by Peter Bunzl
“I can’t go,” Malkin said. “Mechanical foxes don’t do well underwater.”
“We’re not leaving you behind, Malkin,” Robert said.
“Don’t be concerned about me,” Malkin replied with false bravado. “I’ll be fine. I suppose this is goodbye.” He gave a brave woof. “By all that ticks, it’s been nice knowing you. If there’s a space for mechanimals in the afterlife, I hope to meet you there.”
“NO!” Lily said, her voice fierce. “You’re coming with us. We’ll tow you behind in a spare suit.” She pulled one off its hooks and tightened the belt in its midriff to stop Malkin falling through into the feet. Then she placed him in the top half. It held him like a cradle, and Malkin stuck his head out of the fish bowl helmet, watching as Lily and the others climbed into their own suits. He looked mighty strange, held in the centre of the man-sized suit. It was lucky though that being a mechanimal, he didn’t need an oxygen tank like the rest of them, because there wasn’t one to spare.
The rest of them finished putting on their diving helmets and strapped the heavy tanks to their backs. There was a gauge that attached to the suit arm with a needle in it painted with luminous radium to glow in the dark, so you could see how much oxygen you had left. When they were finally all suited up, they struggled through the knee-deep water to the hatch at the far end, Lily dragging Malkin by the empty leg of his suit.
“This should lead to the airlock beyond this room that will take us out into the sea. But we have to be careful,” Dane said. “We all need to open it together.”
They climbed through into the airlock and closed the hatch to stop the room behind them flooding. Then Lily reached for the rusted lever on the hatch, but Robert tapped her on the shoulder.
“Wait!” Robert cried, the words echoing off the inside of his heavy metal helmet. “There’s another problem!”
He could see Lily staring at him through the glass of both her helmet and his. She was frowning deeply. “What is it?” she asked.
“How are we going to get in at the other end? If we try to enter the Diving Belle directly from outside it’ll be flooded with water before we can even climb aboard.”
“Clank it, you’re right!” Lily cursed. “We’ll have to go back aboard the Shadowsea first and enter the Belle that way. Can we do that?” She looked to Dane.
Dane nodded. “There are two docking airlocks on that side of the Shadowsea, remember?” he said. “The one the Diving Belle’s attached to and a second, emergency airlock next to it. We can go in through that one. From there we’ll be able to cross back into the Diving Belle the same way we left it, without flooding her…” he said, glancing at the leaks that were already filling the room they were in.
“That’s if we’re quick,” Lily said. And she directed them all to the rusted lever once more.
It took all of Robert, Lily, Dane and Caddy’s combined strength to push it downwards and open the door. Soon, they were engulfed in pitch-black water, as one by one, they struggled out the far hatch that led to the open sea…
Silence.
The deep water muffled all noise.
After the screeches and groans of the submarine city, Lily found the quiet a blessed relief.
They crawled through the darkness around the outside of the Shadowsea Submarine Base, clinging onto the maintenance bar and feeling their way along the curve of the walls in an anticlockwise direction.
Lily was out in front. She had tied Malkin’s suit to hers with a length of rope before they’d swum through the hatch and now he floated behind her, bobbing along in his man-sized diving suit. Lily thought it was probably the first and only time she would be towing a mechanical fox deep-sea diving. She wished there was enough light to see him. She could sense the others behind her. Robert and Caddy, then Dane last, Spook snuggled somewhere in his suit. They inched along in line, heading back round to where the Diving Belle was docked on the Shadowsea’s far side.
The going wasn’t easy. The water pressing against their suits kept their movements slow and heavy, and the air inside Lily’s helmet tasted warm and metallic, the atmosphere as thick as treacle.
As they rounded one section of the base, Lily jerked to a standstill.
