“When you learn to build stairs yourself,” Cindy said. That was one part she didn’t like about these personas. The bickering. It was so unlike them otherwise, and yet it was seeping into their everyday interactions now even when they were pretending to be other people.
She wasn’t kidding about the stairs, though. The room they had entered was below the warehouse, only accessible from a locked hatch behind a dust-covered stack of boxes full of 90’s era computer parts. If they wanted a staircase instead of a ladder to get in here, they would need to hire someone from the outside. And then, when those people were finished, Cindy and Simon would have to have them killed. Not that Cindy actually had a problem with a little murder now and then. She just didn’t want to expend the effort on something that didn’t immediately further their goals. And murder investigations could get so messy. Not everyone’s death was as easy to fake as a suicide as Susan Laramie’s had been.
“Why do we even need to be here?” Simon asked. “Shouldn’t we be out prepping the next part?”
“Think for a minute, Simon,” Cindy said. “Think of your beloved theory. If this were fiction, what would we be here for?”
Simon appeared to give this serious thought. “Well, I’m not sure if this were a TV show or book, but if we were in a movie? This would be the short scene after the credits that gives the audience hints of what to expect in upcoming movies.”
“Well, there you go then,” Cindy said. “I guess that must be why we’re here.” Simon looked satisfied with this. In truth, Cindy was still far from admitting that they were fictitious, but Simon had been right about their situations enough times that Cindy wouldn’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. She tried to ignore any existential dilemma this would cause by telling herself that her brother was simply certifiably insane. And that probably wouldn’t be far off from the truth. He was the unpredictable one, after all. She was the calm and cool one, the one who kept their endeavor on track.
While Simon puttered around in various filing cabinets looking at paperwork, Cindy went over to the room’s far wall, with its massive corkboard holding a map of the world. Let Simon believe they were here for whatever fictional reason, but Cindy had wanted to come because she felt a base need to update the map. Not that the map mattered anymore this late in the game, but map had been her cornerstone from the moment they had taken up their mission, and it felt wrong to leave it here all alone and uncorrected.
There was a small jar of pins with various colored heads on a table nearby, and Cindy rooted through it until she found a red one. Then she went back to the map and stared at the representation of their handiwork. Years of work, going all the way back to long before the two of them had been born, and it was finally in the end stages.
There were pins sticking in places throughout the entire map, but the vast majority of them were white. Each and every white pin represented some project that fell under Paperclip Unlimited’s purview, all of them either stalled out or too far from completion. Almost all of them, with just a few exceptions, were in some body of water. One hundred and thirteen white pins in all. At this late stage, most of them were no longer of any use to Cindy.
In this sea of white, though, three colors stood out. At the moment, there was only a single red pin placed directly over El Bajo Seamount in the Sea of Cortez. A project that was over with and had finished its part to play in things to come.
There were four yellow pins in the map. One had been stuck in Isla Niña in the Galápagos Archipelago. That was the one Cindy needed to update. She removed the yellow pin and replaced it with the red one she had taken from the jar. They’d gotten what they needed from there.
Cindy smiled as she found the three remaining yellow pins, touching each one as though to assure her that those projects were still ready to be tested. One in the Hawaiian Islands, likely the next one that come to public light. One in the Great Lakes. And one on the Great Barrier Reef.
They were all wondrous. They were all special. They were all her babies, just like Teddy Bear and Call It George had been.
Out of the entire map, there was only one pin that was not white, red, or yellow. There was a single green pin in the Atlantic Ocean. This particular map didn’t show the ocean topography, but if it had, it would show that the pin was the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, a place so far below the surface of the world that no human had ever been able to travel all the way to the bottom.
Cindy caressed the green pin. That was the end, the final part of everything she and her brother had worked toward for their entire lives. As she touched it, Cindy sang softly to herself, allowing a wicked smile to grow on her lips.
“There’s a hole, there’s a hole, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.”
But unlike the song, the creature in the hole was far, far worse than a frog. And within the coming months, the world would finally see it.
Maria Quintero and Kevin Hoyt will return in
Assassin’s Pod
Read on for a free sample of Agrushell: A Deep Sea Thriller
Chapter 1 — Dawn
The merchant ship Evectoria, chartered by Flomax PLC, a civil oil company, dropped its undersea seismic charges in grid reference 33445-55. This returned geological data of anti-syncline of a magnitude with a high chance of oil. The owners of the company were very pleased. The seabed where the seismic charges fell was made into a wilderness.
Neither the stillness of the sea, nor the mirror of its silver surface could hide the Atlantic Ocean’s immensity, nor conceal the knowledge of abundant life within its infinite and unseen depths.
The edges of retreating storm clouds glowed with honey and intricately bright straw yellows with the new day’s light. The dawn reflected across the ocean to point at silhouetted box shapes, a towering derrick, and the dark metal shapes of cranes.
The North Sea oil platform Danson, field3 was an alien construction of man in a world of ocean, crisscrossed metalwork that stood impervious to the battering white-tipped waves from which it sprang, on vast grey-painted steel columns.
The changing wonder of the dawn, however, escaped ‘Mud Engineer’ Steve Staples completely; he observed the growing light with a hangover-aggrieved squint.
