The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook

by Lydia Millet

  Stand up to him? How?

  I’m not sure. But maybe the ghosts can help us.

  The ghosts? The ghosts of pirates? We have to get help from them?

  Behind him, in the gloom, the flickering forms of the ghosts shifted and weaved, faintly menacing but suspended.

  She felt a tug of despair. Jax looked so small in front of her, so slight and babyish, his blond hair waving in the water, his small body, in the overlarge wet suit, dwarfed by the tank gear and the weight belt.

  Here they were in this alien greenness, this universe unknown to them. No Max, no Dad, no anyone—

  No one else even knew where they were. No one knew they were here in the deep, here in the ocean where even grown people drowned.

  She’d never felt so alone.

  The cold and the Pouring Man, making his way toward them. When they were down here, surrounded by water—breathing his element. At their very weakest.

  And all these ghosts at his command. These ghosts who had been cruel while they lived, and probably could be cruel now.

  It was frustrating. It seemed practically impossible, to push out fear.

  And if she and Jax lost, if they lost….

  But Jax? What happens if we lose?

  Don’t think about that, he told her steadily. He’s coming now. And we can’t run. We can’t move. We have to stand up to him, whether the ghosts fight for him or for us. Just don’t give in to fear.

  I need to know, Jax. Now it’s your turn to tell me everything. What happens if we lose?

  There was a silence between them, a blankness. And then:

  It’s simple: if we lose, then we’re his, thought Jax heavily. We’re pressed into service. We join him.

  She shivered despite herself. Slowly she raised her hands in front of her, her fingers whiter than paper, wrinkled as an old, old lady’s. Behind the white hands, the dark ghosts in their slow and shifting field.

  They anchored themselves next to the rope, directly under the buoy again. She didn’t know why, except that it seemed, in a way, closest to home—closest to the only thing that was familiar: the kayak their dad had built.

  And she grabbed one of Jax’s hands. If she could keep hold of his hand, she was thinking, that would help, anyway. His fingers were pruney like her own. She held them tightly.

  And when he raised the other hand and pointed, her heart leaped into her throat.

  Across the sand, from out of the gloom where the brightness barely reached, the Pouring Man was walking toward them. Just walking, impossibly, on the bottom of the ocean. His clothing floated around him, but it seemed to be rags, black rags, and nothing else about him floated at all. Not even his hair. It was still plastered down over his forehead, as though it was soaked in a way that not even the ocean tides could touch.

  His feet hit on the sandy bottom, placed one in front of the other, deliberately and surely, and the sand rose around him in soundless dusty clouds.

  He smiled, she saw, but it was not a smile you wanted to see. Not at all.

  As he got closer and closer, walking ploddingly with a slow-motion gait, the smile exposed his teeth. His upper lip was pulled back in a snarl.

  Still he came, and she knew she was squeezing Jax’s hand so hard she might be hurting it, but she couldn’t help herself.

  He walked right through the ghosts, when he was close enough—walked through them like they were nothing at all, and they scattered at his approach, shifted away from him, slinking and cowering as though, at any moment, he might hit them.

  His teeth were sharp, she saw when he was only a few feet away. She was mostly looking down across the sand, trying to contain her dread by looking at the ground instead of up at him. She couldn’t close her eyes, she knew—that would not be facing him, as she must—but she didn’t have to stare right at him, did she?

  She did. She did, for all of them.

  She forced herself to look up again. The colorless eyes. The teeth that came to points. The blue, rubbery lips.

  I know you, she thought. You’re the dead soldier. Your name is fear. My mother told me about you.

  And he nodded. Unhurried, the way all things seemed to happen here. He moved his head up and then down with a kind of condescension, as though she was a stupid child and he was humoring her.

  Your name is fear, she thought. I am afraid of you.

  No! thought Jax. No!

  But she shook her head. You can’t beat fear if you don’t admit to it. So I admit it. But I won’t run. You won’t get me.

  His smile seemed to waver a bit, but then strengthened again. He was near them, maybe six feet away, maybe five … four … three….

  Behind him the ghosts pulled in and rose up, a crowd at his back. They were so close now she could see some of their faces—pitted with scars, mouths of stained and missing teeth, some wearing eye patches like kids in Halloween costumes.

  You won’t get my brother. You won’t get either of us, she thought, fighting against the strong desire to close her eyes, no matter how useless it would be.

  He was right there. He was so close that he filled her vision. His cold face, the angry eyes.

  We are afraid, she thought forcefully, but here we are anyway. See? We won’t run from you.

  And then he was on them. And filtering inside. Leaking in. Through the holes and the skin.

  She felt his sour essence move through her mouth and down her throat, through the holes of her nose and ears, through her pores, the follicles of her hair, her fingernails. She felt a sickness in her scalp and lungs and at the pit of her stomach, right through the rubber of the wetsuit, from her hips down her legs all the way to her feet, from her shoulders to her fingertips. She felt it in the very ends of her bones—her skeleton, she guessed, as though he lived in it.

  He filled her with his rotting sickness, his creeping paralysis. She couldn’t move.