The sea in front of them was filled with brightly glowing fishes, floating together in one vast group that seemed to go on for miles. Their luminous fins were bright as knives, their scales glowed like shimmering armour and their eyes sparkled like diamonds. The fish seemed identical, each one no bigger than her little finger, plain looking and as sharp and pointed as a piece of flint. As individuals Lily imagined they probably wouldn’t be able to light up anything, but together, in their enormous school, the thousands of them glowed bright as the sky at night, shining like a field of shooting stars.
Lily’s heart soared and she forgot her own predicament as she stared in wonder at the darting glowing fish. She had never seen anything quite so beautiful in all her life. They seemed almost miraculous. There were, she realized, greater things than herself and her friends in the wild corners of the world. Things to whom the water was not a danger, but home. Things that glowed with hope. Even in the darkest places, working together, life could find a way.
She looked to Malkin and Robert and the others bobbing behind her and gave them a grin through the glass of her diving helmet.
All of a sudden, Lily had an unexplained sensation of standing on the edge of a deep drop. She gazed down beneath her feet. There was the immense chasm of the Darkwater Trench, the abyss stretching out beneath her. The fish were floating above it in the current. Warning her and the others they had been going the wrong way! The Diving Belle was in the other direction! She held her hand up to Robert and the others, pointing back past the airlock the way they had come.
She saw a flash of terror on their faces in the faint bioluminescent light.
A moment later, the fish flickered away, leaving them in darkness once more.
They retraced their steps carefully, feeling their way once again in the dark. Lily was last in line now, and Dane at the other end of the pack was leading the way, taking them all in a clockwise direction this time. Soon the sensation of walking along a cliff edge disappeared and Lily knew she was back on safer ground. She recognized the feel of the airlock leading to the suit room as they passed it and realized they had been out here a long time, a little too long which meant…the oxygen!
Lily examined the oxygen gauge on her arm, the needle glowing in the dark. The tank was almost empty. Lily’s pulse quickened in sickening terror at the thought of running out of air, as she imagined ending up as another body at the bottom of the ocean. She wished they hadn’t wasted time going in the wrong direction. Now she only had about five minutes of air left. The other three must be in the same situation.
She mustn’t panic, she realized, that would only make her use her oxygen up quicker. She tried to calm herself, taking slow deep breaths and concentrating on her path ahead in the dark.
Finally, with a wave of relief, she saw a faint red light up ahead.
Lily had never been so glad to see anything in her entire life.
It was the interior cabin lamp behind the Diving Belle’s porthole windows and it glowed like a weak sunset moon, leading them on.
Dane hastened towards it, and the others followed.
Step by step, the light from the lamp grew bigger. As Lily and the others approached it, she saw that the Belle had tipped sideways, and she realized that the base must have too. Its moorings were loosening. Lily glanced back over her shoulder to see that the entire base had shifted, drifted. Now more than half of it was perched over the edge of the Darkwater Trench. If it continued to fill with water, and drift as it was, soon the moorings would snap altogether and, with the entire thing weighed down with water, there would be nothing left to stop it tumbling into the deep-sea trench. They had to hurry, get away as soon as possible.
The needle of Lily’s oxygen tank was nearly at zero now. She pushed the others forward, driving t
hem faster towards their destination. Malkin floated behind her attached to the rope.
Finally, they arrived at the Belle’s window. Beside them was the hatch that led to the secondary airlock on this side of the Shadowsea base. With Dane, Robert and Caddy, Lily fought to open the hatch and they tumbled through into the airlock beyond, scrabbling around as water filled the chamber, they fought their way to their feet and pushed the hatch shut behind them, shutting the light and the open sea.
Lily pulled a lever and they waited as the room drained of water.
Then she wrestled off her helmet and breathed in the air in great cool gulps. The rest of them did the same. It was rancid, but at least it was breathable.
They struggled from their diving suits and threw them to the floor. Caddy wiped her face and Lily pulled her tangled scarf from her suit, while Robert took his cap from his pocket and lodged it firmly back on his sweat-drenched head. Dane checked his jacket to see that Spook was still in his pocket and still all right.
