Pillars of the Deep

by Harper Alexander

  I’d been a shell.

  Returned to the water, my dehydrated spirit reconstituted. I felt it swell inside me, energy and elation flooding my limbs.

  Oh it was spectacular, being reunited with the water. I spiraled in glee, torpedoing through the invigorating cold. Bubbles sparkled around me, fizzing and gushing and tickling as they popped.

  I tired quickly of my heavy, twisting clothing, wrangling out of my shirt and shimmying out of my pants. Stripped to my underclothes, I kicked off afresh, loving the caress of water against flesh.

  Ahh, freedom. I was one with the fluid, sinuous atmosphere, a lover reunited with her mate, a child come home.

  Soon the calls of the whales joined the underwater ambiance, the liquid vibrations coming to me across the distance. I turned toward the call, crimped entrails of hair swirling thick across my vision. If my lion’s mane was out of control on land, it was a kraken-like beast underwater, elongated and writhing and alive.

  That thing blooming in my soul uncurled further at the sound of the whales, straining toward their music. For a moment I thought that hatching spirit might burst through my chest, so strongly was it magnetized by the echoing melody. Come, the whales hailed, inviting me to join them. Swim away with us. Dive into the buried splendor of the deep blue beyond. Join us on the road to Atlantis.

  Atlantis…

  It called to me like a sunken lighthouse, a faint but enduring beacon sputtering in the distance. A buried-treasure candle to the gypsy moth of my soul that had been wandering, wandering…

  Wandering no more.

  The road to Atlantis was before me, and my heart was already there. All there was left to do was kick off after the receding echoes of the whales and follow them into the uncharted depths of the fathomless ocean.

  The Salt Queen forgotten, I pushed deeper into the water, propelling myself after the parroting voices of the pod lest I lose them to the immense underworld shadows.

  And just like that I was off into the wild abyss, chasing a dream and a destiny and the unrequited whispers that had haunted me from sea to freaking sea.

  Chapter 9

  I delved into the deep unknown, leaving the sky in a far-distant world. The birds could have their thrilling heights, their soaring heavens; I longed to drift, to wander the hidden universe beneath the tides. Consumed by euphoria, I pursued the music of the whales. I wriggled through swaying groves of plankton, twined through ethereal swarms of manta rays. They were more graceful than ballerinas, more silent than secrets.

  Punctuating the dark indigo shadows were the colorful snippets of parrotfish, flurries of yellow-brushed or zebra-striped butterfly fish, flashes of bluefin jacks. They swirled around me like constant confetti, always a million of them darting about on hush-hush little missions.

  Then there were the leopard sharks, the Harlequin Sweetlips. Miles of murk and pockets of wonder. Deeper and deeper I pressed, locked in a trance, anything that might have mattered from Before left above the more and more distant surface. It was gone, sealed in a different dimension. I had been swallowed by the Abyss, and it was not going to spit me back out.

  The fairytale allure of Atlantis lurked somewhere in the fathomless expanse, baiting me like any fish, its spell a potent undercurrent of haunting pipe organ notes mixed with a pixie-like choir of bewitching siren voices. I was as hopelessly hooked as any legendary sailor lured to his death.

  It just wasn’t my death I expected to find there.

  I didn’t know what I expected. Maybe nothing more than a graveyard of said sailors that I would get to keep company with–woohoo–but the mystery and magic of it all held too much promise for something so anticlimactic. No, I expected something much more wondrous, whatever that entailed.

  For what felt like days, I drifted. I had definitely left behind small-time coral reef exploration for deep-sea diving, and knew I was hopelessly lost in relation to the coast I’d launched from. If I surfaced now, my only hope for rescue would be some wayward sailor on the high seas.

  But of course, I didn’t need rescuing. I could swim all the way to Madagascar. All the way back across the Indian Ocean to Australia, if I wanted to. The world was my oyster.

  Never had the analogy been so fitting.

