8.

She concentrated on keeping a hand on the rope but pointing her head and shoulders downward. Curiously the water got warmer as she descended, or it felt that way to her, at least, which was the opposite of how she’d expected it to be…there was so much color swirling around her that she couldn’t see anything else at first—a lovely bright aqua color. She saw why the verse had called it fire, the night of fires beneath the sea.

The salt load made the seawater hard to see through, though: it was a mist of fine particles, glowing and swirling around her. Not like the clear water in a turquoise swimming pool; more like blooms and currents of light.

She and Jax had wikied the plankton, microscopic pictures that showed their shapes. They were beautiful, even the poisonous ones—lacy and delicate, shaped like acorns in some cases or diamonds or stars. Of course you could never see that unless you were looking at them under a microscope, she thought, but it was strange to think of those all around in the water, minuscule organisms, life forms entering her body and Jax’s along with the water molecules—tiny beings like whole worlds, sculpted and fragile-looking though in fact they were powerful enough to give out this amazing glow…

And to make her and Jax pretty sick, possibly. If they were the toxic kind.

Hopefully they weren’t.

She felt pressure on her head as she went down, but then it seemed to subside. Jax was ahead of her, further down; she could just make out the wake that rose from his kicking fins. Down further they swam, and she found she was thinking of her mother—would her mother somehow appear down here, gliding out of the dim fathoms like a mermaid? The dream had put the notion in her head—her mother swimming up through the turquoise water, reaching for them through the luminous particles.

Then she realized the thought was actually more alarming than comforting. She wanted the same mother back she’d always had—the real mother she’d always known, exactly the same as the day she vanished, not one iota different.

In the dream her mother’s long hair had floated around her as though it was submerged…almost as though her mother, it occurred to her suddenly, had drowned.

No. Just because her mother had called her a visionary didn’t mean that anything she thought of had to have some kind of deep meaning.

A dark mass loomed up: kelp, or seaweed that looked a lot like kelp, curling out of the depths. It had pods, rubbery pods on the end of stalks that were like long tentacles, waving beneath. The algae all around them lit up the underwater world, and she could see the bottom—sand littered with dark debris, with unfamiliar shapes.

Jax grabbed onto something at the bottom and looked up at her—a hard object, partially beneath the sand. He motioned for her to come over too, and she grabbed it, her feet above her head, looking down and around, her free hand pushing the water. It was a piece of wood, maybe a rib of the boat.

They were floating in a half-illuminated country, dim in some places and then shining from the phosphorescence. The brightness receded into a murkier distance if she tried to fix her eyes on something far away, but the foreground was clear. Around them were the ship ruins—pieces of wood and metal, she thought, though she didn’t know how the wood could be anything but rotten after three centuries underwater. A few small, dull-colored fish swam in and out and around.

There were rocks, too, piles of boulder-size rocks like small stone mountains on the sandy floor. From their cracks rose twisting columns of seaweed, stems emerging from the outcroppings where they were anchored and flowing overhead into a dark-green canopy. Their stems and leaves swayed gracefully with the slow currents near the bottom of the ocean. They were like forests.

The strangest thing about this kingdom of the sea, she thought, was how it was silent and loud at once.

Then, with the toes of his swimfins touching the sand, Jax unclipped the anchor weight from the guide rope and re-clipped the rope to his weight belt. There was enough slack for them to swim quite far without pulling the rope taut, which they had to in case they needed to signal Hayley.

So here they were, she thought: thirty feet under the surface of the endless Atlantic, no adults knowing where she was, no safety net, and who knew what strange thing would come shooting out of the dark…. There had been great white sharks sighted, recently, in the waters off Chatham. Not only that, but—she’d heard it said—they were actually hunting people now. Their usual food was getting harder to find….

Chatham was fifteen miles away. Great whites, Jax told her once, could swim forty miles in an hour. When they were hungry.

She wished Max was here.

Jax was swimming among the fragments of the wreck. She moved more hesitantly than he did, touching the rope. She wished they’d brought a tool to communicate with—boards they could write on or something. She should have made an agreement with Jax, she realized, that he could ping her down here, that they could make an exception to his promise.

She was surprised she wasn’t freezing. Maybe that was a bad sign—maybe when you didn’t feel cold anymore that meant you had, what did they call it, frostbite? Or hypothermia?—and were about to go unconscious….

Of course. Jax was holding his waterproof watch up to her face, its digital readout lit up. He could actually type on the thing, which was blocky and huge over the arm of his wetsuit. For all she knew he could watch Youtube videos on it. 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 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 was 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 wetsuit, 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.

Ω

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 either, 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 onto 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.