“We made it in one piece,” he said, brushing a clump of sweaty damp hair from his face and kissing Spook’s nose.
The four of them helped Malkin, lifting him from the cradle of his improvised diving suit. The fox scrabbled out of his rubber, metal and glass prison, and sniffed disgustedly at the rest of the pile of discarded suits and helmets. “About clanking time that was over!” he complained in the darkness. “I NEVER want to go diving again!”
“Me neither,” Caddy said.
“Nor me,” Robert said, his teeth chattering.
But Lily only thought of her moment of grace with the fishes. She took the Wonderlite from her pocket, flipped the lid and spun the wheel. In a shower of sparks, the flame sprang to life once again. Even the trip through the water hadn’t dampened its wick.
“At least those things won’t be able to follow us here,” Caddy said. “So we can take a breather.”
“I don’t think so,” Robert said. “Did you see how much the base was tipping? And how much it’s been shifting about since we’ve been here? I reckon, with all the water it’s taken on, it might be about to break free of its moorings.”
“You noticed that too!” Lily said with a shudder.
Robert nodded. “We’d best hurry,” he said. “I don’t think we have much time.”
With Dane’s help, they opened the opposite door of the airlock and found themselves back in the corridor of the Shadowsea station, on the far side of the blocked door. Robert could see now that a fallen metal truss was wedged against it. Beyond it was the flooded passageway, and the trapped zombies. They’d had to make their way around the dangerous outside of the base to bypass all those hazards, but they wouldn’t have got through any other way.
Lily held the Wonderlite out and surveyed their surroundings. There was no flooding here, only the few puddles of water they’d brought in with them through the airlock from the sea outside. The rest of the corridor was clean and dry and they were just a few feet down from where the Diving Belle was attached to the ship.
“Come on,” Lily said, beckoning to the others.
Together they opened the door and stepped through into the Belle’s airlock passageway. Robert went first, followed by Caddy, Lily and Malkin. Dane hung back in the corridor, watching the others as they struggled to turn the lock on the Belle’s roof hatch. Finally, with Lily, Robert and Caddy yanking and pulling as one, and with a little help from Malkin’s jaws, they got it open.
Malkin tumbled straight in, landing on the floor of the Diving Belle’s cabin like a cat. Robert went next, holding out his hand so that Caddy could follow behind him.
Lily waited at the hatchway for them all to get safely into the submersible. She looked back over her shoulder. Dane was still standing in the Shadowsea’s corridor. It was almost as if he didn’t want to leave.
“You next,” Lily called out to him.
Dane glanced down at Spook in his hand and shook his head. “I’m not going.”
“What?” Lily asked.
Dane peered down the dark corridor, back into the deep tunnels of the Shadowsea. “My parents are still here somewhere.”
Lily put a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t save them now,” she said softly. “They really are gone.”
“And I’m here. Still living. How is that fair?”
“I felt the same way when it happened to me,” Lily said. “And the answer is: it isn’t. It isn’t fair. But it’s how things are.” She felt a little teary as she said it, thinking of her mama gone too, and Robert’s da, and all that had come to pass since those great losses. “It’s true, we get older, keep living. And you think they don’t see all that, think they don’t experience it with you. But they do, in here.” She touched her heart. “The ones we’ve lost, they may be gone from the world, they may be gone from time, but they’re eternal now. Their life is complete, but yours is not. There’s so much more for you to see… Things no one else has seen yet. Luminous, shining, miraculous things.”
“Like those fish…” Dane said. His eyes sparkled as he stroked Spook in his palm.
“And all kinds of other fantastical, amazing visions,” Lily said. “We came back, Dane, and that’s a gift – a blessing not many get. You can make your life anything you want it to be, once you decide to throw yourself in and live it to the full. That doesn’t mean you have to forget the past, or those who lived there. The best way you can honour it, and them too, is to go on living.” She took his arm. “Now come on. There’s someone waiting for you, up in the world.”
