Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

  I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. I can’t imagine not seeing her smile. I can’t imagine not keeping her warm. No matter what I promised her, I can’t imagine being here without her.

  131. Cardboard Forts

  My parents bring Mackenzie to visit for the first time. I know why they haven’t done it until now. Because I’m scary sometimes. Maybe scary in a different way than I was at home, but still scary. And then there’s everyone else. Mackenzie’s tough, but a psychiatric ward for young people is no place for a young person.

  My parents had warned me they were going to bring her, in spite of their reservations.

  “She’s convinced things are much worse than they are,” my mom had told me. “You know her imagination. And it will be good for you to see each other. Dr. Poirot agrees.”

  So during visiting hour one day, when those of us with visitors are escorted into the rec room by the pastels, I find her sitting at a table with my parents.

  I hesitate when I spot her, having totally forgotten she was coming. It’s like I’m afraid that if I get too close I might break her. I don’t want to break her, and I don’t want her to see me like this. But it’s visiting hour. You can’t run away from visiting hour. I cautiously approach my family.

  “Hi, Caden.”

  “Hi, Mackenzie.”

  “You look good. Except for your bed-hair.”

  “You look good, too.”

  My father stands and pulls out the one chair at the table that isn’t occupied. “Why don’t you sit, Caden.”

  I do as I’m told. I sit down, and do my best to keep my knees from bouncing, but only succeed when I give it all of my attention. When I give it all of my attention, though, I lose the conversation. I don’t want to lose that. I want to shine for Mackenzie. I want to give off an everything’s fine kind of vibe. I don’t think I’m succeeding.

  Mackenzie’s lips move, and her eyes emote. I catch the tail end of what she’s saying. “. . . and the Dance Moms practically gouged one another’s eyes out, so Mom, who’s like totally not one of them, found me a calmer dance studio where the people aren’t psycho.” Then she looks down, and goes a little bit red. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  I’m not feeling much of anything right now, but if I could feel bad because she’s feeling bad, I would—so I say, “Well, there’s psycho, and there’s psycho. There’s no medication for Dance Mom Syndrome. Except maybe cyanide.”

  Mackenzie giggles. My parents are not amused.

  “We don’t use that word here, Mackenzie,” Mom says. “Just like we don’t use the C word.”

  “Cyclops,” I say. “Because the doctor has only one eye.”

  Mackenzie giggles again. “You’re making that up.”

  “Actually,” says Dad with a weird sort of pride, “he’s not. The other eye is glass.”

  “Both his wings work, though,” I tell her. “But there’s nowhere to fly.”

  “Why don’t we play a game?” Mom quickly says. The last game I remember playing was Apples to Apples when Shelby came. Or was it Max? No, I think it was Shelby. Although I know how to play the game, the concept was out of my reach at the time. The rules are pretty straightforward: an adjective is put down, like maybe “awkward,” and everyone has to throw down a noun that best fits. Throwing down an absurd card only works when you’re ironic, not medicated. Last time, I think the cards I played made everyone else profoundly sad.

  With all the visitors engaged in playtime pursuits, however, Apples to Apples is the only game left on the shelf, and Mackenzie grabs it, not knowing the sordid history.

  “I have an idea,” says Mom when Mackenzie sits down with the box. “Why don’t we use the game to build a house of cards?” Mackenzie begins to protest, but Dad gives her a bulgy-eyed don’t-argue-we’ll-explain-later sort of look.

  I grin at the house of cards idea, getting the irony that they don’t. The parrot would call that a good sign. He’d suggest I try to play the game after all. For that reason, I don’t.

  Dad starts with the concentration of an engineer laying the foundation of a bridge. Each of us adds cards in turn. We don’t seem to get more than ten cards up before the house falls. Four attempts. The fourth time we actually get further, building a second level before the whole thing flattens.

  “Oh well,” says Mom.

  “It’s a tough thing to do, even when the sea is calm,” I point out.

  Mom and Dad simultaneously try to change the subject again, but Mackenzie won’t let them. “What sea?” she asks.

