by C. W. Trisef
“Way to go, big P!” Ana cheered. “How’d you score that one, sister?”
“He just came up to me out of the blue, asked when the last day of school was, and told me he wanted to reward us for doing so well in our first year of high school,” Paige explained. “Well, actually, he thought it was my last year of middle school, but…”
“Who cares?” Ana beamed. “When do we shove off?”
“He wants to leave first thing in the morning, so you’d better come over tonight,” Paige said. “He told me he wants to take us back to that island we saw in the helicopter a few months ago.”
“Really?” Ret asked with great enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” Paige continued. “I told one of the maids about how lame that trip was, so she must have told Dad, so maybe he wants to make it up to us. He ordered the staff to prepare the yacht for the three of us—and your mom; she’s invited, too,” Paige explained. “You might want to let her know.”
“I’ll text her right now,” Ana said. Taking their seats in Quirk’s class, Ret took out pen and paper to start writing his essay on the indigenous tribes of the Lesser Antilles, even though his mind was really focused on the exciting prospects of their impending trip with Mr. Coy.
Somewhere in the bottomless underbelly of Coy Manor sat an extravagant yacht, moored to a dock that stretched into the heart of a placid harbor, surrounded by jagged rocks. Ret reasoned there must have been some kind of inlet to this cavernous bayou, but it was too dark to see much further beyond the ship. The girls excitedly boarded the craft, whose windows and railings shimmered and shined with luxury. Crew members hurried about the decks, buzzing from the galley with their platters of appetizers. Maids bounced in and out of guest cabins, stocking linens and fluffing pillows. Even a string quartet strummed peacefully in the dining room, filling the damp air with elegant ambiance. Never before had three teenagers felt so much like royalty as the evening transpired in deliciousness and entertainment.
“Where’s your mom?” Paige asked Ana as they finished off another plate of hors d’oeuvres.
“I don’t know,” Ana replied. “She wasn’t at the house when we got home from school. I texted her a little while ago, and she said she’d meet us here. In the meantime, who’s up for another game of shuffleboard?”
The next thing Ret knew, he was aroused from sleep by a sudden jolt. He had dozed off in an armchair in the main deck’s stateroom, with Paige and Ana curled up on a nearby couch. As he sat up, he found himself rocking back and forth quite involuntarily. Then he saw the room’s chandeliers swaying to the same rhythm. Something like an engine hummed quietly a deck below. Ret looked out the large windows and was shocked by what the approaching dawn revealed: they were at sea.
Before Ret could awaken the girls, a startling, yet somewhat familiar, voice filled the stateroom.
“Shiver me timbers!” Mr. Coy bellowed like a pirate. “Get yer scurvy sea legs into me quarters before I measure ye fer yer chains, ye lousy bilge rats!”
Still drowsy, Ana rose from the couch, hair disheveled and eyes squinted, to see what in the world was going on. Ret continued to stare at Mr. Coy in befuddlement.
Mr. Coy shook his head disapprovingly and sighed. “Meet me in my office,” he translated.
“Where?” Ret asked quickly before Mr. Coy left.
“Arrr! ‘Where,’ says you?” replied Coy the pirate. “Below the poop deck, says I!” He stormed out of the room and said, abandoning his pirate accent, “And hurry up!”
Mr. Coy was right about their sea legs. Perhaps on account of the choppy waves and the misty gales, it was with staggering imbalance that the sleepy trio made their way to the captain’s cabin on the upper deck of the yacht. Once inside, they found Mr. Coy standing next to Ivan, who was at his usual post at the controls.
“Allow me to bring you up to speed,” Mr. Coy immediately began speaking to them. “This vessel is sailing south, en route to a certain shadow—or, as you previously called it, a pod of whales.” Ret’s eyes widened with exhilaration. “You see, my loyal first mate, Ivan, and I returned to that tiny little island, which turned out to be the Bahamian island of Bimini, to investigate that shadow, which proved to be so—” Mr. Coy glanced at Ret’s hand before finishing, “—so sensational. Come to find out, the shadow was not a pod of whales after all,” adding, under his breath, “surprise, surprise.”
“Good grief,” Ana mumbled, feeling put-upon.
