by Paul Tobin
“Bzzz,” Melville argued.
“Oh, don’t be like that! It’s just too dangerous for you!” As if to illustrate my point, a huge burst of lightning came crashing down only a few yards away from us, slicing through the air like a dagger. There were hundreds of lightning strikes, crashing down all around.
“Bzzz,” Melville said.
“I know it’s dangerous for me, too! But I have to help Nate! I have to save Polt! I have to stop the Red Death Tea Society!”
“Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzz! Bzzz!”
“I know you want to do all those things, too, but you’re too small to survive the storm! Please! Go back home.”
Melville hovered in place for a time. I could see that she was thinking, and I knew she wanted to help, but she’s awfully intelligent for a bee, and she knew I was right.
“Bzzz,” she said, turning around and flying off.
I watched her zoom away.
Wondering what she was doing.
Because I couldn’t understand what she’d said.
I landed at the edge of the lake.
Nate was nowhere to be seen. There were a few dozen people who’d taken shelter when the storm began, huddled beneath the protection of picnic tables or the open pavilions, where at least there was some shelter, but the storm was so intense that it was a constant barrage of danger. Even the birds had taken refuge, abandoning the skies and their trees and squeezing into the same spaces as the humans and the other animals, so that all of the people in their bright bathing suits were grouped together with pigeons and squirrels, with dogs and cats and seagulls and even an owl, all of them shifting uneasily, much like happens at our school dances, where everyone huddles against the walls with their closest friends and avoids the dance floor at all costs.
One of the gulls came wobbling out from beneath a picnic table. It trembled and squawked with the efforts of pushing onward through the storm, waddling closer and closer, barely visible in the driving rain. The hail plummeted down, rough pellets the size of marbles or golf balls thumping off the gull, making a constant clang clang clang noise.
“Wait,” I said. “Clang clang clang?” I tried to shield my eyes from the horrible rain so that I could see the bird better, but the downpour was too thick and the constant flashes of lightning too bright, so I didn’t recognize the seagull until it had hopped and flopped all the way to my feet, where it stopped and gazed up at me with a unmistakable expression of distaste for the storm.
“Piffle,” it said.
“Sir William!” I said. Then, “Where’s Nate? He’s doing something stupid! I need to find him!” I shoved the note I was carrying at the robot seagull, as if to prove what I was saying, but of course Sir William has known Nate longer than I have, and there’s no way he still required any proof that Nate could do some intensely and immensely foolish things, such as going off all by himself and trying to be a hero.
The rain all but dissolved the note, and the hailstones battered it away. I was getting bruised by the fierce weather, and even though I wasn’t using the jetbelt the wind was picking me up, gusting me around.
The earth shook.
Again.
Worse this time.
The ground jerked upward and I was slapped into the shallow water at the edge of the lake. I’d barely stood up before I was tossed again, this time by an enormous wave that washed me almost fifty feet onto the shore, where a group of pigeons were staring at me from beneath the shelter of a picnic table that was luckily bolted down to a section of concrete. Several of the pigeons and I made eye contact, and I could tell they were judging me, which is probably the only time in my life that I’ve felt mentally inferior to a pigeon, because pigeons are, as my dad once explained, whimsically-brained.
“Don’t you have something better to do?” I asked the pigeons, fully aware that they never have anything better to do, which is why we should teach them to play checkers or perhaps how to read a book, or at least teach them some common courtesy, because walking under phone lines where pigeons are perched is the bravest act in most people’s lives.
My phone rang.
It was Liz.
“Delphine,” she said. “This is not fun anymore. Where are you?”
“The lake. Don’t come here. It’s too dangerous.”
“See you in a bit,” she said. Then hung up.
“Ahh! You pigeon-brain!” I told my phone. Then I looked to the pigeons and said, “I’m sorry. That was rude.”
The rains and the wind were still blowing me around, and I still couldn’t find Nate. Maybe he’d lied about where he was going? I didn’t want to believe that the last words he’d ever spoken to me were lies. I didn’t want to believe that he’d spoken any last words at all. But where was he? What was I supposed—
“Delphine!” I heard. The lake waters erupted in a straight line.
“Help!” This time the voice came from a blur of blue, yellow, and red that zoomed across the beach.
“Me!” Another blur from a different direction, cutting across the picnic area. It was Chester, running so fast that when he rushed past the bolted-down picnic table it was ripped up in the wake of his speed, shattering into wooden shards, ripping chunks of concrete from the ground, with pigeons scattering in all directions and immediately buffeted by the winds and the hailstones, in deadly danger of being torn apart in the same manner as the picnic table. Then, the pigeons started disappearing from midair, plucked out of their windswept flight by Chester as he rushed the poor birds to the safety of another pavilion, much as I’d saved the moviegoers from the falling sign.
“Chester!” I yelled, but by then he was gone again, running so fast that he dashed across the lake itself, sending violent sprays of water out in both directions, as if a giant knife had sliced down through the lake to . . .
. . . to . . .
“Hey,” I said.
For the briefest of seconds, before the water had filled the trench caused by Chester’s speed, I could see the top of a building.
