Elise and The Astonishing Aquanauts

by Steven Welch

  Elise buckled into the co-pilot seat just as the elephant’s undulating trunk reached out and shoved the glass.

  The Aquaboggin rocked backwards.

  “She is strong and annoyed,” Jules said, “but I do not want to harm her.”

  The elephant opened its huge, toothy mouth and bellowed. The sound was so loud, even in the sub, that it hurt their ears and rattled the ship.

  The sound died down, and the elephant regarded them for a long moment. With a loud grunt, it turned and walked back to the rock pile.

  They watched it as it began piling loose rubble onto the pyramid of rock. Bit by bit it grew the pile, carefully and surprisingly gently lifting rocks and adding them on.

  “Is that its nest?” Elise asked.

  “Perhaps. There is only one way to know for sure.”

  “How?”

  “We must talk to the elephant to learn its secrets.”

  “No,” she said, “that would be a bad idea. Maybe we should just go.”

  “Not an option.”

  Jules opened the hatch, dropped the ladder, and stepped back out into the cathedral. Elise poked her head out of the hatch but didn’t follow him. She just watched as the old explorer stepped towards the enormous creature, his hands raised in the air and his knees bent in a slightly silly way.

  Jules whistled.

  The elephant turned. The saucer sized eyes flashed anger, then squinted as if looking at Jules, considering, thinking.

  It bellowed and began walking towards Jules. He kept his hands in the air and dipped his stance a bit.

  Elise thought it might have been the least threatening pose that a person could strike, but then she was proved wrong when Jules dropped to his back and lay there, legs akimbo, pot-belly exposed.

  She wanted to shout to him, to tell him to stop acting like a fool, but she was afraid that the sound would startle the beast.

  I don’t even know how to fly this thing, she thought. I’m going to be stuck down here.

  The elephant towered over Jules Valiance. He lay there like a dog waiting for its belly to be scratched.

  The glistening, constantly color shifting trunk reached out tentatively and pushed on Jules’s stomach. He made a high pitched sound but didn’t move much.

  The elephant cocked its head and considered Jules.

  Elise thought that it looked curious.

  It roared. Jules wiggled his arms and legs back and forth like a dying cockroach.

  The elephant made a throaty, weird, gurgling noise and stood up on its back legs.

  Was that a laugh? No, it’s going to crush him, she thought.

  It trumpeted. Then it went back to all fours and turned away, back to gathering rocks to add to its pile.

  Jules stood up. Elise joined him.

  “Really?” she asked him.

  He dusted sand from his back and shoulders.

  “It was an opportunity. We live or we die. Best to take the path unexpected.”

  He motioned for her to sit down next to him on the sand.

  They watched the elephant go about its odd task of building its mound.

  The sound of rocks falling woke Elise up. Jules was already standing. Time had passed. The elephant was gone but to where she didn’t know. It had walked away while she slept and now there was an avalanche coming down one of the cliff sides at the bottom of the ocean.

  Jules motioned for her to follow him. They walked quickly back and into the Aquaboggin. The hatch was shut, and they were in their seats.

  Through the forward viewing glass they watched little stones, chunks of coral, and waves of sand tumble down into the valley.

  “There’s someone coming,” said Elise.

  The cause of the avalanche came sliding down the side of the valley on his back, under control like a snowboarder.

  He was a big man with skin that was sharp patterns of black and white and he had a fin that ran alongside his back.

  This was the kind of man they had seen riding atop the machine that had been destroying Paris.

  The man stepped out from the avalanche and onto the sea floor. He was tall and powerful, with thick limbs. There was some kind of armor around his waist, like a kilt made of fat scales.

  “A merman,” Jules said.

  Yes, I think you’re right, thought Elise.

  Something in the distance caught her eye.

  “Uh, Jules, I think there are more of them.”

  Several more figures were running out of the gloom along the valley floor toward the cathedral.

  Click.

  “What was that?”