  “What sea, what?” I say.

  “You said the sea was calm.”

  “Did I?”

  “Mackenzie . . . ,” Dad begins, but Mom gently touches Dad’s shoulder to stop him.

  “Let him answer,” Mom says gently.

  I suddenly feel very, very uncomfortable. Shamefully embarrassed. Like I’ve been caught on a date with my finger up my nose. I turn away, looking out of the window, where I see rolling hills of freshly mowed grass. It grounds me. If only for the moment. Still, the captain must be somewhere, listening to every word I say.

  “It’s . . . like that sometimes,” I tell Mackenzie. It’s the only thing I can say that will keep me from imploding in on myself.

  And Mackenzie says, “I get it.”

  Then she reaches her hand out and puts it on mine. I still can’t look directly at her, so I look at her hand.

  “Remember when we used to make forts out of cardboard boxes on Christmas?” she says.

  I smile. “Yeah. That was fun.”

  “Those forts were so real, even though they weren’t, you know?”

  No one says anything for a moment.

  “Is it Christmas?” I ask.

  Dad sighs. “It’s almost summer, Caden.”

  “Oh.”

  Mom has gotten teary eyed, and I wonder what I did to make her cry.

  132. Without Whispering

  It’s late afternoon. Almost sunset. The sun, low on the horizon, casts a hypnotic reflection on the sea. Our sails are full of a steady wind as we head relentlessly west. If indeed the sun still sets in the west.

  I’m on deck with Carlyle. He hands me his mop, and lets me do some of his dirty work.

  “Somehow I don’t think the captain would approve,” I tell him. “Or the parrot.”

  He seems to have no opinion about the captain, but of the parrot he says, “That bird sees everything. I gave up keeping secrets from him long ago.”

  “So then . . . whose side are you on?”

  Carlyle smiles, and dumps some water from his bucket for me to mop up. “Yours.”

  He watches me for a few moments, then says, “You remind me of me when I used to be in your shoes.”

  “You?”

  “Yep.” He closes his laptop, to give me his full attention. There are others in the rec room with us, but they’re mostly just watching TV. We’re the only ones talking. “You’re lucky. I was also fifteen when I had my first episode, but I didn’t end up in a place as nice as this.”

  “You?” I say again.

  “At first they thought bipolar one, but when the delusions got increasingly psychotic, and I started to have auditory hallucinations, they changed my diagnosis to schizoaffective.”

  He says the words without whispering. He says them without the fearful gravity people on the outside give the words. The idea that Carlyle is one of us troubles me, because what if he’s lying? What if he’s making it up to mess with my head? No. That’s just paranoia. That’s what Poirot would say, and Poirot would be right.

  Carlyle explains that schizoaffective is a cross between bipolar and schizophrenia. “Oughta be called ‘tri-polar,’” he says. “’Cause first you get manic, thinking you’re king of the universe, then you go off the deep end, seeing things, hearing things—believing things that aren’t true. Then when you come down, you fall into a depression once you realize where you’ve been.”

  “And they let you work here?”


  “I’m cool as long as I’m on my meds. Learned it the hard way, but I learned. Haven’t had an episode for years. And anyway, I don’t technically work here—I volunteer in my free time. I figured I got this thing, and a master’s in psychology, I might as well use them.”

  It’s all too much for me to take in. “So what do you do when you’re not mopping up our mental crap?”

  He points to his laptop. “Software company. I design games.”

  “No way.”

  “Hey, the meds can muddle your imagination, but they can’t kill it.”

  I’m amazed, thrilled even. When I turn to look out over the deck, other crewmen are busy with tasks assigned by the captain, or just milling around. It’s a gorgeous sunset, filled with just about every color.

  Carlyle wrings out his mop and looks around, satisfied with the cleanliness of the deck. “Anyway,” he says. “Just because it’s a long voyage, it doesn’t mean you’re on it forever.”

