Under Plum Lake

by Lionel Davidson

  My mouth was opening and closing, and I looked at Dido and saw he'd not spared a glance for what was outside. He was studying the panel. He said, “Yes. There,” and I looked where he pointed.

  Beyond the turquoise mountain, far in the distance, soared three slender peaks. He pressed the panel, and we moved. There was only the faintest lurch, but now I saw how fast we moved. The cliffs began hurtling past. The speckled valley below unravelled like knitting wool. In seconds, the three peaks were dead ahead, and he slowed the boat.

  From a range of maybe ten miles, they stood weirdly alone, towering pinnacles, rising abruptly from the ocean bed like a cathedral.

  “Now you'll see,” Dido said, and we began to rise. We rose gently, closing slightly with the pinnacles as we went up the length of them. We rose a mile, two miles, three; and all the time the pinnacles continued, straight up. Then the boat slowed to a stop, and we broke surface into a fine summer's day.

  Everywhere, the sun glinted. Where the pinnacles had been, there was land. At this distance, four or five miles, it was just a flat green smudge.

  “I can't go closer,” Dido said.

  He twisted a control, and it came closer.

  It did it in a series of jumps, as if the transparent wall had become a lens. The green smudge enlarged to a stretch of coast; then a beach; then a portion of the beach. People were sunning and swimming from the beach. There were trees behind, and streets, and buildings. I could actually see a policeman directing traffic in a street; and behind him a building, and on the building a flag. It was a British flag.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “Bermuda.”

  “But — we were in England. Only minutes ago!”

  “That's not the point.” He shook his head. “It's just a mountain top. Your whole world is mountain tops. You're mountain-dwellers. Do you want to go to the other world, Barry? Below the abyss?”

  The way he said it scared me, and I said nothing. He leaned across and touched my forehead. Again the swift headache came and went.

  “You want to go to the other world, Barry,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You want to go to Egon, below the abyss.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you do. I knew it,” he said, and laughed, and we began the descent.

  I know now that he did what he wanted with me. He put into my mind what he wanted me to know, and took out of it what he wanted me to forget.

  I forgot my clothes, left in the cave, and the flashlight still switched on there. I forgot I had to get back, and all I had to get back to: my home, my parents, Sarah and Annie. I forgot all that. I forgot who I was.

  Of the descent, all I know is that presently, cocking his head, he said, “Now. We're at it. The Glister Deep.”

  “What is it?”

  “The way through the abyss. We're going in. You're too sleepy to see it, Barry.”

  “I'm not,” I said. “I want to see it.”

  “You feel like a sleep.”

  “I don't. I don't want to sleep.”

  “You do,” Dido said, and leaned forward and touched me; and I passed into the other world, sleeping.

  Part Two: Under The Sea

  8. There

  What can I say about it? I know I shouldn't say anything. I'll say it. I'll keep on saying it, just as it happened. The first thing was a breeze, ruffling my hair, and his voice saying, “Wake up.” I stretched and stirred. We were in a car, on a road, cruising. It was an open car, and he was driving.

  Ahead, for mile upon mile, I could see the road twisting and looping. High above, the sun shone in a blue sky. To the right there were forest-clad hills, and to the left green meadows sloping to a river. There were cows at the water's edge, and across the river two people galloped on horseback. He saw me rubbing my eyes and staring all about.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “In Egon.”

  “ Under the sea?”

  “Miles under. Thirty miles at least, here.”

  He saw me peering up, and laughed.

  “You won't see it,” he said.

  “But — how does it stay up?” He laughed so much he had to slow the car.

  “How does your sky stay up?” he said. “Or your sun? How does your ground stay down?” He wiped his streaming eyes. “Don't worry. I'll explain later. Though I don't know how much you'll understand,” he added cheerfully.

  He told me we were in tigra-nut country, and pointed out the details of the forest. And I looked at it, and at the meadows and the river, and blinked, but none of it changed. The sky was high and blue and the sun shone in it.

  Sky and sun — below the sea?

  “Don't worry,” he said. “Breathe!”

  I breathed. There was the most delicious scent in the air. I couldn't breathe in enough of it. It was coming from the forest, and I saw that the tigra trees were strange and beautiful, their trunks dappled with maroon and silver. From the high blue foliage large nuts drooped in clusters, like purple melons.

  We were passing a small clearing in the forest, and I saw movement and wondered if it was animals.

  “Not animals,” he said, though I hadn't asked aloud. “They're tigra pickers.”

  And soon afterwards, at another clearing, I saw a group of them on the ground: men, stripped to the waist in the hot sun. There was something strange about them. I couldn't say what it was. They were clustered about a huge crate, like a boat, piled high with the purple nuts. Overhead a net was stretched between the trees and a chute led from it to the crate. Men were swaying overhead in the net and tumbling the great nuts down the chute. They waved, and Dido said, “We'll stop a moment.”

  There were thirty or forty men in the clearing, some working, others eating at a long table or lying in the sun. They recognized Dido, and called as we approached.

