by Steven Welch
Jules felt his heart racing as he watched, just as it had that morning when Les Scaphandriers discovered a blue and gold replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the heart of the sea.
Make no mistake. The Atlantic Abyssal plain is the blackest of black. So the fiery light of this strange cathedral was blinding at first. It took the cameras a moment to adjust.
Impossible. Jules piloted the submersible closer and around the spires and chimeras. On closer inspection, it wasn’t exactly Notre Dame de Paris, but it was shockingly similar, a gothic cathedral of stained glass and stone and the glow came from within it with the force of the sun. Just, impossible.
The excited murmur and current of fear in the sub was so strong that it was almost overwhelming. Jules could remember that feeling as if it had only been a moment ago.
Fast forward.
Hovering at the tall metal doors of the cathedral structure, lighting spilling out from cracks and seams and glass. Words carved roughly into the metal of the portal in letters a meter high.
“Keep Out.”
They had joked. They had argued. They had a brief but intense discussion. Should we go inside? We mustn’t. We must.
We can’t.
We are Les Scaphandriers and we are at the bottom of the sea staring at a man-made structure that’s a complete anomaly, an impossibility, a curiosity beyond anything ever seen in the history of our world.
This will re-write history. This will change everything we know.
This is what we do. This is what we did.
We will.
We did.
God help, me, thought Jules as he stared at the video.
We did.
The sub had forward and aft robotic “hands” that pulled the portal doors wide. The light was blinding. They moved forward and into the abyssal cathedral at a snail’s pace.
A rush of water stirred particulates and shook the sub as the massive doors slammed behind them.
Roaring, rushing, chaos as the water inside of the vast cathedral was drained by force, drained in a heartbeat, countless liters of cold, deep ocean water drained so quickly that the submersible dropped to the stone floor with a painful thud and rolled onto its side.
He remembered the taste of fear and blood as they piled out of the submersible hatch into cool, fresh air. Impossible. Fresh air at the bottom of the ocean. Staring up at the flying buttress and gothic vaulted ceiling as the others gathered around, cameras rolling, words blending into a chaos of excitement and discovery. Great statues of strange creatures, like men but not, perhaps men of the sea or gods of the ocean or some fevered imagining of a mad sculptor. A tiled floor of many colors, clean and shining under the overwhelming cobalt light from an enormous globe at the center of the cathedral. The globe was a full ten meters round, pure blue light coruscating with energy so that tendrils of power constantly writhed along its surface. This blue globe of awesome energy hovered in a bracing structure of pure gold and looked like a porthole, or a massive lock.
Fast forward.
The team scattering about the place, studying every detail, the excitement, the thrill. Then, the realization that there were words carved and etched and written on surfaces all around them and the words began to glow a soft blue light the globe and the words were shown as only one.
“Curious?”
Jules at the base of the globe, the camera focused on a tiny doll-like sculpture, a merman cherub holding a violin no bigger than your hand.
Had it moved?
Inscribed in shifting languages at the base of the little sculpture was “Don’t Touch.”
Jules reached out with his aqua-gloved hand and poked it with a finger.
The cherub began to play the violin.
The sound then, the thunderous painful sound. Behind them, just as in the Great Lady of Paris, a towering pipe organ, but this one crusted with coral of all colors and alive with tiny creatures like crabs. The organ came to life with such power that Jules remembered being afraid that the stained glass would shatter and send the depths of the ocean roaring into the place, drowning them all like rats.
The organ played a song he didn’t recognize as the little sculpture fell backwards and revealed a red button at its base.
A brass plaque next to the button had tiny lettering inscribed on its surface. Jules leaned in to read it. The thunder of the organ grew louder and louder. He remembered the pain in his ears, the pounding of the low frequency moan in his heart. Watching, ten years gone, in the cold of the Hall of Les Scaphandriers, he felt sick as he looked again on what the little plaque said, carved in English. Wait, in French. No, it was Arabic. Spanish. Hindi. Ancient Mayan.
He remembered shaking his head. The inscription was all languages at once, and it said,
“Curious?”
Madness. This was madness.
And of course, the great Jules Valiance, the leader of Les Scaphandriers, the Commander of the Society of Astonishing Aquarists, the man who lived for the thrill of exploration, for the visceral pull of discovery, did exactly what they wanted him to do.
Jules pressed the button.
The porthole erupted in blue energy and the thundering, whirling, overwhelming sound of the organ became a cascade that overwhelmed them.
Tendrils of that energy, reaching out, capturing Zuzu as she cursed and pulling her into the seething energy pit. McAllister, then, pulled along, clutching desperately at the tiled floor. A section of stone ripped from a wall flying like a missile, striking LeBuche as it went, cutting him nearly in half.
Holding the jacket of Three John as both of them were being sucked toward the portal, fighting the pull, making it to the sub.
“No man left behind!” his voice screaming these words but drowned by the roar of the energy cascade. Three John wrenched away by the growing force of the energy pool.
Screaming. That’s my voice screaming, he thought.
