PLANKTON WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH
by Foghorn Jollypox
Copyright 2011 Foghorn Jollypox
Smashwords Edition
I should have known something was wrong by the way Allison reacted when I first spotted her.
Peering in the big front window of the restaurant, trying to see through the sprayed-on fake snow, I spotted her at one of the farther tables. She had on sunglasses, though the interior was far from bright. She was holding something – phone, glass, napkin, I couldn’t tell what – right in front of her mouth, so I couldn’t read her expression.
I was late meeting her for dinner – late because she had called at the last minute and asked me to stop back at our apartment and pick up our camera. When I gave her a wave with my gloved hand, she simply swept her arm in an exaggerated and angry-looking come-on gesture. This took me by surprise. I didn’t think I’d arrived all that late. As I walked in the door, rattling a string of bells against the glass, I reached for my phone to check the time, but was distracted by the sight that met me.
The name of the restaurant was either Nudibranch Descending a Staircase or Spotted Eagle Ray and Child; I can’t quite remember. But whatever the name, the interior of the place was spectacular, larger than I ever could have imagined from the outside. Realtors use the expression “cathedral ceiling,” but the ceiling here was actually as high as in a cathedral, with a dome and all, and even an oculus letting in the last of the daylight far up at the center. So high that it gave me a moment of dizziness to stare up at it, and I had to lower my gaze again in order not to stumble.
The area where I’d spotted Allison was actually farther into the establishment’s recesses than it had seemed from the outside, two rooms away. I would have to negotiate a very crowded floor in order to reach her. The room where I now stood was bright, with white surfaces, a glowing fish tank that took up the entire length of wall behind the counter, and white-painted metal tables that stood on a mottled gray and green carpet. It seemed that this first area was the combination piano bar and coffee house. The next section, visible through a broad arched opening in the wall, was the main dining room; and the space beyond, quite dark, seemed to be the bar. Allison must have decided to get a drink before dinner. Fine with me; I felt like a couple or several myself.
For a moment I wondered if this was a sort of “theme” place whose patrons tend to dress up in this or that retro fashion. Women in particular seemed to be wearing a lot of bold colors and even feathered hats, somewhat 1920s-style. Come to notice it, plenty of the men were also rather floridly attired, not in drag exactly, but loud and bright. There seemed to be far more servers than necessary for the number of tables, often appearing in small processions, bearing multiple goodies to the same location.
Damn, I hoped Allison wasn’t pissed off at me just for being late. If so, it would have meant that she was in one of her rare petulant moods. Rare, but hard to break when they do occur.
Of course, there was also that other issue. We were due to leave in a couple of days to spend the holidays in Cozumel. I had as much enthusiasm for the trip as Allison did, but she had convinced herself that, deep down, I actually wanted to stay in town and do a real Christmas. She was wrong, but because I’d always been the more traditional of the two of us when it came to holiday spirit, she’d lately been reading into my every action some sign of reluctance to fly off to the tropics. In fact, the opposite was true. Maybe over a couple of drinks, we could finally clear it all up tonight.
I looked for her again, but now there were too many people milling around for me to see anyone sitting down, so I began making my way back toward the bar.
Just then the piano player, who’d been rattling out jazzy instrumental versions of Christmas carols, began singing in a powerful voice that was gruff, yet oddly tuneful.
I smiled after hearing the words to the song because, at that moment, I realized that the situation with Allison already had been cleared up.
Away
in a mangrove, no crib for a bed,
The leatherback hatchling
retracts his sweet head.
The gulls in the bright sky can’t
reach him down here,
No damage will come to his carapace dear.
So that was it. Allison had chosen this place because it married the holiday and marine themes; she’d done it as a joke to make light of any conflicted feelings either of us might still have about not doing a traditional Christmas.
Cetaceans are lowing, the hatchling awakes…
A clamor of dropped dishes drowned out the rest of the singer’s words. I didn’t really mind. The gimmick was a bit too cute for my taste. Still, I appreciated what Allison had done.
Passing among the tables in the piano bar/coffee shop, I got some strange looks from several of the seated patrons. One woman shuffled all the way around in her seat to look me up in down, her elderly lips pursed, drawing her ivory cheeks in hollowly. I noticed then that the feathers in her hat were set into some kind of shell, and that the bone-white color and gloss of that shell exactly matched that of her face. I must have done a double take because she suddenly spun back around, leaving me staring at the back of her lavish fur coat, which almost perfectly matched the mottled gray-green of the carpet.
I trudged on, squeezing among the increasingly numerous tables, and finally made it to the second area, the dining room. Here there was another hugely vaulted ceiling, a fish tank even longer than the one in the coffee bar, and yet another piano player. This guy’s voice was even rougher than the last one’s. I could see him sitting at his baby grand, crooning away. He looked like the late actor Lee Marvin at his most grizzled. Because he wore black, his head seemed to float in the dimly lit room.
The clamor of voices and of utensils clinking on plates was greater in here, and the player’s voice was frequently drowned out as he sang:
God
rest ye merry, trilobites,
Let nothing you dismay
That North
Atlantic Drift has come
----
mumble – mumble – unintelligible –
To steer
us clear of sulfur vents
When we have swum astray…
The air was close, and I began to feel slightly lightheaded, which didn’t help my attempt to move through the room. There seemed to be no aisles between tables – not through the center of the room, not even at the periphery, where the tight arrangement of tables went right up to the walls. The gloom and the haphazard layout conspired to leave me quite disoriented, and I had to keep looking around to find the archway that led into the bar where Allison had been waiting for me. There were still too many people standing or shuffling about for me to see anyone seated back there.