  Despite the pitch-black depth to which I dived, my vision adjusted for each new level of inhibition. It was as if even obscured in the greatest recesses of the earth, my eyes used some many-faceted new gear to catch the barest refraction of moonlight from the surface, shattering it into a rippling floodlight and amplifying it throughout my surroundings. Seemingly sourceless illumination glimmered across the ocean floor, casting everything in enchanting hues of midnight turquoise and silver. In the darkest areas, turquoise deepened to a smoky, mystic blue, but never was I completely immersed in darkness.

  Like long-extended stairs, I followed drop-off to drop-off, plunging endlessly into new cavities of the earth. I began to notice exotic species of fish that I couldn’t quite identify, more angular and freakish, colors that glowed almost more than they shimmered.

  First a multitude of blushing silhouettes, then a luminous garden of color, jellyfish appeared in the depths ahead like a minefield of miniature hot-air balloons. I hesitated before breaching their ranks, but they haunted the water as far as I could see in every direction. Cautiously, I proceeded into their midst, and they granted me a pass through their lantern-like groves.

  Beyond the jellyfish I encountered an extensive graveyard of shipwrecked ruins. The chorus of the sirens increased just a little around the sunken relics, sending a faint murmur of chills down my spine.

  Free of the field of wreckage, a stretch of empty sea floor opened up before me–and in the distance what appeared to be another drop-off, its ledge glimmering eerie green like the crest of the dune in the desert, when I discovered the night-time pipe organ mirage. A curl of anticipation tickled my insides, what loomed ahead reeking of significance.

  I kicked faster toward the ledge, my muscles twinging with fatigue. I hadn’t noticed it until that moment, delving onward like someone obsessed. But it had been ages since I’d used my ‘swimmer’s’ muscles, and suddenly I’d not only returned to the sport, but kicked it into overdrive and swam a whole freaking marathon, questing to the far reaches of the ocean.

  I would pay for it with egregious cramps as soon as I stopped moving.

  Until then, I was still caught up in the tail end of the spell, drawn toward that mysterious light as surely as any of the previous bait. It flickered, beckoning, and everything I’d been experiencing since the appearance of the ruins on television culminated to a climactic peak inside me. Just a little ways further, over that ridge, lay the culprit of my deepest fears and wildest dreams…

  Pieces of lava rock appeared in droves across the seabed the closer I got to the impending ledge. They glinted with flecks of lavender, violet, and sea-green, becoming more frequent as I went. It was like a volcano of pixie dust had exploded, leaving sparkling, charred nuggets for miles. Strange pearly eels slithered through the rocks as I traversed their midst, startled away by my intrusion. I even spotted what looked like a miniature dragon, with filmy fins-for-wings and webbed membranes between its little horns, but it darted into the shadows of a rock cluster before I could glean a closer look.

  How charming and peculiar, but I couldn’t be sidetracked from the elephant in the sea looming before me. I had bigger fish to fry.

  As I came upon the ledge, a long row of succulent-like flowers clinging to the rocks by the edge snapped shut and sucked themselves into protective little cocoons, but I hardly noticed. Over the ledge I peered, slowing to a halt for the first time since I set off to ‘test the waters’ of my new aptitude.

  A massive school of silver fish churned beyond the crest of the drop-off, playing in stray ripples of that mysterious light. Their numbers were so thick that I couldn’t catch a glimpse through the shimmering wall they created. But the minty-turquoise prisms dancing through magnetized me more than ever, d
rawing me over the ledge toward the living barricade.

  As I neared the flock, a peculiar thing happened. The pattern of their dance changed, their ranks parting to create a perfect, round portal for my passage. The slivers of light became beams, stabbing through, like a spotlight illuminating me. I swam straight into the light, the slithery bodies of the silver fish tickling my edges as I passed through.

  At first it was difficult to peg what I was seeing, as the fin-churning portal closed behind me, sealing me into this secret new region. I saw something through the waves of light, some far-off architectural cluster, but the way the beams wavered and fluctuated messed with the impression, painting it like a tiny, distorted palace, spires jutting out at strange angles and domes billowing like balloons, and windows jumping from one tower to the next, to unnatural spaces in between.