All of his friends disappearing into the pit.
The camera shaking madly as he somehow made his way back into the sub, climbing in through the top hatch, desperate to get away from that noise.
The hatch closing just as the walls and glass of the cathedral imploded around them and swept the submersible up and around and into a vortex of rushing water.
Jules at the controls, jamming buttons and bringing the sub to life, full power to escape the maelstrom and get to the surface.
The ocean around him…the ocean…my God.
Jules escaped the pull of the titanic rip current. The others, Three John, Zuzu and the rest, were sucked into the torrent. The rear camera showed the bright cobalt light where the cathedral of Notre Dame at the bottom of the sea had been, and it showed something so horrifying that it still gave him nightmares, night terrors that sent him screaming out of bed.
The ocean was collapsing into the cobalt energy, the writhing tentacles of some unknown power. The sea floor, the water, everything was being pulled into that awful light.
These miles wide energy portholes opened up in the deepest canyons in all the basins of the world’s ocean simultaneously. Thousands of them. In the space of four hours, the ocean, the one body of water that covered seventy percent of the Earth, the precious thing that gives life, was gone.
That was the day that the world ended, the day when the ocean was pulled into the seafloor to who knows where and the skies became red as blood with hurricane sandstorm winds and things from hell came to kill everything he knew.
That was the day Jules Valiance killed his friends and destroyed the world.
The video went black.
That word, that question, stabbing again and again into his heart.
“Curious?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE NURSERY
TWO DAYS INTO her stay at The Nursery and Elise still didn’t feel comfortable.
There were eight kids in total and they were all the same age. Ten years old. Hemmi looked older and Zola looked younger but they were all born on the same day ten
years before, born on the day the world ended.
Getting into The Nursery was no easy task. The lower levels of the hospital had been completely burned out and stripped. Hemmi couldn’t tell Elise how that had happened for sure, but the tales were of panicked Parisians ransacking the place for medicine and then somehow setting it on fire. There was also a scary story, one that Hemmi would tell the kids in the dark just to keep things interesting, about monsters that roamed the halls on the day the world ended, and how the things hunted and killed anything that moved.
Once you climbed the rickety burnt out stairwell and slithered through the countless piles of debris that made a maze of the place you had to tightrope walk a series of wooden planks set out over a five story drop into darkness. Elise had declined to follow them at first glance, afraid that the crab couldn’t make it, but he was more agile than most crabs and lighter than you’d think and he skittered across the make-shift bridges with little effort.
The Nursery was on the top floor. Someone had done some decorating, making the wide rooms and halls as pleasing and homey as possible in impossible circumstances. There were plastic flowers and paper ribbons and plush toys scattered about the place.
Hemmi explained to Elise on their first night that Ms. Dodd had been with them since they were born but she had been killed two years ago. She went out to look for supplies and came back to them with horrible wounds that wouldn’t heal.
Ms. Dodd had taken care of them since that first day. She concealed and protected them from the things that came to kill. She was a nurse, and they were newborns.
Eight kids.
Elise walked into the newborn’s room on that first night and counted the little cribs, all set up in rows. There were twenty places. Twenty places for twenty babies.
Hemmi pointed her to a corner of the reception room. There was a mattress and some blankets and that’s where Elise slept. He also gave her a book. It was fat with handwritten pages.
“Ms. Dodd’s diary. She taught us our letters and a bit of reading but I can’t make much sense of it because the writing is all scribbly.”
Elise opened the book. The English script was cursive.
She was tired, but she stayed up late the first night, reading by the light of her twist torch.
Ms. Dodd’s diary told of those first days and weeks after the world changed. The horror she felt, then the determination to save the babies. Everyone else had run or been killed. Things, and then people, had stormed the lower levels, stripping everything. She had defended and barricaded The Nursery as the babies wailed and cried. Ms. Dodd was an English nurse from Banbury who was engaged to marry a Frenchman named Marc who worked at the zoo. She dreamed of better things but Marc never came and better things became impossible.
Elise grew cold as she read of Ms. Dodd’s ordeal and terrible choices. Newborn babies are needy things, and she had done the best that she could but there was only so much food and so much medicine and so much time. So, there could only be so many babies.
Some of the white pages were stained with tears and some were stained with blood.
Elise stopped reading. She understood what had happened, enough to know that a brave woman had done everything in her power to save twenty little lives and that only eight were left. That in itself was something of a miracle.
*
Elise spent time evaluating her situation on the second afternoon at The Nursery.
She found Hemmi playing a version of basketball with a two of the other kids. The children of The Nursery were thin and frail but energetic and had scavenged a fair amount of food and drink that was stashed into lockers in a locked room. Only Hemmi had the key.
The smell in The Nursery was pungent, a rank mix of filthy toilets and filthy kids. Elise didn’t think she would get used to the stench.
The noise was constant even at night. The kids subscribed to no particular sleep pattern, so Elise was cranky from constantly being awakened.
They were decent enough, as Ms. Dodd had apparently been quite the disciplinarian, but without her the politics of children had begun to assert itself, so manners were there one moment and gone the next.