I also kept getting distracted, in rather a pleasant way, by the voice of the singer. He actually had a hell of a range; it made me think for a moment of the alien opera singer in that Fifth Dimension movie. Was this guy’s voice really moving through a preternatural number of octaves, or was I imagining it?
Then I saw her again. The milling crowd had parted, giving me a brief view of her seated alone at a table that could have held five or six people. She still wore the sunglasses, yet despite that, and despite the dim lighting, I could see her eyes. She definitely looked worried, even panicked. She was looking around, searching for something – possibly for me – but didn’t seem to see me.
I headed straight for her, feeling on the edge of panic myself.
In my headlong charge, I ran right into one of the tables, startling its several occupants so severely that they all leapt immediately to their feet and scuttled backward with amazing speed.
I stumbled, regained my footing, and looked around to apologize, but the people I had disturbed were now turned around and simply walking away from their dinner, heading in different directions, weaving through the crazy maze of tables.
I didn’t have time to think about it. Something was wrong, and I needed to get to Allison.
At last I made it through the final arch and into the bar. I spotted Allison’s table, but she was gone. The table was still unoccupied, even though all the rest back here were full. I called out her name, looking around. A few people glanced my way, but no Allison.
“Allison!” I shouted again, still drawing very little attention, still not seeing her.
She had to be in here. I didn’t think it possible that she could have gone back out through the archway without my noticing it; there hadn’t been that many people at the entrance when I came through. She had to have gone further into the place.
I pushed on through the bar, looking for a back exit, or maybe another archway into yet another room. The sparse light grew sparser still as I went on.
Had I been moving as fast as I’d been earlier, I would have crashed into another table, but this time the glow of a candle alerted me to the obstacle I was headed for, and I managed to only lightly bump the table’s edge.
The occupants did not scatter this time, and when I looked down to apologize, they beamed up warmly at me.
They were a friendly, handsome couple in their early fifties. He was compact and strongly built, with a multi-directional mop of mostly gray hair that gave him a rugged look at odds with his rather delicate hands. She had jet black hair with a faint wave pattern most pronounced where its ends grazed the padded shoulders of her black blazer.
Back in the dining room, the Lee Marvin guy started singing again, and most of his words carried fairly well:
O molting night,
Brittle
stars are fattening nicely
It is the night –mumble
mumble….
Long lay
thee here, behind this clump of coral
But when it’s clear,
you can pounce and fill your gorge.
A thrill of hope: that
lurking cod has vanished
And lookee: here comes a fat and tasty
urchin!
Faaaaaall on your cephalothorax!
O hear the chitin bursting….
It stuck me then that the couple might have seen Allison, might even have spoken with her, this being a seemingly friendly place, and it being the holiday season. I described her and explained my situation, doing my best to impart the urgency of my finding her.
They looked at one another, nodding knowingly, and the man handed me an extra drink the waiter had mistakenly brought for him. I sat and drank just to calm my nerves.
The look that had just passed between them suggested that they had seen Allison, but now they seemed to be simply ignoring my question. Infuriating as it was, I realized I had to engage these two in conversation if I was going to get anything out of them. As I listened and nodded, I kept an eye out for Allison, and for any hitherto unseen exits from this room.
The man was telling me about their visit to Turkey, but he called it Anatolia, explaining matter-of-factly, and with erudition that spoke of wondrous breeding, that they’d managed to arrive in Asia Minor in a different era, long before our own, and that his wife had gotten a job tending bar at a saloon frequented by a number of Knights Templar. The two of them were as much reminiscing as telling the story to me.
“I’ll tell you, my young friend, those Templars always had a spectacular line of rubbish to spin once they’d got a belly full of Greek wine.” He turned to his wife. “Heavens! Can you imagine if they’d ever got their hands on any real booze?” Facing me again, he added, “There was no such thing as distilled spirits in those days. Oh, there were stills, alright, but they were rare, and only alchemists had them, and they weren’t making scotch. No indeed.”
“Please, darling,” said his wife. “Don’t let’s get started on the alchemists. We’ll bore this poor floater to tears.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What did you just call me? What does ‘floater’ mean?”
She gently put a warm hand on my arm and fixed her brown eyes on mine in a way that ought to have made her husband froth with jealousy. “Darling,” she said, “just be glad you live when and where you do, and that your floating doesn’t take you to certain other times and places.”
“We were there to do a job, you see,” her husband explained. “We were in charge, and the Templars were simply the muscle to back us up, and the bartending gig was just a cover until we made sure those careless knights hadn’t been infiltrated.”
“A job,” I mumbled, wondering when he would get to the point so I could get up and get moving.
“Our employers were dead set on making sure that Mozart, who wouldn’t be born for many centuries yet, would never be exposed to sitar music. The process of preventing that situation had to be started well in advance of the Viennese genius’s arrival in our world.”
“Absolutely nothing Indian,” the woman explained. “No sarod, no veena, not even those lovely little finger drums. What are they called again, dear? Oh, it doesn’t matter. You see, our employers had been in contact with a certain group of veteran time travelers who assured them that, if Mozart ever got an earful of eastern music, so great would be the impact on Western consciousness that the world would come to an end within two hundred years of the great composer’s birth.”
