by Jack Heath
She had landed in an underground lake.
No. She listened to the rushing, swirling sounds.
Not a lake. A river.
The one the bomb was supposed to redirect.
The last flickering sparks above gave her just enough light to see. The water was black and sleek—and fast. It swept Sarah through a small cavern, where startled bats hid between fat stalactites, watching her with eyes like red berries.
She didn’t have long to take in the view. The current dragged her towards a stone wall. Sarah paddled frantically in the other direction but it was like trying to walk out of a hurricane. The wall rushed up to meet her.
At the last second, she realised that the river wouldn’t haul her to an impenetrable wall. That made no sense. There must be somewhere for the water to flow through. So she inhaled, filling her lungs with the cold, dead air, and ducked under the surface.
It was pitch black. Sarah shut her eyes, bottling a wave of panic as she was swept under the wall. She didn’t know how long that one quick breath needed to last. She had to keep her heart rate low.
The water took her down, down, down, roaring in her ears. The cold was unbearable. Every time she reached up, her hand bumped against stone. There was no air. She was going to drown. Her mother would never know what had happened to her. She and Yvette and Dale and Uncle Claude would waste the rest of their lives searching for her while she floated facedown in an underground reservoir.
What’s that sound?
The water shook with the force of it—an endless smashing noise, getting louder and louder and louder. At the same time, the underground river seemed to be accelerating, as if excited to show Sarah what was next. She swept through the blackness, faster and faster.
She didn’t recognise the sound of Axe Falls until she was exploding out into the fading moonlight, twenty metres above the sea.
She hung in the air for a moment, stunned by the blast of fresh air, surrounded by dangling crystals of white water. She barely had time to register where she was and what was happening before she began to fall.
She hurtled towards the distant sea, the wind making her wet pyjamas stick to her legs. The noise was like crashing cymbals right behind her head. She plummeted down and down until she slammed into the ocean, narrowly missing a sharp slab of rock.
When she surfaced, she couldn’t see. Axe Falls was pouring a spectacular avalanche of water onto her head. The velocity made the waterfall seem almost solid—it was like being pummelled by a torrent of wet tennis balls. She dipped down, swimming between the rocks and out into the open ocean.
Soon she was in calmer waters. She surfaced and floated on her back, breathing the salty air and listening to the distant croaking of the gulls. The sun was just starting to peep over the horizon, banishing the stars.
She was alive.
She hadn’t burned to death, drowned, been eaten alive or blown to bits. She had saved Mum, Karla and their little town—
Assuming no more monsters lurked in the deep beneath her.
Sarah rolled over and peered down into the water. She saw nothing suspicious, but didn’t want to linger.
As she kicked her aching legs and paddled to the shore, she wondered if Yvette would believe a single word of it.
THE UNEXPLAINED
‘I don’t believe a single word of it,’ Yvette said.
Sarah sighed. ‘Haven’t you read The Boy Who Cried Wolf?’
‘I could ask you the same question. You know the moral of the story, right?’
‘Sure—just because someone has exaggerated things in the past, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real wolf this time.’
‘That is so not the moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf,’ Yvette said.
They were lying on Yvette’s bed, legs up, heels against the wall. Yvette was tossing a ball up in the air and catching it.
Sarah shrugged. ‘Well, think what you like. My mum saw the monsters. Kooky Karla too.’
‘Well, who am I to doubt “Kooky Karla”?’
Yvette probably did believe Sarah—at least mostly. But it was true that no trace of the creatures had been found. Not in the town or on the beach, nor in the bay or around the sunken houseboat. Claude had even arranged another inspection of the Quirinus Two, and the divers hadn’t turned up anything.
Sarah hoped this meant all the monsters had been crushed in the collapsing mine. But it would be a while before she felt safe swimming in the ocean again.
‘Something sank our boat, didn’t it?’ she said.
Yvette squeezed her hand. ‘Sorry. I get how much that sucks.’
‘I know you do,’ Sarah said. Yvette’s old house had burned to the ground, although to be fair, she had only just moved in. ‘Thanks again for letting me stay here.’
‘Are you kidding? This has been the best week ever. If I had my way, you’d never leave.’
Sarah smiled—one of those smiles that started at her heart and spread out to encompass her whole body.
Wait. A week?
‘It’s been a week?’ Sarah gasped. ‘Our Cthulhu projects are due!’
‘Yeah—haven’t you done yours?’
‘I did it, but it was in my house when it sank.’ Sarah tried out the words, seeing how they sounded.
Yvette snorted. ‘Very convincing.’
‘Thanks. Here, let me help you finish yours.’
Typically, Yvette had built a detailed model of the R’lyeh, the sunken city from the story. But her Cthulhu figurine wasn’t painted yet. It was clearly just an action figure with a toy spider glued to its face to look like tentacles.
‘Spooky,’ Sarah said.
‘Shut up. Help me stick the wings on his back.’
Sarah held the wings in place while Yvette warmed up the glue gun. She liked the way Yvette had painted the creature’s long shadow onto the ocean floor.
‘Why now?’ Sarah asked.
‘Hmm?’
‘The monsters were on that ship when it crashed,’ Sarah said. ‘In one of those cages. But they waited six years before they came in to the shore. Why?’
‘Maybe it’s because they weren’t real,’ Yvette grumbled.
Sarah ignored her. ‘What if they didn’t head towards land looking for food? What if they were just trying to get to shallow water?’
‘Why?’
‘To escape from something even bigger, even scarier?’
‘Something like what?’
Sarah stared at the figurine, towering amongst the ruined buildings in the diorama.
‘Cthulhu isn’t real,’ Yvette said.
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Of course not.’
She fell silent. She knew that in certain parts of the ocean, you could drop Mount Everest into the water and stack four Empire State Buildings on top of it and you still wouldn’t reach the surface. Humans knew more about the surface of Mars than about the ocean floor.
Who knew what was really down there, lumbering through the deep, killing and eating and being so terrifying that they gave nightmares to the scariest things she’d ever seen?
She pushed it out of her mind. There were some things it was better not to know.
‘I’m sorry you never found your ghost,’ Yvette said.
Sarah sighed. ‘Thanks.’
But suddenly she wasn’t sure. There had been a voice, hadn’t there? Telling her to get out of the houseboat when she first heard the creaking. Telling her not to dive into the water—and when she did, telling her to use the camera to escape.
Was that just her own instincts? Or was it someone else, trying to protect her?
Suddenly Sarah spotted something out of the corner of her eye. Someone standing in the doorway. A man with a thin moustache and crooked teeth.
But when she turned her head for a better look, no-one was there.
Published by Scholastic Australia
Pty Ltd PO Box 579 Gosford NSW 2250
ABN 11 000 614 577
www.scholastic.com.au
Part
of the Scholastic Group
Sydney • Auckland • New York • Toronto • London • Mexico City
• New Delhi • Hong Kong • Buenos Aires • Puerto Rico
SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First edition published by Scholastic Australia in 2015.
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Australia Pty Limited, 2015.
E-PUB/MOBI eISBN: 978-1-925065-66-4
Text copyright © Jack Heath, 2015.
Cover illustration and design copyright © Scholastic Australia, 2015.
SCREAM logo design by blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration by John Engelhardt.
Additional Illustration: Tentacles © istockphoto.com/Elodie_M; Shipwreck © istockphoto.com/RaStudio; Fishing net © shutterstock.com/Kasa_s
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, unless specifically permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 as amended.