  That was what he did, she understood in a rush—he made it so you couldn’t move, you couldn’t do anything. You were mostly water, after all, and so he could move through you—not just the world, but your body. She remembered it from biology: the human body is up to 78 percent water … and then you had no independence. She didn’t even know if she was holding on to Jax’s hand anymore; nor did she feel the reassuring grain of the sand on the fins. All that was gone, all contact with the outside. It was as though she had no center.

  She was pure chaos. The chaos of terror.

  And then there were terrible scenes—scenes she called up, scenes she saw, but scenes she also knew were true, that had happened, scenes from actual history. She saw the pirates on their ship, their ship that had once held a cargo of helpless slaves; she saw the vicious fights at sea, the blood and dirt and the violence that was casual for them. She saw them kill, with guns, knives, bare hands; she saw them hurt when they didn’t even need to—people who couldn’t fight back, people without weapons. She saw it when she didn’t want to, and because it was inside her she couldn’t shut it out by closing her eyes….

  She was shaking, she knew, but the sensation was far away, someplace she couldn’t quite be right now. She thought to herself: It’s not that it isn’t real. But it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be the world.

  And she forced herself to look hard—so hard she thought her eyes were burning. Was it evil? Was it that people were evil, to do these things to each other?

  They called them pirates like it was glamorous or something, almost a joke, really, but they were just gangsters who hurt and killed people. The gangsters of their time. How could she get through to them?

  Forgive, she thought. The pirates had done all the worst things, and those worst things bound them to the Pouring Man. But if she could forgive them, maybe they’d listen.

  But how to forgive them? How?

  And then she saw the pirates when they were kids. She saw, in one long rush like a deep fast-forward, a movie that sped through her in swift flashes of perception, the ugly history of their lives. She saw how
they were born and how they were hurt, the dingy spaces they barely lived in, the cruel figures that inhabited those small and stinking rooms. She saw how meanness made them feel alone, how the whole world turned into their enemy slowly because they made the wrong choices. And finally that left them here, the unloved and unloving, the criminals that hovered here as ghosts.

  They’d lost themselves, she thought. They’d lost their own souls, if that was what you called it—those pieces of themselves that felt pity for other people. The pieces that could love, the pieces that were kind.

  They weren’t strong enough, and they were weak when they were hurt, and they couldn’t say no to any of it.

  That’s what it is, she realized. You have to be strong enough to say no.

  The viciousness came from being weak.

  The scene flashed away for a second, and instead of it there was the face of the Pouring Man. Frowning.

  Was that the pressure of Jax’s hand? Maybe. It made her feel better.

  You are losing, she told the Pouring Man, and as she thought it she felt an enormous grief flow through her for all the people who never had a chance to be happy, to be who they wanted to be, to live in the world without being made of pain. The grief was almost an ache, so powerful, so glittering and moving like a clean, fast river, that it made her forget to be scared.

  I can see past what you want me to see, she thought. I can see what people want to be.

  The river kept flowing through her, and then the Pouring Man was a few feet away. He had receded a bit. His frown was angry now, his teeth bared as though he was going to leap forward and tear open her throat.

  No, she said, and felt sensation slowly creep back into her arms and legs like the tingle after your foot fell asleep. That was Jax, holding her hand—she was sure of it.

  A kid would turn away, she thought. A kid who was too weak to stand up to the bad guys. And some people stayed kids forever, even though they grew old. They grew old but they never grew up. They never got stronger at all.

  I want to turn away, she thought. Who wouldn’t?

  But I won’t.

  This isn’t your world, she told the Pouring Man. She felt as though she was speaking clearly through the thickness of the salt, through the liquid, the words flowing out of her mind with the force of objects. It isn’t his world, she thought to the ghosts, who streamed from him now, streamed from his shoulders and his hands and arms like dark flags into the water, shapeless, flapping things. It doesn’t have to be.

  And then she was back. Her body was hers again; he had withdrawn his sourness from her flesh and blood in a shocking split-second, leaving her warm and full of energy. She was here in the water, only a couple of miles from her home, holding Jax’s hand.

  And the ghosts were on the Pouring Man. They were clawing and shredding at him, his arms, his shoulders, his face and his head. They had their hook hands into his black rags, their knives and swords shoved into him, all over him from every possible angle. They mobbed him.

  The ghosts were on her side.

  We’ve won their loyalty, thought Jax to her. You did it. They can’t kill him, though, because he’s not alive. All they can do is stop him for a while.

  In no time the Pouring Man seemed to be falling apart. He was peeling, splitting down the middle.

  As they watched he was rended—that was the word that came to her. He was ripped into parts as though his body was soft—stringy in the middle, stringy as the sides of him split off and dark fragments floated in disarray. There was no blood, nothing like that, because, she guessed, he didn’t have any; and as he split and drifted, the ghosts shrank back into the shadows.

  She turned and looked at Jax, and she thought he was smiling, or would have been if the regulator wasn’t blocking his mouth. But then his expression changed, and she looked where he was looking.