“Something to do with knowledge of the Higgs Boson falling into the wrong hands,” her husband added.
I’d had enough.
“Even though I’m no physicist,” I replied sharply, “I’m reasonably sure that what you just said makes no sense. And much more to the point, I really need to find my wife, and I get the distinct impression that you’ve seen her, and yet for some reason, you refuse to say what you know.”
The man lit a cigar, sat back, and nodded rather smugly as he regarded me. “Yes, I can see you’re a man of action.” His tone of voice was sweating out plump little beads of sarcasm.
I looked from one to the other of them. “Why on earth won’t you simply tell me whether or not you’ve seen my wife? It’s a simple enough question: There’s a women about five-foot-six, late twenties, chin-length black hair, wearing sunglasses. I’m sure you’d remember if you’d seen this person in just the last few minutes, and I can’t imagine why you won’t just say yes or no.”
The man mimicked me in a mock dramatic voice: “Just say yes or no! I’ll get to the bottom of this!”
“Better to get to the surface of this,” came a new voice from somewhere behind me.
I stood and looked around to see who had spoken. There was no one.
The man sitting at the table had begun to bellow: “And the sixth horseman likened unto a baby-faced, middle-aged badass, and the grey hair over his sunburnt beer belly was sealed with a varnish that contained silver and charcoal flecks in tight abundance.”
That was it. The couple were clearly insane – or if they weren’t, they were having themselves a good old laugh by deliberately delaying me when I was clearly in urgent trouble.
he gnarled old piano player had migrated back here to the bar, where he’d taken a seat at yet another baby grand, this one coated with shining mother of pearl.
Plankton
we have heard on high,
Coursing sweetly through the brine,
Stretch thy baleen open
wide,
Receive thee now this rich delight.,
Glo
– aw-aw-aw-aw-aw
…aw-aw-aw-aw-aw
…aw-aw-aw-aw- AWWWWriaaaaaa
In excelsis …
The old codger really bawled out the last few beats of Gloria, then stopped two syllables short of the end of the verse and addressed the room with great confidence and panache.
“Say, did I ever tell you folks the one about the two Jurassic mosquitoes who fell asleep during an amber alert?”
A wave of laughter from the crowd.
I was moving along the rear wall of the place, desperately searching for another way out. I suddenly realized that Allison might just have gone to the restroom, and if I could find that, I’d simply wait outside for her, or get a waitress to go in and check the place for me. That look I’d seen on Allison’s face might have meant she was getting sick.
In fact, I thought, her feeling ill was the most likely explanation for her sudden disappearance, but in my earlier panic I had missed the obvious.
But what was up with the way people were reacting to me? I looked around and saw faces turning away to avoid meeting my gaze. Maybe I’d raised my voice a little too much when I got exasperated with the Higgs Boson couple.
Said
the Gulf Stream to the tiny sprat,
"Do you see what I see?
Way up on the surface, little sprat,
Do you see what I see?
A skiff, a skiff, trawling on the waves
With a gillnet big as
a cave,
With a gillnet…
Again the pianist stopped and addressed the crowd. “You know, folks, I always thought that the Lord of the Rings movies would have been better if Michael Caine had played that talking tree character. And maybe Gandalf, too.”
The crowd roared with laughter again, but this time I didn’t get the joke. Then I cursed myself for getting distracted again. Just think about finding Allison, you idiot!
At last, practically feeling my way along the curved wall of the bar, I found another archway, the room beyond totally black.
Before entering, I opened my cell phone, using its screen to light my way. But just as I lifted my foot to take the first step through, a face began to emerge out of the darkness in front of me.
I took an involuntary step back. The face seemed to float on air. I stepped back some more. In a moment I saw that it was the old piano player himself. As he emerged into what little ambient light graced the barroom, I saw that his outfit was neither a tuxedo nor black, but something strange and skin tight, the pale green of dry moss.
He fastened his eyes onto mine with a burning laser glare that sent a million-volt sizzle through me.
And he spoke.
“Now you listen up, and listen good. I’ve gone free diving at hydrothermal vents on parts of the ocean floor where puffed-up college boys like you wouldn’t venture in a billion-dollar mini sub with robotic arms. No air tanks for me. No GPS, no depth gauge. No quaint little let’s-get-retro compass, either.” Grinning at me through a jagged landscape of alternately brown and missing teeth, he drew hard on the slender silver stem of a polished applewood pipe carved in the shape of Neptune fondling a mermaid’s foamy loins. “No fancy gear. Just a discount-store mask, my own damned lungs, and a pair of balls like you couldn’t aspire to in a lifetime of Red-Bull lattes and Jagermeister-induced bravado. So don’t give me any pseudo-slumming academic buttercup, twinkle-headed crap about what can be done and what can’t. I know what I’m capable of, goddamnit!” He was roaring now. “I KNOW WHAT I CAN DO!”
He stumped back to his piano, took a swig from an ancient pewter ale stein, and began to tickle the ivory anew.
I felt a heavy arm on my shoulder and turned to see, grinning down at me, a freckled and youngish, though slightly haggard face, topped with long blond serpents of oleaginous red hair that had nearly turned to dreadlocks.
“Don’t let old Nelson’s Navy get you down, bro.” He handed me a full mug of amber beer, astonishingly cold to the touch, and said, “Let your buddy Slasher buy this round.”
