The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook

by Lydia Millet

  They were nearing the glow on the waves now, and it began to look like something unearthly—not the reflection of lights from boats or shore on the waves, nor the shine of starlight, that much she was sure of.

  “Can anyone see the buoy?” asked Jax, who was farthest forward.

  “Not yet,” said Cara.

  “Here,” said Hayley, and snapped on one of the flashlights. Ahead of them her beam jumped on the water, but revealed nothing. “Oh well.”

  On and on, and briefly Cara turned and gazed back at the shore behind them, which looked almost as dark as the water, as far as she could see. A ways to the north there was one point of light, which she thought was maybe a restaurant called the Beachcomber—it was the only business on the beach side that she knew, up at Cahoon Hollow. It was built right over the water, a tourist trap, as her dad called it, and was always crowded in the high season. As far as she knew, it was the closest thing that would be lit up at night north of here … and then she heard a gasp: Hayley. She turned back around in time to see, gleaming ahead of them, an ocean that looked turquoise.

  It was lit up like an aquarium. She couldn’t tell whether the thrill she felt was one of excitement or plain fear.

  She felt herself break out in a sweat—or maybe she just noticed that she was already sweating beneath the oversized wetsuit, which was awful to paddle in.

  “That’s it, Jax,” she said.

  “Has to be,” he agreed.

  “We’re going to have to do it without Max.”

  They gazed at each other, not quite believing it.

  “The buoy is yellow,” she said after a minute. That was the way she had seen it. “Let’s look for it.”

  “We need to tie the boat to the buoy,” added Jax. “And Hayley, you’ll be the lookout. Then, if we need you, we can pull on the anchor line and you can come in.”

  “Lookout? Alone?”

  “Look,” said Jax. “We don’t know what we’re doing. We may need someone out of the water, someone who could help if something happened to us. Because this—this is his domain.”

  There was a silence as Hayley waved her flashlight around; but it was swallowed up in the glow from the waves, no use at all.

  “There,” said Hayley, and pointed.

  Sure enough, a yellow buoy floated a few feet away.

  “I’ll tie it,” said Jax, and before they knew it he was doing an odd slither off the boat and into the water. The kayak rocked but didn’t flip. Jax half groaned, half screeched. “Cold! It’s so, so cold!”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” said Hayley. “And I don’t get it—how deep down is the wreck, anyway?”

  “It’s not supposed to be too deep,” said Cara.

  “Very shallow. About thirty feet,” sputtered Jax from the water, working to attach the boat to the buoy. She could see his legs moving beneath the glowing water to keep him afloat, vague silhouettes. The kayak bobbed away from him for an instant, pulling the rope taut, and Cara steered them back with her paddle.

  “There,” he said, and then tied on another rope—a guide rope that was going down with them into the depths. He scrabbled with a hand in the front hatch of the kayak and brought out a donut-shaped weight, which he fixed to the end of the rope before he dropped it into the water.

  “How’d you learn to tie all those knots?” asked Cara, surprised.

  “We had a thing on knots at camp,” said Jax, and then glugged some water by mistake and spat it out as he clung to the side. “They did a Boy Scout deal. So Hayley? We’re going to need a signal, in case of emergency.”

  “How will you signal?”

  “Three tugs in a row. And you can do it, too—tug on the rope if you need to,” he told Hayley. “Three sharp tugs in a row if you want us to come up. If there’s danger up here, danger to you, anything. I don’t think you can pull us up—it would capsize this thing. So if we signal, all it means is you should get out of here.”

  “And you can paddle back in to shore if we’re not back in what—Jax?”

  “It should be about two hours, since it’s so shallow here. I mean, I think we have about two hours’ worth of air. Cara, I’m going to need you to put my dive weights on me. After that I’ll sink down. The belt’s in the bottom there. So—let’s do the masks first, OK? And then hand me my weights and I’ll just drop…”

  “Masks on,” said Cara, and handed his over the side.