Then the lake settled back into place and the building was gone. But . . . I’d seen it. Out in the middle of the lake, far off shore and far below the surface, there was a submerged building with a bright red teacup painted on its side.
“Hey,” I said again, and dove into the waters.
The first time I’d ever gone to Polt Pond, I’d been with my family. Back then I was maybe four years old and probably as smart as a cheese sandwich.
I’d been snorkeling with my brother Steve, who even in today’s world is mostly the kind of brother who . . . when he gets transformed into a zebra . . . you shrug and say, “Well, it was going to happen eventually.”
Snorkeling was a lot of fun, because I was wearing flippers and a mask and I could sneak into someone else’s world, where the fish would stare at me like I was some unfathomable creature, which of course I was, to them. The fish would swim right up to my face and just stare, even if I reached out and touched them. One small fish tried to hide in my hair.
Because I was very naive and only cheese-sandwich smart, I’d tried to swim to the bottom of the lake, which, considering the depths, was very much Something I Should Not Do. Luckily, Dad was there and he touched my shoulder and shook his head before I’d gone very far, and so I’d kept to the shallows, diving no more than five or six feet, all with Dad watching, and with the colorful fish investigating us, occasionally nibbling at our fingers.
It was magical.
It was a whole other world, beneath the surface.
Beneath the surface, it was still a whole other world, even more so than the last time, because this time there were SO many fish. They were coming from the deep water, scared up to the shallows by something happening down in the dark depths that made it too dangerous even for the fish, with them now circling around me in vast schools of all shapes and sizes, many of them looking to me as if in hope that I could solve whatever problem was bothering them.
I gave them a thumbs-up, which was perhaps more confid
ent than I felt, and also it struck me that fish do not have thumbs, so it’s likely they found my gesture to be confusing.
I swam toward the center of the lake, where I’d seen the building.
The water went deeper, first a little more than ten feet, and then maybe twenty, and then a vast black hole where I couldn’t see the bottom. Swimming was very easy, because as luck would have it my jetbelt worked underwater, meaning I was swimming much faster than any of the fish that were following me, which quite likely annoyed them. It would be like a visiting goldfish beating my best time on my adventure training course.
When I reached the edge of the seemingly bottomless pit I stopped for a bit. I wasn’t hesitating; there was no way I was going to chicken out, not with Nate’s life at stake and all of Polt depending on me. It’s just that, one talent where a goldfish definitely has me beat is that of breathing underwater. It’s not so much a lack of training; it’s more a lack of gills.
So . . . I stared at that watery void and wondered how far I could swim, how deep I could make it, before my breath ran out.
“About four hours,” one of the fish said.
“Gahh!” I gasped, exploding bubbles out of my mouth.
The fish said, “What I mean is, you can breathe and even talk underwater, thanks to the nano-bots in your system. I took a quick moment to upgrade them after the flooding in the school.”
“Gahh!” I said again, and tried to swim past the fish and escape, because I was seriously not in the mood to deal with a talking fish. I have not, in fact, ever been in that mood.
“Sorry, Delphine,” the fish said. It was about the length of my forearm and had a bit of a pancake shape, the way some fish do, so they look chubby from the side but thin from straight on. It was vibrantly colored, with bright reds and glowing oranges. Basically, it was a Dazzling Pancake Fish, if such things exist.
The fish’s voice sounded a lot like . . . Nate’s.
I reached out and tapped on the fish. It went clang clang clang, which is not a fish noise. It is a robot noise.
“You are a robot fish,” I said, the first time I’d ever made such an accusation.
“If you’re wondering what I am,” the fish said, “I’m a robot fish. But also I’m a note that’s been left for you. I would like to point out that I am only responding to your probable statements, as I’ve calculated your likely responses.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“If you need to punch me, I have installed a punching pad.” The fish twisted in the water, and on its opposite side it had a somewhat fatter area, like a cushion.
“I no longer doubt you,” I said, punching the fish, which . . . on impact . . . whooshed a couple of feet back in the water. I hadn’t punched it very hard, because while the topic had never before come up in my life, I honestly do think it’s rude to punch fish, even when they’re robots.
The fish said, “So, if you’re here, that means you’ve probably come to rescue me. It’s too late for that. Go back.”
“I’m not going back,” I told the fish. I was hovering twenty feet below the surface of the water. Several schools of fish were swimming around, like flocks of birds in the air. They were investigating me, and they were investigating the Nate-fish, and also examining the hailstones that were plunging into the water before bobbing back up to the surface.
“I calculate that you will refuse my request to go back,” the fish said. “So I will now pose this as a request. Delphine, as a favor, please go back.”
“No,” I said, beginning to swim toward the dark void of the bottomless pit. The robot fish followed, whirling in circles around me, then even swam in front of me and began pushing back . . . trying to stop me.
“In all probability, you’re not listening to what I’m saying,” the fish said.
“I never listen to what talking fish tell me to do,” I mentioned, which is a rule that I think more people should live by, or at least those people who encounter talking fish, which, I’ll admit, is probably uncommon.
