Cave Beneath the Sea

by Edward Willett

  “I think we go now,” Ariane said.

  “It’ll be the middle of the night when we arrive,” Wally pointed out. “And we don’t know what we’ll find. We might not even be able to find enough fresh water to materialize in.”

  “Better to find that out tonight than in the morning when Rex Major is already on his way,” Ariane argued. “If we end up having to go to the Turks and Caicos to find a pool, then get a boat to take us to the island at first light, we’ll need every minute we can spare.” Until she’d said that out loud, she hadn’t realized that that might actually be what they’d have to do. She frowned. “How much money do we have?”

  Wally looked around to make sure nobody could overhear him then leaned in close. “We’ve got about $2,000 in cash with us,” he whispered. “Hidden in the lining of my backpack.”

  Ariane’s eyes widened. “That much?”

  Wally nodded. “I’ve been carrying it everywhere I go,” he said. “Just in case.”

  “Then that’s the plan,” Ariane said. “We go straight to the island if we can. If we can’t, we get as close as we can and hire a boat in the morning.”

  She hushed as she saw the waitress approaching, the same one they’d talked to earlier in the day. “Can I get you kids anything else?” she said.

  “No, we’re good,” Wally said.

  “Here’s the bill, then,” the waitress said. “No rush.” She gave them a smile – a rather knowing smile, Ariane thought – and went to greet a family of four that had just come in the door.

  “She thinks we’re on a date,” Wally said. He’d clearly seen the waitress’s expression, too. He gave Ariane a shy grin.

  “Little does she know we’re actually plotting to save the world from an evil sorcerer,” Ariane said. But she felt her own mouth curve into a smile. “I’d rather we were just having dinner before going to a movie.”

  “Me, too,” Wally said.

  “Some day,” Ariane said.

  That produced an awkward silence. Ariane drank the last of her Diet Coke to cover it, then got to her feet. “Let’s get going.”

  They took the bill to the front and Wally paid cash; then they went out into the dark, dank, drizzling night, crossing the street to the park to be away from prying eyes. Ariane held out her hand and Wally took it, his fingers warm in hers. She exerted a little of her power, drying them and pushing the raindrops away, so that they stood perfectly dry even as water pattered all around.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “Ready.”

  She squeezed his hand, and together they leaped into the clouds.

  Ariane felt both immensely large and frighteningly immaterial, like a giant shadow puppet cast on the clouds by some powerful light. As always, she felt the urge to let herself expand even farther, to join with the clouds and leave her consciousness behind forever, but she suppressed it, helped by the bright hard core of the shard of Excalibur she carried, the piece of steel that would never allow itself to be destroyed in that way. She was also helped by the sense of Wally’s presence, mingled with hers within the clouds in an intimate fashion that would be intensely embarrassing to think about too much, so she tried not to. Instead, she focussed her attention on the journey ahead.

  Every time she used her power this way it became easier to navigate, to correlate the clouds and the land below with the features of the map she had consulted. They rushed away through the billows of vapour, not in anything like a straight line, following weather fronts to keep to the clouds, making short leaps across empty air in some places, dropping down into streams and lakes in others, the kilometres flashing by faster than the fastest jet. As always, Ariane had no sense of time passing, so she couldn’t be certain how long it took them to cross the continent diagonally from northwest to southeast, but it was still only the middle of the night when they flashed out over the Atlantic. She felt the salt water below, a different feeling than the land over which they had been passing: she could no more make use of earth than she could of salt water, but the earth was neutral, whereas the sea felt coldly inimical, mocking her power, all that water forever beyond her control.

  The clouds were fresh water, though, and it was through the clouds they flashed, until the strange near-sight sense the Lady’s power gave her showed her Cacibajagua Island below despite the darkness all around. Shaped rather like a comma, with a round, fat part on the south end tapering to a long, curving tail at the north, it was no more than ten kilometres long and maybe half as wide where it was fattest. A small hotel crouched on the eastern side of the broader part of the island, between an inland airstrip and a long, wooden dock where several boats bobbed at anchor.