  Instinct lured me downward, out of the direct path of the light. I saw then that the light was a flat layer of rays, fading and sparking in my direction as if the tail end of a reflection on an invisible ceiling, but when I followed the highway of luminescence back to its source, it was actually cast by a vertical display just like the Aurora Borealis, hovering and dancing above the most ornate rendering of a fairytale city I had ever seen, nestled in the murky distance of the sunken valley.

  Wonder sparkled through my blood, sweet and foreboding at once. Could this be…

  In my bones I knew it was. In my bones, and the salty marrow stirring in my deepest physical crevices that named me a bred-and-born child of the sea.

  Atlantis.

  How was one supposed to approach Atlantis? Was it just the ruins of a long-lost legend that stood before me, or was it occupied to this day, a sunken civilization evolved for underwater life that would explain my ancestry? Did they guard the perimeter? Would I be met with a harpoon-wielding army? A fleet of swordfish, perhaps?

  If it wasn’t abandoned, would it be other fully limbed humanoids sporting gills like myself that I would find residing here, or might there be other creatures from myth and legend? Mermaids? Sirens? More of the fantastical creatures I’d spotted near the drop-off, no doubt. Sea-drakes and exotic eels and the like.

  I treaded water briefly, considering the best way to announce my presence. Did I just…waltz up to the gates and see if they let me in?

  What manner of language would they even speak?

  I had been eager enough to leave my entire existence behind in a heartbeat to pursue the Call that emanated from this place, but now that I had reached the threshold, I realized how grossly out of my element I was.

  Perhaps the wrong terminology, since for the first time in my life I was actually fully immersed in ‘my element’, but it amounted to the same lack of knowing what in tarnation I was supposed to do.

  But I was overthinking it. If I hadn’t thought twice about up and swimming across the entire Indian Ocean as my response to falling overboard, what was I doing thinking twice about approaching my destination?

  What other alternative was there? Swim back the way I had come?

  Ha…

  Lest I entertain the hysterics-inducing notion long enough to induce said hysterics, I slithered forward through the water once more, down toward the city clustered in the distance.

  I didn’t realize just how far away it was until it had amplified in size about five times its original appearance, and all I’d really accomplished was getting close enough that I could see landscape details across the ocean floor that hadn’t been evident before. Erstwhile unseen rocks and dunes and sunken ships took form across the hazy, sandy expanse, and the city grew in size until it was a hulking network of architecture that loomed over me. Only then did I start to appreciate its bulk, and by the time I reached the gates they towered about two-stories high, framed by pillars as large as ancient Redwood trees, and the domes of the city itself faded into a separate dimension of aurora-dazzled ambiguity above. I grew dizzy, head craned way back, trying to find the tops.

  I wasn’t accosted at the gates by harpoon-wielding mermen riding swordfish steeds, as I’d fancied. In fact, I didn’t see anyone at all, save for a fist-sized jellyfish squelching its sluggish way through the decay-crusted bars. Unbothered by my presence, it drifted amiably past, a brainless wisp disappearing into the vastness that abounded.

  Godspeed, little sloth-blob, I couldn’t help but hail, finding myself unduly concerned with what awaited it in the big blue Beyond.

  Then a crackling, grinding sound drew my attention back to the gate, and to my astonishment the barred entrance was cracking ajar and opening of its own accord.

  Oh, I thought, swishing back a step. Well…

  I eyed the gates suspiciously, looking for some indication of an automatic opening mechanism or some lurking gatekeeper that I simply hadn’t noticed before, but nothing obvious jumped out at me. It was just me and the lonely, quiet depths of the sea, loitering at the threshold to a mythological city with our mouths hanging open. It would seem that the welcome mat had been unrolled for my incoming, the gates yawning wide to admit me. Fine, pearly sediment stirred up to cloud the entrance as the bottom bars scraped through the sand, and I used that as an excuse to hesitate before accepting the invitation. But then the veil cleared, and the dust settled, and given there were no obvious threats awaiting me beyond the threshold, my excuses evaporated with the cloud.

