I saw no sign of the puffers. If they stayed deflated, they could be hiding anywhere.
“What is this place?” Trudy asked, her flashlight beam roaming.
“Shanghai tunnels,” said Griswald. “Los Huesos is honeycombed with them. Before the boardwalk, there used to be nothing but saloons above, and not the nice kind where they clean the urinals once a week. Customers would belly up to the bar and the barkeeper would pull a lever that opened a trap door to the tunnels down here. Next thing the poor sap knew, he’d be forced to crew a schooner to Shanghai.”
Treading lightly across the cave, I caught sight of a crate labeled Strange Secrets from Deep Sea Trenches Best Left Buried. From cargo nets overhead were suspended bundles of spiral narwhal tusks, and a giant nautilus shell the size of a minivan with portholes and a mangled propeller.
“What is all this stuff?”
“Hmm? Oh, you mean the collection?”
“Why, yes, Uncle Griswald, I do mean the collection.”
“The beach regurgitates a lot, Thatcher. There’s no room for it all upstairs, so we Keepers use the tunnels for storage.”
I was glad I’d never had to dust down here.
I pointed at the shell with the propeller. “That’s a submarine,” I said.
“Oh, aye, she’s called the Other Nautilus. And a fine vessel she is. She’s not seaworthy, but for a death trap, aye, a very fine vessel.”
Padding down the tunnel, we continued to search for the puffers, pulling crates aside and pushing barrels out of the way. Every time I nudged a coil of rope or kicked away a canvas tarp, I expected a ball of puffer spikes to leap at my face. What I didn’t expect, though, was the fully inflated puffer fish that thundered by on fat, spiky legs. I managed to jump back into the wall just in the nick of time, so instead of impaling me on its spikes, it only gouged a few more shallow holes in my flesh.
“That one’s got the head!” shouted Trudy.
Griswald aimed the harpoon cannon. He appeared to have a clear shot. Unfortunately, it was a clear shot at my head, so I yanked the gun out of his hands before I became Thatcher, the Amazing Boy with the Harpoon Through His Skull.
“Come on, you two! It’s getting away!” Trudy’s flashlight pushed against the darkness as we gave chase, leaving hobbled Griswald behind. The sound of surf echoed through the chamber, and a moment later we heard a great splash. We rounded a bend in the tunnel and came to a cave opening, just in time to see a swollen globe of spikes go under the water.
“Too late,” Trudy said, along with some curse words she must have picked up from Griswald.
“No,” I said. “Not this time.”
I hefted the harpoon gun to my shoulder. There wasn’t any point in aiming because I didn’t know how to aim a harpoon gun, so I just turned it in the general direction of the puffer fish. I squeezed the trigger and the harpoon shot out with a great kick. The rope unspooled until it hit its target and then went taut.
Trudy saw what was happening before I did. Even with the harpoon in its hide, the puffer was still swimming strong.
“Thatcher, let go of the cannon!”
“Um?”
Holding the gun in a death grip, I was yanked off my feet and dragged across the tunnel floor. Sandstone crumbled as I dug in with my heels, trying to slow myself, but it was no use.
“Thatcher! Let go, you idio—” And that was the last thing I heard before knifing into the water. I was not going to let go, even as the puffer towed me out to open sea. Skalla’s head was responsible for every nasty thing that had happened to me and my friends.
My finger found a switch on the harpoon gun that reeled the rope in, drawing me closer to the puffer. I held on, into the dim murk, with pressure stabbing my ears, my lungs begging for air. My mind clouded with darkness, cold, and pain. And then there was a greater darkness, a tunnel of black rushing toward the puffer. Maybe this was Skalla’s dark magic, or maybe this was Death. Maybe there was no difference between the two.
The darkness surrounded me and overtook me and closed in on me. Also, there were a lot of bubbles that smelled like fish farts.