“It is actually a submerged road,” said Coy, pausing for dramatic effect, “consisting of several fragments, each arranged from large limestone blocks and laid with impressive uniformity. The largest and most intriguing of these linear features is the half-mile-long road, more particularly the shape of its southwest end—,” then pausing to look Ret in the eyes, “—a hook.” Mr. Coy’s audience glared at him with great intrigue.
“Now that I’ve got you all hooked,” Mr. Coy grinned, “consider this. You will recall the turbulence that got your dear mother—bless her heart—all shook up?”
Mr. Coy’s mentioning of Pauline jogged Ana’s memory. “Mom!” she gasped quietly, retrieving her phone to try to learn her mother’s whereabouts.
“Well, on our return trip,” Mr. Coy proceeded, “Ivan and I encountered the same commotion at the same location. Not preferring a crash landing, we instead landed on the fringe of the turbulent quadrant and safely traveled the remaining distance by foot and fin until we arrived at the underwater road. Initially, however, I wondered if my helicopter was problematic, but only in that one spot? The logic was absurd. And that was when I realized that the turbulent region was in the western corner of Devil’s Triangle.”
There were a few seconds of silence before Ret finally asked, “I’m sorry, sir, but what exactly is—”
“Blimey!” Coy barked in outrage. “You mean to tell me you’ve never heard of Devil’s Triangle?” Three blank faces stared back at him. “I say, next year you three really ought to take a World Geography class or something.” The three Quirk students in the room rolled their eyes at each other. “Devil’s Triangle is, as its name implies, a triangle-shaped region that encompasses much of the Caribbean and Western Atlantic, spanning from Miami to Puerto Rico to Bermuda (which is why some folks call it the ‘Bermuda Triangle’). And,” he added in a voice of mystery, “it’s a place where strange things have been known to happen.”
“What sorts of things, Mr. Coy?” Ret questioned with great interest.
“Do you remember when I told you about the methane hydrates that rise from the seafloor in these parts?” Ret nodded. “Well, let’s just say any ship, sailing over a sea that’s bubbling with those gases, will be a sunken ship faster than you can say Davy Crockett.”
“Jaret,” Ret whispered inaudibly.
“Don’t you mean Davy Jones?” Ana suggested, arriving at her mom’s voicemail again. “Ugh,” she whispered to Ret, “she won’t pick up!”
“And,” Mr. Coy continued without interruption, “as Ivan can attest, the immense energy surging through the skies above that island will kill the engine and disorient the compass of any plane that tries to fly through it.” The faces of Paige and Ana flickered with fear as if sitting around a campfire during the telling of scary ghost stories. “Ships disappearing, planes crashing, entire vessels swallowed by the sea,” Coy proceeded. “Yes, some say these waters be haunted, some say they be cursed. Some say it’s just terribly rotten luck. But what isn’t luck, Mr. Cooper, is now we know exactly where your scar means to take us.”
Ret looked at his scar, absorbing Mr. Coy’s every word. “Devil’s Triangle?”
“Yep,” Coy concurred.
“And the hooked road?”
“Double yep,” said Coy. “Now, you said you felt a feeling—a strange sensation—when you saw that shadow, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” Mr. Coy asked. Ret’s eager face was answer enough. “I think you felt that sensation because
that sunken road is where we’re going to find the first of these elements that we’re supposed to collect.” Then, before Ret could respond, Mr. Coy said, “And do you want to know why I think that?” Again, Ret’s anxious face answered. “Because,” said Coy, “when Ivan and I dove around that road and scrutinized its every crag, we found a larger version of your tiny scar etched in the surface of one of its giant stones.”
Ret couldn’t believe his ears. He would have figured this was all too good to be true, but it not only sounded good—it felt good, too.
“Now, we’ll be dropping anchor soon,” said Mr. Coy, “but we’ll still be a fair distance away from where we want to be. A craft of this size would never make it through the electromagnetic field surrounding the road, so we’ll have to swim to it.”
“You expect us to swim—” Ana began to protest, but Mr. Coy interrupted.
“Yes,” he said, “in one of these.” He parted the closet beside him to reveal some sort of high-tech outfit, hanging upright and gleaming majestically under a spotlight.