  Something equivalent to ‘taking a breath’ filtered into my gills, expanding my torso, and then I did that thing that had perhaps been my long-awaited destiny since I’d been found abandoned as a baby on the beaches of California:

  I swam through the gates of Atlantis.

  Chapter 10

  I didn’t feel remarkably different once past the threshold. There were no sudden waves of enlightenment, no ceremonial rites of validation, no angelic voices raining down from the heavens to christen me with acceptance into the fold of my brethren…

  Atlantis was a ghost town. Streets of rune-etched cobblestones coated in sediment curved into alleyways of turrets, bridges and archways, all the architecture a mixture of stone, coral and jade, and much of it coated in corrosion or textured by barnacles.

  I hovered above the street just inside the entrance, and the gates closed behind me. A reverberating twang warbled through the water as they clicked shut, the automation drawing a nervous glance over my shoulder. Eerie, but if any of the legends were true, I could find myself greeted by all manner of advanced technology preserved within the woodwork of Atlantis. They could have psychic crystal balls, CIA-level world surveillance, disease-healing crystals, the secret to telepathy, or launch space expeditions through underwater wormholes, for all we knew.

  But if any of the sunken technology was still employed, it would seem it was operated by ghosts. I moved through the fringes of the city to keep my limbs from cramping, encountering no one. Wandering down a curving side avenue, I found it equally as abandoned. Paneless windows watched me with gaping, haunted eyes, a stray fish flitting now and then through the openings.

  I glided through the city this way for a good five minutes, wondering what was so important that I had to leave my life behind to respond to the mysterious summons hailing from this place.

  Then the whispering began.

  It was the faintest tickle on my ears at first, little more than the swishing of water. But the barest string of intonations and inflections followed, maybe nothing more than the popping of bubbles, but enough to draw me around, the hairs on my arms standing on end. And then it came again, and was answered by another, and this time I definitely caught the slithery sound of elongated s’s and a few trickling accents that might have been k’s.

  My gaze darted back and forth between the ruins surrounding me. I saw nothing, but my ears did not deceive me. They were definitely voices–hushed and foreign, but voices.

  I said a little prayer, hoping it wasn’t actually a conclave of ghosts that resided here. That I hadn’t followed the enchanting Call down here just to end up trapped in some deep-water horror st
ory.

  A mild panic came over me. I swallowed, and even at the bottom of the ocean my mouth was dry.

  The whispers grew more pronounced, until I could make out the sounds of the words enough to determine they were undoubtedly foreign. And what did I expect, that the residents of an ancient island civilization sunken in the Indian Ocean would speak English, ghosts or otherwise? Of course they were foreign.

  The hushed exchange slithered and slurped around me, making me rotate in an uneasy circle. Show yourselves, deep-sea demons! I wanted to scream, but as one who had extensively tested the dynamics of screaming underwater in her childhood, knew it would only come out in a hysterical blathering yodel, like a blubbering banshee. So I refrained.

  In the midst of the unfamiliar words, a snippet of coherence filtered through that definitely included the word ‘legs’.

  So much for ‘of course they didn’t speak a lick of English on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.’

  But perhaps ‘legs’ was something in another language.

  I heard it again, though, and couldn’t help the self-conscious feeling that came over me. What about my legs? It occurred to me in some far-flung corner of wild imagination that my legs might be notable if observed by those without them–in other words, those that had, oh, fins instead.

  A crazy thought, because plagued by hybrid gills or not I still didn’t actually think it would be the likeness of mermaids that I found in the lost city of Atlantis, but I couldn’t help that tickle of a hunch.

  I was just about to kick into motion and hightail it out of the whispering city streets when a piece of the architecture separated itself from the rest. I whipped toward the motion, my eyes trying to decide what they were seeing. It was akin to what it might look like if an object pressed forward through the veil of a curtain–the pattern remained the same, but a definite shape took form, a camouflaged impression.