Challenger Deep (8 page)
Authors: Neal Shusterman
I don’t tell him that it was the parrot who insisted I get myself a cocktail.
“You go up there because you want to fit in,” he says. “I know about these things. Best thing to do is pour it overboard when no one’s looking.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I tell him. I think of the lonely maiden decorating the bow; how she asked me to be her eyes and ears on the ship. I figure if the captain is ever going to be open to questions, now would be the time, when he feels guilty for my raging F.
“When I was on the bowsprit, I saw the ship’s figurehead. It’s very beautiful.”
The captain nods. “A work of art to be sure.”
“Sailors used to believe they protect ships. Is that what you believe?”
The captain looks at me curiously, but not quite suspiciously. “Did she tell you that?”
“She’s a piece of wood,” I say quickly. “How could she tell me anything?”
“Right.” The captain fiddles with his beard, then says, “She protects us from the challenges we will face before we reach our destination. The monsters toward which we sail.”
“She has power over them?”
The captain chooses his words carefully. “She watches. She sees things no one else sees, and her visions echo in the hollows of the ship, strengthening it against the onslaught. She is good luck, but
more than that, her gaze can charm all nature of aquatic beast.”
“I’m glad we have protection,” I tell him. I know not to push any further, because then he might get suspicious about my questioning.
“Without her we’re lost,” the captain says, then gets up. “I expect you at roll call in the morning. No complaints.” Then he strides out, tossing the wet rag to the navigator, who clearly has no interest in nursing my wound.
My headache is like a brand on my forehead. It makes it hard to focus on my schoolwork—hard to do anything. The aching comes and it goes, and with each return, it’s a little bit worse. The more I think the more my head hurts, and lately my brain has been in constant overdrive. I keep taking showers to cool it down, like the way they pour water on an overheating machine. I usually feel better after the third or fourth shower.
After today’s multiple showers, I go downstairs and ask my mom for aspirin.
“You take too much aspirin,” my mom tells me, and hands me a bottle of Tylenol.
“Tylenol sucks,” I tell her.
“It brings down fevers.”
“I don’t have a fever. My forehead is growing a freaking eye.”
She looks at me, gauging my seriousness, and it bugs me. “I’m kidding.”
“I know,” she says, turning away. “I was just looking at the way you wrinkle your forehead. That’s why you get those headaches.”
“So, can I have aspirin?”
“How about Advil?”
“Fine,” I say. It usually works all right, although it makes me moody as hell when it starts to wear off.
I go to the bathroom with a Mountain Dew and take three pills, feeling too rebellious to take the recommended dose of two. In the mirror I can see the wrinkles on my forehead that my mother was talking about. I try to relax, but I can’t. My reflection looks worried. Am I worried? That’s not quite what I’m feeling today—but lately my emotions are so liquid, they flow into one another without my noticing. Now I realize that I
am
worried. I’m worried about being worried.
I have this dream. I’m dangling from the ceiling. My feet are a few inches from the ground. Then, as I look down, I see I have no feet. My body tapers into a squirming, wormlike bit of flesh, as if I’m a larval version of myself, suspended above the dark ground.
Suspended by what, though? I realize that I’m caught in something that’s like a net but more organic. A web, sticky and dense. I shudder to think what kind of creature could spin a web like that.
I can move my arms but it takes such an incredible force of will to move a single inch, it doesn’t feel worth the effort. I think there are others in here with me, but they’re all out of view, behind me, just past the edge of my peripheral vision.
It’s dark around me, but dark isn’t the word for it, more like lightless. As if the concept of light and dark have not yet been born, leaving everything a persistent shade of somber gray, and I wonder if this is what the void was like before there was anything. Not even the White Plastic Kitchen exists in this dream.
The parrot comes out of the lightlessness, strutting toward me, but he’s the size of a man. It’s frighteningly intimidating to see a bird that big. A feathered dinosaur with a beak that could snap my head off with a single bite. He looks me over with that grin that never goes away, and seems to approve of my helpless situation.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Like I’m waiting for something to suck out my blood,”
I try to say but all that comes out is, “Waiting.”
The parrot looks past me, over my shoulder. I try to turn my head, but can’t move enough to see what he’s looking at.
“Ah, here’s the proboscis!” he says.
“What’s that?” I ask, realizing too late that it’s a word I’d rather not have defined.
“Its stinger. The sting is the only pain you’ll feel. Then you’ll drift off as easily as falling asleep.”
And sure enough, I feel the sting, potent and painful. I can’t tell exactly where the unseen creature stings me. Is it in my back? In my thigh? In my neck? Then I realize that it’s everywhere at once.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Even before my terror can blossom, the venom takes effect and in an instant, I don’t care. About anything. I hang there in absolute peace as I am slowly devoured.
A science exam, which, for once, I did not study for. It occurs to me that I don’t have to take this test, because I know more than the teacher. I know so much more. I know things that aren’t in the book. I know the inner workings of all things biological down to the cellular level. Because I’ve figured things out. I KNOW how the universe works. I’m practically bursting with the knowledge.
How can a single person have so much crammed in their brain and not have their head explode? Now I know the reason for the headaches. This knowledge is nothing specific that I can describe. Words are completely ineffective. I can draw it, though. I
have
been drawing it. But I must be careful who I let know the things I know. Not everyone wants the information spread.
“You will have forty minutes for this test. I suggest you use your time wisely.”