  He leaves me with that thought as he goes belowdecks. It’s only after he’s gone that I see the captain. He’s standing at the helm, his favorite place for looking down on the rest of the ship—and right now he’s looking straight at me with an acid gaze from his singular eye that could dissolve me into nothing.

  133. Crestmare Alley

  Nature, whether natural or not, unleashes its fury with a vengeance as we finally sail into the churning winds of the stalled storm front. The sky instantly turns from unrelenting day to an end-of-time kind of twilight as the ship pitches and rolls like a cork. Lightning flashes around us with thunder less than a second behind.

  As I stand on deck, not knowing what to do, I watch the sails shred then heal, shred then heal above me, the scars on the fabric becoming as thick as the ratline ropes. I wonder how much they can stand before they fail. The captain barks orders to scrambling crewmen, who disgorge from the main hatch like ants from a flooding anthill. I’m thinking they should be going the other way. Better down than on deck, where they can be washed away, but perhaps they fear the wrath of the captain more than the wrath of heaven.

  “Take down the sails!” the captain orders. “Secure the riggings!” He kicks a crewman in the behind. “Faster! Do you want us to lose a mast?”

  The storm has been looming for more than a week—plenty of time to prepare the ship for this onslaught, but the captain chose to do nothing, sticking to a unique philosophy.

  “Preventative measures are the bane of spontaneous action,” he said. “I prefer the glory of heroism amidst panic.”

  Well, now he has panic. Whether or not heroism will save the day is yet to be seen.

  The captain sees me standing there with no particular orders. “Take the helm,” he tells me, pointing to the upper deck. “Man the tiller. Turn us into the waves!”

  I am shocked that he has actually asked me to take control of the ship. “Into the waves?” I ask, not sure I heard right.

  “Do as I say!” the captain yells. “These waves are thirty-footers if they’re an inch. If they hit us broadside, we may capsize—and I prefer to sail this ocean right-side up.”

  I leap three steps at a time to the helm, grab the tiller, and struggle to turn it. The parrot swoops past me, squawking something, but I can’t hear him over the thunder and crashing waves.

  I finally get the tiller to move, pulling the stubborn rudder, but not soon enough. A wave hits us at an angle, crashing over the starboard bow. The crew is washed across the deck, grabbing on to anything they can for purchase.

  Finally the ship comes about, challenging the waves. The bow pitches downward into a trough, and a wave hits us head-on. I can’t help but think of Calliope and how she’s faring through this. Do the waves batter her as they batter the rest of us? If she feels everything, does she feel the pain of the ship as it struggles to stay in one piece?

  White water floods the deck, then drains away, leaving behind crewmen coughing for air. I have no idea if anyone has been lost to the sea.

  I feel a sudden pain in my shoulder. The parrot has rounded back and landed on me, digging his talons in to keep from being torn away by the wind. “It’s time, it’s time,” he says. “You must dispatch the captain.”

  “What? In the middle of this?”

  “Kill him,” insists the bird. “Throw him overboard. We’ll say he was lost at sea, and you’ll be free of him.”

  But my allegiance is still uncertain, and right now, saving my own life is more important than ending someone else’s. “No! I can’t!”

  “He is the cause of this storm!” shouts the bird. “He’s the one who tore you from your life! This all begins and ends with him! You must do it! You must!” Then a gust of wind tears him from my shoulder.

  Whether he’s lying or speaking truth, I don’t have time to consider. Another wave hits us. This time I’m pitched off the helm and down to the main deck, becoming one of the many struggling to remain aboard against the pull of the sea.

  When I look up, I see something the sea brought aboard. A creature that stares at me from the mainsail boom. The thing has a pointed equine face with flaring nostrils and angry red eyes. It’s a horse—but it has no hind quarters. It has no legs at all, just a prehensile tail coiled around the boom. It’s a sea horse the size of a man, with bone-hard spikes up and down its body.

  “Crestmare!” someone yells.

  Then the captain leaps to the boom and in one smooth move slits its throat. The thing falls dead, dropping at my feet, its eyes going dark. “I should have known,” the captain says. “We are in Crestmare Alley.” Then he orders me back up to the helm. “A new course of action,” he says. “Our backside to the waves.”

