A perfect, wayward seashell, lost amongst the fragments and shards of the desert.
Why I had ever thought I’d escaped the whispers of the ocean was anyone’s guess, given that Egypt was flanked by not one, but two of its own seas. That I was immersed in the thick of the desert was just a technicality, an illusion of self-imposed exile that posed no challenge to the range of the paranormal.
Upon unearthing the shell–a pretty, peach-colored cockle–I froze for all of five glacial seconds before glancing around like a criminal and stashing it in a pocket so no one else would see. If I was ever caught pilfering artifacts from our dig, I would be in a stinking heap of trouble, but these oceanic taunts had stirred something frantic and paranoid inside me, and it was pure impulse that acted on my behalf. And anyway, if anyone ‘caught’ me, who would readily suspect a seashell had come from our dig? Egypt may have had its seas, but we were nowhere near the coast, and it was a perfect seashell to boot. No way in the nine circles of hell would this brittle thing have survived through the ages alongside the rest of the shrapnel mosaic that was our treasure trove.
My mouth was dry for the rest of our work hours that day, and it had nothing to do with the climate. When we were done I marched straight to my tent and unloaded the treacherous token from my pocket, wrapping it in a scarf and burying it at the bottom of my travel sack.
Leave me alone, you washed-up dreg of exoskeleton. These are not your stomping grounds. This was my territory. Once upon a time I may have flounced in the salty, cold waves of California and welcomed the call of the sea like a bred-and-born Thalassophile–a term my adoptive mother Sandy had taught me for ‘lover of the sea’–until adventures in first grade science had changed all that. I would never forget it, the day we learned about vertebrates and invertebrates, the difference between mammals, aquatic creatures, and amphibians, and, most notably in my case, the lesson on ‘gills’ that was included in the bullet points for aquatic species. After that, the salty taste of the ocean had turned sour for me, and I had cast off my Thalassophile predilection like it suddenly brought back a deep-seeded trauma.
Baffled by my sudden aversion to what I once revered, Sandy probed time and again as to what prompted the shift, but I had put up walls and grew increasingly agitated by the coastal culture until my fits finally prodded her to get me counseling. I went to therapy for three months, but to no avail–and Sandy, always a tad flighty and ready for a new adventure, decided to up and relocate us to the arid red plains of Arizona, where my aunt and uncle and adorable twin cousins lived. It was there, safely 400 miles away from the ocean, that I’d first found my escape in the polar opposite element that was the dirt and developed my fascination with the ancient artifacts of the southwestern Native American tribes.
From there it was no huge leap that saw me digging up clay pots as an archaeological intern in Egypt in my twenties, but it would seem the seaside lore of my childhood had crept out of the sunken-ship woodwork to remind me of my roots. I could stand there stubbornly insistent that my seashell discovery was nothing but a misplaced fish out of water all I wanted, but the truth was…
Well, the truth was it might as well have been a fragment of an old mirror that I found amongst the other shards, that day, instead of a seashell. A fragment of mirror throwing my true reflection back at me.
3
The Atlantean ambush didn’t stop there. It had soaked into the sand of Egypt, miring me in the mythological mud as I went to sleep that night.
The dream sequence started like it usually did: a layer of foam-laced water creeping under the front door of the Arizona house, down the hall and into my bedroom. It sloshed across my threshold, spreading to the corners and lapping up past the old baseboards at the eggshell-white walls. The water level rose from there, a silent threat encroaching on me where I slept soundly in my bed, soaking into the edges of my botanical duvet.
And then the pipe organ music started, and a shark swam out from under my bed.
I awoke to the distant sound of the real thing, the abrasive, haunting keen blaring across the quiet desert and drawing me out of my restless slumber.
Dread laced through my gut. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the pleasure of hearing a pipe organ play, but it had probably been during some girls’ night in the dorms that included pink Moscato and nail polish and an obnoxious sing-along viewing of The Phantom of the Opera. It was an uncommon instrument, having little business most anywhere except exotic movie sets and traditional churches and a great uncle’s house that you only visited on the holidays. And so there was little to attribute the rare novelty to except the one other thing I knew it by.
