by Liz Kessler
My legs melted away, and in their place, my tail formed.
OK. I was a mermaid now. I could relax.
“Emily!”
Shona was in front of me. I swam to her.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I fell in!”
“I know, but how come?”
I paused. I didn’t want to sound stupid. I didn’t want Shona to laugh at me.
“What is it, Em?” she pushed. “You can tell me anything.”
She was right. Of course she was. She was my best friend!
“Well, I kind of saw something,” I began. “Behind the waterfall.”
“The island, you mean?”
I shook my head. “On the island. I thought I saw a pair of eyes.”
Shona stared at me. Before she had a chance to say anything, I had an idea. “Let’s go and check it out!” I said. “Just swim as close as we can get to the falls, poke our heads up, and see if we can see them again. It’ll take two minutes, then I’ll swim back to the boat.”
Shona frowned. “Emily, I’m not sure. It’s rough over there.”
“I know. Before my tail formed, I thought I’d never be able to deal with it. But now that it has, I feel completely different. Shona, we’re mermaids! It’s the ocean! We’ll be fine!”
“Em, what about our deal?”
I laughed. “I know. And I promise. Two minutes. If it starts to feel dangerous, we come straight back. No adventures, no danger. We’ll just swim as close as we feel safe to swim, have a quick look, and come back. Just to put my mind at rest about what I saw. Please?”
Shona turned away from me and paused for a long time. Then, with a resigned shake of her head, she turned back. “OK,” she said. “But two minutes.”
“Deal!”
The first minute was fine. We swam toward the falls in a current that grew strong enough to make it hard work.
It was the second minute that changed everything. We were swimming along side by side. I turned to Shona and gave her a thumbs-up. “I told you it would be —”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence. A massive rush of water plowed into me like a wrecking ball, snatching me up and spinning me around. It felt as though I’d swum smack-dab into the middle of a ferocious whirlpool.
“Emily! Are you OK?”
I could hear Shona calling to me, but I couldn’t see her. All I could see was white, frothing water all around me. I couldn’t get past it.
“Shona!” I called back, starting to panic. “Where are you?”
“I’m here!”
I peered into the haze of white and could just about make her out. “OK, I’m coming,” I yelled. I tried to swim toward her, but I kept being pushed back down.
“Grab my hand!” Shona called. She was trying to swim to me.
I reached out for her. She was so close. “I can’t — can’t reach you,” I gasped.
As the water swirled around me, I tried again. Shona reached for me, and her arm made it through the swirling water. Finally, we managed to clasp hands.
“Hold on,” Shona said. I gripped her hand as water streamed past us, lifting us, shaking us, pummeling us, and spinning us around and around, inside out.
I remembered the story the man on the boat had told me, about the young man who’d died.
Could we survive this?
“Emily! We have to get out of here!” Shona screamed at me. Her face was as white as the froth surrounding us.
“I know! But how?”
“Keep swimming!”
“I’m trying!” I yelled.
Shona tightened her grip on my hand. “Try harder,” she said. “Come on. Let’s push together.”
So we did. We worked our free arms like windmills and thrashed our tails as hard as we could.
“The current’s getting stronger!” I said. “Are we swimming the wrong way?”
“I don’t know,” Shona replied. “It feels the same in every direction. I don’t know which way is up or down anymore, never mind whether we’re swimming toward or away from the falls.”
As the current grew stronger and stronger, I could feel the energy draining out of me. It was hopeless. We couldn’t fight it.
I looked all around me, trying to work out what we could do. And that was when I noticed something.
“Shona,” I said. “Stop fighting it. Stop trying to get through it.” I pointed to the side, where the rushing looked less frantic. “Look, the current is slower over there. Let’s try swimming sideways instead.”
Shona did what I said. Together, we swam across the current rather than swimming into it — and instead of being beaten backward, we slowly started to make progress.
I couldn’t see much and was so disoriented I barely knew up from down. But it was working. I still had no idea exactly where we were, but the current was slowing a tiny bit. Maybe we were heading toward the edge of the falls.
Would we make it out of here after all?
As the current slowed even more, we let go of each other and swam in single file.
Shona pointed down. “Look,” she said. “It’s even calmer below us. Let’s head down.” She swished her tail and dived lower.
Summoning up all the strength I had, I flicked my tail, threw my body into an arc, and flipped myself even farther downward. Shona was right. The lower we went, the more the bubbles began to subside.
Down, down, swishing my tail as hard as I’d ever worked it, I plowed through the water until my body felt as if it were on fire. Shona was beside me, doing the same thing.
Finally, the current eased so much I could barely feel it. I let my tail relax.
“We did it!” I yelled, turning to grin at Shona.
She wasn’t smiling back at me.
“We’ll get out of this,” I said. “I promise.”
We looked up at the fierce, rushing water zooming past above us. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Like the busiest, fastest highway in the world, but instead of roads and cars, it was water, bubbles, and froth.
