The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (18 page)

So maybe, as memories were ghosts, so were ghosts also a form of memory.

Jax typed on his watch again and held it up.

THEY WERE THE PIRATES, she read. THAT WENT DOWN W/THE SHIP.

Pirates? Pirates and ghosts? It was a regular Halloween party.

The watch was too slow. It frustrated her. She moved her hand through the water and grabbed Jax’s wrist, then tapped her own temple.

WANT ME 2 PING? he typed.

She nodded.

Then suddenly it was like listening to headphones—a voice playing right between her ears. She hadn’t felt this before; before she hadn’t been able to tell when Jax was reading her until he said something that betrayed it. But this, she understood, was different: not only reading but also speaking. It was like Jax had opened a two-way channel on a radio. And what came out didn’t sound like his speaking voice at all. Which made sense, since there were no actual vocal cords involved. But it was bizarre. It took her a while to be able to make out the words properly. No one would have known it was a little boy talking to her; it was more like a clear singing.

They’re bound here because they’re in service to him. They don’t want to be, but they are. The Pouring Man. The way the pirates lived, the wrong they did? It makes them his. It keeps them here. Like slaves.

How do you know all this?
she asked.

But he was grabbing her arm.

The selkie has arrived.

She raised her head and looked—moving slowly and fluidly, it seemed, like everything underwater and like water itself. Among the waving stalks of the seaweed, above a rock covered in roots and old barnacles, a creature was hovering, gazing at them out of huge dark eyes in a pale, blue-gray face. Its upper body had the approximate shape of a woman—Cara thought of her idea of a mermaid—but her head was far larger than a woman’s would be, in proportion to her body, and the face drew into a soft kind of snout toward the chin, like a seal’s. The dark eyes were on either side instead of in front, as people’s eyes were, and long black hair floated around. She looked solemn and wise, yet the big eyes also reminded Cara of a baby.

Jax motioned to Cara to stay close as they swam toward her. Her body, they saw, tapered into a tail like a seal’s, like the lower half of a seal’s body—not a fish tail but a gray one. She had long flippers for arms.

Jax thought to Cara as they swam:
I’ll talk to her.

They didn’t have their third, though, the third person the verse had said had to be there. They didn’t have their
arbiter
, someone impartial to decide.

And decide what, anyway?

She had no idea.

They were almost up to the selkie then, moving through the seaweed. It was darker in here, though the lighted particles still whirled. When the stalks brushed against Cara’s arms as she passed they felt slick and rubbery. Under the twisted canopy were dark shadows cast by the silhouettes of the kelp forest against the glow of the algae; the shade and beams of radiance patterned everything she could see, made their surroundings as complicated and dense as a jungle. Cara had a hard time telling what things were.

The selkie reached out her flippers, which curled around them and drew them in—rough and soft at the same time, almost unbearably strange. It was a kind of formal embrace, it seemed to Cara. She thought how alien it felt to be so close to the creature—she’d never really touched an animal that wasn’t a pet, save for a few crabs from tidal pools and Jax’s pitiable frogs….

And the selkie wasn’t quite animal anyway, of course. She was something else.

Cara realized she was tense, not because she thought the selkie would hurt them but because she’d never been close to anything so
other
. Next to the selkie, even the ghosts of long-dead pirates seemed almost normal. The selkie was not of this world, she knew—it was from myth; it was like meeting a dragon.

If myth were true, she thought—if all of it were true!

Jax’s forehead was against the selkie’s as though they were head-butting. Then he pulled away, bowing solemnly. And before Cara knew it the selkie was gone again, swooshed off into the darkness underneath the waving kelp.

Jax was pinging her.

She wants to give me the key, but she can’t.

Why not?
thought Cara.

Because he’s coming now.

The water around them seemed suddenly colder.

Of
course
he was coming.

So?
she thought at Jax, insistently.
Can’t she just give it to us and then we can go? Get out of here and away from him?

We have to make ourselves safe first. We have to stand up to him. If we can, he won’t be able to get into our heads anymore. He won’t have access to our minds. Then she can tell us what we need to know.

Stand up to him? How?

I’m not sure. But maybe the ghosts can help us.

The ghosts? The ghosts of pirates? We have to get help from
them
?

Behind him, in the gloom, the flickering forms of the ghosts shifted and weaved, faintly menacing but suspended.

She felt a tug of despair. Jax looked so small in front of her, so slight and babyish, his blond hair waving in the water, his small body, in the overlarge wet suit, dwarfed by the tank gear and the weight belt.

Here they were in this alien greenness, this universe unknown to them. No Max, no Dad, no anyone—

No one else even knew where they were. No one knew they were here in the deep, here in the ocean where even grown people drowned.

She’d never felt so alone.

The cold and the Pouring Man, making his way toward them. When they were down here, surrounded by water—breathing his element. At their very weakest.

And all these ghosts at his command. These ghosts who had been cruel while they lived, and probably could be cruel now.

It was frustrating. It seemed practically impossible, to push out fear.

And if she and Jax lost, if they lost….

But Jax? What happens if we lose?

Don’t think about that
, he told her steadily.
He’s coming now. And we can’t run. We can’t move. We have to stand up to him, whether the ghosts fight for him or for us. Just don’t give in to fear.

I need to know, Jax. Now it’s your turn to tell me everything. What happens if we lose?