  They adjusted the masks over their eyes and noses.

  “Wait,” said Cara, and propped hers up on her forehead. She felt suddenly panicky. “Jax. We don’t have a clue what we’re doing! We don’t even know why we’re going down there!”

  “She needs us,” said Jax, sounding pinched and nasal through the thick, cloudy plastic. “You know that, Car. That’s why we’re going.”

  Cara stared at him, but his eyes were invisible through the mask, in the dark. He stuck his regulator into his mouth and flicked on his headlamp.

  Finally she took a deep breath, flicked on her own light, and put in her own mouthpiece.

  “Good luck, guys,” said Hayley. “Don’t die on me.”

  Cara clicked her own weight belt on and handed Jax his, and as he grabbed them and sank, she reached up out and touched the back of Hayley’s hand. Then she slid backward out of the kayak—as close to the backward roll Max had taught her as she could come without a normal diving boat.

  Cold, cold, cold. Even with the wet suit on.

  She got her bearings for a second, breathing the way Max had taught her, only through the mouth. Now I’m a mouthbreather, she thought. It wasn’t so bad.

  Jax was near her, a small, dark shape in the glowing green, moving downward. She saw his swim fins swishing.

  She grabbed the rope and followed.

  Eight

  She concentrated on keeping a hand on the rope but pointing her head and shoulders downward. Curiously the water got warmer as she descended, or it felt that way to her, at least, which was the opposite of how she’d expected it to be.… There was so much color swirling around her that she couldn’t see anything else at first—a lovely bright aqua color. She saw why the verse had called it fire, the night of fires beneath the sea.

  The salt load made the seawater hard to see through, though: it was a mist of fine particles, glowing and swirling around her. Not like the clear water in a turquoise swimming pool; more like blooms and currents of light.

  She and Jax had wikied the plankton, microscopic pictures that showed their shapes. They were beautiful, even the poisonous ones—lacy and delicate, shaped like acorns in some cases or diamonds or stars. Of course you could never see that unless you were looking at them under a microscope, she thought, but it was strange to think of those all around in the water, minuscule organisms, life-forms entering her body and Jax’s along with the water molecules—tiny beings like whole worlds, sculpted and fragile-looking though in fact they were powerful enough to give out this amazing glow. …

  And to make her and Jax pretty sick, possibly. If they were the toxic kind.

  Hopefully they weren’t.

  She felt pressure on her head as she descended, but then it seemed to subside. Jax was ahead of her, farther down; she could just make out the wake that rose from his kicking fins. Down farther they swam, and she found she was thinking of her mother—would her mother somehow appear down here, gliding out of the dim fathoms like a mermaid? The dream had put the notion in her head—her mother swimming up through the turquoise water, reaching for them through the luminous particles.

  Then she realized the thought was actually more alarming than comforting. She wanted the same mother back she’d always had—the real mother she’d always known, exactly the same as the day she vanished, not one iota different.

  In the dream her mother’s long hair had floated around her as though it was submerged … almost as though her mother, it occurred to her suddenly, had drowned.

  No. Just because her mother had called her a visionary did
n’t mean that anything she thought of had to have some kind of deep meaning.

  A dark mass loomed up: kelp, or seaweed that looked a lot like kelp, curling out of the depths. It had pods, rubbery pods on the end of stalks that were like long tentacles, waving beneath. The algae all around them lit up the underwater world, and she could see the bottom—sand littered with dark debris, with unfamiliar shapes.

  Jax grabbed onto something at the bottom and looked up at her—a hard object, partially beneath the sand. He motioned for her to come over, too, and she grabbed it, her feet above her head, looking down and around, her free hand pushing the water. It was a piece of wood, maybe a rib of the boat.

  They were floating in a half-illuminated country, dim in some places and then shining from the phosphorescence. The brightness receded into a murkier distance if she tried to fix her eyes on something far away, but the foreground was clear. Around them were the ship ruins—pieces of wood and metal, she thought, though she didn’t know how the wood could be anything but rotten after three centuries underwater. A few small, dull-colored fish swam in and out and around.

