Dad shook his head. “I don’t —”
“What do you think?” Neptune growled. “It’s time to put it back to work.”
A queasy feeling stirred inside me. Something wasn’t right.
“You don’t think this is all merely to save your lives, do you?” Neptune asked. “Don’t you think there is more to my kingdom than that?”
“I — I don’t know. I don’t under —”
“The kraken is getting back to work, as I’ve told you. It’s been nearly a hundred years, and now it will return to what it knows best: relieving humans of what they do not need. It will bring me riches in quantities I haven’t known for many years.”
What did he mean? He couldn’t possibly —
“And that”— he pointed to the ship —“is where we start.”
“But you can’t!” I yelled. The kraken stirred as I shouted, a tentacle hitting the water with a splash that covered us all. “You tricked us! You made us do all this, just so you can destroy everything!”
Mr. Beeston turned in the water. “We’re not going to destroy everything. That’s what the kraken would have done without you. We want to regain the control that is rightfully ours.”
“And the riches,” Neptune added, stroking a gold sash around his chest.
“Exactly, Your Majesty,” Mr. Beeston added with a creepy smile.
“Why didn’t you just let it sink the ship, then?” Shona asked.
“It will sink it for me! When I am ready. Otherwise, it is wanton destruction.”
“Wanton destruction?” I spluttered. “And this isn’t?”
Neptune’s face bulged red. “Without me, the kraken will destroy everything in its sight, losing it forever into the chasm. I will not suffer that waste!” He waved his trident in the air. “Now go to it! I want every jewel from that ship!”
“But you’ll kill them all!” I screamed, tears streaming down my face. “My mom’s on that ship!”
“Did we ASK her to be there?” Neptune boomed. “Did we ASK you to start this?”
“But you can’t just kill her! And Millie — all of them!”
Mr. Beeston looked at Neptune, then me. “Your mother’s on the ship? What the —”
“I want my mom!” Mandy was crying next to me. “I want to go home.”
“You can’t!” I screamed at Neptune. “Make it not happen — it can’t be happening.”
The kraken twitched in the water, lifting a tentacle, tipping its head to the side.
“DO NOT lose it!” Neptune bellowed at Mr. Beeston. “We’re too close. It’s getting confused. We mustn’t lose it now. Beeston, we need to sort this out.”
“Please don’t do it!” I cried uselessly.
Mr. Beeston wouldn’t look at me as he set off toward the ship. “I’m sorry, Emily,” he said.
Dad lunged after him, grabbing his arm. “My WIFE is on that boat!” he screamed.
Mr. Beeston’s left eye twitched. “That — it’s not our concern,” he stammered.
“Not your concern? Don’t you care that people are going to die when you sink their boat?”
“Tough tails!” Mr. Beeston suddenly exploded. “They shouldn’t stray into Neptune’s kingdom. He is the ruler; everything in the ocean is his. He is only regaining what he’s owed. Humans have stolen from him for centuries, poaching his seas for their own needs. We’re just redressing the balance.”
He was crazy. They all were.
Something was happening in the water. The kraken’s tentacles were twitching, batting the water, spraying us all.
“OBEY ME!” Neptune screamed. “It’s caught between your control and mine. We have to combine them or it will go insane.”
“We won’t!” I yelled back. “We WON’T obey you!”
I grabbed Shona and Mandy. “Come on!”
Mandy pulled away from me. “Look what you’re doing!” she shouted. “You’re making it worse!”
She was right; the kraken was coming back to life, tentacles rising to smash against the water.
“It’s going to kill everyone!” Mandy yelled. “You have to stop it!”
“Then what? If we obey Neptune, it’ll go back into his power again, and he’ll make it sink the ship anyway!” I cried. “What can we do?”
It was ahead of us. Mr. Beeston was calling it to the ship. No!
The kraken lashed forward, tearing a hole through the sea as it spun toward the ship. The Triangle’s surface was opening up again!
And then. And then.
I saw it in slow motion.
A tentacle, rising into the air, water spiraling off around it in an arc of color and light. It came crashing down onto the water, hitting out, thwacking at the surface, swiping at the ship. The ship! It was so close. I could see people lined up along the decks, running madly, but there was nowhere to run. The tentacles rained down. It had the ship! It knocked at it, hungry for destruction. The ship was tilting, people tossed from the deck — hundreds of people in the water, screaming for their lives.
“MOM!”
I whirled toward the kraken, edging toward the chasm; I could feel it pulling me — something holding us together; I couldn’t fight it.
For a split second, everything stopped. The calm came back. The kraken had disappeared under the water. In silence, I watched the chasm close up, covered over again with the glassy surface of the sea.
Just one brief moment of calm, before a screeching wail split the air around us. Lights flared. The glassy surface splintered and cracked. The whirling sea raged below. And the kraken rose. It burst through the water, screaming up from deep below the surface, its long face stretched wide by angry, gaping jaws exposing daggerlike teeth as its tentacles scrambled madly like a mass of giant maggots, smashing the still surface of the sea. As we watched, the water fell away, pouring like a waterfall, leaving just the kraken, surrounded in its fury by utter, black emptiness.
“We’ve lost our power,” I said feebly to no one. “It’s not listening.”
I was being dragged toward the kraken. I could feel its mind pulling me toward it. Nothing I could do.
I couldn’t save anyone. This force pulling me was too strong. No energy, no power to do anything.
I let myself slip toward the chasm.
And it closed behind me.
