Soon, the huge bony fishes grew bolder, venturing closer and closer to Billy. Several gray-black fins broke the surface of the water nearby as the sharks played a nasty game of cat-and-mouse with him. Only he was a mouse without a hole, caught out in the open with nowhere to run.
Another wave crashed down on Billy, casting him under in a spray of surf and salt. When Billy came up again, he saw that the sharks had scattered for a moment. Apparently they didn’t like being on the surface in such turbulent weather. But soon they closed in again, circling him confidently.
One of the shark’s fins appeared nearby, slicing through the ocean like a razor blade. It was headed right toward Billy! Billy wanted to shriek in terror, but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get any air into his body, what with the constant pounding of the waves, and he couldn’t waste any of it, not even to scream.
The fin streaked toward him, then veered away at the last second, so close that Billy could actually feel the wake of the shark’s passage. Another fin emerged, and another, two more sharks now converging on him. This time, the sharks came even closer. Billy could feel the flicking of one of the shark’s tails on his leg as the two sea hunters swam by. The touch was slight, just a graze, but Billy could feel the naked power of the shark’s muscles.
Billy looked around wildly for some avenue of escape. He looked at the nearby rocks to see if he could climb onto one of them, but they had been polished to a sheen by the smoothing action of the surf. He glanced at the cliff face behind him, but could see no caves to hide in, no handholds to lock onto. He even looked skyward in the hopes of seeing the Unicorn, but saw only dark angry clouds.
He felt something at his side, and looked down to see that this time, one of the sharks had actually bumped its head into Billy’s side. It felt like he had been walloped with a rubber-coated jackhammer, though Billy knew that the shark was only playing with him, not trying to hurt him in any way.
At least, not yet, Billy thought.
But he also knew that the situation couldn’t last long. The sharks had gone from being unaware of his presence to circling him warily, to doing reconnaissance in order to find out if he posed any kind of threat. Billy was no threat, he knew, and he figured that the sharks probably knew it as well by now. So it was only a matter of moments before one of the sharks tried to get a free Billy sample before the full Billy feast began.
Indeed, as soon as he thought this, he saw another of those frightening fins cutting through the water, heading straight toward him. This one was coming faster than the others had, too, and Billy thought he could see the jaws gaping open wide, ready to take a chunk out of him.
I hope I give you heartburn, was all Billy could manage to think under the circumstances.
But the shark apparently wasn’t worried about gastrointestinal distress. It continued picking up speed, moving toward Billy faster and faster. The beast was huge, and it got huger looking as it came closer. Billy tried to flee, using sort of a frenzied doggy-paddle, but he knew it was hopeless. The shark must be coming at him at about thirty miles per hour. Billy was moving at a speed of maybe thirty feet per hour. There was no hope of outrunning the hungry predator.
He looked back. The shark was almost on top of him. Only twenty feet away now. And then ten, and then five. Billy closed his eyes, resigned to the end, just hoping that it wouldn’t hurt and that he would, in fact, give the shark not only heartburn, but preferably also some kind of explosive diarrhea.
But the end didn’t come. The expected bite didn’t happen. Billy cracked open an eye. The surf still pounded, the waves still rolled. But all the sharks were suddenly, mysteriously absent.
Billy wanted to shout and clap for a moment, but he quelled the urge. For one thing, he still needed his hands to swim in the deadly surf. For another, recent experience had taught him that if one bad thing had exited the scene, it was most likely because something worse was waiting in the wings.
And sure enough, Billy had done little more than notice the lack of Billy-eating sea-life when the water suddenly disappeared from under him. It was a strange sensation, water literally dropping away from below like some great plug had been pulled on the ocean’s bottom. A moment later, however, just as Billy began to fall downward, he felt the water rise up below him again. He heard a huge noise at the same time, something terrifying but somehow familiar, a sound like a cross between a saxophone and a river barge’s foghorn.
The rapidly rising water pummeled him to one side, hurling him into something rough. Whatever it was felt like thick braided ropes. Billy had an instant to notice that the ropes were suddenly all around him; that he was in the center of some kind of container that was over ten feet to a side.
The container lifted up all around him, and then started to close overhead.
Water started rushing in as the rope-like strands began to press closer to Billy, and he saw the container continue to close above his head. At the same time, he heard that sound again, louder this time, coming from all around him. That sound that was part melody, part roar.
And this time, Billy recognized it. Worse, knowing what the sound was made him suddenly realize exactly what kind of a container he was in. The ropes that were not ropes clamped down around him, pushing him downward. He felt his feet touch something rough and strong, and as soon as they did the object slammed into Billy, clamping him tightly from the waist down. Billy couldn’t move, couldn’t get free now no matter how hard he strained.
Again, the blast of noise issued forth from all around him, one last time as the “ceiling” closed over Billy’s head. Now it was dark. He could hear water rushing all around him. It was all terrifying, but not nearly as terrifying as the mere fact of where he was.
Billy had been swallowed by a whale.
