, while you’re in a wet suit, that’s not a whole barrel of fun.

  Marco pointed up. We would search this thing top to bottom.

  Together we swam out of the base and back out into the sea. I still hoped to see Farouk, but she wasn’t there. With a powerful thrust of his flippers, Marco quickly rose above the thick base and swam upward toward the tapering Lighthouse shaft.

  Higher up, the glow of the beacon cast the building in a dull amber green. The sides just above the base were octagonal and pocked with windows like an office building. But as we squirmed through a door at the base of the se
ction, I could see that there were no offices inside, no floors. Just a huge, spiral staircase flanked by stone buttresses connecting it to the wall.

  As we got closer to the top, the sides slanted inward. The octagonal shape gave way to rounded walls tapering to maybe ten feet in diameter. At the top we could see a hatchway leading up into the chamber that contained the great light.

  Marco and I both swam up carefully through the hatch, which was way over to one side of the circular floor. We peered inside the top chamber to see a steep pedestal supporting a giant rotating ball of light. The ball made a low moaning sound as it turned, and it was too bright to look at it directly.

  Cass and Eloise were in now, too, and she was pointing upward. “Loculus?” she mouthed.

  “Too big,” I mouthed back.

  Besides, the Song of the Heptakiklos was weaker up here, not stronger. With frustration, I realized we must have missed something at the base. I pointed downward through the hatch. Let’s go back.

  I looked at my watch—3:12. Seven minutes left. My air gauge was low, and I hoped Farouk had left us a little margin of safety in case we got stuck.

  I led the way this time, spiraling down the stairwell. Sure enough, the Song was growing stronger now.

  Obey the Song. Follow it.

  I could feel it leading me down into the base, until I found myself nose to the floor. It was then I knew that the Song was pulling me lower.

  The Loculus was not in the Lighthouse shaft or the base. It was in the island itself. Had to be.

  I turned and waited for Cass, Eloise, and Marco, then pointed downward. “Inside the island,” I mouthed. They all looked at me as if I’d gone completely bonkers.

  Which was pretty much how I felt.

  I swam out the latched door. With a strong kick, I propelled myself along the surface of the island. The Song of the Heptakiklos was raging, but I couldn’t tell if it was getting louder. Like the rest of the sea bottom, the island was covered with muck and shells and slimy waving tubes. But the surface itself was so much darker than the rest of the sea bottom. What was this island made of? And how had Massarym been able to move it?

  I swam down to the surface of the small island, planted my feet, and started to clear away sea growth. As I pulled up some slimy grass fronds, sand sprayed upward. But under that sand was a rock-hard smoothness, way too hard for me to dig through without tools. Whatever material the island was made of, it seemed to be tinted green—maybe from algae, or maybe Massarym had figured out some space-age material, an industrial-grade structure that could support a Wonder of the World.

  Whatever it was, the Loculus seemed to be inside it, and we needed to find a hatch, or a way to dig.

  I reached down and rubbed my gloved hand along the island surface. I tried to pry away some of the barnacles, but they were stuck tight. Marco joined me. He took out his knife and began hacking away at the barnacles, trying to see what was underneath.

  With a mighty, Marcoish thrust, he managed to bury the blade into the surface.

  The ground below us heaved violently. Marco and I were flung upward into the sea. I could see him mouth “Earthquake!”

  Bad timing. What were scuba divers supposed to do during an earthquake? No one had taught us that.

  Eloise and Cass had swum away from Marco and me, investigating the sunken sides of the island. They must have noticed it, too, because I could see the whites of their eyes as we swam toward them.

  But instead of coming to meet us, they veered away, as if we’d just farted.

  I could tell Cass was trying to say something. He and Eloise were both pointing to something behind us.

  Marco and I turned. The island’s side, now rising through the water, showed two burning white spheres. For a moment I thought we’d somehow found two Loculi.

  But Loculi didn’t blink. And they didn’t have beady black eyeballs. And they weren’t set into a massive, dragon-like head.

  I felt my legs kicking like crazy. But they weren’t fast enough to get away from the giant, gaping mouth that thrust forward out of the green island and closed tight around me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

  OF ALL THE ways a person could die, being digested by a prehistoric creature posing as an island had never crossed my mind.

  I somersaulted helplessly into a massive gullet. My flippers hit the top of the creature’s throat, making a gash that spurted yellow goop. Then they bounced off the sticky, toadstool-dotted tongue, which nearly sucked those flippers off my feet.