Elise found the place stifling. More than that, she didn’t feel any safer here than she did out in the street.
Hemmi was about to take a shot when Elise interrupted.
“You have a second?” she asked.
He tossed a ball of stripped rubber and tape to one of the other boys and joined her. They walked to the Reception desk and sat.
“What’s up?”
“Did you ever think about getting out of here? Finding a better place?”
Hemmi spit.
“You been out there. Better? What’s better?”
“You can’t stay here forever. It stinks, and it’s dark, and it’s just crap. You’re going to clean out the stuff right around here, round this block, and you’ll need to scavenge further and further away. You can’t stay here forever.”
“Yes I can.”
“What if there’s something better just a mile down the avenue? You’ll never know.”
“There isn’t. Don’t be stupid. You want to go, go.”
Hemmi returned to the game.
*
That night Elise was awakened by a scream.
She was tucked in a pile of blankets under the reception desk with the crab at her side. Her first instinct was to curl up into a ball and stay still, hiding.
Another scream. Angry voices.
Elise shook off the blankets and ran to the sound, around the corridor corner and near to one of the old restrooms.
Flaubert, covered in blood, was standing over one of the other kids, a dark little girl named Gwynne. Elise had noticed the girl before, that she was different. Her speech was thick and hard to understand and Elise thought that she might have been born with some sort of condition. She was sweet but simple and now Gwynne was screaming and bleeding from a cut on her head. Her face was red with blood. Hemmi and two of the boys were standing around the two in a little circle.
“Kill her.” It was little Zola. He was pointing at Gwynne. “Kill her.”
Flaubert kicked the girl hard in the side.
The crab raised its claws and started to move toward them. Elise grabbed his shell like you would a dog collar and pulled him back.
“What is this?” she asked.
All eyes turned to Elise. Flaubert threw a rock at Elise. It hit her in the chest and she dropped to her knees.
The crab moved then and Elise grabbed one of its back legs and yanked hard. It stopped, but the claws were raised high and were waving quickly back and forth.
Hemmi pushed Flaubert.
“Why’d you do that? Elise didn’t do anything.”
Flaubert went to kick Gwynne again.
“Stop!” Elise said. She noticed, then, the shining metal blade in Flaubert’s right hand. A razor.
Gwynne was crying and holding her head in her hands. Blood was pouring from her face. She curled up into a tight ball.
“You needn’t have come out here, Elise. This is our business.” Hemmi pushed Flaubert hard and away. Flaubert tucked the blade into her belt, under her shirt, and stepped back.
Hemmi said something quietly to Flaubert, something that Elise couldn’t hear. Flaubert shrugged and walked away.
“Next time I’ll take her tongue,” she said as she went.
The little circle of boys stepped back as well. Hemmi came to Elise and knelt down next to her.
“You needn’t have come out here,” he said again.
The crab moved between them and knocked him back on his butt.
“Hey!”
Elise moved to Gwynne. There was a nasty straight slice in the girl’s scalp just below her eyebrows. Elise was terrified. Her heart raced. The cut didn’t look too deep, but there was so much blood. Elise thought for a moment that she was going to be sick. Elise put her arms around Gwynne.
“It’s ok. It’s ok.”
Hemmi s
tood up and came to them. The crab only let him get so close.
Elise glared up at him.
“She needs a bandage. She’s bleeding really badly.”
“Let her get her own. Little freak. Hell with her.”
“What did she do?”
“That’s between the freak and Flaubert. That’s how we handle things.”
“Please. She needs a bandage.”
“We don’t have any.”
“Fine.”
Elise spent the next hour taking care of Gwynne. She used the beer that she had scavenged to clean the cut and the blood. She then tore strips from an old sheet to wrap the girl’s head. Elise sat with her arm around Gwynne for a while, the two of them tucked under the reception desk with the giant crab curled up in front of them like a dog.
Elise asked, but Gwynne at first wouldn’t say what had caused the fight. The crab fascinated the child. Gwynne stroked the creature’s bumpy red shell. The two eyestalks swiveled and leaned in, looking closely at her.
“What’s his name?”
“I haven’t named him yet. He’s amazing, though.”
“All things must have a name. Especially amazing things.”
Elise smiled. True.
“Charlie. His name is Charlie the Crab.”
Gwynne nodded approval and adopted a solemn look.
“Good name. Charlie.”
The three rested quietly in the darkness for quite some time.
Then, just as they were drifting off to sleep, Gwynne said,
“Ms. Dodd always said that she liked my singing. I like to sing. Flaubert cut me cause of it. Flaubert told me to stop, but I like to sing. I don’t want to stop.”
“You can sing to me if you want. Sing to Charlie and me.”
Gwynne was quiet at first and then she began to hum and then she began to sing in a shy little voice. She sang softly, lullabies that had probably been sung to her by Ms. Dodd.
Elise drifted off.
And then Gwynne fell asleep at Elise’s shoulder on the last night of her short life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN