The rest of it went slower as every muscle in her body was telling her she needed to rest.
I’ll do that later. When they are back.
In the points of the pentacle she placed five portions of bread wrapped in linen, and in the valleys five of the scented candles. Finally came the part she’d been dreading. She removed the withered hand from its wrapping and, trying not to look too closely, placed it in the centre of the circle.
I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.
She raised her voice and started the chant she’d learned earlier. The room thrummed in sympathy.
Kerub impero tibi per Adam
Aquila impero tibi per alas Tauri.
Serpens impero tibi per Angelum et Leonem.
The walls of the nursery seemed to beat and pulse, as in time with a giant heart. Overhead she heard the sound of rapid movement, footsteps fading in the distance as if something had just run across the room upstairs. She caught a movement at the corner of her eye and turned just as dark shadows slithered from the walls and began to make their way towards her.
She raised her voice to a loud shout, and started to stamp her feet in time. The whole room responded by ringing with each stamp.
Ri linn dioladh na beatha, Ri linn bruchdadh na falluis, Ri linn iobar na creadha, Ri linn dortadh na fala.
The shadows continued to come forward, a wall of them four, six, eight feet tall until they filled the whole room and writhed high around the circle. She was buffeted from side to side as the floor bucked and swayed.
Damnú ort! she shouted at the top of her voice.
A percussive blast blew through the room; a light so bright that she could still see it even when she pressed her eyes tightly closed. The rocking abated, and silence fell, her eyes slowly adjusting again to the dim light provided by the candles. Even before she could focus she heard him—George—singing
Don’t let the dark stop you shining,
Her legs went to jelly beneath her and she half-fell, half-stumbled to the floor, tears blinding her. Someone sat there beside her. She reached out a hand.
George?
Cold flesh pressed against her, wet and clammy. She tasted blood as the sound of a car engine roared, brakes screeched and glass shattered.
The shock of the crash broke her back.
As night fell, the shadows gathered around the room, falling on the body, whispering as they fed.
WHERE THE DARK IS DEEPEST
—RAY CLULEY—
The bright lights of the ward showed Sheila in stark detail. Her pale, drawn face. The swollen lump on her forehead. The crusty line of blood that bisected her eyebrow. More disturbing to Stan were the tubes in her nose and mouth and arm, the bandages, the clamp on her finger and the wire that ran from it to the monitor with its steady rhythm.
Stan took a seat by her bedside without removing his coat. He stroked the hair from her face, careful not to touch her wounds. Her breasts rose and fell under sheets as tight as swaddling.
“Oh Sheila,” he said. “What happened?”
He covered her free hand in both of his and closed his eyes as if to share the darkness with her.
***
“Two hundred metres.”
Sheila nodded, not liking how easily Tom took control of the transponder. He may not have meant anything by it, probably just rookie enthusiasm, but it was so much like Mark that she had to wonder. Silly, really. She had plenty to do. Maybe it was his Aussie accent that bothered her, the way it made everything sound like a question; two hundred metres? Mark had at least always been sure of himself.
“Roger that,” came Stan’s voice from up top, tinny but clear despite all the ocean between them. “How’s your pilot?”
Tom glanced over and she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger.
“Not bad, for a Sheila.”
Sheila turned the circle into a middle finger and Tom laughed. He was never going to get tired of the Sheila jokes.
Under his laughter the submersible pinged its sonar.
“Two hundred fifty.”
They wouldn’t roll camera until five hundred metres and then they’d keep it running all the way down. Still, Sheila remained close to the viewport, eager to see anything and everything they shared the water with. There was nothing yet, though. At least not that she could see. But then down here, in the gloom, many animals had become almost completely transparent; their survival depended on not being seen. And yet . . . maybe something . . .
“Losing the lights,” she said.
Tom nodded.
The Nautilus carried quartz iodide and metal halide lights with ten hours battery life. Sheila flipped the switches to cut them off.
“Ah.”
Brief bright flashes flared outside and on the monitors. Bioluminescence: bacteria-powered light.
“Firefly squid,” Tom said.
“Yep. Very good.”
Was that patronising? But Tom began an Attenborough impression that suggested he was okay. It was quite remarkable, considering his accent.
“At three hundred metres the ocean looks like space, stars shining in the darkness . . . of the twilight zone.” And he launched into the soundtrack of the television series.
It did look like space out there, though. A permanent night that would become darker than anything else she’d ever seen. She flipped the lights back on.
“Three fifty. Temperature, five degrees.”
Five degrees outside, but inside they were sweltering; the Nautilus was even more cramped than the Alvin. A titanium cylinder two metres wide by eight metres long, the Nautilus was not a large vessel and it was crammed full with equipment: pressure valves; controls; food; water; urination bags; plus one researcher and a pilot, which was why it paid to have a pilot who knew more than simply how to drive. Especially when your researcher was still learning the ropes. There were only two of them, but the Nautilus quickly warmed up with their combined body heat.