  Most important, though, the Lady’s power showed her the small freshwater lake near the centre of the hilly interior. There was also a swimming pool at the hotel, but there’d be no way to materialize there without being seen, and so she took them down into the lake.

  One moment they were amorphous mingled blobs of magical something-or-other in the clouds, the next they were solid Ariane and Wally. They spluttered to the surface and stood in shoulder-deep, milk-warm water.

  Surrounded by hills that blocked all light from the resort, and with the sky overcast, the lake was pitch-black. Ariane knew Wally was close at hand, because she could hear him breathing, but she couldn’t see a thing.

  More wonderful, she discovered she could still sense her mother, back in Victoria. The sensation made her smile in the darkness.

  “Too bad we don’t need to develop film,” Wally’s disembodied voice said.

  Ariane laughed. “I can tell where the shore is,” she said. “I can feel everything in the water...including you.” She reached out a hand toward him.

  “Ow!” he said. “That’s my nose.”

  “Sorry,” Ariane said.

  His fingers found hers and she squeezed them as she had before they’d begun the journey. “This way,” she said, and led him toward what her Lady-of-the-Lake-powered senses told her was the nearest shore, just a few metres away. They clambered out onto big, rounded rocks, in air that felt as warm and almost as wet as the water had, and sat down while Ariane ordered them dry – although in this weather, they’d soon be sweating. She took off the coat she’d been wearing in Horseshoe Bay and stuffed it into her backpack. She could hear Wally presumably doing the same, then rummaging in his backpack some more; moments later a flashlight came on. “That’s better,” he said, and flashed the light around.

  Dark water, green trees, black rocks.

  “Not very informative,” Ariane said.

  “Not the kind of terrain you want to stumble around in, in the dark,” Wally agreed.

  And dark though it was, it was far from quiet. Sound filled the night: creakings and croakings and chirpings and warblings.

  “They don’t have any big predators on Caribbean islands,” Wally said after a moment. “I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

  Something squawked so loud Ariane’s heart jumped to double time. “I hope you’re right,” she said. Another squawk, or maybe a shriek, came from her right, followed by a splash. Something had just jumped into the lake. Wally flashed his light in that direction, but all Ariane saw was spreading ripples. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” she said nervously.

  “That depends,” Wally said. “Can you sense the shard?”

  Ariane closed her eyes and concentrated. The shard she carried with her sang its song as always at her side, and she could even sense the first shard, tucked away back in Saskatchewan, just as she could sense her mother in Victoria. The shard Merlin carried was hidden from her while it was in his possession. And the fourth, the one they thought was somewhere on this island...

  Nothing.

  Ariane opened her eyes – not that it made much difference – and said, “No.”

  Wally turned and aimed his light away from the lake, into the surrounding jungle. The circle of illumination slid over what looked like an impenetrable tangle of vines and undergrowth. �
��We can’t hike through that,” Ariane said. “And we can’t just sit here all night. Maybe we should go to the Turks and Caicos, get a boat in the morning, or else come back when it’s light –”

  “Wait a second,” Wally said. “I just glimpsed –”

  He was twisted around on the rock where he sat. Now he aimed the light to Ariane’s left. She turned her head and saw what he had spotted: a signpost, shaped to look as though it had been roughly carved from driftwood, though it looked a little too perfectly roughly carved, if that made sense, like a prop from Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise. “Welcome to Lake Tanama (Butterfly Lake),” Wally read out loud. “No swimming.”

  “Oops,” Ariane said, glancing uneasily at the water they’d just clambered out of. “I wonder why?”

  “Some sort of parasite, maybe,” Wally said absently. “Could be Schistosoma worms.”

  “Shkisto-what?” Ariane almost shrieked.

  “But probably not!” Wally said hastily. “Wouldn’t you be able to sense them?”

