Elise and The Astonishing Aquanauts

by Steven Welch

  Elise peered into the cold chamber through the little glass porthole in the floor.

  The crab was still, its shell nearly white except in places under its claws and belly where there were still spots of dark red. The eyes on talks were receded back into its shell. The feelers waved so slowly that Elise had to look hard to see the movement.

  He was alive, but not for long, she thought.

  “Do you think he’s in pain?”

  “No, girl, I do not. And I am Jules Valiance of Les Scaphandriers and if anyone would know such things, it is I. So, he is as peaceful as can be and he dreams of eating little fish. Of this you can be sure.”

  Elise didn’t really believe Jules, but it felt good to pretend so she did.

  *

  The Madame stood at the doorway to her restaurant. The red sun was high, and the breeze was light. Jules, Elise, and Hemmi stood there as well, and it was time to go.

  “Merci, Madame, for your hospitality. There is much for me to do and I must be on my way,” Jules said. He turned to the children.

  “You will stay here. You will earn your keep by catching flying shrimp and turning this foul soil into a garden for Madame. I will return and feast, but in the meantime, you will obey her or she will throw you into a chasm to be devoured by slimy things.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Elise.

  Jules knelt down and took her hands.

  “You are a brave little idiot girl. I thank you for your courage. I will tend as best I can to your crab friend and perhaps you will see him dance when I return.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed off to the west.

  “I made a mistake. Many years ago. I go west now to correct things.”

  “Your hands are shaking. Are you scared?”

  Jules smiled.

  “I, the great Jules Valiance, am wetting myself.”

  He thought she would laugh, but she didn’t.

  “Well, you can’t go by yourself. I’m going with you.”

  “No, you are not.”

  “Yes, I am.” She held her hand out flat. It didn’t tremble at all.

  “Steady as a rock,” she said.

  He quickly stood and moved to The Madame. They stared at each other for a long moment, then embraced.

  “I will return, Gracie,” he said, “and slay more of your monsters.”

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  “As you were born to do. Bon voyage, Jules Valiance of Les Scaphandriers. God speed.”

  Jules turned and walked quickly to the Aquaboggin. He looked down to his right and Elise was there.

  “I said I’m going with you.”

  Jules looked hard into the wide eyes of twelve year old Elise St. Jacques.

  “Where we go, idiot, we might not come back.”

  “I know.”

  Jules looked back to Hemmi.

  The boy turned without a word and went back into the restaurant.

  “He’s staying,” Elise said, “I think he needs to stay.”

  With that, Jules turned and saluted The Madame. She made a rude gesture.

  “You’d best be on your way, old man,” she said and pointed at the sky.

  Jules and Elise looked up and saw that there were dozens of massive, floating jellyfish drifting in from the west. The electric blue of their skins glistened in the rising sun, and tentacles curled and uncurled, searching for food.

  Jules smiled slightly.

  “Of course,” he said. Then he slapped Elise on the back and ran to their flying sub.

  In moments the engines of the Aquaboggin were rumbling, the propeller blades began to spin, and Elise was strapped into the co-pilot seat with Jules at the helm.

  The blades whirred to life, and they lifted up and to the west. Jules circled back once, a final salute to the great and wonderful Madame de Laclos, the lady of the island, the last restaurateur on Earth.

  “We have fuel now and we must evade those disgusting jellies, so hold on.”

  Jules jabbed a button on the console and twin wings flipped out from either side of the Aquaboggin. The autogyro propellers stopped spinning and dropped back into their homes while jet engines ignited.

  “I hope you like to go fast.”

  Elise gave him a thumbs up.

  The ship blasted ahead, a rocket accelerating with such speed that Elise was jammed back into her seat and her eyes slammed shut.

  The jellies were a blue and purple blur as they shot safely past them and beyond.