Tom still wore his cap, despite the heat, but he had stripped down to a vest that might have been white when he bought it. Sheila wore her favourite T-shirt. It was much cleaner than Tom’s vest, bright white with a big blue cartoon dolphin standing on its tail, smiling. A line of text said ‘beautiful and clever’. An ex had bought it for her. A before-Mark ex. But even in the T-shirt and shorts she was too hot. She loved the Nautilus, but she did wish it was cooler.
At least Tom had stopped joking about air con, or opening a window.
Their windows were five tiny viewports the size of saucers—anything bigger and they’d implode under the pressure—with overlapping fields of view, which was one plus they had on the Alvin. Camera stations rigged outside took stills and motion picture which they could watch via a series of monitors not much bigger than the viewports. Not that there was much to see out there yet. It was very dark outside, and it was only going to get darker as they left the photic zone, the twilight zone, the midnight zone, right down to the abyssal plain.
Another advantage they had in the Nautilus was the ability to drop five thousand metres instead of the Alvin’s four and a half. Not as good as the Shinkai or the COMRA, but good enough for the Mariana Trench. Seven miles deep, it was the largest in the abyssal plain and only six submersibles in the world were capable of reaching it. Yet between all of them they’d explored less than one percent of this part of the planet. Even the Nautilus, which had made over three and a half thousand successful dives since its construction in ‘82, had still seen very little.
“You been here before?” Sheila asked.
“Not in this. Mostly the Alvin. You?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“First time in a submersible?”
She glanced at him but he was checking the monitors and it was hard to tell if he was joking. “No,” she said, “just first time here. I filmed a lot of continental slope stuff in this tub, and some vents for a couple of TV programmes.”
“Cool, which ones?”
“Er, there
was Beneath the Surface and one called Water Worlds? It’s for kids.”
Tom nodded but said, “No, I mean which vents?”
“Oh. Both ends of the Pacific. Went one and a half miles down near the Galapagos Islands and then filmed the dragon chimneys near Japan.”
She sounded like she was justifying her involvement, but Tom’s tone had suggested nothing more than curiosity. She was still too used to Mark. Tom didn’t seem to have noticed.
“I’ve seen the dragons,” he said. “Amazing.”
Sheila nodded. They’d been very impressive, massive columns as big as stacked houses erupting in the darkness, spewing superheated water as hot as molten lead and loaded with minerals. Clouds of sulphides solidified to give each chimney a strange vertical shape that sat in four hundred degrees of a chemical cocktail, scolding and toxic. And yet there was life. In fact, a certain type of bacteria thrived in such conditions, just as a certain shrimp ate the bacteria. At the dragon chimneys the crustaceans feeding on the bacteria had been squat lobsters that were actually furry and white. People used to believe that life couldn’t exist without the sun, but each vent was its own little oasis community taking energy not from the sun but from the Earth’s core. Sheila had filmed vent after vent for the best part of three months and had never been bored, finding a new species for every ten days she spent there.
“What’s the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen?” Tom asked.
“Hm?”
“The dragon chimneys are beautiful, right, but what was the most horrible?”
Sheila thought about it. She thought of Mark. Thought of him in their bed, fucking an undergraduate he was working with. The girl had hidden her face under the sheets but Mark had simply climbed off and apologised, like he’d left the toilet seat up or something. She shook her head.
“I once saw a killer whale toying with a seal,” Tom told her. “No reason for it. It washed it off an ice sheet and tossed it around. Didn’t eat anything except a flipper, and even that seemed like an accident.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Okay, next. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen?”
“I saw a field of tube worms once.” She was tired of the game already, but Tom seemed to want more. “They were feeding off the methane escaping from the sea bed,” she said. “Thousands of them, hundreds of metres across the ocean floor. Looked like a field of alien grass.” She wiped the sweat from her brow. “What about you?”
“Weirdest thing I’ve seen?”
She nodded.
“Well, I saw this woman once who could smoke a cigarette with her —”
Sheila held up her hand. “Never mind.”
Tom grinned, reported the depth and temperature, then said, “I was half a mile down, bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and we found what looked like a massive lake. I mean, sandy shore, tide line, everything, except underwater. We’re thinking, what the hell?”
“Cold seep.”
Tom only glanced at her but his disappointment was clear. “Yeah. Big soup of salty brine, heavier than sea water. What we thought was a sandy shore was actually hundreds of thousands of muscles.”
“Plenty of weird shit down here,” Sheila said.
“Yeah.” Tom pointed at the left view port. “Take a look.”
A number of jellies were moving with them, glowing in the lights of the submersible. They clenched the dark water in gentle convulsions that set them drifting up and away like underwater ghosts. They made her think of Mark; he’d lacked substance, too.
“Did you know,” Tom said as Sheila watched them, “We’ve learnt more about space than our own ocean?”
Sheila did know. She thought everybody knew. “Yeah,” she said.
“We know more about the moon than we do the abyssal plain.”
The abyssal plain was where they were heading. With ninety percent of the Earth’s living space in the ocean, it always amazed Sheila that people didn’t think of it as an ocean planet, and with over sixty percent covered by seawater over a mile deep, it astounded her that so little was known about its depths.
