The Expeditioners and the Secret of King Triton's Lair

by S. S. Taylor

  “They must be eating the coconuts,” I told Sukey. “We wondered why there weren’t any on the beach.”

  “Can all eels come out of the water like that and climb trees?” Sukey whispered.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe they’ve evolved to be able to come up on land. It must be an unknown species. But at least they don’t seem interested in us.”

  “This is crazy,” Sukey said. “A new species of eel. Bioluminescent jellyfish. Zander would have loved this.”

  “Yeah, he would have.”

  We were both silent, thinking of Zander.

  “Kit,” she said, after a minute. “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it? We’ll find them. We’ll get off this island.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just pulled her into a hug and we sat there like that for hours, leaning against into other and listening to the eels chewing on the coconuts up in the trees. At some point, we must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was very early morning, the sun staining the sky pink as it rose.

  Sukey was still fast asleep and I carefully got up so as not to wake her. I walked down to the edge of the water. There was no sign of the eels now, and the waves softly lapped at the shore, the breeze salty and gentle on my face.

  I walked for a while, following the shoreline as far as I could before it ran into the sharp rocks of the cliff. I still felt frustrated by Dad’s map. I had figured out the musical code. That should have been it. And yet there was some other mystery to discover. I felt suddenly angry. What was Dad thinking? We’d almost died and he was playing games, teasing me with maps and clues.

  Except I couldn’t quite believe he’d do that. If what the Explorer had said was true, that Dad was leaving these clues for me and me alone, then these puzzles must have some purpose. I was missing something.

  I pulled the whistle out from under my shirt and put it to my lips. I’d memorized the notes, and I played the piece through a couple of times, but no melody emerged. I wracked my brain for songs that Dad had sung to us, tunes he whistled while he worked, ballads he liked to sing in the bath, but nothing matched the notes on the map. I was about to turn away and head back down the beach when something made me look out at the water.

  And look again.

  The sun was very bright now. I wondered if I was hallucinating.

  Emerging from the sea and onto the beach was a sea turtle as big as an elephant.

  Thirty-two

  It had a huge head and beak, its skin a shiny, pearly green. I knew it must be a sea turtle, but it was unlike any sea turtle I’d ever seen. Its shell, instead of being flat and ridged, was domed and perfectly smooth, made of a pearly but transparent glasslike substance. There were shiny metal fittings all along the edges of the shell, hinges and screws and gadgets. Its flippers were each as big as a rowboat. The right one had a long scar on it in the shape of a check mark.

  When it blinked its giant golden eyes at me, I knew this was the creature I thought I’d hallucinated under the water. The creature that had saved my life and brought us to the island. The turtle blinked again and waved its right flipper, the one with the scar, insistently, making a reedy chirping sound that sounded very much like Dad’s whistle. I considered: If Dad’s map had been a musical code, a code that was meant to summon the turtle when played on the whistle—well, then, why? Why did Dad want me to see this fantastical turtle?

  And then something happened that I couldn’t explain: I heard a voice inside my head.

  Not my own mind’s voice, the one I had been hearing for as long as I could remember, the voice that told me I’d said something stupid or the one that told me to be careful or that sometimes said things like No one likes you or You have no idea what you’re doing or That’s a good map!

  This was a completely different voice. It was a voice that came from somewhere else, that said, in a low whisper that seemed familiar, Get inside. Come with me.

  I stepped back so quickly that I tripped over a bit of driftwood on the beach. “Was that . . . was that you?” I said out loud once I’d gotten up, before I realized how crazy it was. A turtle who could somehow make me hear what he was thinking? It was impossible.

  His mouth didn’t move, but I heard the voice inside my head again. Yes. I hear you think. You hear me think.

  Like this? I thought, trying to direct the thought at the turtle’s head.

  Yes, said the voice. Come with me.

  With an audible click, the front of his shell opened, and again, he waved his flipper insistently. I didn’t know what else to do—the whole thing was so crazy that if I thought about it for more than two seconds, I was going to run screaming down the beach—so I stepped inside and sat down on a little ridge in the turtle’s shell that served as a bench. The shell slowly lowered and clicked shut.

  I was inside an airtight dome, but I found that I could breathe without any trouble at all. When I put my hand over a row of little holes down near the floor, I felt cold air coming out of them. The whole inside of the shell was made of a shiny, transparent substance that gleamed and glittered. It smelled of the sea, a fresh salty smell that surrounded me.

  And then he was using his flippers to scoot us along the sand and into the shallow waters off the beach. We sank silently below the surface in a rush of air bubbles and as soon as we were away from the beach, the turtle took off, speeding through the clear turquoise of the sea. We sped up and slowed down. The coral reef stretched out around the island. The turtle wove in and out of the reef so I could watch the colorful fish and anemones moving peacefully among the seaweed.

  Look.

  I did. And everywhere I looked, there was color. A huge yellow parrot fish swam by, inspecting me through the clear shell. A purple octopus flew up from the ocean floor amid a cloud of black ink. I saw a few of the coconut eels swimming dreamily down toward the ocean floor. A pack of bright yellow manta rays flapped by and we saw a fuchsia eel baring its teeth at the turtle from underneath a rock. All around me were amazing fish I had never seen before, fish I was pretty sure no one had ever seen before, and I felt a pang of sadness again, wondering if Zander would ever get to see them.