  “I locked the door.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  INTO THE WORLD BELOW

  THE MERMEN WERE dressed for battle.

  They had armor that covered part of their bodies and the blade weapons that they carried came in several forms, an axe, a sword, a spear.

  Jules activated the engines, and the propellers began to spin.

  “We’re leaving, right?” Elise asked.

  “Fish men and a sea elephant creature have arrived on the scene. Delights beyond imagination. We are not leaving. But you stay in the ship. If they attack, fly out of here as quickly as you can.”

  “I don’t know how to fly this thing.”

  “Yes, life is fat with lessons. Next time pay attention.”

  Jules was out of the sub before Elise had a chance to complain.

  “Bonjour, my friends, who wants a cigarette?” Jules said, his hands open and at his sides.

  The four soldiers flanked him. They were close enough now that Elise could see the thick, almost leathery nature of their skin. Their muscles rippled like pythons beneath the black and white skin. Any one of these brutes would break Jules in half. She glanced over at the control panel. Pull back on the throttle and the stick, step on something at her feet, maybe she could fly it up and out. Or maybe you’re being stupid, she thought.

  The soldiers, if that’s what they were, had Jules surrounded. Elise saw that his hand was near the pistol on his hip. This is not going to end well, she thought.

  “Parlez-vouz Francais? English? I have a smattering of Esperanto, if that will do?”

  The tallest of the merman stepped up to Jules. He towered over the old man.

  “Ah,” Jules said, “you must be in command, with such height and vigorous muscularity. I am Commander Jules Valiance, of Les Scaphandriers. I represent Earth and her ocean. What’s left of it. Who are you and why do you carry large pointy weapons?”

  The merman made a low clicking sound and glared at Jules. A whistling sound came from a blowhole on the back of his neck.

  The others moved closer and raised their weapons.

  “Yes. Elise,” Jules said loudly enough for her to hear, “there is a green button below the yoke of the vessel. Push it please. Quickly, before I am disemboweled.”

  Elise stared at the control console. There were a dozen green buttons, and she didn’t know what a yoke was, except in an egg.

  “Elise, all due speed, please.”

  The merman leader leaned down to Jules and glared at him, only an inch away from the old man’s face. It made another clicking sound, low and guttural. The sound from the blowhole was a wet fart.

  Elise wanted to push all of the green buttons, but what if something blew up?

  The ground shook. There was a bellow, a roar, a thundering sound, and the ground was rattling so hard that the entire Aquaboggin shifted left and right.

  Jules dropped and rolled away from the mermen, scrambling on his hands and knees, looking back at the enormous alien elephant that was rumbling toward them, eyes blazing and trunk held high.

  The mermen brought their weapons up, but the elephant was on them so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to form a flank or run away.

  The enraged beast swatted them with its trunk and the mermen went flying. One of the warriors was sent as far as the cathedral’s inner wall, where he struck the stone with wet smacks and slid b
ack down, perfectly and completely dead.

  A blade cut the elephant’s thick hide.

  It roared again and kept roaring, bringing its legs down as weapons, as bludgeons, the three mermen scrambling to get out of the way.

  Elephant blood sprayed as a sword ripped into the skin on the back of one of those massive legs. The elephant’s trunk grabbed one of the mermen and lifted him, the toothed suction cups ripping and tearing at the merman’s flesh.

  Jules was back in the Aquaboggin. He pushed Elise out of the way and dove into the pilot’s seat.

  “The green button, you idiot.”

  He pushed a button under the yoke and Elise heard a loud hiss from the exterior of the sub.

  Heavily pressurized gas sprayed out in clouds from all sides of the Aquaboggin.

  Elise watched in horror as the elephant, bleeding from its wounds, shuddered and swayed.

  There were two mermen still alive and moving. They stopped and dropped to their knees and fell face down into the sand.

  The elephant slowly knelt.

  “What did you do?”