He was leaning over the helipad railings and shivering. His black half-length coat and jeans were failing to keep out the dawn’s early chill. Long brown hair fell away from his face as he drank coffee from a polystyrene cup. Then, as he hung his head over the rails again, his hair fell to cover his red-rimmed eyes.
A tight knot of worry was clenched in his belly as he worked his thoughts around the events of last night, causing anxiety to creep like sickness up his throat.
He rubbed his eyes and cursed his aching head and roiling stomach, which had turned to bile at the taste of last night’s copiously, consumed lager.
He spat weakly over the side of the oil rig’s helipad railings and raised the cup of black bitter coffee that ‘Gerald the cook’ had pushed into his hands, probably just to escape his stale beer breath.
Steve was sure the tub of lard hadn’t washed his own hands since he got on this trip. How dare he look down his sweaty nose at him, hangover or not? Although, he knew from vast experience that his hangovers were not a pretty sight.
He took a moment to visualize himself pouring his coffee over ‘le fat chef’ but soon lost the mental energy. Instead, he was left feeling weak and generally sorry for himself, with only the ghosts of a self-confident identity for company.
As he pondered his self-inflicted sickness and the consternation caused by last night’s card game, a voice disturbed his inner thoughts.
“Hi there, Mr. Staples!”
It was Dan Giles, the ship’s resident junior geologist and generally happy bugger, calling out to him as he walked across the helipad.
“Are you enjoying the dawn?” he asked, his face already lit with a ready smile. “It’s quite something, don’t you think?”
Dan was blue-eyed, well-spoken, an
d big enough to give you pause for thought. All topped off with a modest and easy manner. A man whom Steve wanted to resent for his good fortune but couldn’t. He could see the man’s genuine warmth in a soft, almost imperceptible, amber radiance. Dan’s head and shoulders were shrouded in a delicate vivacity of light, which Steve had seen and trusted before.
The subtle radiance reminded him of his aunt in her purple dress, imbued with the none-too-subtle aroma of joss sticks and that warm glow. She was the one who’d first mentioned the word ‘aura’ to him, like a shared secret wisdom, in a room filled with glass and pottery angels, and who’d shared the same gentle luminosity of colors that Dan emanated. Perhaps, despite his customary aloofness , it was why Steve had begun talking to the man so soon after they’d met.
He was instantly drawn to the genuine friendliness he saw and the easy companionship on offer. It left him torn between the inner distance he tried to keep from people and his own desperate need for friendship, all of which only seemed to increase his inner confusion.
Waiting briefly for an answer that didn’t follow, Dan continued talking.
“It’s strange, the change between the dark of night and the dawn of the day,” he mused aloud and then looked earnestly into Steve’s eyes.
“The time when one changes to the other, it’s primal, like we’re at the beginning of everything, feeling the world begin again all around us. Or maybe we realize the fragile nature of our existence, having survived the cold of the night, shivering in the dark and waiting for the dawn?”
With the delicate state of his stomach and the ache behind his eyes, Steve certainly felt fragile.
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “It’s bloody cold enough, though.” And Dan laughed as if they had shared a great joke together.
Bemused and strangely unsettled by Dan’s words, as if they were a warning or explanation of something he couldn’t quite understand, he wanted to ask for an explanation, to try and share in this revelation, but that something inside him like a barrier in his chest held him back as it always did.
The long-distant sound of his mother’s voice was wise and patient in his memory. “The sensible voice is the one that listens before it speaks.”
He remembered her soft voice and kind smile, and for a moment his defenses were down as the memory of her kindheartedness flooded him; tears sprang to his eyes, and he clung desperately to the railing. Then, the rawness of another memory of his mother, this one painfully dark, sprung up, and his emotional shutters slammed shut. He glanced quickly to see if Dan had caught his momentary weakness, but Dan’s eyes were out to sea, on the rising dawn.
“It’s just another crappy day in paradise, Dan, and this coffee proves it,” he managed weakly.
He raised his half-empty cup, grimaced, and mimed a gag, hoping his voice was steady.
Dan smiled a golden-brown gentleness, and Steve’s inner barrier was again shaken.
“Well, Steve, we may not have great coffee, but we have some view,” Dan mused, returning his gaze to the sunrise.
Steve was suddenly saddened by the feeling he was missing a connection, a sharing of something important, and he understood that the failure was in him. He brooded on his hangover again and wished that he had the courage to open up his feelings, to finally share his inner thoughts with his companion. But all he could do was watch Dan from the corner of his eye, searching for (and not finding) a way past the silence of his solitude to share his well of emotions with the other man.
He heard a familiar childhood chant in his mind: ‘Freaky weirdo, with a strange hairdo.’
Still unanswered, Dan gently shrugged off the quiet and said in a benevolent voice, as if he were accepting Steve’s failings, “Perhaps, it is that the dawn’s fragile light gives us hope, after the fears of the dark night.”
Quickly brightening, he said, “Well, enjoy the new sun and a beautiful day. I will see you later, Steve. I’ve got to make a call home to say goodnight to the kids.”