  They stared curiously at me.

  I'll say now how we were dressed.

  We'd dressed in persongs on the boat. It's a one-piece tunic, the persong. It has a square neck or a round neck or even a high neck. (Girls wear a blouse below theirs with a kind of decoration or ornament at the throat.) Underneath there are short pants or long tights. The outfits are in varied colours, and in different patterns and materials.

  Dido and I wore the same — they were his — so the men weren't staring at me for that. They were staring at my hair. Theirs was pure white, like his. But as hard as they stared at me, I stared harder. I saw what was so strange about them.

  They were giants. They were several times the size of normal men. Their heads were enormous, and their hands, and everything about them.

  They spoke to Dido, but they looked at me. Even the men working stopped and came to look at me. They were young, I could see, with sandals on their feet and cotton-like slacks halfway to the ankle.

  One of them bent and picked me up, like a puppy. In the hot sun a powerful odour came off him, not unpleasant, almost spicy. He held me with one hand and put another under my chin and looked in my eyes. I felt again the sudden slight pain as when Dido had touched my forehead, and immediately he spoke English.

  He said, “What's your name, big shot?”

  I said, “Barry.”

  “Where do you come from, Barry?”

  “England.”

  “What happens in England?”

  His eyes were green and huge. It was like talking to a monument. I could feel his breath like a breeze, and his deep voice rumbling through my body.

  I said, “I'm at school there.”

  “Are you? And how old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  He almost dropped me. He laughed so much I shook all over. He repeated what I said to the others, and one of them took me from him and had a look at me. They were passing me from hand to hand when Dido stopped them.

  “We can't stay here,” he said to me, agitated. “My father knows I'm here. He doesn't know about you. I shouldn't have done it. Come. And don't ask questions about the car,” he s
aid. We were walking to it, and he saw I was just going to start asking. For one thing, there were no wheels on it.

  We got in and I watched what he did. He pressed a couple of buttons and it rose slightly and took off. It took off silently with just the sound of the breeze, so I knew it wasn't a hovercraft or a jet. I couldn't tell what sort of craft it was.

  “What was so funny about my age?” I said.

  “They thought you'd be my age.”

  “What's your age?”

  “Ninety-nine,” he said.

  He saw my mouth drop open.

  “My little sister is sixty,” he said. “Our baby, who sleeps all day, is eighteen.”

  “Eighteen years?”

  “Years . . . You won't understand. And I shouldn't have got you. Maybe my father does know.” He was frowning, rubbing his face. “And I have an important exam coming up. You're going to be nothing but trouble.”

  “Well, what do you —”

  “Just shut up,” he said.

  “Look, I didn't ask you to —”

  “Good night,” he said, and touched my forehead, and I was asleep again.

  The sun was lower when I woke.

  We were in the air. We were coming in to land.

  “There's an inn here,” he said, “and friends of mine. There's no projector. My father can't come in here.”

  I couldn't make anything of this, but he was nodding and seemed cheerful now. He patted me on the head, and I looked carefully at him. Ninety-nine!

  “It's crude, this place,” he said, “but it will do. Mura was my nurse. She'll help. She'll have to. I want to keep you for a bit. Afterwards, well. . . She'll keep quiet. I'll make her.”

  I didn't like the sound of any of this. I didn't like the “afterwards”. I didn't like him putting me off to sleep whenever he felt like it, or patting me on the head like a pet.

  We were driving along a country lane, and I watched him nodding his head and sucking his teeth, and I looked up and thought of the sea pounding on top of the sky.

  I thought of waking in the world below it; of the giants in the tigra forest, the little sister of sixty, the eighteen-year-old baby who slept all day; also of the car that could turn into a plane. At this time I'd forgotten the boat, and the canoe, and everything before it. I knew only what he wanted me to know, and I didn't know if it was a dream or a nightmare.

  9. Through the Projector

  Just as we walked into the inn he began calling. There was a wooden hall there, with a reception counter and chairs and tables — enormous, all of them. He began calling, “Mura! Mura!” and a woman came hurrying in. She was a giantess, bigger even than the men in the forest, and fatter, and she roared with delight at sight of him.

  “Dido!” she cried, and bent down and picked him up and hugged him. But he kicked and struggled so much in the air — he was fifteen feet in the air — that she put him down, and he began shouting at her.

  She roared pleadingly back. Then his eyes went to a large metal frame, like a doorway, set in the wall opposite the counter.

  “They've got the projector!” he yelled. “My father's been in.”

  He began shouting again, trying to restrain her as she moved behind the counter. But she fiddled with something, and the frame lit up. It glowed a moment, and the area in front of it glowed. A woman was there. She wasn't on a screen. She was there. She was sitting at a table with flowers. We were standing right in front of her.

  The woman spoke to him, but her eyes remained on me, and presently he pushed us both forward into the glow, and we were there with her in the room. I looked all round the room. I looked behind me, and the room still continued. I wasn't in the inn any more. I was in this other room. It was the strangest room. It was made of mother-of-pearl, or shell. It was in the air. There was a long curving window, and through it I saw sky. The whole room was flickering in the sky.