  And then we were beyond the reef and in the open water. The ocean floor fell off quickly and the turtle began descending, maybe ten feet every couple of seconds. The ocean grew darker as less light filtered through and it became harder and harder for me to see anything outside the shell. For the first time since he’d come up on the beach, I felt afraid, and I thought about Sukey, all alone, wondering where I’d gone. I shouldn’t have left her.

  We must have been traveling for nearly an hour when I saw the turtle wave his flipper again, and I heard the voice say, We’re almost there. I looked up to see something emerge from the murk, a huge dark field of shapes rising from the ocean floor. At first I thought they were trees, but as we got closer, I could see that they were the masts of sailing ships.

  The turtle swam slowly, letting me see the shipwrecks heaped on the ocean floor.

  As we came around, the words painted on their hulls, though worn away by time and water, stood out against the sand.

  The Mary South.

  The Adelaide.

  The still brightly painted hull of the Fair Beatrice. The turtle swam down so I could see that there weren’t any bodies in the wreck, just the broken half of the boat that had brought us here.

  This was the final resting place of Gianni Girafalco’s ship and of many others, as well. And perhaps it was the final resting place of their treasure.

  Was this what Dad had meant for us to find?

  I was still staring at the ghostly ships when the turtle started moving again, darting and circling and dropping though the now murky water. It got darker and darker as he swam, but his flippers began to glow like the jellyfish and I recognized the white light that had surrounded me in the water after the wreck.

  We were in a different part of the ocean now. No sunlight filtered down from the surface and I could see only because of the t
urtle’s luminescent flippers. There were no colorful fish or coral here, only small, amoebalike creatures, tiny shrimp, an odd-looking spiny fish that stared at us for a moment before moving on. The turtle swam deeper and deeper and the ocean floor sloped down steeply into the blackness.

  As the turtle swam along the bottom of what seemed to be an underwater canyon, I suddenly realized why I had a nagging familiar feeling that I’d seen this before. As I looked at the walls and curves of the canyon I realized I’d seen this exact topography described in lines and shades on paper.

  We were swimming through Girafalco’s Trench.

  I scrambled for the map and followed our route along what seemed to be the eastern slope of the trench, keeping an eye on my compass. We kept going, down into the narrowest part of the trench. The lights in the turtle’s flippers illuminated the walls as we reached the bottom. We flew along the ocean floor. Then the turtle slowed, turned, and soon we were speeding through a narrow tunnel of rock into what looked like a giant undersea cavern.

  And suddenly, it was even lighter. Light poured from the walls of the cavern, pearly, creamy light from no source I could see. It seemed to respond to our presence, getting brighter as we got closer, dimming once we’d passed. The walls seemed to be made of the same substance as the whistle.

  We’re almost there, the turtle said.

  Where?

  There. The turtle pointed its flipper into the water ahead.

  At first, I was only aware of a huge presence, of something taking up a lot of space. As we got closer, the presence resolved itself into the outline of thousands of buildings sprouting from the ocean floor, some very tall and skinny, some short and squat, some with rounded dome roofs that looked almost like the turtle’s shells, pearly but translucent, and in the very center, a huge, ornately decorated structure that reminded me of a church, with soaring towers and minarets and a dome rising above all the others.

  It was a massive underwater city.

  The turtle slowed and we approached a huge arch that seemed to mark the entrance. I had been staring so hard at the buildings that I hadn’t noticed two other turtles—not quite as large as mine—hovering at attention next to the gates. They chirped something at my turtle, who chirped back, and we went on through the arch.

  All across the ocean floor, there were thousands of structures, made of the same mother-of-pearl as the turtle’s shell. The tall, wide walls of the buildings were a rich, creamy white. The huge sheets of shell material were joined together with shiny metal rivets, the doors and windows made of translucent glass. And decorating the sides of the buildings were thousands and thousands of colorful seashells, pink and red and blue, forming incredible murals, just like the ones on St. Beatrice.

  There were other objects set into the sides of the buildings too, I realized as we swam more closely—shining gold coins and gemstones and pottery, the treasure from the ships, salvaged and used as decoration.

  The turtle wove his way through the streets.

  My mouth must have hung open as I stared at the incredible sights all around me.

  And then I heard the turtle’s voice in my head.

  Welcome to King Triton’s Lair.

  Thirty-three

  There were more turtles inside the city. Some swam like guards around the perimeters, circling around and around the glimmering structures. We wove in and out of the grid of streets, my turtle slowing down in front of the murals so I could see that many of them were maps like the ones on St. Beatrice.

  Who lives here?

  The voice took a moment to answer in my head. The Men of the Sea. But they are gone. We keep the city safe.

  Where did they go?

  We do not know.