  To Madame de Laclos they were a shooting star with a bright orange tail. She watched Jules and Elise go and then went back inside. Once the jellies had passed by it would be safe to harvest food. The flying shrimp would be coming soon and now there was another mouth to feed.

  As the years passed, Hemmi would become the greatest gardener that the island of Ouessant would ever know, but that’s another story.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE LITTLE SHIP WE’VE SEEN

  THE MEMORY SCENE of the little flying ship played out across the skin screen once again.

  There it was, a flying metal tube with propellers and weapons, swooping and firing and killing their most skilled assassins.

  Agrunctus had played it several times now, back to back, without commentary, as the Razor continued its dissection of the city.

  “As you can see, Goddess, it is a speck of a vessel, but carries a deadly sting. Scynda and her Men of Many Eyes fell like infants to a sword.”

  If Agrunctus expected a reply to his commentary he was mistaken.

  Silence, then the skin screen rippled and the video of the little flying ship was replaced in a blinding snowfall flash of pulsing chromatophores by a figure too dark to see, swathed in shadow and static.

  “Are you full?” came a voice soft and gentle.

  “Not yet, but almost, only ten percent to go. This city, this Paris, was rich soil and you will be pleased.”

  The face on the screen came into focus. Thin and feminine, scalp covered in a glowing shroud tapestry, skin a masterpiece of organic and inorganic elements wedded in flowing and sensual patterns, eyes wide and vibrant and golden. She smiled and her teeth were perfect white gems that sparkled with arcing electricity.

  “Such a lush place, so deserving of respect, and it’s being harvested by another grotesque abomination that sits in his own filth and ponders nothing except the next pretty thing to torment. You are perfectly suited for your role, Agrunctus, you and the others who pilot the Razor Ships on what was once Earth. You disgust me and I love you for it.”

  Praetor Agrunctus was silent as he considered how to respond. Her royal eyes were pleasant and her royal voice was a slinky soft thing that tickled the fun parts of his belly. Her words, though, confused him. Was that an insult or a compliment?

  He chose to gurgle something inarticulate and bow. The feminine creature on the skin screen raised an eyebrow then spoke again, more loudly, with more force. It was a command.

  “When your ship is satiated, return at once to Orcanum for release. This world is almost done and we will go on to the next.”

  “What of the little flying ship, Goddess?”

  “You’re already hideous, Agrunctus, don’t add stupidity to the mix. What’s it going to do, bite me?”

  The skin screen shuddered in waves of black and white then went dark.

  Agrunctus sank back into his control throne with a loud, wet, slippery sound. He let out a sigh of relief. He was glad that the conversation was over. He liked to torture, he didn’t like to be on the receiving end of the whip.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE GREAT LADY AT THE BOTTOM OF THE EMPTY SEA

  ELISE THOUGHT THAT she might get used to the bouncing and the rattling of the submersible as it was buffeted by the winds but she didn’t.

  The red glow of the sun was ahead. They flew above the storm and below the haze of dust and sand that choked the atmosphere above, slicing through the relatively clear space between.

>   The dry desert of the ocean basin was obscured below them, but now and then a mountainous peak was visible, a plateau, a dark canyon. Elise thought about all the wonderful animals that had lived there, the dolphins and the whales and the sea birds. All gone. All dead, like most of the world.

  Her Dad loved the ocean and the creatures that live in the depths. They would visit aquariums and marvel at strange fish, octopus with their intelligent eyes and clever ways, even the sharks and rays so beautiful and fast. She could hear his voice now, in her thoughts, excited about playing in the surf or watching a television show about whales or reading a magazine about the sea and dreaming of having their own boat to sail.

  Her Dad’s voice was many things to Elise, now. It was a comfort, an unwanted ghost, a reminder, and a wound. At that moment she hated his voice because she knew that he would be hurt by the death of the ocean and its animals but he had hurt her by dying and leaving her alone.

  Part of her wanted to hurt him, hear the pain in his voice, because she loved him and he had left her alone. That thought made her ashamed and that shame just made her more angry.