“Who?” Dane asked.
“Your grandmother,” Lily said. “I read in the paper that she was looking for you.”
“I think I remember her,” Dane said slowly.
Then he climbed through the hatch into the airlock, and down into the Diving Belle and, with relief flooding through her heart, Lily followed him.
When Lily hopped through into the Diving Belle, Dane was already at the controls. Malkin sat beside him, his tail thumping nervously on the floor.
Lily, Robert and Caddy slammed the roof hatch closed behind her and twisted the wheel to lock it shut.
Dane pulled the release lever so that the Diving Belle detached from the Shadowsea, then he locked the steering wheel dead ahead, and engaged the Diving Belle’s engines. When he was done, he reached into his pocket and put Spook beside him up on the dashboard, before reaching across to ruffle Malkin’s ears.
Lily gripped Robert’s hand tightly in her own, staring through the porthole at the disappearing Shadowsea Submarine Base.
Water was pouring into it freely now and it would surely soon break free of its moorings and tip over into the Darkwater Trench. There was nothing anyone could do to stop that. Who knew what was down in that trench, or if the base would survive the fall intact. It was destined to sleep with the fishes and all the strange creatures at the bottom of the ocean. Sights no one in this life or any other had seen. Gone but not forgotten.
“I wish Miss Buckle could’ve made it out too,” Dane said softly as the base floated further from view. “She didn’t deserve an end like that. And neither did my parents. But thank you for saving me,” Dane continued. “For helping me get out.” He gave everyone a tiny smile. It was all he could muster, but it was enough for Lily to know that, despite everything, eventually he would be all right.
She put a hand on Dane’s shoulder. “You asked for our help, remember. It was the first thing you said to me in the hotel. You must’ve believed there was hope when you did that. And you came to the right place, because none of us ever lets a friend down, do we?”
She grinned sideways at Robert and Caddy, who had put their hands on Dane’s arm too. “We do not!” Malkin said, answering for all of them, and offering Dane a paw.
Lily laughed. With everyone close together, she and Dane were engulfed in a warm hug.
Lily basked in it. The tension that she had felt wound up inside her heart like a watch spring the whole time she had been on the Shadowsea suddenly
dissipated and she felt free again. Dane should never have tried to use the Ouroboros Engine. But Lily could see why he had. If someone had offered her the chance to bring her mama back, she knew she would’ve taken it too.
But you couldn’t cheat death like that. Not Dane’s way or Professor Milksop’s. And not Papa’s way either, at least not without a great cost. And you couldn’t really turn back time. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t carry a part of the ones you loved with you. They were eternal, always at your side, in every decision you made and every choice you took, and in that way you would never truly lose them, and they would never truly lose you.
As the Diving Belle picked up speed, gliding away along the ocean floor, the five of them broke apart from each other and climbed into their seats and, with Dane at the helm and Spook by his side, they headed for home.
The journey wasn’t easy. For many gruelling hours they worked together to pilot the Diving Belle back towards New York, the submersible gradually emptying the ballast tanks as it rose on a slow and steady upwards gradient.
According to Robert’s calculations with his compass, and Dane’s navigation points marked out on the oceanic map, they had less than an hour to go. They might finally reach home!
All of a sudden, the dials monitoring the Diving Belle’s battery strength dropped into the red zone.
“The power’s running out, Dane. We have to surface at once,” Robert cried. They had been so close! But they had no choice. If they continued on their course, the power would fail, and they would fall to the bottom of the ocean once more.
Dane pulled a lever and the ballast tanks began a full evacuation of water as the Belle powered upwards.
Lily stared through the porthole as the Belle broke the surface. The sea around them was choppy and as soon as they broke the surface, they were buffeted about in the circular cabin. The waves threw them this way and that and they drifted with no power to turn the rudder or steer by. Without their props to keep them afloat they had little chance; if they weren’t rescued soon, then they would sink.