  “How do I know?” She stretched her awareness throughout the warm water. She had no idea what a Schistosoma worm even was, but all she sensed were small fish and... “Yuck!”

  “What?” Wally said.

  “Leeches. Down in the mud.” She shuddered and withdrew her awareness from the water. “No wading if we can help it.”

  Wally shone the light on his own face, gave her a quick grin that was probably supposed to be reassuring but of course looked like a Halloween mask with the light under his chin, and then swung the light back to the signpost. “There’s more,” he said, moving the light lower. “Look.”

  “The Resort,” she read on one carefully shaped and mounted piece of “driftwood.” The pointy end of it indicated a path into the forest. “The Jujo Cataract,” read the other sign. It pointed along the shore of the lake, where she now saw there was a boardwalk. They weren’t in uncharted wilderness after all. “What’s a Jujo?”

  “That’s the name of the underwater cave that’s the whole reason for this resort,” Wally said excitedly. “And the Jujo Cataract has to be the freshwater waterfall that pours into it at this end. That path will take us straight to the shard!”

  “If it’s there,” Ariane said, trying to temper the sudden leap of hope and excitement in her heart. But she was already getting to her feet. “Let’s go!”

  The sounds of the warm, humid night suddenly seemed nothing more than the soundtrack of a Caribbean-vacation TV commercial as they stepped onto the boardwalk. Amazing what a touch of civilization can do, Ariane thought.

  The boardwalk led along the shore of the lake, threading its way between rocks and jungle on one side and black water on the other. After a few hundred metres Ariane began to hear a new sound in the noisy night: the rush of water.

  “You hear that?” she said.

  Wally nodded. They hurried forward.

  The boardwalk ended abruptly, becoming a square platform surrounded on three sides by a railing. To their right, the lake also ended, water pouring from it through a rocky gap and falling away in white spray into darkness beyond. “Dead end,” Wally said, sounding disappointed. “The water must tumble all the way down the hill before it drops into the cave.”

  Ariane laughed at him. She felt almost giddy with hope. “Dead end?” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He looked at her, face puzzled in the dim light the railing reflected back from the flashlight beam.

  “I’m the freaking Lady of the Lake,” she said. She got down on her hands and knees. “Put the flashlight away and take hold.”

  Wally laughed. “Right.” The light went out. She heard his backpack zip. She felt his hand around her ankle. She reached out and stuck her hand into the smooth curve of water falling into darkness, and then she and Wally fell with it.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Cave and the Cataract

  Wally barely had time to remember how much he hated being dissolved into water before, with horrifying, shocking suddenness, he was back in his body, and floundering: not in fresh water, but salt. He choked, his clothes and backpack pulling him down. He still had hold of Ariane’s ankle: he held to it like the drowning man he was about to become. The water fell away from him and he gasped air. “Ariane!” he gasped. “What...?”

  “It’s okay!” she shouted. “There’s a ladder!”

  “But I can’t –”

  See, he wanted to say, but the water, clearly connected to the sea somewhere, had surged upward again, plunging him under. He gripped Ariane’s ankle even more tightly. “...got to let go of me!” he heard her shouting at him as his head broke the surface again.

  “No!”

  “It’s all right! My foot’s on the rung – just let go and grab the ladder instead.”

  Another surge of seawater, lifting him up so that his head banged into Ariane’s leg. As the water fell away this time he released her ankle and lunged with both hands, scrabbling in the dark. He felt the wooden rung of a ladder under his right hand, gripped it, found it with his left as well. When the sea rose again, he held on to the ladder instead of Ariane, who he sensed had climbed above him. Gulping air, he followed.

  They clambered out onto another wooden platform.

  “I’m an idiot,” Ariane gasped in the dark. “I thought...I don’t know what I thought. Salt water.” She shuddered. “I hate it. It feels...dirty to me. It hates me.”

  “It hates the Lady,” Wally said. “Can you at least dry us?”