  There were rocks, too, piles of boulder-size rocks like small stone mountains on the sandy floor. From their cracks rose twisting columns of seaweed, stems emerging from the outcroppings where they were anchored and flowing overhead into a dark-green canopy. Their stems and leaves swayed gracefully with the slow currents near the bottom of the ocean. They were like forests.

  The strangest thing about this kingdom of the sea, she thought, was how it was silent and loud at once.

  Then, with the toes of his swim fins touching the sand, Jax unclipped the anchor weight from the guide rope and re-clipped the rope to his weight belt. There was enough slack for them to swim quite far without pulling the rope taut, which they had to in case they needed to signal Hayley.

  So here they were, she thought: thirty feet under the surface of the endless Atlantic, no adults knowing where she was, no safety net, and who knew what strange thing would come shooting out of the dark…. There had been great white sharks sighted, recently, in the waters off Chatham. Not only that, but—she’d heard it said—they were actually hunting people now. Their usual food was getting harder to find….

  Chatham was fifteen miles away. Great whites, Jax told her once, could swim forty miles in an hour. When they were hungry.

  She wished Max were here.

  Jax was swimming among the fragments of the wreck. She moved more hesitantly than he did, touching the rope. She wished they’d brought a tool to communicate with—boards they could write on or something. She should have made an agreement with Jax, she realized, that he could ping her down here, that they could make an exception to his promise.

  She was surprised she wasn’t freezing. Maybe that was a bad sign—maybe when you didn’t feel cold anymore that meant you had, what did they call it, frostbite? Or hypothermia?—and were about to go unconscious. …

  Of course. Jax was holding his waterproof watch up to her face, its digital readout lit up. He could actually type on the thing, which was blocky and huge over the arm of his wet suit. For all she knew he could watch YouTube videos on it. She should have known he wouldn’t come unprepared—even if he forgot to clue her in about it.

  DONT B AFRD, read the watch’s display.

  She shook her head, giving him a thumbs-up. There was a surreal beauty here, with the glow all around—if you could overlook the danger lurking out there in the infinite dark water beyond this small patch of light.

  The danger of him.

  Jax went back to his watch, pressing a button on the side rapid-fire, and then lifted it up for her to see again.

  I MEAN THEY WONT HURT US. UNLESS HE TELLS THEM TO.

  She raised her hands to say: What? Who?

  Jax typed again.

  BHIND U.

  Warily she turned herself around in the water with a dog-paddling motion and startled when she saw them—figures among the ruins. They looked like outlines of people, darker than the swirling light of the water but still see-through: outlines like pencil drawings with only the faintest washes of color filling them. They were dressed in ragged coats, some with hats, some with long things hanging at their sides—one at the front had a red coat, an old pistol with a silver handle stuck into his sash. A black hat with a peak at the front.

  Many of them. A crowd. Maybe a hundred or more.

  She turned back to Jax.

  GHOSTS, read his watch. WHYDAHS CREW. THE 1 WITH HAT IS CAPTAIN. BLACK SAM BELLAMY.

  She should be afraid—now it was ghosts?—but the thin, mangy figures weren’t coming closer. They just hung there passively, moving in a way that was odd and almost imperceptible. They shifted in the water so that she saw not a progress forward or backward, not the regular motion of bodies, but a kind of series of snapshots, like stop-motion photography—a pattern or imprint, a series of microscopic differences in position.

  She’d never believed in ghosts. Ghosts were just stories told to gullible kids around campfires, kids who wanted to be scared for a second while they were roasting marshmallows. But then … memories were a kind of ghost, she thought in passing—like her grandparents, whom she never knew but had pictures of in her head from old black-and-white photos.

  So maybe, as memories were ghosts, so were ghosts also a form of memory.

  Jax typed on his watch again and held it up.

  THEY WERE THE PIRATES, she read. THAT WENT DOWN W/THE SHIP.