“Slasher?”
He held out his hand. “Slasher Wendell Holmes, Erie Community College Law School, 2008.”
Oh, lovely. Another lunatic. “Whatever,” I said, grasping his hand. “I’m Charlie Edwards. PADI Open Water course, Molly O’Hara’s Dive Shop, 2003.”
His grip was fierce, and to my surprise, he pulled me halfway across the bar in a couple of seconds. I stumbled after him, somehow managing to finish off my entire mug of beer along they way.
“Okay, I won’t take that nutty piano guy seriously,” I said. “But what do you make of those creeps I was sitting with a moment ago. Did you notice them?”
“All I can tell you is that you need this next beer.” In his hand was a long-necked something-or-other. Still gripping my hand hard, he held the bottle hard against my lips until I took it with my own hand and began to swig deeply, gratefully, and thoughtfully.
“You’re not going to turn out to be crazy, too, are you?” I asked, although I was already pretty sure he was a few sparkplugs short of a four-stroke.
“Not on your life,” he said. “Tell me of your predicament.”
“Slasher, my friend, I have a problem. My wife is somehow missing within these walls, and I believe she is frightened of something or someone. The fact that nothing anyone here says to me makes a lick of sense – well, that has begun to scare me, too.”
He nodded. “This way.” He took me by the arm – much more firmly than I would have liked, and marched me back toward the archway that led into the dining room.
“Ummm, not that I really want to go into that black pit beyond the rear archway,” I said, “but I don’t think that out there—” I pointed toward the dining room and the coffee bar beyond “—is the place to find my wife. I don’t think she went back out. I think she went further in.”
He kept pulling me. I would have put up more resistance, but I was holding out hope that with Slasher, I might have found someone with whom I could actually reason.
He stopped at the bar and ordered another round, this time something that had the color of Bushmill’s whiskey, but tasted like Clamato juice. I didn’t care. It went down nicely.
He stood still, holding my upper arm firmly.
“Um, Mister Slasher, sir…Is there any reason why we’re just standing here?”
His only response was to tighten his grip.
I took a deep breath and a deep swig and slowly scanned the room for any sign of Allison. Waiters milled, customers with new and different outlandish outfits arrived at tables. Others stood and made for one archway or another.
Then, in the great tarnished mirror above the fish tank behind the bar, I suddenly saw Allison staring straight at me, or rather at my reflection. A youngish blond guy, vaguely familiar, was standing next to her, a little too close for my liking. They must have seen me looking back at them, but did not react in the slightest.
I turned around to look at the spot they ought to have been, but they were nowhere. Indeed, the entire view looked quite different from the barscape I’d just been looking at in the mirror. I searched in utter bewilderment for Allison or the blond man, but the only familiar faces were the middle-aged couple who’d visited medieval Turkey.
I spun around to look in the mirror and spotted Allison again, but she had moved, and the blond man was following her.
And again, I turned to see a different scene than the one in the mirror. Allison and the other people I’d seen were gone, and so was the time-traveling middle-aged couple. The Lee Marvin guy’s piano seemed to have lost a leg and had tilted over.
I took a few steps, looking around in disbelief.
Then, just at the edge of my vision, in the archway that led to the dining room, I once more spotted Allison. Slasher had been right. Somehow, she had made her way out toward the front door of the restaurant.
I bolted toward her, calling out at the top of my lungs, yet she did not look up.
Then there was a familiar tugging on my arm. Familiar, but stronger than before; almost violent. When I turned to shout at Slasher to let me go because I’d found Allison, he was smiling, as friendly as ever.
Then he was shoving a beer bottle in my face, using it to force open my mouth, and pouring the stuff down my throat.
I resisted at first, but the beer tasted better than anything I’d ever ingested before in my life. Indeed, I felt a thousand times better, less desperate. The light in the room now seemed amplified, as though someone had turned up a rheostat. I grabbed the bottle with my own hand and chugged and chugged. Something far from ordinary was going on here, something dangerous, and it seemed that one of the rules of this little Wonderland trip was that beer gave one the power to see one’s surroundings and navigate around obstacles. The thought certainly seemed crazy when it struck me, but it also seemed undeniable. And I needed to see and think clearly in order to find Allison. So I drank.
I looked back toward the archway and couldn’t find her.
Slasher didn’t seem to notice. “Did you use to watch Max Headroom?” he asked, and went into a stunningly perfect imitation of the jerky, repetitive-head-movement routine for which that bygone cyber-character was once famous.
“Before my time,” I said. Then after another swig, I broke free of his grip and began calling out to Allison, but my voice was drowned in the bar’s ambient clamor, which had suddenly leapt higher by a great many factors of ten.
Once again, Slasher caught up with me and stuffed the neck of a cold bottle between my lips. His strength was impressive.
I marveled at how quickly I had forgotten the simple principle that I needed to keep swallowing the beer in order to find my way around this bewitched place.
I drank, my spirits lifted, my vision improved.
This time, Slasher walked with me, marching me through the archway, into the relative brightness of the dining room. The crowd had thinned out, and there seemed to be fewer tables.
Had I been in that ghastly bar so long that the dinner crowd had mostly finished and gone home?
As we crossed the room, getting nearer to the coffee bar, I had a distinct sense of the entire place twisting, rotating on an axis.