Some great leviathan of the deep had been called forth somehow, had risen up and swallowed Billy whole as he treaded water on the surface. No doubt whatever person had been controlling his fate of late had seen Billy about to get torn to bits by sharks, decided that would be far too nice a thing to have happen to him, and had called up something that could instead swallow him in one piece and then slowly digest him over a period of a few days.
The sound came again, the whale’s call coming up from what Billy now knew was the huge beast’s throat. But it sounded different now, more familiar.
We must be completely underwater now, he thought. That’s why the sound is different. We’re under the ocean.
The thing that now held Billy firm moved slowly, like a thick rubber blanket with a mind of its own.
It’s the tongue, Billy realized. The whale’s tongue, holding me trapped.
His heart started beating rapidly, and Billy was pretty sure he was about to do one of two things: either have a heart attack…or have several of them.
The tongue shifted again, moving Billy around like a particularly juicy piece of prime rib.
Baby back Billy ribs, thought Billy insanely. Then he went back to his pitiful prayer that the thing now eating him would have some kind of horrific intestinal disorder that would cause it to explode. Preferably while the whale was right in front of the girl whale it liked during the Whale Undersea Formal Dance.
But then Billy realized something odd: the tongue, though not allowing him to move around as he wished, wasn’t moving him deeper into the monster’s throat, either. In fact, every time the tongue adjusted, Billy got a bit more comfortable.
Not only that, but though Billy could hear water rushing by at a tremendous pace right outside the whale’s mouth, the mouth itself now had no water in it. Like the whale had sectioned off a section of itself solely for the purpose of carrying Billy.
But why would it do that? Billy thought.
He felt around him as best he could. Most of what he felt was that ropey substance. It was thick and rough, like the kind of ropes you would see in a western movie, usually hung around some poor sap’s neck.
Billy realized he didn’t much care for that comparison, and pushe
d it out of his thoughts as much as possible. He was still curious, however, what the thick, itchy substance all around him could be. Then he had a flash, remembering a lesson from biology class.
It’s baleen, he thought.
That had to be it. The ropey substance was actually made of the same thing as hair or fingernails, and some whales used it when eating. The baleen hung like Venetian blinds from those whales’ upper jaws. The whales would scoop up huge amounts of their preferred food, usually a kind of tiny shrimp called krill, swallowing vast amounts of water at the same time. They would then press their tongues up to force the water out, and the krill would get caught in the baleen, allowing the whales to then swallow the tiny creatures in one huge mass.
But it’s not eating me, thought Billy. Why not? And what’s it going to do instead?
It was now clear to Billy that the whale had no intention of actually consuming him. The water could still be heard outside the whale’s mouth, moving quickly as the behemoth swam swiftly through the ocean’s depths. But Billy had no way of knowing where the whale was ultimately headed, or what it planned to do with him when it got there.
Billy, as he had that first day of Mrs. Russet’s class when faced with the terror of a pop quiz, tried to relax as his mother had shown him how to do. He closed his eyes, even though it was already pitch-black in the whale’s craw. He breathed in and out as slowly as he could, trying to control his heart rate and his breathing. He focused on the pink and red sparks that he could see behind his eyelids, imagining them to be stars whirling through a tiny universe in his mind.
The song of the whale jerked him out of his self-induced trance. The sound was incredibly loud in the whale’s mouth, so concentrating on anything else was out of the question. The whale sang loudly and long, a meandering tune that would have been quite lovely and calming if it weren’t for the fact that Billy was right in the middle of it.
The whale song stopped abruptly, but then Billy heard more. Not from this whale, though. He heard a different whale, seeming to respond to the musical communication of the one that now held Billy. He wondered for a moment if the other whale wanted to know why Billy’s whale was talking with its mouth full. Or maybe Billy’s presence made his whale sound as though it was wearing some kind of whale retainer for its whale overbite.
Regardless, the second whale’s singing was joined by the sounds of a third whale. And then another, and then even more. Soon, Billy couldn’t distinguish among the many rich sound waves he heard, which were only slightly muffled by the fact that he was currently inside something’s mouth. But it was clear that, where there had only been a single whale before, now Billy was at the center of come kind of Whale Convention.
The songs continued, with Billy’s eardrums being blasted periodically as the whale in which he rode would burst forth in its own conversational song. It seemed to go on forever, for days and days. Billy knew that couldn’t be possible: there couldn’t be more than a few hours’ worth of air in here with him, at most.
That thought, of course, gave him even more to worry about.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, he thought, to suffocate while completely dry in the middle of the ocean?
His subconscious must have been trying to tell him something with that internal question, because soon after he thought about suffocating, his fingers and toes started to tingle. The air around him took on a stale flavor, oddly acidic and nasty. Billy started gasping, and even though it was pitch dark where he was, he swore that a black ring started pushing in on the edges of his vision.
I’m out of air, he realized. Or at least out of oxygen.
Soon, Billy’s fingers and toes were numb, and the tingling had moved up to his arms. He got very light-headed, and simultaneously felt as though his head might pop like a balloon at any moment. It also got very hard to concentrate on anything in particular. A haze of thoughts whirled through his mind, calling up images and memories without rhyme or reason:
Seeing Vester emerging from the wall of fire in the Hall of Convergence.
