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

your world, she told the Pouring Man. She felt as though she was speaking clearly through the thickness of the salt, through the liquid, the words flowing out of her mind with the force of objects. It isn’t his world, she thought to the ghosts, who streamed from him now, streamed from his shoulders and his hands and arms like dark flags into the water, shapeless, flapping things. It doesn’t have to be.

And then she was back. Her body was hers again; he had withdrawn his sourness from her flesh and blood in a shocking split-second, leaving her warm and full of energy. She was here in the water, only a couple of miles from her home, holding Jax’s hand.

And the ghosts were on the Pouring Man. They were clawing and shredding at him, his arms, his shoulders, his face and his head. They had their hook hands into his black rags, their knives and swords shoved into him, all over him from every possible angle. They mobbed him.

The ghosts were on her side.

We’ve won their loyalty, thought Jax to her. You did it. They can’t kill him, though, because he’s not alive. All they can do is stop him for a while.

In no time the Pouring Man seemed to be falling apart. He was peeling, splitting down the middle.

As they watched he was rended—that was the word that came to her. He was ripped into parts as though his body was soft—stringy in the middle, stringy as the sides of him split off and dark fragments floated in disarray. There was no blood, nothing like that, because, she guessed, he didn’t have any; and as he split and drifted, the ghosts shrank back into the shadows.

She turned and looked at Jax, and she thought he was smiling, or would have been if the regulator wasn’t blocking his mouth. But then his expression changed, and she looked where he was looking.

Because the dark fragments that had been the Pouring Man were drifting together again, piece by piece. They made two columns in the water, two small columns; they were turning into something. Not into him, but into two people. They gathered and became more solid and more colorful. They shaped into figures of children—children wearing scuba gear. Children with masks on, and oxygen tanks on their backs. One with long hair, the other shorter and blond.

Her and Jax, in fact.

She was looking at two kids who might as well be their own reflections. Like a mirror image.

Except for their eerie smiles. The other children didn’t have to close their mouths around the regulators to breathe. They simply smiled, with water flowing through them. And Cara recognized those smiles, because they weren’t the smiles of kids.

The smiles were his.

She looked at Jax, trembling. He pointed upward, and in that same moment the copies began to rise. They didn’t swim, didn’t even move their arms: their arms, like the Pouring Man’s before them, hung at their sides, motionless. Despite this they rose through the water.

Jax let go of her hand and fumbled to unclip his weight belt. Then she was grabbing at her own, letting it drop onto the sand beside the rope, and she felt herself turn buoyant again. He was pulling up through the water, and she was beside him, kicking her fins .… It was a race, clearly; she didn’t have to be Jax to know that. They had to beat the copies to the top.

Those versions of themselves were not them. They were him.

And they could hurt Hayley.

Gasping, she and Jax broke the surface.

And there was Hayley, sitting in the kayak, looking shockingly normal—part of the world of makeup and clothes and TV, the regular, mundane world.

Her face was lit up by one of the flashlights; apparently she hadn’t wanted to sit alone in the dark.

The boat was rocking a bit but not close to flipping.

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “Wow, what a relief. I was about to call 911!”

But then, behind her on the other side of the boat, in the dark, another Jax and Cara broke the surface too. Hayley jumped in her seat and turned around, shining her flashlight down at them and giving a short shriek.

All of them pulled out their mouthpieces hastily, all four of them struggled to raise their masks onto their head so they could talk to Hayley. All four of them had bruise-like creases on their cheeks where the masks had bitten in.

“They’re not us,” Cara told her, her lips numb with cold.

“They’re him,” said Jax. “Don’t believe them.”

“No,” said the fake Jax, talking just like the real one. “We’re real. Those are the copies. Please, Hayley. Believe us.”

“Please, Hayley,” begged the fake Cara. “It’s me!”

It was amazing how much she looked like her—even her voice, the way she ran her hand over her wet hair.

“You have to choose,” said the fake Jax. “You have to choose between us. Choose the real ones. Choose us!”

The real Jax bobbed up and down in the water, splashing. “Hayley! Be careful! If you choose wrong they’ll hurt you—”

“So choose right!” said the fake Cara. “Choose me!”

“Follow your instincts, Hayley,” said Jax, shaking his head. “Don’t second-guess yourself. You know the real us, I know you do.”

Treading water, Cara gazed up at her friend, who was casting the beam of the flashlight back and forth between the two sets of them.

“What is this,” said Hayley, sounding angry. “What’s happening?”

“You are the arbiter,” said the real Jax. “Not Max. It’s you who’s supposed to be the impartial judge. But you have to choose the version of us that’s real, Hayley. That’s real and wants to be good.”

“I’m sorry for bringing you here,” said Cara. “I am … but the bad one could say that too, the copy of me. But she couldn’t know what’s on your mother’s shelf of statues, could she? She could never know that. Could she?”

“Careful,” warned Jax. “If I know, the fake me could know, too. Because he can read