“Mr. Coy,” Ana asked suspiciously, “are you a superhero?”
“I call it the subsuit,” said Coy proudly. “The idea came to me one afternoon while I was doing some work in the Great Barrier Reef. It has all the sophistication of a world-class submarine, yet it remains as practical as scuba gear.” Ret wondered how something that looked as simple as a wetsuit with a backpack could yield such results. Then Mr. Coy put his doubts to rest. “But the genius,” he said, “rests in this.” From the suit’s facemask, Mr. Coy detached a piece that resembled a doctor’s stethoscope. With the device behind his head, he gently pulled the two tips apart and clamped them snugly on his forehead, one on each temple. Instead of culminating in a circular chest piece, the tubing led from the tips to a sort of pronged plug, which Mr. Coy explained should be inserted into its outlet at the top of the backpack.
“And that’s going to help us how?” Ana questioned, now texting vigorously.
“Just as a stethoscope discloses the pulse of the heart,” Mr. Coy taught, “my neuroscope reveals the impulses of the brain. Inside the subsuit’s backpack, among other things, is a superintelligent computer, which sends an electrical current through each of the two tips attached to the forehead, creating a current between them that passes through the brain. This current intercepts the electrical impulses being transmitted among neurons and sends them out of the brain. The neuroscope, which quite literally is a giant exterior axon, carries the impulse to the computer, which interprets and fulfills the message.”
Ana stared at Mr. Coy, mouth wide open in confusion, as if he were speaking another language.
Mr. Coy stepped toward the hanging subsuit, close enough so that he could plug the end of the neuroscope into the suit’s backpack. “You see, as long as your electrical impulses stay within your brain, your power to do and create is limited to the extent of the human body. But when you withdraw those impulses and insert them into something less restricted and more powerful, then the only limitation is what you can imagine. In essence, the entire globe becomes your brain.”
“No way,” said Ret, whose jaw had dropped with awe.
“Yes way,” Coy replied, well-pleased. “So, Miss Cooper, to answer your question, your subsuit will be nothing but help to you. In a few moments, we will deliberately jump ship en route to that submerged, underwater road, and unless you are some sort of superhero, my dear, you’ll likely need to breathe once or twice before we get there. All your brain can do is tell you what your lungs already know because the brain can’t produce oxygen on its own.” Suddenly, the subsuit began pumping air through its mouthpiece. “But the subsuit can, even underwater, because it knows a process that the brain doesn’t: electrolysis.”
“Great,” Ana muttered to Paige, “I always wanted to sound like Darth Vader.”
“Or say, perhaps, you find yourself being pursued by a hungry predator,” Mr. Coy said. “If your first instinct is flight”—without any notice, the room’s ceiling fan was ripped from its socket and flew into Mr. Coy’s hands where it continued to spin—“then the subsuit will provide you with a way to escape.” Paige took a step closer to Ret, using her attempt to avoid the falling sparks from the ceiling as a subtle excuse. “Or, if your first instinct is fight”—a pair of stainless steel spears emerged from the suit’s arms, extending just beyond the back of the gloves—“then the subsuit will ensure your victory.”
“Nice touch,” Ana commented to Ret approvingly. “I dig Wolverine.”
“As you can see,” Mr. Coy concluded, “the subsuit has the ability to analyze its surroundings down to the minutest molecule and then manipulate them to whatever extent it needs in order to meet your request. Modern science has yet to unlock the full potential of the human brain, so I created my own key to do so.” He removed the neuroscope from his head and held it before them. “Maybe someday I’ll show you the host of other uses for this key of keys.” He watched it in silent reverence. “Some people say I’m out of my mind. I say, exactly.”
“Why won’t she answer?” Ana said in hushed frustration.
“Now, the maids will get you outfitted; there’s a subsuit for each of you, including your—” Mr. Coy stopped abruptly. “Where is your mother?”
“I don’t know,” Ana answered with worry in her voice. “Last night, she texted me and said she’d meet us here, but I haven’t seen her, and now I can’t reach her at all.”
“Get used to it, deary,” Mr. Coy said gruffly. “We be in Devil’s Triangle now.”
