The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

She should have known he wouldn’t come unprepared—even if he forgot to clue her in about it.

DONT B AFRD, read the watch’s display.

She shook her head, giving him a thumbs-up. There was a surreal beauty here, with the glow all around—if you could overlook the danger lurking out there in the infinite dark water beyond this small patch of light.

The danger of him.

Jax went back to his watch, pressing a button on the side rapid-fire, and then lifted it up for her to see again.

I MEAN THEY WONT HURT US. UNLESS HE TELLS THEM TO.

She raised her hands to say: What? Who?

Jax typed again.

BHIND U.

Warily she turned herself around in the water with a dog-paddling motion and startled when she saw them—figures among the ruins. They looked like outlines of people, darker than the swirling light of the water but still see-through: outlines like pencil drawings with only the faintest washes of color filling them. They were dressed in ragged coats, some with hats, some with long things hanging at their sides—one at the front had a red coat, an old pistol with a silver handle stuck into his sash. A black hat with a peak at the front.

Many of them. A crowd. Maybe a hundred or more.

She turned back to Jax.

GHOSTS, read his watch. WHYDAHS CREW. THE 1 WITH HAT IS CAPTAIN. BLACK SAM BELLAMY.

She should be afraid—now it was ghosts?—but the thin, mangy figures weren’t coming closer. They just hung there passively, moving in a way that was odd and almost imperceptible. They shifted in the water so that she saw not a progress forward or backward, not the regular motion of bodies, but a kind of series of snapshots, like stop-motion photography—a pattern or imprint, a series of microscopic differences in position.

She’d never believed in ghosts. Ghosts were just stories told to gullible kids around campfires, kids who wanted to be scared for a second while they were roasting marshmallows. But then … memories were a kind of ghost, she thought in passing—like her grandparents, whom she never knew but had pictures of in her head from old black-and-white photos.

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