Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (10 page)

3

There was a long time during which I knew nothing except that I knew nothing: I was conscious, it seemed, but had nothing to be conscious
of
. It was the strangest of sensations – or
non
sensations – and yet it didn't bother me at all. I accepted that I must be either dying or dead, but I was perfectly calm about this. There had been nothing in particular to live for except living itself ever since my marriage to Marion had turned so spectacularly sour on me. I was just sorry that I had, as it were, taken Naomi Fredriksen with me.

I waited patiently for the long corridor with the lighted door at the end to appear, but they never did.

Instead what happened was that I became aware of a terrible coldness spreading through me. I barely noticed it at first; it began not as a physical chill but as a freezing of my feelings, of my emotions. I regarded Naomi Fredriksen's death, and its horrible manner, with complete dispassion. I didn't find it appalling, or sickening, or depressing. I didn't even find it interesting. The same was true of my own existence.

But soon enough the cold took on a physical aspect, and began creeping through me, starting at my core and working slowly outward until finally it reached my extremities. It was like being flayed alive from the inside out. I can't describe the pain – can't even properly recollect it. It was an agony that would have killed a living human being ten times over. Me, of course, I was already dead. There wasn't the escape route of oblivion.

The torment lasted for eternity, and then abruptly it was gone. With its disappearance there came a return to my body of the sort of vibrancy it had possessed when alive. There was the illusion of warm blood running through my veins. I flexed my muscles appreciatively, feeling small cramps slowly ease. I was still very cold, but it was the cold of a brisk winter's day, not the searing chill I'd known just moments before.

For a while I thought I was breathing. Then I realized that I wasn't, that I didn't have to.

And finally I opened my eyes.

Instantly I panicked.

I was lying twisted, mainly on my back, half sunk into ooze at the bottom of the ocean. In the very far distance above me I could see a flicker of light – either the storm had passed or the intensity of its lightning strikes was now so great that they formed a seemingly continuous discharge. Around me, unconcerned, strange marine plants waved slowly in currents I could not feel, and a couple of poisonous-looking muddy grey-brown fish darted between vague hunched masses that I knew to be overgrown rocks. I could smell – or thought I could smell – the bittersweet shit-scent of eons-old corruption and decay.

But none of these things especially registered alongside the overpowering terror that the pressure of the water should be squashing me flat!

I began choking, as if fighting for the breath I didn't need.

It took a long time for me to realize that I felt no great burden from the water at all. Despite the contortion of my position on the sea floor, I was as comfortable as if I'd been lying at home in my own bed.

Although this may seem hard to believe, it was only now that the wonder of my situation began to hit me. I'd never since childhood – when I'd cast aside childish things, as enjoined by no less an authority than Christ himself – believed in any afterlife, or the soul, or any of the guff earnestly propounded to the ignorant masses by people whose education and intelligence really should have told them better. So far as I was concerned, once you were dead that was it. You re-entered the carbon cycle, and future generations unwittingly feasted on your remains. But now I was, as we said in the real-estate business, having to swiftly re-evaluate my prior estimate.

I tried to sit up, but was powerless to shift. I could turn my head, but that was about it. It wasn't that the muscles of my limbs and torso weren't working – I tested them again and they were – but as if some immense weight that I couldn't directly feel were pinning me to the spot. Had I been right about the water pressure after all?

Hours passed. The distant glimmer of light above me darkened. Night must have fallen. I could see little but shadows and darker shadows; only later did it strike me as strange that I could see anything at all.

And then there was that ripping, wrenching, tearing sensation of ultimate cold once again. I cried out in silent agony. There was, of course, not even a spiral of air bubbles to mark my scream.

Mercifully, this time the pain didn't last long.

With a sense of release not unlike orgasm I felt my heavy physical body pull free of the
other
body I was now inhabiting. Taken by a wayward current, my corpse flopped over to one side. Already its silhouette was looking a little puffy from the gases of decay. It seemed to retain a precarious grip on the sea bottom for a few minutes, bobbing gently, and then it floated completely clear of me.

I sat up and watched its almost invisible mass slowly begin to rise in the dark water.