I remembered what the crazy couple had said about the Templars, Mozart, and that elusive subatomic particle. Was it possible that they weren’t crazy? Could something be happening to the universe itself? Whatever the case, finding Allison and getting out of this place remained my first priority.
Slasher, still fiercely gripping my arm, looked at me and said, “I think we’re going to need a bigger saloon.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “And when you stop making sense, I really begin to worry.”
“A lot of people have it worse than you,” he replied somberly.
“What?” I cried, dismayed at hearing him lapse into babble.
“A great man people indeed….”
“Maybe,” I snapped, “but that’s more or less irrelevant at the moment, isn’t it?”
“I met one guy,” he continued, “who said he was a fourteen-hundred-year-old vampire. When he was human, he used to teach Old English as a Second Language. Then he was turned, and he just kept it up over the centuries. He taught the Anglo-Saxon language to families of Norse and Danish raiders who’d settled into the Danegeld region of the English midlands. Later he taught it to Norman spies, and after the Normans had taken over, he taught Norman traders who needed to do business with English merchants. Nowadays he spends six months of the year in Alaska. Dark most of the time then, you see. Better for his kind. Anyway, he’s a very burned out guy. Has six or seven shots of rum and starts moaning, Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m still doing the same stinkin’ job after all these years.”
I replied, “A.) That’s still nonsense. Vampires don’t drink booze. B.) More importantly, it’s still irrelevant. I need to find my wife immediately. I think something’s happened to her. C.) If what your friend said is true, and he taught the Anglo-Saxon language to Norman spies, then he was a despicable traitor, so why should I feel sorry for him?”
“Your point?” Slasher asked.
“My point?” I thought for a moment. He had stumped me there. I was beginning to forget my sentences before I’d finished them. “As long as you get us out of here, I don’t care what makes sense and what doesn’t. But what do you make of the fact that there are now two versions of that psycho piano player, and that one of them now distinctly resembles the Ghost of Christmas Present.”
I pointed at the man in question, who seemed to have grown a coating of leaves and grass that billowed in a breeze that I couldn’t feel.
Slasher still held firm to my upper arm, but he did take a good long look at the twin pianists. “Well, the one that hasn’t morphed into the Green Man looks more like Marv Levy than Lee Marvin, but overall you’ve got a point.”
“Marv Levy? Don’t tell me you’re a Bills fan,” I groaned.
“Born and bred and bereft,” he said.
To hell with this guy. I bent my knees, dropped and twisted free of his grip.
“Allison!” I howled, still unable to generate enough volume to penetrate the room’s general clatter. And that was strange, too. There were very few diners left, yet the white noise level was thunderous.
I wasn’t surprised when Slasher caught up with me a moment later, and didn’t really resist when he stuck a brand-new, ice-cold bottle of something wonderful and bubbly between my lips. And again, I felt a renewed alertness and calm descend upon my soul. I also felt strangely cocky and in control, despite Slasher’s machine-like grip on my upper arm.
“Lead on, McDickhead,” I cackled.
Slasher had just managed to get us within a few feet of the archway when it suddenly began closing, iris-style, like the shutter of a camera lens. It constricted into a tiny pucker of holly, ivy, and solid rock. There was still enough of an opening for us to get through, but just barely.
He began talking, but then choked on his beer and had to use improvised hand and body gestures to communicate. He seemed to be asking if I thought if I could get through what was left of the opening. I looked around and realized there was no choice but to try. The dining room was about to collapse on us.
I nodded and headed through. The back of my shirt caught on something, but Slasher freed it, then gave my legs a push that sent me much father than I’d have thought possible. I was still trying to figure out which direction was up when he appeared at my side again. He stood for a moment, leaning on my arm, breathing heavily.
“Hey,” he said. “Let’s stay still for a couple of minutes, catch our breath. What do you say?”
“Fine with me.” I shook my head. “Man, I’ve never been so tired in my life. What a scare back there, huh?”
Somewhere beyond the wall that had just closed up, the two piano players launched into a duet that came to us through clusters of old-timey phonograph horns that stuck out of the wall at random angles. Funny I hadn’t noticed them before.
Good
King lizardfish looked out
On his feast of gobies,
When the
fry squirmed round about,
Wriggling, fresh and ….
Again the singer interrupted himself. “Say, folks, that reminds me. I dated this gal a couple of years ago who always used to….”
Slasher started laughing before well before the punchline, and I joined him. It was such a relief to be alive and on this side of the wall that we were almost giddy with the feeling.
I still had my beer and took a long, enlivening slug. I once again felt stronger. We were home free. All we had to do was make it out that door, and I’d find Allison. Then we could go to some place less psychosis-inducing than this joint and have a few calm drinks and a bite of dinner. And Slasher should come along. I probably owed him my life; the least we could do was treat him to some grub and libations for his trouble.
“Y’know,” I said, “You’re like Virgil to my Dante. You carried me piggy-back through Hell and out to Purgatory, and now I can make it the rest of the way on my own. But come along. I’d love for you to meet the wife”
“Actually, I was just thinking we’re not out of the woods yet.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“For one thing, listen to the sound of that wall cracking.”
“Which wall?”
“Well, I meant the wall opposite the counter,” Slasher said, “but the one behind the counter is also coming apart now. And that enormous fish tank with it.”
“Oh, dear lord,” I said, watching the water gush toward us, preceded by long slender shards of glass. “Duck!”