I snicker. There’s something about what he said that strikes me as funny, but I can’t say why.
The moment I receive my Scantron and flip over the exam, I realize the words on the paper aren’t the real exam at all. The true test is something deeper. The fact that I’m having trouble focusing on the printed questions is a clear indication that I must look for more meaningful answers.
I begin to fill in the little circles with my number two pencil, and the world goes away. Time goes away. I find patterns that are hidden within the grid. The answer key to everything, and suddenly it’s—
“Pencils down! Time is up. Pass your answer sheets forward.”
I do not remember forty minutes passing. I look at both sides of my Scantron to see wild constellations that don’t exist in the heavens, and yet are more true than the stars we can see. All that remains is for someone to connect the dots.
The girl with blue hair is made Mistress of the Treasury and is given a trunkful of manifests from sunken ships. Her job is to go through them and find evidence of lost treasure, based on what was listed as the ship’s cargo. It might not be so bad, except that all the pages are shredded into confetti, and must be pieced back together. She labors at this day in and day out.
The pudgy kid, who everyone now calls the lore-master, struggles to learn what he can from the massive volume the captain inflicted upon him. Unfortunately, the entire book is written in runes from some language that I suspect is either dead or never actually existed.
“This is hell on earth,” the lore-master declares to me in his frustration, and the parrot, who seems to hear things before they’re even spoken, points out that since land is nowhere to be seen, it would best be described as “hell asail.”
The choker-girl is in charge of morale—odd because she’s always so dismal.
“We’re all gonna die, and it’s going to be painful,” she’s said several times, although she always finds a different way of saying basically the same thing. So much for morale.
The boy with the bag of bones has become skilled at telling fortunes. He holds the little leather pouch of the remains of the parrot’s father, ready to roll-and-read whenever the captain asks.
Bone-boy confides in me that he makes up most of his
readings—but he’s vague enough that it all can be interpreted to be true by someone who really wants it to be.
“How do you know I won’t give away your secret?” I ask him.
He smiles and says, “Because I can just as easily prophesize that you’ll get thrown overboard by a crewman destined to be rich and famous.”
Which, of course, would make any member of the crew want to hurl me into the sea. I have to admit it, this guy is no idiot.
The navigator continues to do what he’s done since I met him. He creates his navigational charts, searching for meaning and direction to guide us to the trench and back again.
“The captain has special plans for you,” the navigator tells me. “I think you’ll like them.” And somehow, in four steps he conjures “special plans” to “swollen glands,” and begins to feel his throat in a troubled way.
“You, my insolent F, shall be our artist in residence,” the captain tells me. Just the mention of the brand reminds me that the pain in my forehead never quite goes away. Mercifully there are no mirrors on board, so I can’t actually see it, only feel it. “Your purpose shall be to document our journey in images.”
“The captain is partial to images over words,” the navigator whispers to me, “because he can’t read.”
I know I should hate the captain with all my heart, and yet I don’t. I can’t explain why. The reason must go as deep as the trench we sail toward—it must hide in a place that no light can reach except for the light you bring with you, and right now I feel pretty much in the dark.
I peer off the side of the ship, pondering the depths, wondering what unknowable mysteries lie beneath us. When I look at the roiling sea long enough, I see things in the randomness of the waves. There are eyes everywhere in those waters scrutinizing me, judging me.
The parrot is watching, too. He struts along the railing toward me.
“‘Look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you,’”
the parrot says. “Let’s hope the abyss finds nothing of interest.”
In spite of the captain’s disdain of the crow’s nest, I still make the climb twice a day to have my cocktail, and commune with my fellow crewmen—although few of them are social once their potion is in hand.
Today the sea is a roller coaster, doing everything short of corkscrews and loops, and the ship’s rolling motion is always worst in the crow’s nest, which pitches to and fro atop the mainmast like the weighted tip of a metronome. Even as I try to hold my drink steady, it sloshes within the glass, spilling a little bit on the ground, where it flows into the dark spaces between the planks and disappears.
“It’s alive, you know,” says the master-at-arms—a seasoned
crewman in charge of the cannon, with unpleasant tattoos up and down his arms. “It’s alive, and waits to be fed.” I then realize that the voice isn’t coming from his mouth, but from one of the skulls inked on his arm. The one with dice for eyes.
“What’s alive?” I ask the tattoo. “The ship?”
The skull shakes its head. “The dark sludge that holds the ship together.”
“It’s just caulking,” I tell it, and that makes all the other skulls begin to laugh.
“Keep telling yourself that,” says the dice-eyed skull, “but when you wake up with a few less toes, you’ll know it’s been tasting you.”
I climb out to the bowsprit in the middle of the night, avoiding the crewmen on watch. Once there, I intentionally slide off the well-polished pole, and the maiden—the ship’s figurehead—catches me, as I knew she would. At first she holds me by my wrists, but then she pulls me close, embracing me with her wooden arms. Although there’s nothing but her arms keeping me from plunging into the depths, somehow I feel safer here than I do on board.
The sea is calm tonight. Only the occasional swell sprays us with a light, salty mist. As she holds me I whisper to her the things I’ve learned.
“The captain believes that you are good luck,” I tell her. “That your gaze will charm the sea monsters.”
“Good luck?” she scoffs. “How lucky am I if I must pose forever on this bow and take all the abuse the sea doles out upon me? And as for sea monsters, nothing will charm them but a full belly—of that you can be sure.”
“I’m just telling you what he said.”