  My poor fried brain was trying so hard to latch on to something normal. It was conjuring up images of the Walk on the Moon bouncy house in the Mortimer P. Reese Middle School Annual Kidz Frolic. But the rest of my nervous system was telling me I’d just made the transition from human being to fish food.

  This could only be Nessie. The Kraken. Mu’ankh. Greenie. When Massarym went on his trip to “find a movable island,” he brought back this escaped Atlantean beast to protect the Loculus.

  And now we were inside it.

  I raised my arms over my head to protect my headlamp. As I tumbled, I caught glimpses of Cass, Marco, and Eloise. Cass had lost one of his flippers to the Amazing Suck-o Tongue. I was veering downward now, toward the thing’s throat, where it was getting narrower but no less gross. I finally stopped when I crashed into a wall.

  Well, maybe not crashed. Squelched would be more like it. The wall was fleshy and gray, with a thick, lined seal running from top to bottom like a tightly shut curtain.

  As the other three barreled into me, the curtain of flesh began to open, bowing outward from the center on both sides. Showtime.

  I screamed inside my mask, even though I knew I was the only person who could hear me. We were passing through the opening, tumbling downward. If my knowledge of anatomy was correct, we had just entered the beast’s esophagus.

  We slid downward through a smooth, narrow tube that hugged us on both sides. I have never not wanted to be hugged so much in my life. The light from my headlamp was useless here; the creature’s fluids made it nearly impossible to see out my mask.

  Finally the tube ended, and I somersaulted downward into a cavernous chamber. I spun a couple of times and landed with a splat on a gelatinous floor—well, it would have been a splat if I could have heard it.

  Marco and Eloise landed next to me, and a one-flippered Cass tumbled to a stop not too far away. Cass jumped up, holding his side. But even just standing up proved not to be too easy. The floor wasn’t exactly flat—or steady. Cass teetered off-balance. As I wiped the slime off my mask, I could tell Cass was angry about something. He was also pointing downward, to where he’d landed.

  An old television set, in pretty good condition, was sitting there, minding its own business, on the floor of . . .

  The stomach.

  That was where we were. It had to be.

  I was feeling the Song of the Heptakiklos like crazy right now. I was afraid the beast had the Loculus in its clutches, maybe right underneath us. I was tempted to stab through with my knife, but I was pretty sure this thing would kill us if I tried. I shone my beam around. The chamber was about the size of my sixth-grade classroom, and not that much more attractively decorated. Not far from the TV was a hair dryer, a hardcover book, and a soggy Elmo doll—all just passing the time. I guess the beast just ate whatever it saw.

  “What now?” Marco was mouthing.

  I held my hands to my ears and mouthed back: “Song of the Heptakiklos.” It wasn’t an answer to his question, but at least he would know that we were close. For what it was worth.

  Cass lifted the TV, a look of utter confusion on his face. The box was pretty well embedded. The stomach floor stretched up with it.

  As Cass tried to tug the TV free, I heard a deep rumble. Without a chance to brace ourselves, we all pitched violently upward. My head bounced off the stomach ceiling, dislodging my headlamp. I dived for it, but the lamp changed course in midwater. Instead
of falling downward it veered off, straight through the valve that went back up into Mu’ankh’s throat.

  Marco turned to me, and his lamp shone into my face. I pointed up to my own mask. No light.

  This was getting worse by the minute.

  Marco stayed by my side as we all floated back down to the stomach floor. Cass was pointing to the TV and shaking his head. “I will never do that again,” he was mouthing. Which was wise. Irritating the beast that swallowed us wasn’t exactly a good strategy.

  But what was?

  My watch said 3:18. In one minute we were going to run out of oxygen.

  You are dead.

  Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.

  No one will ever know what happened to you. Not Mom on the island. Not Dad in Greece. Not Aly in Atlantis. No good-byes. Nothing.

  My brain had decided not to be an optimist at this time. I tried to shut down the thoughts, or at least switch them to the great dilemma of How to Get Out of a Stomach. This was not something they taught you in biology. Stomachs were where things got digested. Digestion was the breakdown of food into components for your bloodstream, your respiration, and your excretion—the last part of which I did not want to think about. All of this, I knew, was accomplished by stomach acid.

  Acid!

  I looked around. My friends’ lights were bouncing off the stomach walls. I could see the outlines of all kinds of debris down here, not just the TV but some fishing nets, a wooden lobster pot, a baby carriage.

  Baby carriage?

  All this stuff must have fallen off ships. But if the stomach was supposed to digest, why wasn’t all this stuff eaten up by acid?