  “Gas,” Jules said, “an anesthetic created from the leaves of the coca plant. We used it to temporarily paralyze fish so that they might be studied. It was also employed once to incapacitate a prehistoric gill-man in the sultry dark of the Amazon, a relic from a lost time, but that is another story entirely and one you are unlikely to believe.”

  The elephant creature was down on its knees but not unconscious. There were several bloody cuts along its skin and it was touching the wounds with its trunk.

  Jules grabbed a little medical kit and began climbing back up out of the hatch.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There is a creature in need, little idiot.”

  The elephant turned at Jules’s approach, its eyes blazing. He held up his hands. Jules then reached out and gently touched the creature’s trunk.

  Elise couldn’t hear what he said, but Jules spoke for several moments. Then, he reached into the kit and produced a tube, like paint or glue, and applied something sticky and yellow to the many bloody wounds.

  He offered up a bit of something.

  The elephant ate it.

  Is that a chocolate?

  Yes, Elise thought, he just gave the thing a chocolate.

  Jules patted the beast on the side and made his way back to the sub.

  “You have chocolate?” asked Elise.

  “Chocolate flavored antibiotic. You never know,” he said.

  Jules and Elise sat in the Aquaboggin and watched the huge beast as it rested in the gloom of the cathedral on the bottom of the sea.

  “Will it live?”

  “Of course,” said Jules, “the wounds are superficial. She is just tired and, how do the English say, shagged out.”

  A few moments passed and then the creature stood. While its legs were shaking and it swayed as it walked, the sea elephant made a soft trumpeting noise and staggered out of the cathedral and into the darkness of the valley beyond.

  The merman began to stir.

  Jules hit them with another dose of the coca gas and they fell again.

  “We don’t have much time. That was the last of the gas. Let’s go.”

  Jules and Elise rushed out of the Aquaboggin and raced to the rock pile.

  He pulled rocks away from the pile. Elise helped him. They worked hard, tossing aside smaller bits of rubble then dragging bigger chunks out of the way.

  “This is terrible. The poor thing spent all that time building the pile, and now we’re wrecking it again,” said Elise.

  “Consider it exercise for the beast’s physical rehabilitation.”

  There was a glow, a blue glow coming from under the mountain of rocks. They worked harder and harder and the light grew brighter as they did. It was cold in the deep trench but Elise and Jules were sweating from the effort. Minutes passed, then an hour, and then they had moved enough of the rock on one side that the other side crumbled in a mini avalanche and blue light flooded the cathedral. Elise’s skin tingled and there was a copper smell in the still air, the smell of ozone after a lightning strike.

  A pedestal, and on the pedestal was a little sculpture of a cherub holding a violin. The light was rising from beneath the pedestal, softly illuminating the tiled floor at their feet.

  Jules walked swiftly to the cherub and struck it with his hand. He cursed. Elise didn’t understand. He cursed again and struck it with his fist and it must have hurt but he did it again and again.

  Jules screamed. Elise was afraid and she stepped away from him.

  With a final curse he reached out, his hand bloody from striking the stone cherub, and grabbed it.

  The touch of his palm against the stone of the sculpture was what it had been waiting for, just that simple touch.

  The pedestal turned to dust. Elise could hear a hum growing louder and louder from beneath their feet. The light became intense and Jules backed away as a tiny circle of energy where the pedestal had been erupted and expanded.

  The glow was a spinning pool of white and cobalt energy in the floor of the cathedral, a shimmering circle as wide as a dinner plate, then a dinner table, then ten meters across. The mirrored surface spun slowly, rotating eddies of quicksilver, and the edges of this strange pool were eating the floor as it expanded.

  Jules and Elise stood at the edge of the energy pool. The expansion stopped. It was thirty feet across and the bright blue light was blinding.

  Elise picked up a rock and threw it at the glowing pool. The rock hit the surface and disappeared without a sound. The shimmer rippled, like the surface of liquid metal pond, then returned to its slow, hypnotic rotation.

  “The mermen are waking up. We need to make haste away,” Jules said.