  “I think so,” Ariane said. And suddenly he felt the water fly off his body, almost as weird a sensation, despite how often he’d experienced it, as being dissolved into stream or cloud. He still felt uncomfortable, though, as though his skin were crusted.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “The water went away, but the minerals stayed behind.”

  “Feels like it,” Ariane said. “I didn’t notice that when we hit Hudson’s Bay on that test trip...remember?”

  “I remember,” Wally said. “But then, at the time we were mostly focussed on not freezing to death. At least there’s no danger of that.”

  “Does the flashlight still work?”

  “It’s waterproof. It’d better.” Wally dug in his backpack, found the flashlight, turned it on. He swept it around.

  They stood on a dock, currently quite high above the surging seawater, no doubt designed to still clear the surface at high tide. He leaned over the edge and flashed the light down. From the looks of the posts supporting the dock, the tide was either halfway in or halfway out at the moment. He turned the light toward the sound of rushing water. The Jujo Cataract, their highway down the hillside, fell through a black hole in the cave’s ceiling. Presumably the whole chamber was a lot better lit when divers came calling.

  That gave him an idea. He shone the light around some more, and quickly spotted what he’d suspected might be there: lights all around the cavern, waterproof and tucked away in odd corners of the stone walls and roof. But though he looked, he could see no switch to turn the lights on.

  It wouldn’t be down here where the water reaches, he reasoned. It must be...

  He lifted the light.

  A wooden stairway led up about ten metres, into the night air. His light barely extended that far, but he glimpsed some kind of structure at the top. More clearly, he saw electrical cables, strung on the underside of the stairs’ handrail. “Up there,” he said to Ariane, gesturing with the flashlight.

  She squinted up the stairs. “What is it?”

  “Some kind of hut,” he said. “I’m betting there’s a switch inside to turn on the lights down here. If it works, we might be able to see what we’re doing...maybe well enough to find the shard.”

  “But can we get into it?” she said doubtfully. “Won’t it be locked?”

  “On a private island? Why would it be?” Wally started up the stairs. “Only one way to find out.”

  The hut continued the faux-castaway style of the signposts. It appeared to
be made of roughly cobbled-together wood, roofed with palm fronds, but a closer look revealed sturdy square-cut timber in the walls and a tin roof beneath the palms. The electrical cables entered through an opening in the foundation.

  As Wally had hoped, only a latch secured the wooden door, not a lock. He pulled the door open and flashed the light around the interior.

  The building was about four metres on a side, with a small window in every wall. Under the window across from the door, a simple wooden bench stretched the hut’s length. A blue metal toolbox rested on one corner of the bench, alongside a large first-aid kit. Along the wall to the left hung rope, several orange life preservers, flippers, and snorkels. And to the right...

  “Ah,” Wally said in satisfaction. He went over the red-painted junction box and flipped the big switch on its side.

  Light stabbed his eyes. “Ow,” he said, at the same moment as Ariane.

  “Warn me next time!” she complained, squinting at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. He turned off the flashlight and returned it to his backpack. “Now let’s go see what’s what.”

  They went back out onto the staircase and down into the cave.

  It had been transformed. Carefully placed spotlights had turned the cataract into a glittering ribbon of diamonds. The seawater – higher than it had been, Wally saw, which meant the tide was coming in, not going out – now glowed a beautiful blue-green, lit from below. Other lights cast dramatic shadows over the rugged walls, which sparkled with both moisture and growths of crystals.

  “It’s beautiful,” Ariane whispered.

  Wally agreed, but they weren’t there to sightsee. “You still can’t feel the shard?

  Ariane shook her head. “No,” she said. “If it’s here, it’s still under salt water.”

  Wally stared down into the pool. Seawater continued to surge and recede. He could feel the change in pressure each time in his chest and ears, as though the vast space were breathing – as though it were alive.

  “If the Lady hid the shard here,” he said, “She would have had to have put it somewhere near the cataract...wouldn’t she? She couldn’t have entered the seawater.”