Feeling the wind on his face as he rode the Unicorn.
Blythe’s hand in his as he told her he liked her and hoped they could be friends.
Blythe’s laughing face as she walked along the paths of Dark Isle.
His mother, singing Happy Birthday.
Himself, holding a shining object aloft, then crashing it to the ground with a sound like thunder.
Billy shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs in his mind. What had that last image been? He couldn’t remember that ever happening before. Yet he had seen himself in it, as though it had already occurred. What was the shining object? Why would he hit the ground with it?
He tried to focus on the image, but his mind was now too muddled from lack of air. Billy’s eyes started to flutter.
I don’t like tapioca pudding, he thought, his mind now firing completely randomly. It makes goldfish dress in poodle sweaters.
And on that note of wisdom, Billy’s eyes closed, and the thick black ring that had been pushing in at the edges of his vision now overwhelmed him. Billy went limp, thinking about tapioca pudding and hearing the songs of whales all around as he fell blissfully into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND
In Which Billy finds help in a Most Unusual Place, and Bargains for the future…
When Billy returned to consciousness, he didn’t know where he was. But the fact that he had in fact returned to consciousness at all seemed to be a good sign, since he had fully expected that never to happen again.
He thought about sitting up to see where he was, but then decided to just lay where he was for a minute. Wherever he was about to find himself, it felt cozy and dry, so why ruin the moment? He let himself ease back into full alertness, allowing himself to slowly come back to reality. If the word even meant anything any more.
Finally, he opened his eyes.
A blue fish was hanging in the air directly in front of him.
Billy closed his eyes.
He opened them again.
The fish was still there.
Billy hadn’t really expected that. He had more or less figured that the fish was just an illusion his over-extended mind had coughed up. Sort of like a psychic hairball. But no, the fish was still there, hanging in the dry air right in front of Billy’s gaze. It was a beautiful blue fish, about the size of Billy’s hand, with wide white eyes on either side of its head, and a long thin nose—or was it snout?—that ended in a tiny mouth framed with delicate teeth.
The fish continued to hang there, looking at Billy. He noticed that the fish’s gills were flapping like they were caught in some kind of breeze.
Something else floated into Billy’s view, something yellow and far too close for comfort. Billy batted it away with his hand, and to his surprise realized that what had just drifted over his eyes was his own hair. But it wasn’t curly. It was straight now.
Straight? How can my hair be straight? thought Billy. Did the whale style my hair while it was eating me? It must have, because the only time my hair is straight is when it’s….
The end of that thought sent Billy bolt upright. A shock of pain sizzled through his head at the movement, but Billy barely noticed as he looked around himself.
The only time his hair was straight, was when it was wet. And as Billy looked around, he realized that the fish hadn’t been hanging in midair in front of him…it had been swimming.
Billy was still in the ocean.
The soft thing he had been resting on was the muscular body of a giant clam, six feet in diameter, its huge shell open at the middle so that Billy felt like he was laying on some kind of strange bed with a gigantic curved headboard behind him. The fish he had seen when he first awoke was floating in the water before him, still looking at him with apparent curiosity.
Billy felt at his neck, half-expecting to find he had grown gills there. But there were none. So how was he breathing? he wondered.
Then he suddenly realiz
ed: he wasn’t.
No air was going into or out from his mouth or his nose. It was like he was holding his breath. But there was no discomfort, no burning in his lungs as there should have been. He just simply wasn’t breathing.
Maybe I am dead, after all, he thought. And then he wondered if this was Heaven. If it was, his Sunday School teacher had gotten a few things wrong over the years.
He glanced about again, and saw that the giant clam was sitting in the middle of the seabed. All around it were huge blooming flowers of coral, like orchids and lilies in the sea. Brightly colored fishes flitted all around the coral, darting in and out of gaps in the reef like they were playing the world’s largest and fastest game of hide and seek. What looked like tiny shrimp sat astride some of the fishes, preening and cleaning them as they swam.
There was a creaking sound, and Billy suddenly jumped to his feet and pushed off the clam’s muscular body as the clamshell slowly pulled itself shut, encasing the clam in a six-foot shell of solid armor. Billy now found himself hanging lightly a few feet above the floor of the ocean. He looked up, expecting to see the water’s surface not too far overhead: after all, it was so bright that he knew the sun must not have too much water between it and himself. But to Billy’s surprise, he saw that the light all around was being supplied by a thick ceiling of jellyfish, hundreds of thousands of them, which floated about a few hundred feet above him. Their long, trailing tentacles dangled below them like an upside-down jungle. The jellyfish glowed a pale blue, and their tentacles themselves flashed quickly in all the colors of the rainbow. It was entrancing, beautiful, unreal.
Billy’s admiring gaze was interrupted, however, by the blue fish he had first seen when he awoke. It swam up in front of Billy’s face, then made a motion with its head. It swam a few feet away, then swam toward him again and made that same motion once again.
Billy: Messenger of Powers Page 35