The torrent of water, glass, and little fishes came down over our backs. So did plaster and lathe. So did trophies and plaques and the establishment’s first dollar bill, a priceless artifact from the 1800s – one of the first pieces of United States paper currency.
But we weren’t thinking about all that stuff. No sir. Because not only were the walls giving way; the floor was heaving and the outer doorframe was going from rectangle to rhombus to pentagon and finally to contracting iris, just like the previous doorway had done.
Slasher reached for my upper arm again, but there was no need. I shot toward that door, stumbling at breakneck speed across the collapsing room.
Mere feet from the doorway, the ancient piano player – the one who had grown the dense coating of verdure, and now resembled that well-loved, leafy Dickens character – appeared from nowhere, blocking my way. He was even more heavily coated that before, with moss and pine bows and lichen added to the leaves and grass. Bugs circled his head as though swarming around a rotting carcass. My momentum slammed me straight into him, but he barely budged.
Time was running out. The exit was closing and we were going to get crushed. If this maniac wanted to stay here, that was fine, but Slasher and I were getting out.
I hauled off and slugged him in the jaw with all my strength. His body swayed back so far I thought for sure he was going down. A second later, however, he came upright again, as though his feet had been nail-gunned to the floor. By that time, I’d blown past him and found Slasher, who was already waiting by the shrinking exit.
This time, the remaining opening was a few feet over our heads. I jumped frantically, slapping high, missing the opening and falling away from it.
On my way down, Slasher caught me around the hips and boosted me back up to the opening. He propelled me with amazing speed. I managed to get a purchase on something solid up there, and pulled myself higher.
Then there were two sets of hands pulling at me from above, hauling me out of that cursed establishment, and out into soft, rainy daylight.
Daylight! How long had I been in there?
I lay on the sidewalk, looking up at concerned faces that were studying me. Slasher appeared and began speaking to the others. It took me some time to realize that one of the faces looking at me was that of my wife.
“Allison!” I cried with relief.
She said something I couldn’t understand, then kissed me hard on the mouth. I smiled at her. I couldn’t believe how exhausted I was, how heavy I suddenly felt.
Then I remembered the beer. I needed more of it in order to clear my head. I looked around and found one on the sidewalk beside Slasher’s crouching form. I grabbed it and took a long pull. Not as much of an effect as before, but it felt good going down.
Slasher suddenly grabbed the bottle away from me.
“Oh, crikey” he said, laughing. “Now he wants it. He kept spitting it out before.”
I frowned. Slasher’s voice sounded nothing like it had earlier. And now he was Australian?
“I thought you were a Bills fan,” I said.
“I’m sure you did, mate. I’m sure you thought a lot of things.”
I sat up a few times, but Allison and the others kept urging me to lie down. I felt so heavy suddenly, and wondered if gravity had been different inside that horrible restaurant. Maybe something to do with…I tried to think…maybe someone tampering with the structure of the universe. Tiny particles…. My thoughts gets blurring away from me.
Allison was in tears. “Good God, Charlie,” she said. “I was so panicked. I wanted to go with Sanders to look for you, but they wouldn’t let me.”
“Slasher,” I said. “His name’s Slasher, not Sanders.”
Slasher laughed. “You know best, mate.”
Someone was saying, “…pure. At least until the next stop.”
Someone held another bottle to my lips, and I drank deeply. Everyone but Allison stood up and milled about.
And then I dozed.
Next thing I knew, I was moving again. I looked around and found that my vision was still very foggy. I heard Allison arguing with someone I looked around and saw her several feet away. She had her hands pressed to her lips, her face red. She was crying again, and this time it didn’t look like they were tears of relief. She was terribly upset. I tried to wave to her, but found I could not move my hands.
Good God! I was bound!
Slasher was nowhere in sight. I didn’t recognize my surroundings. I was in a broad hallway with a paint job that screamed institution. Was this a prison?
I moved my head frantically, looking around as much as my condition would allow. The men and women around me were unfamiliar, and their clothing resembled uniforms. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
“Where have you taken me?” I demanded. I tried to shout the question, but it came out as a dry croak. “Allison? Where are we? What do they think we’ve done?”
And then I saw a face I did recognize.
The piano player. He’d lost his leafy hairdo and was dressed in a navy blue t-shirt and jeans. He was saying something to one of the uniformed men, but I couldn’t hear.
Whatever I was strapped onto, it now stopped moving.
The uniformed man listened to the pianist and then nodded to one of his underlings – who then came toward me with a syringe in his hand.
I watched with horror as the needle went into my arm. Soon I would be unconscious, or worse.
“Allison!” I shouted. “Higgs boson. You’ve got to find out what sitar music has to do with Higgs boson! Somehow sitar music is the key.”
Then all was darkness.
I woke lying on a narrow bed in a small space, dimly lit. I was right up against a steel wall that seemed to curve up over me. This must be a prison cell, I thought.
I tried to recall the events that had transpired before I blacked out, but whatever they’d injected me with had left my memory foggy. Had that been deliberate? Had they tried to erase my memory of…of whatever had gone on?
Only after sitting up did it occur to me that my hands were no longer bound. Why would I expect my hands to be tied down?
A swift tapping came from somewhere nearby. I looked around, blinking, then noticed that most of the light in the little area was coming from a circular panel in the wall opposite where I’d been lying. The tapping came from that direction. I moved closer to the disk of light and, as my eyes focused, I realized that I was looking at Allison through a small window. This time, she was smiling.