Ahead of us, the water was still moving, but at a fraction of the speed of the mayhem above us. At least we could see through it down here: Schools of fish dotted about, trailing seaweed, rocks poking up like mini mountain ridges.
A couple of long silver fish came toward us, swimming by without stopping or showing any interest. One was big enough that I thought for a second it might be a shark. I didn’t really want to hang around.
“Come on,” I called to Shona. “Let’s swim on.”
“Which way?” Shona asked.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. Down here, it all looked the same. Then something caught my eye. A tiny ray of light, like a tube. A tunnel of sunlight directly ahead of us. It looked even more still than where we were now. At least it was brighter. Maybe we’d be able to see where we were from there.
“Let’s try over there,” I suggested.
Shona shrugged and followed me as we swam toward the light.
Edging into the bright, sparkly tunnel, I noticed the change right away. No current. It almost felt as if there was no water. As though we’d hit upon some kind of vacuum: complete nothingness.
“Em, I’m not sure about this,” Shona said.
“Neither am —”
Aaaaarrrggghhhhh!
A rush of water snatched the rest of my sentence away.
Suddenly, the nothingness of the tunnel turned to absolute chaos. The calm vacuum was now a streaming, screaming tornado, lashing, crashing, hurling, and whirling around in every direction.
And we were in the middle of it.
I’d been in whirlpools before. I’d been hurled around in the sea before. The one thing I remembered about surviving them was —
Nothing.
I actually couldn’t remember anything about surviving whirlpools. My mind was numb and blank, and at the same time, it was full. Full of water and bubbles and froth.
Plus, I had never been in a whirlpool this bad. Water threw me in every direction, s
pinning me around as if I was on the most sadistic theme park ride in the world.
I couldn’t even see Shona anymore. Was she still in here with me or had she managed to get out?
I had no idea.
So I did the only thing I could think to do.
I closed my eyes, gave myself up to the mayhem, and prayed that the thunderous, rushing water would be done with me soon.
It felt as if we were in there for hours. First the heavy wash, then the spin cycle that went on forever.
And then I realized something had changed.
I wasn’t being spun around and around anymore. I opened my eyes and blinked as I tried to take in where I was.
Still in the tube — but the rushing had stopped, and the spin cycle was over. I could see the light sparkling again.
Despite my tail feeling like it had been tied in a hundred knots, and my arms feeling like they’d been wrung out and twisted so hard they were little more than rags, I knew I had to recover some strength before it started again. I had to find Shona and somehow get out of here and back to the boat.
So I began to swim out of the tunnel of water. As I did, I realized that the current was on my side. The sea was growing warmer, and the flow was getting stronger — and before I knew it, I was zooming along as if I was in some kind of underwater rapid.
Oh, thank goodness! I was being spat back out of the falls again.
A moment later, I heard someone beside me.
“Shona!”
She zoomed past me. “I can’t stop!” she yelled.
I swam harder to catch up with her. The water was making it easy. The current was carrying us along.
I managed to catch up with Shona, and together we let ourselves glide.
The water felt so gentle now. Benign. We were out of the falls. I could have laughed with relief.
I smiled at Shona. “We did it,” I said.
Finally, she half smiled back at me. “I think we did,” she agreed. “I thought we were done for at one point.”
“Me, too. I’m just glad we’re out of it.”
The current was slowing. I flicked my tail to keep propelling me along. All I had to do now was swim back to the boat, climb aboard, and get back to the others, hopefully before Mom realized I had gone anywhere. Shona could swim back to the hotel, and we’d meet up later and laugh about all this.
But as we reached the surface, it looked different.
“Em . . .” Shona said.
I turned to her.
“This isn’t where we started,” I said. The boat was nowhere to be seen. We appeared to be in a bay of some sort. And it was kind of dark.
“Wh-where are we?” Shona stammered.
I rubbed my eyes and looked around. The land was rocky, green, and lush. It wasn’t like anywhere we’d been. It certainly wasn’t the open ocean.
A thought was forming in my head.
It couldn’t be . . . it wasn’t possible. I mean, the man said . . .
As I took in our surroundings, I realized that the man had been wrong. It was possible. It had happened.
We’d come through to the other side. We’d survived, and now we were in a whole new world.
The world behind the falls.
Shona and I swam toward the shore. Behind us, the rushing waterfall was a heavy, white curtain closing us off from the outside world. Ahead of us, damp, rocky plinths beckoned. There were no beautiful, golden, sandy beaches here.
The water lapped against the rocks so gently it was hard to believe that only moments earlier, this same water had thrashed us around so wildly we’d wondered if it would ever let us go.
“How did this happen, Em?” Shona asked as we swam.
“I — I don’t know,” I confessed. “It’s not supposed to be possible. At least, it’s not possible for humans.”
Were we the first to ever come here?
We’d reached the rocky shore. “I’ll climb up onto the rocks and see what’s beyond them,” I said as I pulled myself out of the water and waited for my tail to melt away and my legs to reform.