  She wanted her Dad’s voice to shut up.

  *

  They flew for hours.

  Elise nodded off and was awakened by a loud beeping sound.

  A light was flashing on the cockpit flight console.

  Jules put the ship into a steep descent. There was no storm below them now, just canyons and mountains, like photographs of the Grand Canyon that she had once seen, but far more vast, stretching on beyond the horizon.

  The ship passed below the cliffs of the tallest of the mountains and the turbulence lessened, their flight became smooth, and the ship leveled out.

  This had been an ocean.

  Elise found it hard to imagine at first, but then there was a shipwreck half-covered in sand. Another, lying on a shelf that then dropped another thousand feet straight down into the canyon.

  Was that something alive?

  Yes, she thought. Yes, it was. They were dropping fast, but she could see creatures like centipedes squirming and crawling along the canyon walls. Swarms of flying shrimp passed them by, going up to the sun as they were on the descent, and she heard a soft pelting as the things spattered on the exterior of the sub.

  They flew deeper now and out of the sun so the light became dimmer and dimmer.

  Jules piloted them toward towers, tall outcroppings of rock, sentinels that had been carved by ocean currents for millions of years and now stood on wide plateaus.

  Elise heard Jules take a sharp breath as they got closer.

  He said something low that she couldn’t hear.

  She looked closer at the towers as they approached and saw that there were carvings on them, strange faces and figures dancing and monsters she could not have imagined.

  He flipped switches and the autogyro propellers popped and dropped and took over their flight, the jet engine falling silent. They moved more slowly now, but in control and hovering like a dragonfly.

  “Our years of exploring her depths and we knew so little,” Jules said, “we thought she had given up her secrets but look, idiot girl. We are four thousand feet below the surface and those petroglyphs speak of a civilization older by far than ours. Who did this? Where did they go?”

  He switched on the exterior flood lights and circled the towers as they descended. The faces carved into the rock were of creatures more fish than man, and chiseled tentacles seemed to wrap the entire monument, writhing and overlapping. They were close enough now that Elise could see little things like cockroaches climbing all over the stone. There were small crabs as well with legs like spiders.

  Had something like this carved spire been found by explorers in the deserts of Egypt or in the jungles of Peru they would have been considered wonders of the world. The artwork was primitive, crude, but clearly defined and there were things on the pillars, rituals of violence and more that troubled Elise. Elise was fascinated by the towers, but disturbed by them as well, in some primal way that she didn’t understand.

  “If these were under the ocean, they were carved before the ocean was even there, right?” she asked.

  “Perhaps, or they were carved under the ocean a million years ago by creatures beyond our imagination.”

  Elise thought about the people they had seen atop the massive black bulldozer in Paris, the humans in chains and the other things, the things that looked like they were alien, with fins and strange skin.

  Those things looked like the carved faces on the tower.

  “Maybe these are new,” she said.

  “No. Some of the rock is worn away by tides and now by wind. These are older than time as we know it.”

  A little beep and a flashing blue light.

  “Ah. We are nearly there.”

  “Where? Where are we going?”

  “There,” Jules said. He pointed forward at the flat plateau below them, at the bottom of the Atlantic basic, a thousand miles from the coast of France, from the restaurant of Madame de Laclos, from dead Paris and the things that devour it.

  They flew slowly toward a gothic cathedral sitting amid a plain of boulder and sand, a cathedral carved of ocean rock and coral and shells.

  There were flying buttresses, some broken and some not. There were broken glass windows, huge and round. It was spectacular, beautiful and yet horrifying because Elise knew that it was impossible, a cathedral so much like Notre Dame here at the bottom of an empty sea.

  She looked at Jules. His eyes were wide and she could see that he was sweating and pale, even in the dim light of the cabin.

  He’s scared, she thought.

  Maybe I should be scared too.