  Pirates? Pirates and ghosts? It was a regular Halloween party.

  The watch was too slow. It frustrated her. She moved her hand through the water and grabbed Jax’s wrist, then tapped her own temple.

  WANT ME 2 PING? he typed.

  She nodded.

  Then suddenly it was like listening to headphones—a voice playing right between her ears. She hadn’t felt this before; before she hadn’t been able to tell when Jax was reading her until he said something that betrayed it. But this, she understood, was different: not only reading but also speaking. It was like Jax had opened a two-way channel on a radio. And what came out didn’t sound like his speaking voice at all. Which made sense, since there were no actual vocal cords involved. But it was bizarre. It took her a while to be able to make out the words properly. No one would have known it was a little boy talking to her; it was more like a clear singing.

  They’re bound here because they’re in service to him. They don’t want to be, but they are. The Pouring Man. The way the pirates lived, the wrong they did? It makes them his. It keeps them here. Like slaves.

  How do you know all this? she asked.

  But he was grabbing her arm.

  The selkie has arrived.

  She raised her head and looked—moving slowly and fluidly, it seemed, like everything underwater and like water itself. Among the waving stalks of the seaweed, above a rock covered in roots and old barnacles, a creature was hovering, gazing at them out of huge dark eyes in a pale, blue-gray face. Its upper body had the approximate shape of a woman—Cara thought of her idea of a mermaid—but her head was far larger than a woman’s would be, in proportion to her body, and the face drew into a soft kind of snout toward the chin, like a seal’s. The dark eyes were on either side instead of in front, as people’s eyes were, and long black hair floated around. She looked solemn and wise, yet the big eyes also reminded Cara of a baby.

  Jax motioned to Cara to stay close as they swam toward her. Her body, they saw, tapered into a tail like a seal’s, like the lower half of a seal’s body—not a fish tail but a gray one. She had long flippers for arms.

  Jax thought to Cara as they swam: I’ll talk to her.

  They didn’t have their third, though, the third person the verse had said had to be there. They didn’t have their arbiter, someone impartial to decide.

  And decide what, anyway?

  She had no idea.

  They were almost up to the selkie then, moving through the seaweed. It was darker in here, though the lighted partic
les still whirled. When the stalks brushed against Cara’s arms as she passed they felt slick and rubbery. Under the twisted canopy were dark shadows cast by the silhouettes of the kelp forest against the glow of the algae; the shade and beams of radiance patterned everything she could see, made their surroundings as complicated and dense as a jungle. Cara had a hard time telling what things were.

  The selkie reached out her flippers, which curled around them and drew them in—rough and soft at the same time, almost unbearably strange. It was a kind of formal embrace, it seemed to Cara. She thought how alien it felt to be so close to the creature—she’d never really touched an animal that wasn’t a pet, save for a few crabs from tidal pools and Jax’s pitiable frogs….

  And the selkie wasn’t quite animal anyway, of course. She was something else.

  Cara realized she was tense, not because she thought the selkie would hurt them but because she’d never been close to anything so other. Next to the selkie, even the ghosts of long-dead pirates seemed almost normal. The selkie was not of this world, she knew—it was from myth; it was like meeting a dragon.

  If myth were true, she thought—if all of it were true!

  Jax’s forehead was against the selkie’s as though they were head-butting. Then he pulled away, bowing solemnly. And before Cara knew it the selkie was gone again, swooshed off into the darkness underneath the waving kelp.

  Jax was pinging her.

  She wants to give me the key, but she can’t.

  Why not? thought Cara.

  Because he’s coming now.

  The water around them seemed suddenly colder.

  Of course he was coming.

  So? she thought at Jax, insistently. Can’t she just give it to us and then we can go? Get out of here and away from him?

  We have to make ourselves safe first. We have to stand up to him. If we can, he won’t be able to get into our heads anymore. He won’t have access to our minds. Then she can tell us what we need to know.