  Except for the turtles, the city was deserted. The turtle was too big to enter the buildings, but he hovered near the windows so I could see into the rooms. Most of them contained furniture, couches and beds and tables made of coral and mother-of-pearl, decorated with seashells, some of them turned over as though whoever had lived there had left in a hurry. There was something timeless about the scenes in front of me. The Men of the Sea, whoever they were, could have left yesterday. Or a hundred years ago.

  When we’d been through the whole city, the turtle glided over to a central domed structure, a temple, I decided, and we swam inside through a huge window that seemed to have been made for him. We found ourselves in a cavernous hall, with the seashell murals decorating the walls and tables and chairs in rows. They were made from the same mother-of-pearl as the buildings. At one end of the hall was a huge throne, beautiful and empty, constructed from red coral and decorated with seashells and gold coins and gemstones.

  “King Triton’s throne,” I whispered to myself.

  Yes, the turtle answered. Now I will take you to the place.

  Which place?

  The place you were told to go.

  You mean my father? Do you know my father?

  The turtle didn’t send any response, and I had a moment of doubt. This was crazy. What was I thinking? Of course Dad hadn’t been here. It was ridiculous. If he had discovered the city where King Triton lived, if he had discovered a race of giant turtles who could communicate without talking, if he had found the ships’ graveyard, well, we would have known about it, wouldn’t we?

  But we had thought that about Ha’aftep Canyon. Maybe this was a place like that, a place that Dad had wanted me to know about, a place he didn’t want to reveal to the world. Because like Ha’aftep Canyon, it would be destroyed if people knew about it. I imagined tours through the city streets, gift shops selling shells plucked from the buildings, the turtles placed in cages for viewing.

  The turtle made his high chirping sound, and a door in the wall behind the throne slowly swung open, revealing a winding tunnel lined with the pearly, light-emitting substance that surrounded the city. We swam through and the doors closed behind us.

  We were now inside a long tunnel. Waiting for us at the end was another turtle, standing sentry before a small, rectangular room. This turtle was bigger than my turtle and his face had a wizened, wrinkled look to it that made me think he was very, very old. He warbled in a high reedy whistle and my turtle warbled something back before settling down on the floor of the cavern. I waited, but he didn’t offer any explanation. I walked around the inside of the shell, trying to figure out why he’d brought me here and what I was supposed to do.

  The walls of the room were covered with more of the shells, arranged in shapes that reminded me of hieroglyphics. At the far end, an entire wall was covered with tiny white stones and shells. They had been set into its surface, forming lines that radiated out from a central circle in imitation of the rays of the sun. Was that it? A picture of the sun? Was it another code? Clearly this is what the turtle had wanted me to see.

  I stared at the pattern until the lines of shells blurred together and I had to stand back to see the design made by the winding lines.

  And then, finally, I knew what it was.

  This was the next map. Dad had been leading me here all along.

  I tried to imprint it upon my brain, to take a mental picture of it so I would remember later, but it took me a while to get oriented. Before I could try to match this map to the maps in my head and figure out what it was, my turtle looked up sharply, as though he’d heard something, and whistled to the other turtle, who started to move around as though he was very agitated, churning up a lot of sand in the chamber. My turtle chirped and wheeled around, swimming back out through the tunnel, his flippers rowing through the water. I couldn’t see anything now, just the white of the churning water as we flew away from the map I’d come all this way to see.

  “No! No!” I pounded on the shell, not trusting my inner voice and yelling out loud at the back of the turtle’s head. “We can’t leave! Go back! I didn’t memorize it yet!”

  But he didn’t respond. We swam out of the throne room and then out of the city, very quickly now, up through the trench. Frantically, I took out my
compass and kept track of our direction so I’d be able to find my way back. We sped through the dark part of the ocean and then into the shallower, lighter waters, filled with all that bright sea life.

  What’s wrong?

  Danger.

  What kind?

  No answer. The turtle seemed scared, swiveling its head back and forth to search the ocean around him.

  We raced up toward the surface once again.

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the map. But I hadn’t looked at it long enough. It was the most frustrating kind of work, trying to remember something I’d hardly seen.

  This time, the beautiful fish and bright-red coral held no fascination for me. I shut my eyes and tried to remember, but all I could come up with was a mosaic of shells with no logic or order.

  The water around me became lighter and lighter and then suddenly, the door was opening and I was tipped out into the shallow water. Before I knew what was happening, the turtle had disappeared and I was standing on the beach, warm turquoise water up to my waist, blinking up at the bright sun as though nothing had happened.

  Thirty-four

  “There you are!” Sukey called. I looked up and saw her running down the beach toward me. “Where were you? Did you go swimming?”

  “I—I—I—” I stammered. I looked behind me to make sure the turtle wasn’t still there, but the water was calm, smooth as glass. We were alone. I stood speechless. She looked sunburned, her freckles not as stark as they usually were against the now-pink skin of her cheeks and nose. I was shaken. My legs were weak. I was worried I was going to pass out. I wanted to tell her about the turtle, but I didn’t even know where to begin and my brain was racing. The turtle’s thoughts had made their way into my brain and mine had made their way to his. Could it happen again? Did Sukey know what I was thinking? Would I be able to hear her thoughts? Had she been able to hear what I was thinking last night as I’d held her on the beach?