* * * * *
It was late in the morning the previous day when Pauline received word from Ana of Mr. Coy’s intentions to treat them all to an end-of-the-year voyage. As soon as she received her daughter’s text message, her blood began to boil in panic. She called Principal Stone immediately.
“Coy’s at it again,” she shrieked over the phone. “He says he’s celebrating the end of the year, but I have a feeling he’s just taking them to that dreadful island.” She was panting heavily. “Oh, sir, what should I do? What should I do?”
“Meet me at the school,” Principal Stone ordered.
Pauline was there in a flash. She burst into Stone’s office in hysterics.
“Oh, what are we going to do?” she mourned.
“You’re going to keep quiet,” Principal Stone sneered, “that’s what you’re going to do.” Pauline went silent and glared at Stone. She was startled when the door shut behind her. “Tie her up, Bubba.” A pair of strong arms gripped Pauline as Bubba emerged from where he had been hiding behind the door.
“Tie me up?” Pauline barked. “What is the meaning of…”—Bubba forced her hands behind her back, his red hair and eyes glowing like fire—“…unhand me, you demon child!”
“Now, now, Mrs. C,” Bubba smirked, “you were rather fond of me once.”
“You’ve been very helpful to us, Mrs. Cooper,” said Principal Stone, “but I’m afraid your services are no longer needed.” Pauline continued to vocalize her shock and anger. “Stuff something in her mouth, would you?” Principal Stone added. Bubba obediently wedged a towel between his captive’s jaw. “I’m so sick of listening to her worry about those juvenile kids of hers and pretending I care.” Pauline erupted in a flurry of muffled screams before falling limp at the prick of a tranquilizer.
When Pauline regained consciousness, the first thing she saw was Mr. Quirk’s face, hovering a mere inch above her own.
“Welcome aboard!” Mr. Quirk greeted her. Dressed in a flashy tank top and wedgie-prone shorts, Mr. Quirk clearly wasn’t trying to hide his farmer’s tan. The bridge of his glasses was white from its constant rubbing against the glob of sunscreen smeared on his crooked nose.
“I’m sure you’re anxious to recover your miserable children,” Quirk taunted a squirming Pauline. “I’ve been waiting all year for this.” A thick patch of chest hair tickled Pauline’s face as Mr. Quirk continued to speak to her. “Yes, you will make a fine figurehead, in
deed,” he cackled.
* * * * *
Ret had scarcely zipped up his subsuit when something collided explosively with the yacht, causing it to reel and tremble. When the yacht rebounded, Ret jumped to his feet and rushed on deck.
“What was that?” Ana and Paige wondered, emerging from the cabin where they had put on subsuits of their own. They looked toward the back of the ship where the sound had come from, just in time to see the wind disperse the lingering cloud of smoke.
“We’re under attack!” one of the frenzied maids announced as Ret zoomed past her on his way to the stern. After assessing the damage and finding no injuries, Ret’s attention turned to identifying their attackers. When he looked behind to see who had fired on them, he saw Principal Stone, Mr. Quirk, and Bubba catching up to them in a speedboat, with Pauline tied to the bow.
CHAPTER 11
THE ROAD TO SUNKEN EARTH
“Batten down the hatches!” Mr. Coy bellowed. “All hands on deck!” Ret burst into the control room, with Paige and Ana close behind. “Prepare for battle!” Coy ordered Ivan.
“Battle?” Ana protested, catching her breath. “In case you haven’t noticed, my mother is strapped to that—”
“It’s more strategic maneuvering than combat,” Mr. Coy explained, slightly annoyed. Just then, the yacht shook from another assault from its predator. “Ivan, do you see that restless patch of ocean to the east of us there?”
“Yoo mean zhe bubbleeing vater zat vee have been trry-ing to avoid?” Ivan asked.
“Precisely,” replied Coy. “Sail directly into it, and engage hover capabilities. Let’s see if Mr. Stone has ever—Ben Coy.”
“Are you mad?” Ana put forth indignantly.
“Getting there,” Mr. Coy muttered, controlling his patience. “Now, if you three will kindly step outside, I best be changing into my subsuit.” He guided them to the door. “I foresee a rescue in the very near future.”