The hum of a motor and a long, low hiss came from somewhere to my left, and more light spilled into my little cell. A woman I didn’t recognize entered and came toward me. She wore a lab coat and had a stethoscope hanging over her shoulder. She was young, no more than thirty, with a round, pretty face and wavy, jet black hair tied back.
“I’m Doctor Torres,” she said in the accent of a Spanish speaker. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m….” I had to stop and think about the answer. “I’ve got a headache, and my stomach doesn’t feel so hot.”
She smiled. “That’s to be expected. You’ll feel much better in a few hours. You’re very lucky. It doesn’t look like there’s any lasting damage. You probably didn’t even need to come to the recompression chamber, but your wife and the divemaster thought it best to be safe, so they brought you here.”
“Here?”
“You’re still in Cozumel, Mr. Edwards. And will be for several more days, as I understand it. We’ll just keep you here for another few hours, and then you can go back to your hotel and enjoy the rest of your vacation. I don’t advise any more diving on this trip, but you can still snorkel anytime. There’s no nitrogen buildup from that.”
I looked through the little round window at Allison. Someone had just shown her how to turn on an intercom.
Doctor Torres reached in front of me and pressed a button next to a small speaker below the window.
“Merry Christmas, darling.” Allison said. “It’s almost midnight. Christmas is in about twenty minutes.”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of what she had just said. Allison began to explain things.
Apparently we’d been just coming to the end of a drift dive along a nearly vertical reef, about to begin surfacing. Allison and I had paused to look at a spectacular flame scallop when my camera strap broke. The camera, my most prized possession in the world by far, had gone bouncing down the steep slope of the reef and out of sight, and I had followed.
Allison had waited for me, keeping an eye on the other divers. There had been six of them, including the dive master, Sanders, whose name I had twisted into ‘Slasher.’ They were riding a pretty fast current. On a drift dive, you really have to keep up with the group; if you get separated, you could easily get lost and end up surfacing much farther from the boat than you want to be. So Allison was growing concerned.
After I’d been out of sight for a couple of minutes, Allison decided to come looking. When she finally spotted me, her depth gauge read 130 feet, and I was at least twenty feet farther down – way too deep for a recreational dive. I waved at her as though nothing was wrong, and when she motioned for me to ascend with her, I apparently got distracted and swam off, following a procession of blue chromis, and soon I was out of sight.
“I was worried that neither of us would have enough air left,” she said, “so I went in search of Sanders. He was already sending the other divers up to the surface. I pointed him to where I last saw you, and he started down right away. I followed him for a while, but then he started waving my air pressure gauge in my face and gestured that I had to go back to the surface right away. He had a reserve tank, but I had none, so I couldn’t go along with him to find you.”
“You went back to the boat?”
“Yes.”
“But I remember seeing you several times, always from a long distance off.”
“I was watching for you from the surface,” she said. “As soon as I got the tank off my back, I jumped back in the water with just my mask and snorkel. One of the other divers got back into the water with me, probably to make sure I wouldn’t do something stupid, like try and free-dive down and look for you. You remember John? Young guy with blond hair and beard? Traveling with his wife?”
“Yeah, sure.” My most recent memory was of his reflection in a mirror, next to Allison’s, on someplace horrible. “So…let me guess, I was out of my head with nitrogen narcosis?” I said.
Allison nodded. “Sanders says that’s almost guaranteed if you stay at those depths very long without NItrox or one of those other special blends. You might as well have been back in your college dorm, huffing laughing gas with your stoner friends. They say the experience is just about the same. And Charlie, you went down at least a hundred ninety feet before he finally caught up with you. We figure that once you lost your orientation, you kept going deeper, and that just made it worse”
Sanders appeared beside her, smiling.
“Actually, that was my depth when I first spotted him,” Sanders said. “He was down past two hundred, easily, when I reached him.” He chuckled. “God almighty, you gave us a scare. Honestly, with the currents down there, I didn’t expect to find you. I figured if anyone ever saw you again, it’d be days later, as a floater.” He was shaking his head and grinning at the memory. “And when I did find you, you had the regulator out of your mouth and were talking to the bloody gorgonians. I’d stick the thing back into your mouth, and within thirty seconds, you’d spit it out again and try to swim away from me.”
“And once we got you back on board,” Allison added, “you grabbed the nearest regulator and wouldn’t let anyone tear the thing out of your mouth. From the little bit of your babbling we could understand, it sounded like you thought the regulator was a bottle of beer. You didn’t calm down until we put you on pure oxygen.”
“The only time you seemed at all concerned about the situation was when I finally caught up to you, down past 200 feet. That’s when you started to swim into a cave, and just as you got to the mouth of it, a great bloody moray eel stuck its face right in yours. Big bastard he was, pale green, with a head the size of a honeydew. Just about then you finally decided that up would be a better direction than further down.”
“And what was it you said about the coral heads?” Allison asked him.
He laughed. “You know how sometimes the coral heads are so much bigger at the top than at the bottom that they actually form arches? Well, there was one time, going up along the slope of the reef, when you absolutely had to swim through one of those arches. Couldn’t get you to just ascend; you insisted on swimming under. Even when your tank got stuck on the way through, you still absolutely refused to back up. I had to free the tank and push you through, and you ended up doing a couple of somersaults through the water. As soon as you recovered, you started putting your ear to the tube sponges, one after another, as if you were listening. And you were waving your hands like you were conducting music!”