“Six,” the fish said. I was pushing forward, moving it back, diving deeper into the darkest parts of the water.
I said, “What? Six?”
“Five,” the fish said. If I wasn’t wearing my jetbelt, I wouldn’t have been able to make any progress pushing against the fish, but . . . as it was . . . we were already a good forty feet under the surface, and going down, and down.
“Four,” the fish said.
I said, “Nate-fish, I know you’re only a preprogrammed series of messages, but even so I’d think you’d be smart enough to understand when you’re beat. I’m not backing down, not if you think you’re going to sacrifice yourself, not without me at least trying to help.” The fish clamped its mouth onto the hem of my shirt and tried to tug me back, but I wouldn’t let it stop me.
I wouldn’t.
“Three,” the fish said. It was difficult to see anything, because the light from the surface couldn’t reach this far down. I was at least a hundred feet under the water.
“Two,” the fish said.
“Just stop it! I’m not sure why you’re counting down, but we’re friends and I’m not stopping! So if you think you’re going to spray me with some knockout gas, you’d better think again, and if you think you’re going to do that thing where you play with my mind, you’d better not, or I’ll triple all my shoulder-punches from now on, and if you think you’re going to—”
“One,” the fish said, circling back to my front and pushing against me even harder than before. It was starting to be much more difficult to make any progress, because I wasn’t only fighting against the robot fish, I was fighting against the intensifying water pressure, and I’d swum so far down that it was pitch black, so I was catching only the slightest glimpses of the fish, chance metallic gleams in an otherwise black void, but I was sure I’d seen that building, and I was going to find it, and I wouldn’t let some stupid robot fish keep me from Nate, not when he was stupidly going to sacrifice his life to stop the Red Death Tea Society, not when Nate and I had never had a chance to—
“Zero,” the fish said.
And the lights came on.
They were so bright against the blackness.
The lights were streaming from the robot fish’s eyes, powerful searchlights that were probing the water’s depths, illuminating the vastness as if I were floating in the middle of some gigantic cathedral, sinking lower and lower. The robot fish was no longer pushing against me, but instead leading the way.
“I may as well just give up and let you help,” the fish said. “Index level one has been reached.”
“What? Index level one? What’s that mean?”
“In all likelihood, you have inquired about index level one. While I would normally avoid the question, perhaps by talking about cake in order to distract you, I find that—”
“Talking about cake would distract me,” I admitted. “What’s all this about cake? Wait. Did you just admit that . . . whenever you don’t want to answer one of my questions . . . you fool me into talking about cake?”
“Yes,” the fish said, then pivoted to the side with the punching bag.
I punched it.
“Okay . . . get back to talking about level one,” I ordered. The fish began swimming deeper into the depths. If you’re wondering if it was creepy following the glowing eyes of a talking fish into a bottomless void, then the answer is yes, and I was wishing I could distract myself with cake.
The fish said, “Because I’m currently programming this robot fish on a day when I have to tell the truth, the truth is that I keep a chart of stubbornness.”
“Okaaaaay,” I said. I already didn’t like where this was going. And I also didn’t like where we were going, because the eerie fish-face lights were no longer the only illumination in the watery depths. There was a strange red glow coming from below, and at no point in the entirety of human existence has a strange red glow in the darkness meant anything nice.
“Level Six stubborn
ness is not wanting to go to bed when you’re supposed to,” the fish said. “And Level Five is not wanting to quit playing video games. Level Four is not wanting to quit studying the atomic interplay at the center of black holes, although maybe that’s just me. Level Three is not wanting to do your homework, although that one’s not me. Level Two, the second most stubborn thing in the entire world, is wanting cake more than pie, although that one’s just you.”
We were getting closer to the pulsing red light. It was about the size of a beach ball, hanging in the depths of the blackness.
“And what’s Level One stubbornness?” I asked. “What’s the most stubborn thing in the entire world?”
The robot fish said, “The most stubborn thing in the world is . . . Delphine Cooper.” It swiveled to show the punching pad again, with the red lights of the strange floating object illuminating it from below, making the fish look almost too scary to punch, but I was able to do it anyway, because I am stubborn that way.
My phone rang.
It was Liz.
“Bad weather we’re having,” she said. “Rain. Hail. There’s a couple of those one things. What do they call them? Umm, oh yeah. Tornadoes.”
“Plus the earthsqueaks!” I heard. It was Ventura’s voice.
“Right,” Liz said. “Those, too. Where are you?”
“Nearing the bottom of the lake,” I said.
“Cool.”
A pause.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Yep.”
A pause, and then, “How do you even get cell phone reception down there?”
“Probably because my phone is super-charged. Nate worked on it. He said I can get reception anywhere. Even in space. Listen, Liz . . . get somewhere safe. It’s too dangerous there.”
A pause, and then I could hear Stine and Ventura and Wendy and Liz talking back and forth, wondering if anywhere was safe, and there was a discussion that I couldn’t catch because it was hard to hear my friends over the roar of the winds coming through the phone, plus the sounds of the lightning flashes and the crakk-crakk-crakking of hailstones hitting all around them.