  “Retreat?” shouts the navigator through the window of the map room. “My maps say we must pass this way.”

  “I said nothing of retreat! This is a duel—and a duel begins back-to-back.”

  Once more at the tiller, I force the rudder to one side, and the waves do the rest. We are easily spun 180 degrees.

  I know I should be looking forward, but I can’t help but turn my eyes aft. In a long flash of lightning, I see another wave coming at us from behind, higher than all the others—and at the wave’s crest, I see too many fiery red eyes to count. Apparently the crestmares don’t know the rules of a duel.

  I hook my arm around the tiller as the wave hits. The stern disappears beneath the wave, the main deck is flooded, and the surge hits the helm, submerging me. As I hold my breath for what seems like forever, twisting with the force of the water, I hold tight to the tiller. I think we’ve been taken down and are on our way to the bottom, but then the water clears, and I’m gasping salty air.

  When my eyes clear enough to see, I witness something hell itself could not have conceived. Dozens of crestmares maneuver around the deck, their tails giving them the agility of monkeys. They wrap their sharp bodies around crewmen like snakes. One creature opens its mouth and reveals sharklike teeth that plunge into the neck of its screaming victim. Then it takes the dying sailor over the edge and into the sea.

  A crestmare leaps toward me and I swing my fist, knocking it aside, but it curls its tail around my arm and twists its body, and in an instant, it’s there breathing into my face again. I think it will take off my head in a single bite, but instead it speaks.

  “It’s not you we want . . . but we’ll go through you if we have to.”

  Then it head-butts me, leaving me back down on the deck, and swings away.

  That’s when I see the captain. He’s set upon by three crestmares—one constricted on each leg, and a third around his chest. He holds the third one by the neck as it snaps at his face. He tries slicing at it with his dagger, but it knocks the dagger away, and it clatters to the deck.

  You must dispatch the captain, the parrot had said—but maybe I don’t have to. Maybe the crestmares will do it for me. If they kill him, though, and drag him into the sea, what of Calliope? Without his key, she can never be free.

  Before another wave has a cha
nce to flood the deck, I scramble for the captain’s dagger, then plunge it into the back of the head of the crestmare trying to bite him. It falls dead, then I go after the two on his legs. Another one leaps at us, but I knock it down, and crush its head beneath my heel.

  Freed from the crestmares, the captain is disoriented. He gasps to regain his wind. If ever there were a time he’d be too weak to fight me, this is it. I grab a board from a broken crate, and swing it at the back of his head so hard that the force of it sends the peach pit flying out from behind his eye patch, along with a small silver key that clatters on the deck. The captain goes down. He doesn’t know what hit him.

  Another wave looms behind us—the crest full of red eyes like the leading edge of a lava flow. Let the crestmares get the captain now, I don’t care. I have what I want.

  Before the wave hits, I hurl myself forward toward the locked trapdoor of the forecastle, and fumble with the key in the padlock.

  I feel more than hear the wave hit the stern of the ship. The rush of water moves closer along the deck, but I don’t turn to look. Finally the padlock clicks open. I pull it free, lift the hatch, and throw myself in just as the wave reaches the bow, washing me down into the forecastle.

  I stand up. There’s water to my waist—the forecastle is half flooded. Mooring ropes are curled on either side of me. Then, right in front of me, dim, but clearly visible, I see a pair of legs protruding from the point that marks the tip of the bow. Calliope was right! She is more than a part of the ship; she has her own legs, but they’re badly corroded from being so long in this dank place. Then I see why she can’t free herself—there’s a bolt through her lower back, keeping her attached to the bow. I can set her free!

  “Calliope! Can you hear me?” I shout. In response she moves her copper foot. I struggle with the bolt, but my bare hands aren’t strong enough—and I curse the shipbuilder who left her like this.

  Then from behind me I hear:

  “You might want this.”

  I turn to see Carlyle holding out a wrench, like somehow he’s been here all along, just waiting for me.