Steve watched him leave with sleep-grimed eyes that unexpectedly seemed a little blurry. “Yeah, I will see you later …”
And Dan strode away.
“Oh, marvelous,” he admonished himself about his useless interaction with his friendly conversationalist. “Very well done.”
The undemanding and friendly Dan had left him feeling aggravated and remote. He was a little disappointed that Dan hadn’t the time to reverentially talk about his family; he enjoyed the feeling he got when Dan described them, a tingle of gladness, as if the children were laughing somewhere close by.
He kept seeking the man’s presence—he desired the warmth he felt in Dan’s company—but like a wise old moth he feared the flame. In his heart he envied the easy nature of the man, and it left his inability to risk exposing his secret a nagging irritation.
He looked down over the walkway bars again, to the water’s surface beneath him, and in a fit of annoyance dropped the half-full polystyrene cup of ‘le fat chef’ coffee. The cup smacked against a pipe, spraying its contents out over the oil rig’s inner framework. The random act of vandalism dismissed his thoughts of Dan but opened the doorway for his trepidation about last night to return. He kicked a walkway post with a steel-toe-capped rigger boot for good measure and was pleased by the solid thud and subsequent thrumming vibration, but his physical display was also rewarded by a sudden wave of nausea.
He quickly went down two levels, nervously looking around the accommodation levels, white corrugated metal rectangles piled like huge Lego bricks on one side of the platform. With the operations and science blocks they were piled the same, but in red and green on two of the sides. The last side of the rig’s metal-framed square held the cranes and helipad substructure.
Jogging up the walkway toward his cabin, he began to feel relief loosen his knotted insides. He’d made it without running into the source of his anxiety, but when he turned the last corner to his cabin, he found it waiting for him with a stomach-turning grin.
The large beefy frame of Lee Jones turned toward him with a fake welcome on his large fleshy face. Behind him like a smirking wolf was Brainy Michaels, who was the rangy opposite of the big, brawny Lee Jones. Brainy radiated oddly mixed yellows and reds in his aura, shades too confusing for him to interpret, unlike those of Lee Jones.
“Hello, Stevie, mate. Was just coming to check how you were feeling. Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten about the money you owe me from last night.”
He drawled around a replay of his toothy grin, while putting a chunky hand on Steve’s shoulder in an uncomfortable imitation of friendship.
Steve sensed a void of compassion that hovered in Lee’s aura, like a black lake of spite behind his façade of charm; it leaked a radiance of dark, gangrenous greens.
“Mind you, you could always try and win again tonight, if you feel a bit luckier?” Lee continued with his act of good-natured banter, but it was colorless and without friendship.
Steve’s stomach dropped, and his mouth went dry. He had lost every penny he had to Lee last night.
He’d always been good at cards, had always seen in the shifts of their surrounding radiance when the other players had strong or weak cards, when someone else wasn’t confident in the card they played or was just plain bluffing. But last evening in the hot and oppressive atmosphere of the canteen, when he was faced with Lee’s smiling antipathy, he needed lager just to get through the experience, and his gambling edge had vanished in its haze.
He was caught as always between his need for acceptance and being the person he felt himself to be inside, while never finding a place of contentment between the two.
“Er, yeah, sure, Lee, of course I can … You can give me a chance to win it all back, mate?” he asked, his voice sounding too high and anxious.
Lee’s grin became even wider.
“No problem, Stevie. I wouldn’t want you to go ashore with nothing. Or without feeling you’d paid your debts, mate.” His tone was jovial, but a cutting edge hid
beneath his easy tone.
Lee laughed and Brainy joined in. Steve felt a wave of cold wash through his bowels that settled like ice in his stomach. When they had left, he went to a metal toilet cubicle, locked himself in and waited till his guts unclenched and the shaking in his legs subsided. The worst was his knowing that he’d have to try and win tonight, or he would be broke and would have only his home, his mother’s old flat, left to pay off his debt.
Dan retreated from yet another perplexing conversation with the enigmatic and dark Steve Staples that left him frustrated. They had been coming across each other on the helideck since Dan first arrived six weeks ago. He felt that the roughneck man, though mostly quiet, was more than he seemed to be. In between silences he let slip moments of humour and intelligent insight that tantalized Dan’s interest. Unlike the man on deck today, Steve usually seemed to have an innate ability to catch whatever mood Dan was in.
It may be that he wanted to see more in Steve than was there, because of his lack of common ground with his management colleagues. Dan had expected, with his university background, to be welcomed as one of their own, but the management had turned out to be a mixture of arrogance, ignorance, and overbearing self-importance.
Maybe he just missed the camaraderie of student life. He’d not located one person with a shared interest or a desire to discuss anything beyond the work the rig carried out, football, cards, and TV and action films.
He arrived at his cabin still pondering the strange yet enigmatic character he had begun to think of as a companion and went straight to his desk, picking up where he had left off in his latest letter to his wife. Due to his boredom and social seclusion, the letter was reaching epic proportions.
He told her more stories of his boss and head of geology, John Lawson, or ‘School Bully’ as he nicknamed him, trying to imagine her smile as he wrote about the man’s ‘egg in a nest’ balding head.
Galapagos Below Page 19