I found myself lying facedown on a bed of slime. It stank, of course, as slime has a tendency to do. But this particular stink was familiar. It was the smell of weird monster fish. My fingers fumbled with the switches built into the gun until a flashlight attached to the barrel cast a cone of light. I was in another tunnel of some kind, pink and red and wet. Little fish skeletons and crab shells littered the ground, and ahead of me, the puffer fish lay on its side, gawping sadly. It drew in its knees and sucked its thumb, the pillowcase containing Skalla’s head forgotten at its side.
A bigger fish had swallowed us both. A much bigger fish. Bigger on the inside than on the outside. I could stand inside it. I could even breathe inside it.
I forced myself to my feet. The walls and floor and ceiling undulated with nausea-inducing motion.
Keeping the harpoon gun level, I grabbed the pillowcase, then backed away. “Gotcha!” To keep my hands free, I tied the ends of the pillowcase around my belt, letting the head dangle around my knees.
“Thatcher?”
A voice, so faint I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard it.
“Hello?” I called back.
Nothing.
Probably just my imagination.
“Thatcher? Is that you?”
I knew that voice.
“Shoal!”
Drawing my sword, I took off at a run, heading deeper into the fish.
I didn’t know anything about fish anatomy, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t what the inside of a fish was supposed to look like. A fish like this could only be the product of Skalla’s magic. Breathing through my mouth and trying not to touch the walls, I passed through shiny, wet corridors, stepping around other things the fish had swallowed: a motorcycle helmet, a boat anchor, truck tires and safety cones, a toilet, and gelatinous blobs of undigested leftovers. But no sign of Shoal.
“Hey there, Thatcher.”
I pointed my light and saw my own reflection staring back at me in the glistening meat of the fish-wall. It wasn’t alone. There were dozens of funhouse-mirror versions of me, round and squat, or stretched long and thin like a piece of chewing gum, or ruffled like a potato chip.
“C’mon, nothing to say?” said one of my reflections. “Fish got your tongue?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I said. “You should have said ‘Catfish got your tongue.’ See, that’s funny.”
“Not very,” said my reflections. “Tell you what, Thatcher. Why don’t you put down the sack and leave Skalla in here? Then we’ll spit you back out. Promise.”
“Thanks, but I think I can find my own way out.”
My reflections laughed. It was my laugh exactly, just multiplied. “You have no idea where we are, Thatch. This fish—me, us—isn’t just any old jellyfish boy or lobster man. This is one of Skalla’s oldest creatures. One of her strangest. We’re so bizarre and magical that we’re hardly even a fish anymore. We’re a pure reflection of strange things. Like you. You’ve come to a very bad place. Surrender her head, and we’ll let you out. What do you say?”
I raised the sword. “Maybe I’ll just let this do the talking.”
“You’d have to chop for a very, very long time, Thatch. And time is something you’ve run out of.”
“A guy can chop a lot in three weeks.”
The reflections snorted. “Three weeks? Did the king’s sorcerer tell you that? Fin’s a math weakling. You don’t have three weeks. The planets are in alignment now. The currents have already converged. And Skalla is rested. Three weeks? Thatcher, you don’t have three hours.”
I thrust the sword down into the slime floor. It was like trying to puncture a bicycle inner tube with your thumb.
“Aw, come on, you know it can’t be that easy. This is a bouncy, rubbery kind of fish-gut fun-house labyrinth. If you could just cut your way out, everyone would do it.”
“Let’
s just see.” With a sweeping arc of the sword, I sliced into the meat mirrors, right across the middle of the reflections. The blade didn’t exactly cut the fish gut. Instead, things got rearranged, and my mirror-selves blurred into one another, forming a single, distorted reflection. A mouth wider than a banana sneered back at me. It was ugly, and it looked like me.
“Did that make you feel better?” the me said. “You’re still trapped in here.”
“I’m ignoring you.”
“You can’t ignore me. I’m inside you. You’re inside me. I am you. Everything you do, all your weaknesses, your fears, your hopes, your desires, your secrets, your disgusting habits, your really lame jokes …”
“Why are you even bothering?” I said. “If you’re really all that deep inside my head, then you know I only care about one thing right now. I’m getting Shoal out of here.”