  Because the dark fragments that had been the Pouring Man were drifting together again, piece by piece. They made two columns in the water, two small columns; they were turning into something. Not into him, but into two people. They gathered and became more solid and more colorful. They shaped into figures of children—children wearing scuba gear. Children with masks on, and oxygen tanks on their backs. One with long hair, the other shorter and blond.

  Her and Jax, in fact.

  She was looking at two kids who might as well be their own reflections. Like a mirror image.

  Except for their eerie smiles. The other children didn’t have to close their mouths around the regulators to breathe. They simply smiled, with water flowing through them. And Cara recognized those smiles, because they weren’t the smiles of kids.

  The smiles were his.

  She looked at Jax, trembling. He pointed upward, and in that same moment the copies began to rise. They didn’t swim, didn’t even move their arms: their arms, like the Pouring Man’s before them, hung at their sides, motionless. Despite this they rose through the water.

  Jax let go of her hand and fumbled to unclip his weight belt. Then she was grabbing at her own, letting it drop onto the sand beside the rope, and she felt herself turn buoyant again. He was pulling up through the water, and she was beside him, kicking her fins .… It was a race, clearly; she didn’t have to be Jax to know that. They had to beat the copies to the top.

  Those versions of themselves were not them. They were him.

  And they could hurt Hayley.

  Gasping, she and Jax broke the surface.

  And there was Hayley, sitting in the kayak, looking shockingly normal—part of the world of makeup and clothes and TV, the regular, mundane world.

  Her face was lit up by one of the flashlights; apparently she hadn’t wanted to sit alone in the dark.

  The boat was rocking a bit but not close to flipping.

  “I can’t believe it!” she said. “Wow, what a relief. I was about to call 911!”

  But then, behind her on the other side of the boat, in the dark, another Jax and Cara broke the surface too. Hayley jumped in her seat and turned around, shining her flashlight down at them and giving a short shriek.

  All of them pulled out their mouthpieces hastily, all four of them struggled to raise their masks onto their head so they could talk to Hayley. All four of them had bruise-like creases on their cheeks where the masks had bitten in.

  “They’re not us,” Cara told her, her lips numb with cold.

  “They’re him,” said Jax. “Don’t believe them.”

  “No,” said the fake Jax, talking just like the real one. “We’re real. Those are the copies. Please, Hayley. Believe us.”

  “Please, Hayley,” begged the fake Cara. “It’s me!”

  It was amazing how much she looked like her—even her voice, the way she ran her hand over her wet hair.

  “You have to choose,” said the fake Jax. “You have to choose between us. Choose the real ones. Choose us!”

  The real Jax bobbed up and down in the water, splashing. “Hayley! Be careful! If you choose wrong they’ll hurt you—”

  “So choose right!” said the fake Cara. “Choose me!”

  “Follow your instincts, Hayley,” said Jax, shaking his head. “Don’t second-guess yourself. You know the real us, I know you do.”

  Treading water, Cara gazed up at her friend, who was casting the beam of the flashlight back and forth between the two sets of them.

  “What is this,” said Hayley, sounding angry. “What’s happening?”

  “You are the arbiter,” said the real Jax. “Not Max. It’s you who’s supposed to be the impartial judge. But you have to choose the version of us that’s real, Hayley. That’s real and wants to be good.”

  “I’m sorry for bringing you here,” said Cara. “I am … but the bad one could say that too, the copy of me. But she couldn’t know what’s on your mother’s shelf of statues, could she? She could never know that. Could she?”

  “Careful,” warned Jax. “If I know, the fake me could know, too. Because he can read me.”

  �
��I know what’s beside the girl with the white goose,” said Cara. “Do you?”

  The real Jax shook his head.

  “Hayley,” urged Cara. “It’s the gnome thing with the cone-shaped hat. And the basket of mushrooms. Could the copy know that?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Hayley.

  Behind her, the false Cara smiled. “I know that too. She said it first, that’s all. And I know more important things, also,” she said. “I know how you feel about Max.”

  Cara groaned and looked over at Jax.

  “No! Don’t choose them! They’re going to hurt you!”

  Hayley was casting the flashlight back and forth between them. Cara couldn’t see her face behind the brightness of the beam and felt panicked suddenly. It was too much to ask of Hayley, too much to ask of anyone.

  “OK,” said Hayley, and swung her light from one pair of them to the other. “I pick. It’s you.”

  Who? Cara squinted up until the light was out of her eyes again. She saw Hayley looking down—at her.

  The real her and the real Jax.

  Cara let out a sigh of relief—and as she did so her friend swung the beam around again, till it pointed at the copies.

  They were melting, their faces losing definition like wax statues under a flame. They flowed onto the top of the water, spreading like oil, and dispersed.

  In a few seconds there was no trace at all.

  There was a brief pause, full of the sound of her and Jax breathing.

  “Nice,” said Jax, when he had caught his breath.

  “How did you know?” asked Cara.

  “I didn’t,” said Hayley, and raised her shoulders in a quick shrug. “You guys just seemed more desperate … plus, I admit. I didn’t think you’d throw the Max thing in my face.”

  “Does this mean he’s gone?” Cara asked her brother.

  “For now,” he said.

  Her heart sank. When would they beat him so he didn’t come back at all?