  I felt dizzy and faint, with a pain in my head, and I turned and found the woman looking at me.

  “Barry,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I am Dido's mother. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “No,” I said. It seemed safest to say it. I had no idea, anyway. I didn't even know where I was supposed to be now.

  She gave me a long look.

  Dido began to speak but she cut him off with a few sharp words, and suddenly she wasn't there, and the whole room had vanished. We were back in the inn, and he nearly went mad.

  “We've got to stay here!” he shouted. “They won't let me keep you. You've got to be erased here!”

  “Erased?”

  “My father will be coming through. They'll do it here.”

  “What do you mean, erased?” I said.

  “Erased. Can't you understand anything? You've got to be erased. But I wanted to keep you for a bit. I wanted to take you to Mount Julas and Plum Lake, and the power slopes, and sky-diving. And to feed you ragusas, and stardew, and pansa patty. And to see them go crazy when I took you to parties. They'd never have dared get you themselves. Then they could have erased you.”

  “Dido,” I said. I was so confused I could hardly think. “About getting erased —”

  “Just shut up,” he said.

  “But —”

  “I'm going to my room — if this fool has kept it for me. And you can't be left on your own. Come,” he said, and grabbed my arm and walked me through the hall.

  We went in a room — a huge one like a ballroom, with a bed in it — but he didn't give it a glance. He just pressed a button in the wall and the opposite wall turned to glass and opened, and he strode out to a verandah. It was a long wooden verandah. A giant was leaning his elbows on a barred wooden railing on it, but he went as we came out. Dido climbed the bars of the railing and leaned over the top, and so did I. All round was beautiful country, with forested hills swooping to a curving river, and hazy mountains in the distance.

  I couldn't take in anything of what was happening to me. I hadn't for hours. I just said the first thing that came in my head.

  I said, “Dido, when you erase a person —”

  “You take their memory away,” he said abruptly. “You erase the knowledge from their minds, like when you're born or when you die.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “You'd be asleep.”

  “Then what would happen?”

  “You'd be back in the cave.”

  “What cave?” I said.

  He looked at me. Then he smiled. “Well, I did it,” he said. “I erased you. And I haven't even studied it yet. Putting your memory back isn't the same thing as erasing it,” he said. “But let's try.”

  We got down from the railings and he began feeling my head. He lifted my face so that I looked into his green eyes.

  Exactly when it happened, I saw he knew it had happened. “You can remember the cave,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And the cliff. And going out the window.”

  “Yes.” I wondered how he knew I'd gone out the window.

  “And the storm the day before — when I saved you.”

  “When you saved me?”

  “You were drowning. I watched you. I watched you for a couple of days, on and off.”

  I remembered the feeling of being watched.

  Just then I remembered something else.

  “Did you make me come down that cliff?” I said.

  “I put it in your mind. I'm not good at it yet.” He was looking at me seriously. “Anyway, you'll go back and forget now. You'll forget all this. And I wanted to show you so much.”

  I couldn't believe what I'd seen already. Had I really been in a canoe that had turned into a submarine; seen mountains in the sea; visited Bermuda within minutes?

  “I'm dreaming,” I said. “I know it. I'm not under any sea.”

  “You are,” he said.

  “With another sun, and a sky, and forests —”

 
“Look, you're not going to remember any of it,” he said, “not after they've properly erased you. So there's no harm in telling you now.”

  And that's what he did, on the verandah and in the room, while we waited for the people to come and erase me; and I began to learn the things that I should not have learned.

  10. The Stone Brain

  He said we were made of the sea. He said almost three quarters of our bodies were liquid, and that our blood and our sweat and our tears were salty because the sea was salty. He said everything came from the sea; everything had started there, and life on the globe was in just a thin skin round the edge, like the skin of an apple.

  He said that the skin was in three layers, and the exposed outer one, where the mountains jutted out of the sea, was the world of the “mountain dwellers”. At its highest point it was only five and a half miles high (this was Mount Everest), and even that was too high for any life. There was little life above four miles. Jet planes rarely flew higher than six. So this was the narrowest and meanest layer.

  Below it was the sea, and this was seven miles deep, with mountains higher than Everest, and life in every part of it. He said creatures on other planets thought earth was mainly water, with the life in it mainly water-life; and this was true because water covered two thirds of it.

  Not only that: there was more of everything under water. There were more creatures and vegetable life. There were more minerals and chemicals, more oil, coal, gold, food—everything; which made sense because things didn't just start in the sea but also ended there.

  He said that dozens of times mountain ranges had built up from the sea, and life and civilizations had formed on them; and dozens of times they'd worn down again and returned to the sea as dust. And over millions of years, the dust and sediment had formed into “sedimentary” rock and pushed up into mountains, and the whole process had restarted. He said that in the last 500 million years alone, this had happened half a dozen times; although by then the people had gone to Egon.