The departure of my body seemed to make my senses keener. I could see better – not very well, but well enough to be able to check my arms and hands to see that I still
had
arms and hands. I was naked, my clothes having departed with my other body, and the flesh of my stomach and thighs felt firm and oddly youthful where I squeezed it. I seemed to be in the best of possible health, as if I'd somehow shed ten years of smoking, drinking and general physical neglect. My broken arm was healed.

I grinned. If these were the consequences you could expect, I'd recommend drowning to anyone.

Well, okay: if you didn't mind going through that frigid hell to get here ...

My new body wanted me to leap to my feet, but I held back nervously, wary of losing my footing in the liquid ooze. I stood up very gingerly, moving not as if I were underwater at all but as if I were out in the open air. Holding my arms out to either side, I waited until I was satisfied I could keep my balance. It was only then that I noticed my feet weren't sinking at all into the mud. I started walking across its surface, cautiously at first but then with increasing confidence as I discovered it was as easy as ambling across a well kempt lawn. When obstructions loomed in my path – rocks, waterlogged beams, patches of prickly sea plants – they seemed to level out as I approached them and then restore themselves to their former state after I'd passed over them.

The only real difference between this existence and everything I'd experienced in my previous life above the water was the lack of sound – except, as I began to realize, that wasn't really true, not quite. The submarine world had its own particular repertoire of sounds. They were very quiet, which was why I hadn't registered them before, but they were definitely present. Most of them were very low in pitch – the snap of a fish's tail as it abruptly changed course might have sounded like a slap or a crack in the air but down here in the water it was a low, sluggish murmur. Some of the noises, though, like a few of the sounds the fishes and other creatures made among each other, were like little clicks and whistles.

And there was another spectrum of sounds, sounds that served as a backdrop to the rest. These were much more steadily sustained, so that for a long while my brain blotted them out, the way the brain soon learns to disregard a persistent background hum. Once I began to pick these up, though, they became impossible to ignore. I was soon able to identify them: they were the noises the currents made as the waters of the sea floor settled and resettled themselves in response to changes far above me.

They weren't just random noises. As I listened to them more carefully I found they wove themselves together with a definite structure and rhythm.

They were music.

It wasn't a music like any I'd heard back in the human world – indeed, it was so very different that any attempt at analogy is going to be misleading. However:

Imagine the audience has finally hushed and the orchestra has stilled. The first sounds the conductor draws forth are very low, almost imperceptibly quiet tones from the tubas and bassoons, the note barely changing for long moments and yet the sound certainly bearing some tantalizingly elusive melody. This low chorus will make itself felt continually throughout the orchestral piece that follows, even though it can only sometimes be distinguished. Consider it to be the more major currents of the sea floor, the constantly streaming offshoots of the far mightier but far distant currents of the open ocean.

Now, just when the audience is aching for some change to the tapestry being woven by the low wind instruments, there comes a sudden capricious flurry of notes from the first violins, almost immediately countered by the violas and – startlingly in its unexpectedness but nonetheless fitting perfectly into the composition – a tumbling melody played in duet between the xylophone and the harp. These are the eddies as the waters spin around the projecting spar of some long-wrecked wooden ship. As subsidiary eddies playfully develop, piccolos join in. A slump of the ooze brings a muted barrage of thunder from the timpani, and then ...

But really it sounded nothing like that at all. The instruments making up this invisible, phantom orchestra weren't any I'd ever heard, and they brought out harmonies no mortal composer could ever have conjectured. All the music we're accustomed to, even if it's produced electronically, scored by computer software, is ultimately the product of the human mind. This strange subterranean music wasn't. And yet it was, at least to my ears, of quite enchanting beauty.

Furthermore, it wasn't just idle sound.

It was speaking to me, as clearly as if it were pronouncing words.

The music of the underwater currents was telling me to follow quite a specific path, a route along which it would guide me until I reached the destination it desired me to reach – the destination I
had
to reach.

I didn't know what that destination was. In my previous existence I'd have struck up, I'm sure, a clamour of questions, demanding to know where I was being taken before I so much as stirred a single step.

Here, I didn't do any of that.

I followed where the music of the waters led me.