A Christmas carol played faintly in my memory.
Another male voice joined them, asking, “How’s our patient?”
The pianist appeared behind Allison and Sanders. I now recognized him as Marco, who had piloted the dive boat. I had a vague recollection of him, before the dive, giving me a contemptuous look when I was slow putting on my fins. I had stumbled, holding up the line of people waiting to get into the water. ‘Goddamned inept city-slicker college boy’ had been the message I had read into that look, but I’d probably just been overly self-conscious. That’s probably why I imagined Marco’s face when the eel confronted me. He seemed good natured enough now, though.
Up here on dry land, Marco spoke perfect English with a slight Mexican accent, and didn’t talk like Lee Marvin at all, although there really was a visual resemblance. He looked and sounded as though he’d been celebrating with a bit of libation. And he was dressed as Santa Claus.
“Were you down there with Sanders?” I asked him.
Marco shook his head. “He went down alone.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “You weren’t there? But I thought I saw….”
Sanders laughed. “Like I said when we first pulled you up onto the boat, I’m sure you thought a lot of things while you were down there. I’ve seen nitrogen narcosis before, but man! Never such a heavy case of it as you had.”
“Tell him about the buoy,” Allison said.
Sanders threw back his head and laughed again. “Aw, yeah, that’s right! That bloody buoy. See, there’s this buoy that marks the end of the drift dive. It’s white, a little bigger than a basketball, and covered with algae, with a lot of seaweed wrapped around the chain that holds it in place. It was swarming with baby bluestriped grunts.”
“When I surfaced,” Allison said, “the other divers were taking pictures of it, but of course, I was too worried about you to be interested.”
Sanders picked up the story. “That was the final place where you escaped from my grip. I managed to hold you steady at five meters for our second safety stop – I had us do two stops because we’d gone so deep. Anyway, on the second stop, you had no problem holding still, so I figured you were starting to come around. Then all of a sudden, you shot a big blast of air into your BCD and went racing up to the surface, I chased after you, afraid that you might change direction and go smashing into the hull of the boat, but instead you smacked into that buoy and just stopped. You kept your head below the surface and stared at the buoy for the longest time, and then you hauled back and punched it.”
“Hey, that reminds me,” Marco said. “Once Allison and that other guy – John, isn’t it? – Once Allison and John saw Sanders bringing you up, John shouted for his wife to toss him his camera. He wanted to capture the big rescue, which he did, and he also got video of you punching that buoy. Says he’ll be happy to email it to anyone who wants it.”
“And speaking of cameras,” Allison said, “I did find ours while I was looking for you. That’s when I was waving for you to come with me. It’s unscathed, and we’ve got all our pictures.”
After a few more minutes of chatting, Sanders and Marco left Allison and me alone.
“Well, this will give us something to talk about with the Smithsons,” Allison said.
“Who?”
“That friendly retired couple we keep running into at the hotel bar. Remember? The people who go on three or four package tours every year? You enjoyed their stories so much that you sat at their table listening to them for about two hours the other night.”
“Let me guess. They went to Turkey?”
“Among other places, yes.”
“Was there any mention of Higgs boson?”
She looked puzzled. “You mean what the physicists are all excited about? The latest resarch at CERN have been in the papers again lately, but I don’t remember talking about it with anyone. Oh, but wait. You were saying something about it when they had you strapped down to that gurney.” She grinned. “Didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.”
“I’m sure it didn’t.”
“Well, anyway, there’s no harm done,” she said. “We were incredibly lucky.” She looked at her cell phone. “Hey, it’s two minutes after midnight. Officially Christmas now.”
“Merry Christmas. Umm…did I hear the doctor right? I’ll be out of here in a few hours?”
“That’s right. In fact, maybe you should lie down and sleep a little more, so you’ll be more rested when your out of that nasty tub. Oh, and speaking of Christmas, your iPod and ear buds are there on the bench you’ve been sleeping on, just north of your pillow. I put some Christmas music on it for you, since I know how much you miss it.”
“Thanks, darling.” But I was thinking, no thanks. “Love and kisses.”
I lay down and reached for the iPod, thinking maybe a little classical music would help me get to sleep. Then I thought better of it. The local classical station would probably have Christmas music, too, and even if they didn’t, there was at least one classical composer I didn’t want to hear for a good long while. Maybe some of that white noise that I’d downloaded a few months back when things were getting stressful at the office, and I was having bouts of insomnia.
On second thought, a lot of white noise sounds too much like the ocean, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for that.
Allison had left the iPod wrapped in a soft, white cloth, which I absently unraveled while pondering what I should listen to.
I let the iPod slide to the floor and gaped at the cloth in my hands.
The silky white fabric was marked with a rich, blood-red cross, a symbol I recognized from a paperback Allison had been reading on the plane. The symbol of the Templars.
I sat up and hit the intercom button. “Doctor Torres?” I said, my voice cracking from the strain. “Hey Doc? Hey, you got any sedatives in stock here? Like maybe Trazedone – that usually works good for me. Or…or maybe Seconal? I prefer Trazedone, but Seconal’s okay. Hey Doc? Whatever you got out there is fine by me. You there, Doc?”
THE END