  The rotating blades of the sub echoed in the canyon as Jules brought the Aquaboggin to a soft landing at the mouth of the cathedral. The bright floodlights all rotated aft.

  Thousands of tiny roaches and crabs scuttled and scurried away from the light, revealing the stone and coral surface of the magnificent, horrifying building.

  It was Notre Dame, but it was not. It was a bit of this and a bit of that, the whole a representation of gothic cathedrals and churches across Europe, but fashioned out of rock and reef and detritus. And it was at the bottom of the ocean.

  Jules set the Aquaboggin down a few yards away from the entrance to the cathedral. The vessel settled softly into thick sand, landing gear popping out port and aft to stabilize. The propellers slowed then stopped.

  The exit hatch opened with a hiss and the ladder slid down. Jules stepped out and Elise followed.

  She noticed that he had a gun in his hand and she didn’t know how she felt about that. A flashlight in the other hand, and one on his helmet, pierced the gloom. Elise wore her helmet as well, so she switched on her lamp.

  The sand was white, the canyon walls dark.

  Sound was strange this deep in the trench. The canyon twisted their slightest whispers into echoes that went on and on.

  Elise looked up, and the sky was a slender, crooked red sliver cutting between the canyon walls far above them.

  There was a sudden sound like bird’s wings in flight. A swarm of flying shrimp blasted past and around and over them. They covered their eyes and mouths as the creatures passed into the gloom.

  Jules walked to the center portal of the cathedral.

  There were little crustaceans all over the tall metal portal doors, a dark swarm.

  “Clap your hands,” he said. Elise clapped and the roach things scattered with a sound like a blanket of shells being dragged across glass.

  Jules reached out and grabbed one, quick as a wink, and popped it into his mouth. His cheeks turned purple and he spit it out.

  “Ack,” he said, wiping his lips, “It tastes of baby poop and despair. I am appalled.”

  “That’s so gross,” she said.

  Jules led the way through the metal doors into the cathedral. His lights were twin beams that helped them see a bit, but not much. The light from the jagged edge of sun
far above was almost useless.

  Stone benches, overturned and broken. Sand and debris on a colorful floor of rough tile. The soft scuttle here and there of unseen small creatures. Jules trained the flashlights behind them and Elise could see a huge pipe organ covered in a squirming mat of sea roaches.

  At the center of the cathedral was a pile of debris, as tall as Jules, broken coral and rock in a jagged tumble. Jules stood quietly before the pile for a long moment then walked around it, as if searching for something, perhaps searching for a way in or for what had been covered.

  Elise felt something crawl on her neck. She yipped and swatted at it and it squished under her hand. One of the sea roaches. She shivered and swatted herself all over.

  “This is it,” Jules said aloud but to himself, “this is it.”

  “What? It’s a pile of rocks.”

  “No. This is where the world ended. Maybe if we know more, this can be where the world is reborn. Who’s to say?”

  There was a sound then, a big thunderous thump, followed by another. It came from behind them.

  Elise and Jules turned and were face to face with an elephant ten meters high with eyes like a goldfish and teeth like a shark. There were toothed suction cups on its long trunk. The thing’s skin shimmered and changed colors like a cuttlefish and it walked on legs as thick as telephone poles.

  The elephant made an angry hissing sound and rose up on its back legs, exposing a belly covered with scaly armored plates.

  “This is unexpected,” Jules whispered, “an angry, territorial alien elephant has staked its claim to the naked cherub with the violin. Strange days.”

  Before Elise had time to even begin to absorb what Jules had said, he grabbed her by the arm and was carrying her back toward the Aquaboggin at full sprint.

  The elephant dropped back to all fours and began thundering towards them. Jules shoved Elise up into the hatch and shut the door. He moved to the pilot’s seat and switched on the engines.

  “Hello,” he said. The elephant was in front of the sub and staring into the forward viewing glass. The eyes were freakishly huge, bulging, and appeared to be extremely angry.