“Okay. Did you know -”
Sheila held up her hand.
“What?” said Tom, checking each monitor, “What’ve we got?”
She smiled, but it was tight-lipped. “Nothing. I just want you to stop with trivia time. Assume the answer to every ‘did you know’ is yes. I’m not just a glorified chauffeur.”
Tom launched back into Attenborough. “The female ruins the male’s fun, giving him nothing else to do, but watch as she takes them deeper . . . deeper into the dark.”
The sonar punctuated his comment with a sharp ping!
***
Stan released Sheila’s hand and excused himself from her bedside, explaining to her sleeping body that he was going to get a cup of coffee. “Can I get you anything?” he asked from the doorway, as if he could trick her into being awake.
One of the machines beside her huffed up and settled down for her breath. Another made her heartbeat audible with a tiny blip and peak. That was all he got.
***
Below one thousand metres they were in the dark zone. No sunlight at all penetrated as far as the dark zone. Food was scarce, too. Once, Sheila had filmed a whale carcass as it slowly disappeared into the mouths of scavengers. It had been little more than blubber clinging to bones when she came across it, spider crabs over a metre across feeding from it, eels picking at the putrid remains. It was an image that came up whenever she thought of the last year of her marriage. But usually most life forms down here fed upon marine snow, the detritus falling from the surface, which took months to reach where Sheila and Tom were. This was good for them because, with less than three percent organic material to pollute it, the sea was as clear as tap water in the light of the submersible. They were following the continental slope, sonar beating a quiet unhurried heartbeat.
“You okay?” Tom asked.
Sheila turned to see Tom was looking at her with the sort of interest she’d rather he directed at the monitors.
“I’m fine.”
Tom stared.
“I’m fine. Really.”
She’d been thinking of Mark. They’d met on a dive like this, the dragon chimneys actually, so it was hard not to think of him. Just as the underwater chimneys could become cold without warning, dying because the energy had been redirected elsewhere, so her marriage to the prick had quickly cooled, leaving behind only an empty shell of waste chemicals. Relationships made him claustrophobic, apparently. Not that it stopped him having two of them, both at the same time.
“Stan was telling me about a place topside that does good seafood,” Tom said. “Of course it does, right? Anyway, do you like seafood?”
Sheila adjusted their course slightly. “We’re coming up on the trench.”
Tom returned his attention to the cameras and monitors and for the next eight hundred metres they moved silently through the dark, travelling with the current, their horizontal movement barely noticeable unless they looked down at the sea bed moving past.
“Oh,” said Sheila.
“What is it?”
She was quiet for a moment, then, “I thought I saw something.”
Below five hundred metres, new creatures were found all the time, bizarre creatures of all sorts of shapes and sizes. In fact, a new species was discovered with almost every dive.
“I don’t see —”
The rest of his sentence was snapped off as the vessel lurched and a heavy metallic thud resounded in the chamber. Tom was thrown back and then snapped forward. His head struck a monitor. Sheila folded over the controls, was thrown sideways, then fell face down. Her eyebrow opened against the corner of something. She clutched at it. They were spinning toward the ocean floor.
“What happened?” Tom yelled.
Sheila caught a brief glimpse through one of the ports of something rushing away, something dark and long and fast, and then the seabed was rushing up to meet them and they hit it hard.
Twice. Tail end first, then the rest of the tub. A cloud of sand and ocean ooze rose up to envelop them.
***
There were voices in the darkness.
***
“You all right?” Tom asked.
Sheila thought she’d passed out for a moment but the lights came back on and she realised the momentary blackness had been a technical fault. She nodded, still holding her brow.
“You’re bleeding,” Tom said, pointing.
“It’s nothing.”
Tom massaged his neck with one hand, pressed buttons on the monitors with the other. “What did we hit?”
“Down here? Are you kidding? There’s nothing to hit except the floor.”
“Well we did that, too.”
Sheila checked every button, dial, and reading they had.
“Seriously, what happened? Something hit us?”
He’d meant it to sound sarcastic, but Sheila said, “Looks like it.”
She ran the cameras back for him and they watched it together. Tom leaned close. “What, the, fuck?”
Sheila had to agree.
“It’s big,” she said. “Ten, twelve metres.”
“That’s, like, a fucking whale shark or something.”
“Not down here. Not that fast.”
“I said like.”
They watched it again.
“Look.” Sheila tapped the screen.
“Is it a bunch of somethings?”
“I think those are tentacles.”
Tom’s eyes widened. “Strewth!” He winced, looked at Sheila. “Don’t ever tell anybody I said that.”
“Speaking of which . . .”
The radio, the transponder, was working okay. Mark used to hate it when she called it a radio; it was an acoustic transponder, or an underwater telephone, both of which sounded ridiculous to Sheila.
“Stan? We’ve just, er . . . We had a . . . difficulty.”
“Roger that. You all okay? What happened?”
She looked at Tom and he shrugged.
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