  “Go where?”

  “Under there. To the world below. Or perhaps between. Who’s to say?”

  And that’s what Elise was waiting to hear.

  The Aquaboggin thundered to life with Jules in the pilot seat and Elise next to him. The propellers spun faster and faster until they were a blur, and then until they were practically invisible. The ship lifted a meter or so off of the cathedral floor, then hovered over to the lip of the cobalt blue portal. Its diameter wasn’t wide enough for the ship to simply descend. Elise held tight as Jules angled the vessel port side up, starboard side down, until they were looking through the view glass directly into the silvery rainbow sheen of the hole to another world.

  The rim of the portal and the tendrils of coruscating blue light reached out, enveloped the nose of the sub. The light was bright but not blinding, constantly in motion, hypnotic. There was no sound. They were moving forward but Elise couldn’t tell, there was no way to judge movement, just the swirling of the strange liquid light.

  Jules studied the altimeter, the sonar, and the radar. Everything was dead. The light had a mass, a watery thickness that blocked the instruments.

  “We enter an ocean of light,” he said.

  Elise’s skin and the cabin of the sub was a shifting palette of blue and white, reflecting the liquid sea. With nothing to guide him, Jules simply steered the vessel dead ahead at a slow pace, bringing the propellers in and letting the impellers of the jet engines do their work. He considered attempting to take a sample of the liquid light, but he wasn’t sure how to operate the controls that would obtain it. That was something the science team had always tended to, led by North McAllister, the Scottish archeologist and reefer head.

  I should have paid more attention, he thought, then dismissed the regret as beneath him and piloted on.

  Seconds went by, then minutes. The Aquaboggin continued to dive for an hour. Then more.

  The light from the liquid sea was steady, always shifting colors, but the brightness remained constant. Elise went from terrified to exhilarated to fascinated to bored fairly quickly. A part of her hoped that a vicious merman would “jump scare” to the side of the view glass, just to break the beautiful monotony of the cobalt sea.<
br />
  She had just begun to doze off when the ship shuddered and she felt a tilt to port.

  “You are still buckled in tightly, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The swirling light in the view glass was changing, becoming darker, more blue. The cobalt became a deep, rich, saturated aquamarine with strokes of green, like an impressionists painting of the ocean’s depths.

  The Aquaboggin shook slightly and Elise could feel it move up and down, then side to side, as if she were in a strong current.

  There was a sound now, distant but she could hear it, a rumble below a high soft static, getting louder and louder.

  Bubbles.

  Elise saw bubbles in the aquamarine, and the swirling chaos of color became just a single sheet of roaring, deafening bubbles, then she saw nothing but dark blue green and the sub bucked. Jules fought at the controls as the instruments came to life. There was the ping of the sonar, the ticking of altimeter and depth finder, the whir of a strange little device that whirred, and who knows what else.

  She gripped the sides of her leather seat.

  They were in the ocean. She could see silvery fish darting about, particulates in the water, and they were spinning downward like a top toward a massive whirlpool, an undersea tornado, they were in a powerful current going down into an oceanic storm.

  Jules stopped fighting the controls and let the current take them. They were moving fast, spinning around the tides of the maelstrom and then into the surging power of the whirlpool.

  “Do you have your sickness bag for vomiting?” he asked.

  “All used up.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  They entered the maelstrom, and the sub spun around and around, rotating to the left with the power of the sea storm. The centrifugal force jammed Elise and Jules against their seats. Elise thought that her face felt like drippy melted rubber and her ears popped hard. She couldn’t keep her eyes open against the strain. She wasn’t sick yet, but it hurt, her muscles pulling against the G forces. The noise was so loud that she couldn’t think.

  And then they were through.

  The violent spinning stopped.

  The sub drifted calmly, silently, and Elise opened her eyes to see a crystal clear ocean through the view glass. The sea floor was just below them, and she could see the waves rolling softly above. Somehow they were in a shallow sea.