Rising as if in a trance, I tip-toed to the tent flap and let myself out. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but the silhouettes of my peers had long since stopped shifting behind their own canvas walls, and even Savannah’s flirty giggles had died down from Kyle’s tent, so it had to be past midnight.
Axel, Tara, and I had enjoyed a phase of sneaking into each other’s tents after curfew as well, but somehow we were the ones who got caught and reprimanded even though all we ever did was sit in the dark and trade life stories, campfire-style. Meanwhile Savannah and Kyle carried on with their little affair unchecked, and we gritted our teeth in annoyance, grudgingly hanging up our ‘rebel’ coats.
I’d always suspected there would be a time when we grew lax with the model citizen thing again; I just didn’t think it would be so I could sneak out all alone, lured by a dark enchantment.
No one else was roused by the music, which now trumpeted clearly from the north. I pushed off through the sand, oblivious to the chafe of grains on my bare feet.
The desert was washed in shadow, dappled with dips and dunes. I saw nothing out of the ordinary, and so I wandered further out into the wilderness. Like horizontal quicksand, the desert lured me deeper and deeper, until the tents were like a cluster of mushrooms far behind me. I looked back once, second-guessing the wisdom of straying too far from camp, but my tracks in the sand reassured me I could find my way back.
When I faced forward again, a blush of glowing green light was cresting a dune in the distance, staining the lip of the rise a color like the Aurora Borealis.
Peppered with goosebumps, I slogged toward the light. Curiosity rippled through me, twanging my nerves like guitar strings. While the music clearly defined what I would find on the other side of the ridge, a part of me couldn’t believe it until I saw it, and the glow was an unfamiliar element. I all but swam up the slippery hillside, sand raining down all around me, the need to lay eyes on the culprit rising to a crescendo along with the music. Half-sinking, half-climbing, I groped for the crest of the hill and pulled myself over the lip, sending my sights into the basin on the other side.
At the bottom, the blaring instrument stood lonely and haunting in the sand, the keys pressing themselves to the dramatic tune. Each note reverberated up through a spiral-patterned pipe that looked like a unicorn horn, blasting off into the sky in a spurt of green luminescence. The constant release of notes created a shimmering, dancing wave of light above the organ, an exact replica of the Aurora. The five-tiered keyboard, rippling and stomping and alive with song, was designed not from ivory but mother-of-pearl.
If I had been out there under the blazing sun staring across the desert into the trickery of heatwaves, I would have chalked up the whole thing to a mirage. But huddled there in the mild dark, I could blame no such thing.
That other motif from my dreams had come calling, and quite obnoxiously this time. Really, had all the screaming chords and dramatic refrains been necessary? What was next? A whale falling from the sky to crush the artifacts we’d recovered from the dig site?
I lingered at the top of the dune, torn between venturing down to investigate the anomaly and running headlong back toward camp to escape the madness. But I was entranced by the song, a strange nostalgia coming over me. Salty-sweet memories played through my veins, my heartstrings twisting, my chest tighten
ing with an ache that harkened back to freezing cold waves wrapped around my body.
And just like a cold wave engulfing me, I was left shocked by the overpowering sensations. My breath came short, my fingers digging into the sand.
The image of the pipe organ flickered as a breeze passed, and I fought the music’s effects, a stubborn trickle of sanity trying to circle back around to the theory that all I saw before me was a mirage. But the way the vision wavered was entirely too reminiscent of a watery flourish, as if I viewed the sunken amphitheater from underwater, through a warped, liquid lens. I’d never realized before that moment how much the desert plains resembled the bottom of the ocean, but suddenly I might as well have been on an expedition on the sea floor, garbed in scuba gear with bubbles gurgling up from my mask. I imagined a half-buried treasure chest a ways down the dune, a sunken ship in the distance beyond the pipe organ, a tiger shark making graceful circles around the basin of the amphitheater, the silhouette of a whale in the sky…
I closed my eyes hard, smacking the small of my hand to my forehead. Snap out of it, Sayler. There were not whales in the sky.