“Right, because you’re all about helping your friends. Like you helped Shoal by chasing her in the first place when she ‘stole’ the box that didn’t belong to you anyway. And like you helped Trudy by mouthing off to the witch and getting the curse cast on her. And like you helped the Flotsam by doing… well, nothing.”
I opened my mouth to say something back, but no words came to me.
“You think it’s bad now,” the reflection continued, “but it’s about to get so much worse.”
The reflection kept talking. I knew what it wanted. It wanted me to talk back, to defend myself, and while I was doing that, the clock would tick even closer to disaster.
I hated every word it said because every word was true.
Well, okay. If it wanted to tell me the truth, then maybe I could get it to tell me the whole truth.
“I’m not so worried,” I said. “I’ve been threatened, smacked around, cursed to be Flotsam, and swallowed by a fish. I’m cold and wet, and I’ve been cold and wet practically since I arrived in Los Huesos. So go ahead and tell me what’s going to happen next. Or don’t. Makes no difference to me.”
“Nice little performance, Thatcher. But not clever enough to get me to tell you anything I don’t already want to tell you.”
I shrugged. “Okay then.” And I turned my back to walk away.
I knew myself. I couldn’t resist gloating, and neither could my reflection. I didn’t even get two steps away before my reflection called me back.
“Thatcher!”
I stopped but didn’t turn around.
“I might as well tell you what Skalla’s got brewing,” my reflection said. “It’s not like you can do anything to prevent it. There’s a reason why Skalla’s creatures didn’t just kill you outright. It’s not because you and your friends are so brave or capable. It’s because she needs you alive. When Skalla works a spell or casts a curse, some of her own magic, her own thoughts and the residue of her intent, is left inside the creature she worked her magic upon.”
“You know I know that,” I said. “It’s like after Shoal extracted the fish oil that gave her resistance to the boardwalk. The magic was in her blood, so she could share it with me and Trudy.”
“Well, yeah. But don’t act like you understand, because you don’t. Not fully. She’s going to get her magic out of you and Trudy and Shoal, too, right out of your veins. All of it. Everything’s ready. Her time is here. Her magic is bubbling. She’ll raise winds, and she’ll raise waves, and she’ll raise storms, and she’ll drown the entire town of Los Huesos. Then her new Atlantis can emerge, the one her creatures have been building for her in secret. A new Atlantis she’ll rule as queen of the very last island-city. So, what do you have to say about that?”
I had nothing to say.
“That’s right,” my reflection said. “You’re out of words, and since words are the only things you’ve ever had, I guess that means you’ve got nothing. So why don’t you just have yourself a seat and digest for a while.”
I coughed. The smell of inside-fish was starting to overwhelm me. My reflection-self’s words bounced around my head, as if my skull was lined with mirrors.
“It’s all true,” I said. “Everything you’re saying about me…. Yeah, it’s true. All true.” A faint voice drifted through the fish. It was calling my name. “But what you don’t get is that it doesn’t matter. I’m doing something. I’m saving my friend. So you just glisten and talk your fishy brains out, Mirror-Thatcher. As for me, I’m busy.”
Leaving my reflected image alone to sputter to itself, I went deeper into the fish. I kept my eyes straight ahead, ignoring all the digestive burbles that started to sound like my name, spoken inside my head. Turning down another twist in the gut corridor, I found Shoal sitting cross-legged on the ground, her clothes and hair slicked with fish-belly slime. She looked lost, staring at nothing in particular. I wondered what reflections she’d seen in here. What had spoken to her?
I said her name, and she looked up.
She blinked. “It ate you too?”
“I came in voluntarily. Almost.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Can we talk about this later? I’d like to go now.”
“There is no way out,” Shoal said, her shoulders hunched. “I have tried. I tried to crawl out its throat, but its lips would not part for me. I tried to pass through the digestive tract, but this fish is not arranged like other fish. I am pleased that you wanted to rescue me. That was very brave. But I fear you have doomed yourself.”
“I’ve got something you didn’t have,” I said, proudly raising the mighty blade of volcanic glass. “An ancient sword of Atlantis.”
She rose to her feet. “Oh, Thatcher. That is not a sword. It is an implement used for the gardening of kelp.”