There was a silence between them, a blankness. And then:

It’s simple: if we lose, then we’re his
, thought Jax heavily.
We’re pressed into service. We join him.

She shivered despite herself. Slowly she raised her hands in front of her, her fingers whiter than paper, wrinkled as an old, old lady’s. Behind the white hands, the dark ghosts in their slow and shifting field.

They anchored themselves next to the rope, directly under the buoy again. She didn’t know why, except that it seemed, in a way, closest to home—closest to the only thing that was familiar: the kayak their dad had built.

And she grabbed one of Jax’s hands. If she could keep hold of his hand, she was thinking, that would help, anyway. His fingers were pruney like her own. She held them tightly.

And when he raised the other hand and pointed, her heart leaped into her throat.

Across the sand, from out of the gloom where the brightness barely reached, the Pouring Man was walking toward them. Just walking, impossibly, on the bottom of the ocean. His clothing floated around him, but it seemed to be rags, black rags, and nothing else about him floated at all. Not even his hair. It was still plastered down over his forehead, as though it was soaked in a way that not even the ocean tides could touch.

His feet hit on the sandy bottom, placed one in front of the other, deliberately and surely, and the sand rose around him in soundless dusty clouds. 

He smiled, she saw, but it was not a smile you wanted to see. Not at all.

As he got closer and closer, walking ploddingly with a slow-motion gait, the smile exposed his teeth. His upper lip was pulled back in a snarl.

Still he came, and she knew she was squeezing Jax’s hand so hard she might be hurting it, but she couldn’t help herself. 

He walked right through the ghosts, when he was close enough—walked through them like they were nothing at all, and they scattered at his approach, shifted away from him, slinking and cowering as though, at any moment, he might hit them.

His teeth were sharp, she saw when he was only a few feet away. She was mostly looking down across the sand, trying to contain her dread by looking at the ground instead of up at him. She couldn’t close her eyes, she knew—that would not be facing him, as she must—but she didn’t have to stare right at him, did she?

She did. She did, for all of them.

She forced herself to look up again. The colorless eyes. The teeth that came to points. The blue, rubbery lips.

I know you
, she thought.
You’re the dead soldier. Your name is fear. My mother told me about you.

And he nodded. Unhurried, the way all things seemed to happen here. He moved his head up and then down with a kind of condescension, as though she was a stupid child and he was humoring her.

Your name is fear
, she thought.
I am afraid of you. 

No!
thought Jax.
No!

But she shook her head.
You can’t beat fear if you don’t admit to it. So I admit it. But I won’t run. You won’t get me.

His smile seemed to waver a bit, but then strengthened again. He was near them, maybe six feet away, maybe five … four … three….

Behind him the ghosts pulled in and rose up, a crowd at his back. They were so close now she could see some of their faces—pitted with scars, mouths of stained and missing teeth, some wearing eye patches like kids in Halloween costumes.

You won’t get my brother. You won’t get either of us
, she thought, fighting against the strong desire to close her eyes, no matter how useless it would be. 

He was right there. He was so close that he filled her vision. His cold face, the angry eyes. 

We are afraid
, she thought forcefully,
but here we are anyway. See? We won’t run from you. 

And then he was on them. And filtering inside. Leaking in. Through the holes and the skin.

She felt his sour essence move through her mouth and down her throat, through the holes of her nose and ears, through her pores, the follicles of her hair, her fingernails. She felt a sickness in her scalp and lungs and at the pit of her stomach, right through the rubber of the wetsuit, from her hips down her legs all the way to her feet, from her shoulders to her fingertips. She felt it in the very ends of her bones—her skeleton, she guessed, as though he
lived
in it. 

He filled her with his rotting sickness, his creeping paralysis. She couldn’t move. 

That was what he did, she understood in a rush—he made it so you couldn’t move, you couldn’t do anything. You were mostly water, after all, and so he could move through
you
—not just the world, but your body. She remembered it from biology:
the human body is up to 78 percent water
… and then you had no independence. She didn’t even know if she was holding on to Jax’s hand anymore; nor did she feel the reassuring grain of the sand on the fins. All that was gone, all contact with the outside. It was as though she had no center. 

She was pure chaos. The chaos of terror.

And then there were terrible scenes—scenes she called up, scenes she saw, but scenes she also knew were true, that had happened, scenes from actual history. She saw the pirates on their ship, their ship that had once held a cargo of helpless slaves; she saw the vicious fights at sea, the blood and dirt and the violence that was casual for them. She saw them kill, with guns, knives, bare hands; she saw them hurt when they didn’t even need to—people who couldn’t fight back, people without weapons. She saw it when she didn’t want to, and because it was inside her she couldn’t shut it out by closing her eyes….

She was shaking, she knew, but the sensation was far away, someplace she couldn’t quite be right now. She thought to herself:
It’s not that it isn’t real. But it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be the world.

And she forced herself to look hard—so hard she thought her eyes were burning. Was it evil? Was it that people were evil, to do these things to each other?

They called them pirates like it was glamorous or something, almost a joke, really, but they were just gangsters who hurt and killed people. The gangsters of their time. How could she get through to them?

Forgive
, she thought. The pirates had done all the worst things, and those worst things bound them to the Pouring Man. But if she could forgive them, maybe they’d listen.