“Be quick,” Shona replied. “I’ll wait here.”
Once my legs felt strong enough to carry me, I got up and clambered over the rocks to get a better view.
I could barely see the sky. Beyond the cove, dark rocks and immensely tall trees blocked out most of the light. Here and there, breaks in the mass of green and gray allowed a few spots of sky to poke through the gaps. Sunlight sprinkled through them in tiny cylinders of light. No paths out. No signs telling us which way to go.
I made my way back down the rocky bay. Shona was swimming around at the water’s edge.
“Anything?” she asked as I approached.
I shook my head.
“What do we do now then?” Her voice was tight, like a wire about to snap. “Stay here and wait to be rescued? Which will never happen because no one knows we’re here, and apparently it’s not even possible to be here.”
“We could try to get back through the falls,” I suggested.
“No way,” Shona said. “I couldn’t face that again. Not yet.”
“There might be another way out,” I said.
Shona gave me a look that told me she didn’t think it was likely. Nor did I, to be honest.
“Look, there’s only one way to find out,” I said. “Let’s split up. You check out the bay. I’ll go up there and see what I can find on land. Then we meet back here with our findings. What d’you think?”
Shona frowned. “I guess I don’t have any better suggestions,” she said. “But be quick up there. I don’t want to be stranded here on my own for too long.”
“I’ll be as fast as I can. See you back here as soon as one of us has found something.”
“OK.” Shona turned to swim away.
“Good luck,” I called to her.
“Yeah, you, too,” she replied flatly.
I scrambled up to the back of the bay. Climbing over rocks and squeezing through overgrown leafy bushes, I carefully picked my way toward one of the shafts of light.
The rocks tapered upward, narrowing into points, like the trees. Over the tops of them, tiny cracks let in the sky. Shards of light spread out like fans across the forest, beaming down like stars. Diamonds of sunshine danced around me, tiptoeing through the forest, waking it up.
I allowed myself a moment to take in the beauty of it. I’d never been anywhere like it.
It was as if I was in a well — a magical, beautiful, sparkling well, hidden in the earth.
I was on the verge of feeling almost good about this place when I heard a snapping sound nearby, and my heart pounded almost through my chest. I turned to look in time to see a branch waving.
Just the wind. A breeze ruffling the edges of leaves.
As I listened, I heard more sounds. Chirping, high above me.
Birds.
What else lived here? Which animals might live in a place like this?
My feet suddenly felt like ten ton anchors on my legs. What if there were lions or bears or —
Another sound! Rustling in the trees.
I ducked down, my knees on the ground, and held my breath.
Nothing. There was nothing. No one.
Of course there was no one. No one lived here. No one had ever been here. No one could have gotten here.
I stood up carefully, slowly, and crept along the path.
What kind of creature had left this path?
I walked faster, propelling myself through the forest as if my legs could carry me away from the answers I didn’t want to hear.
The ground was like a soft, cushioned carpet, snaking through the trees. I stayed on the path, one step after another, my head down — and then it ended. The path just stopped.
I looked up to see that it had led me to a river: a deep channel through the rocks, with what looked like a fallen tree forming a bridge across it.
I stepped toward the bridge.
Wait.
It wasn’t a tree.
It was tree roots, woven around and around one another like an elaborate braid. The bridge was adorned with stepping stones, perfectly round, placed equidistant from one another all the way along the knotted roots.
This could not have happened naturally.
A shiver ran through my body like a python slithering down my back. The sweet sounds of animals scurrying through the forest became predators spying on me from behind every tree.
What was this place?
I still had no answers, but I knew one thing for sure: we had to get out of here — even if it meant going back through the falls. I couldn’t stay here on my own. I didn’t want to explore the forest anymore. I just wanted to get back to Shona and do whatever we had to do to get away from here.
I turned back the way I’d come. Hurrying along the path, I soon came to a fork. I was pretty sure the way back to the falls was along the left path, so after the briefest pause, I decided to take that one. I started to walk, then jog, and then — imagining hunters and monsters behind every tree — I soon found myself flat-out running.
Which was when I heard the voices.
Indecision pinned my feet to the ground. The voices sounded like they were on the other side of some trees to my right. Possibly down the other path.
Were they heading my way?
If I ran, I could probably get away before they reached me. But the faster I ran, the more noise I’d make. What if they saw me running? What if they heard me?
As I stopped moving, I stopped breathing, too. It seemed as if the whole forest had done the same.
The voices had quieted. Had I imagined them?
I let out the breath that I’d been holding way too long and was about to move when a piercing sound screeched through the forest.
What was that?
I threw myself to the ground, crouching low in the leaves and twigs. Half covering my eyes, I looked through my fingers, just in time to see a monkey swing from the branch of one tree onto the bark of another.
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud. Monkeys!
That’s all it had been. Of course it wasn’t people. There simply wasn’t any way that people could possibly —
And then I heard another sound, and this time there was no mistaking what I heard. Human voices.
And they were heading my way.