But neither could there be a pipe organ sitting out in the desert, so there was that.
First the discovery of underwater ruins, then the unearthing of a perfect seashell during excavation, and now this…this hulking instrument broadcasting its spine-grating bravado for all the desert to hear.
Things had escalated quickly, hadn’t they?
I would be a fool to think it would stop there, and while I didn’t expect a whale incarnate to fall from the sky for everyone else to see, I didn’t think I wanted to wait around to find out what would take the stage next. It was only going to get worse, and I’d be fooling myself if I tried to pretend I hadn’t been running from the subtler omens for a long time.
A very long time indeed.
That getaway to the rusty inland hovel of Arizona had started the chase, and it may have taken a while for the tide to channel its way to a river that would reach me, but reach me it had.
It had reached me, and it would rise around me until it drowned me.
Up until now, the water level had only risen in my dreams, taunting my unconscious mind. But now I was hounded even in my wakeful state–the smack to the head, more effective than any pinch, confirmed it. Long had I gone to sleep afraid of the shark that was my childhood monster-under-the-bed, but now it had grown bold and cultured and come out into the world. The ridiculous visual of a shark donning a suit, and straightening its tie before my old bedroom mirror before venturing out into the big, wide world, pervaded my mind.
I’m coming for you, whispered the shark in his gentleman’s disguise, and in the same way sound travels for miles underwater, the taunt had prolongated to tickle my senses wherever I went.
I blinked the analogy from my mind, trying not to hear the Jaws theme song in the music that vibrated up from the organ.
The enchantment of its tune had been tainted, though, and in place of its bewitchment was left a deep-rooted resignation. Somewhere deep down, I’d known this day would come. But how could I drop everything, just like that? Everything I had worked toward, shaped myself around, spent years of my life building?
The Calling did not seem to care. If I had to guess, I would say it was of the opinion that I simply shouldn’t have wasted all that time. That maybe my ‘passions’ were only misguided, determined attempts to pretend I was destined for things that I was not.
I imagined the ghost that played the pipe organ turning, pointing a long, accusing squid-like tentacle at me and sputtering, Sayler. What are you doing out here in the middle of all this godforsaken land, you confounded long-lost child?
I don’t know, I wanted to sob. But I did know. I’d been running away all this time.
I saw the footprint of that ghostly tentacle slither through the sand, up the dune, and felt it wrap tight around me. It constricted like a snake immobilizing its prey, cutting off my air supply. I struggled to pull in a breath, but heard that spectral voice of reason once again:
Stop struggling, dear one. You do not need to breathe.
A reminder that had more significance than I cared to admit. I strained harder, denying the claim that would set me free. But the harder I fought, the tighter the bonds became, until, mouth agape in a silent scream for air, I slumped light-headed and dizzy into the sand.
Only when I gave up, making no effort to draw oxygen into my lungs, did the invisible tentacle release me. I lay there feeling half-dead, grains of sand tickling my eyelashes. Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
After nearly a minute I came back into myself, blinking suddenly and re-expanding my lungs. Air rushed back into my body, but it chafed my throat like smoke, dry and irritating.
When I pushed myself up from the sand, the pipe organ was gone from the illusionary amphitheater. I was out in the middle of the desert, alone, glancing about for my bearings as if waking up from a dream.
Was it possible I had sleep-walked?
I stopped that line of thinking in its tracks, though, lest another exasperated ghost decide I needed a second lesson in oxygen-deprivation to squeeze some sense into me.
No. I had not dreamed any of it. Not this time. And if I had, it was only the method by which greater things opted to communicate with me.