Oh.
Well.
Whatever.
It was still sharp.
This wasn’t a time for cleverness, or talking, or even thinking. This was a time for chopping. I chopped at the fish wall. I whaled. I slammed and I sliced, again and again, until my arms and shoulders and spine ached, and then I kept chopping.
I wasn’t making a scratch.
No time to get discouraged. More chopping.
So I chopped again, and when I knew for absolute certain that I couldn’t swing the sword—I mean, the kelp implement—even once more, I kept on chopping.
The blade still wouldn’t penetrate the inner fish wall, but something started happening. The slime floor beneath our feet wriggled. There was a rumbling. The stench of fish gas nearly knocked me unconscious. The walls and ceiling quivered, then began closing in on us.
“It’s collapsing!” I shouted.
“No,” Shoal said. “I believe it is regurgitating.”
A flood of the foulest-smelling fluid I had yet encountered during a summer of foul-smelling fluids slammed into us. It was hot and it burned, and I pressed my eyes and lips tightly shut as I tumbled in its flow.
We passed through the fish’s lips out into the sea, but we weren’t much better off. Lost in a cloud of fish puke, I couldn’t see anything and had no way to tell which way was up. I wondered if this was what the Drowning Sleep would feel like. Maybe this was the Drowning Sleep.
A hand grasped mine. It was small, but the grip was strong: Shoal. She pulled me along, my flutter kick probably not helping much, and a moment later we emerged on the surface of the waves, coughing and gagging.
“Are you still alive?” Shoal asked.
“I’m miserable, so I must be.”
Still knotted to my belt, the pillowcase with Skalla’s head inside bobbed on the surface like a grisly buoy.
The witch began to chuckle.
CHAPTER 15
Her laugh started as a low chortle, like someone waking up from an amusing dream. I’d heard Skalla laugh before, louder and more shrieky, but this was worse. This time, I knew she was on the verge of winning.
Overhead, the clouds spun faster, and the blue eye of the storm shrunk to a pinhole. Rain shot down, punching thousands of little splashes in the water.
“Good evening, my darling gu
ppies,” the witch said from inside the pillowcase. “Thank you for keeping me safe and cozy all this time. You’re about to see what all this fuss has been about.”
“Just toss her!” Shoal hollered over the wailing wind. “Be rid of her!”
“But then we won’t be able to stop her!”
“We are unable stop her now. Perhaps we will get lucky and sharks will devour her.”
“Oh, sharks are nothing to fear,” scoffed Skalla. “Voracious eating machines with hundreds of teeth like knife blades? What’s so bad about that?” Shark fins sliced to the surface of the water and began circling us. My heart shriveled in dread as a great bulk passed near, brushing my pants with sandpaper skin.
“But there is much worse in the sea, my dear barnacles. Here, let me show you one of my favorites.”
She whistled as if she was calling a dog. Seconds later, a green-black dome, big enough to fill our living room back home, rose beneath us in a mass of bubbles. It lifted Shoal and me from the water on its leathery back. Looking down, I saw four massive fins, each the length of a surfboard, and a green scaly head shaped like that of a turtle. But the eyes gave it away. There was intelligence in them, and age. There was humanness. Sea turtles don’t start out large. They grow slowly over years, over decades, and this one was enormous. It must be very old, and it must have seen a lot of really bad things.
“How may I serve you, mistress?” it asked in exactly the low, croaking voice you’d expect a sea turtle to speak with if the sea turtle was actually some poor slob who’d once been human.
“Take me to the Ferris wheel, pet,” Skalla commanded. “One last spell to cast, and then this will all be over.”
The turtle started to swim, accompanied by Skalla’s escort of sharks. How to stop her? Stab the turtle with my kelp-gardening implement? Skalla would only summon some other creature from the deep to transport her.
Maybe Shoal was right. Maybe I should just chuck Skalla as far as I could, or chop her head into firewood. My friends and I would still be doomed, but if there was a chance to stop her from drowning Los Huesos and ruling over a new Atlantis, it was worth it.
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