As I rolled onto my back and stared up at the stars, catching my breath, I knew what I had to do. No one would understand, and I didn’t know how I was going to explain the crazy move, but destiny had a way of stirring the crazy in people without bothering to explain itself.
Destiny answered to no one, after all.
As for me, I answered to the call of the sea.
4
There was little to pack, and so I glanced around anticlimactically at my meager belongings scattered about the barren tent, pulled my hair back into a half-tamed knot of determination, and went to inform Professor Brexton of my leaving. All my attempts to conjure up a believable excuse flopped around my mind like fish out of water, spazzing in putty-like circles with their stupid, gaping eyes and O-shocked little mouths, and dying quick deaths on the banks of Isla de Drawing-a-Blanco.
So I made up something on the spot, about the impromptu death of a dear aunt–super original, I know. My endeavors not to cringe must have made me look constipated. But if that was my story, I was sticking to it. I could only hope I wouldn’t end up on the news alongside the others flocking to the Maldives to be a part of the Atlantean legend, broadcast for all my archaeological peers to see.
It would be the ultimate betrayal.
Whether or not the professor was skeptical of my story, etiquette called for unconditional sympathy–and therein lay the hidden brilliance of my plan, cliché or not, so any scoffing inner voices that doubted me for a second could shove it–and so with regret he released me and sent me on my way.
Just like that, I was free. I exited his trailer feeling like a lost little country girl stepping off the bus in big the city, at the wrong stop. Or getting off the wrong bus at the right stop. I wasn’t really sure. Point being I was hugely disoriented.
But I’d made my break, and there was no going back. Dear Aunt Clementine was dead and cold, and would not be coming back to life, unless the Expedition uncovered any of those legendary resurrection crypts that I often suspected were the professor’s true objective.
Even so, by then I’d be long gone, running with wild abandon into the salty winds and crashing tides and frolicking like an over-dramatic, gleeful, vengeful selkie who hadn’t wanted to be found and couldn’t quite accept her destiny until she took out her frustrations by punching a few waves in their frigid, frothy faces.
Short of trudging off on my spontaneous entire-life redirect, I realized I still had to tell Axel and Tara, and they would not be so easy. They knew better than me suddenly having and losing some ridiculous Aunt Clementine out of the blue, in the same breath, and I couldn’t lie to them.
“You what?” Tara demanded, her disbelief enunc
iated like a sledgehammer against a cookie-cutter, but face completely blank.
I hadn’t expected it to register.
Frowning, Axel probed at the inside of his ear as if trying to dispel a drop of water. “I’m sorry, I must have had the wind in my ear–it sounded like you said you’re taking your leave from the expedition?”
“That’s right.”
“What could have possibly possessed you to do that?”
“Don’t tell the professor, but I’m going to join the recovery team in the Maldives.”
“The Atlantean recovery team?” Axel looked at me like he’d never truly known me, like he was second-guessing everything he’d ever known.
“That’s the one.”
“But…”
“But?” I prompted, for lack of a better explanation to use as my defense.
“Just but.”
They stared at me, waiting for more. More that I didn’t have. What was I supposed to tell them? That I’d dreamed of the ruins recovered from the depths my whole life, that I knew their secret? That I was finding wayward seashells among our dusty rubble? That I was haunted by pipe organ mirages that drew me out into the middle of the desert at night? That there was a shark in a gentleman’s suit after me?
“You did say something in the trailer yesterday when we saw the news broadcast, didn’t you?” Tara concluded almost accusingly.
She could read from my tells that something momentous was at play. Or she figured there had to be, for me to drop everything like someone really had died.
Conflict tied my tongue into knots. I wanted to tell them but knew I couldn’t explain it. That it would be too much. “You’re just going to have to trust me. I can’t be here right now.” If I ever can again. Would there be any returning once I surrendered to the Call? Once I gave myself over to the tide? It was no lacy, delicate meandering tide, I knew, but a riptide. The kind that pulls you into its all-powerful vortex and sweeps you hard out to sea.
Sirens and Scales Page 169