Down, down, into complete darkness. Nothing to see. No water, no land. Nothing. Falling through nothingness. Spiraling down, whisked around in a vacuum of whirling blackness, twisting me, throwing me around and around.
It grabbed me.
Lashing at me, scorching my face, my hands, my body, the kraken’s tentacles screamed across me, again and again. I writhed and struggled, but it was impossible. I couldn’t keep out of its clutches.
I touched something that felt like jelly. With shuddering, horrified disgust, I realized it was the edge of a sucker the size of a dinner plate. I gripped my body, trying to curl into a tight ball of nothingness.
“Why are you doing this?” I shouted uselessly as sticky, slippery tentacles slithered across my body, creeping around my tail, around and around, pulling me into a locked coil. I couldn’t move a single thing. Brown hairs brushed across my face, writhing like a nest of worms. Terror sucked my breath away.
What could I do to stop it? Beg? What could I say? Why wasn’t it listening? I’d woken it up! It should be in my power!
My thoughts rambled uselessly as tears streaked down my cheeks.
The tentacles reached higher and tighter, wrapping me up, trapping my arms, climbing up my body, finally closing around my neck.
This was it. This was where it ended. No one to save me.
The darkness slowly grew darker.
The ship’s safe! It’s all stopped. The monster’s gone. But the people are still in the water. Lots of them. Someone’s got to save them.
“What have you done with her?” Emily’s dad is screaming at the really tall merman in the throne. “What have you done with her? Give me my daughter!”
r /> The big merman waves this great big fork thing around. “Do you DARE question me in this manner?” he yells at the top of his voice. What is his problem? Can’t he see people are in trouble here?
“Give her back to me!” Emily’s dad howls, his voice cracking. “Give her back!”
“We can’t,” the big merman answers. “The kraken has her.”
There’s uproar after this. The merman’s yelling. Some of the people from the ship have broken away. They’re swimming toward us, shouting, calling things. They’re coming closer.
“MANDY!”
It’s Mom! My mom’s in the water! I try to paddle my raft toward her. I can’t get away. Mr. Beeston’s tied it up to that stupid chariot thing.
“Mom!”
What if that massive hole opens up again? What if it sucks us all in?
Someone’s calling Mom from one of the lifeboats. She hovers in between us.
“Get in the boat!” I yell.
“Stay there, Mandy!” she shouts to me, swimming back to help the others. “I’ll get them to come for you.”
I nod, swallowing hard as I cling to my raft.
I can’t stop thinking about Emily, in there with that thing. I can’t let it happen. Was she honestly that bad? What did she ever really do to me?
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she never had it in for me. It was always me who had it in for her. It was me who tripped her up in swimming, and called her names and stole her best friend. What did she do wrong, exactly? So a few people liked her more than they liked me. Could I really blame them? I like her more than I like me at times.
I edge toward the big merman in the chariot.
“Please,” I beg. “You have to do something. She’s going to die in there.”
He turns slowly around toward me, looking down on me as though I’m an ugly beetle that’s just crawled out of the sea. “What am I expected to do about that?” he says, his eyes flickering toward the chasm. He looks away from me. “I didn’t cause it. She brought it on herself.”
“But can’t you end it? Make the monster stop?”
“I cannot and I WILL not. Now leave me al —”
“HOW DARE YOU!” Someone suddenly shouts from the other side of the chariot. “Give me a leg up, will you, Jake,” she says in a quieter voice to Emily’s dad. Then she hauls herself up onto the chariot. Millie! It’s Mystic Millie!
The merman glares at her. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asks, his voice rumbling like an approaching typhoon.
“Yes, of course. You’re Neptune,” she says. “But that —”
“KING Neptune!” he booms.
Millie presses her lips together, sucking on her teeth. “Look, you could be King Kong for all I care,” she says, squeezing out her long black skirt over the sea. “That still doesn’t give you the right to let a poor innocent child get eaten by your precious monster.” She stares into his eyes and pulls something out from under her cape. It looks like a gold pendant. “Now are you going to do something about it?” she asks in a low drawl.
He stares back, his eyes flicking to the pendant. No one says anything. As he glares at her, something changes in his eyes. It’s as though a flame starts to flicker behind them.
“Well, I . . . ,” he says.
Millie moves closer to him. “You know, even the greatest among us are allowed to change our ways if we want to,” she says quietly.
Then there’s splashing in the water behind me.
“Mandy!”
It’s Dad!
He’s panting hard. He grabs me, clutching onto the raft. “Thank God,” he says. “Thank God.” He’s crying. I’ve never seen my dad cry. “We’ve got to do something,” he says, his words coming out in rasps. “Too many people in the water — not enough boats — someone’s got to help.”
“Where’s my wife?” Emily’s dad gasps. He reaches up to grab Millie’s hand. “Make him do it,” he croaks. “Get my daughter back. Promise me!”
Millie folds a hand over his. “We’ll get her back, Jake,” she says. “I promise.”
He dives under the water and heads toward the ship.
I pull away from Dad. “PLEASE!” I scream at Neptune. “There has to be something we can do.”
He lifts his fork thing in the air again. “Leave me alone, all of you,” he says. “I do not need this. I will make MY decisions. I will NOT be influenced by ANY of you. If I choose to change my mind, it’s not because of anything that you have said to me. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, anything!” I scream.
Millie rolls her eyes, slipping her pendant back inside her cape. “Whatever you say,” she says with a frown.
“Well, then,” says Neptune, “there is one last thing that may calm its rage and release the child. It comes from an ancient rhyme. It has never been used.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Once its magic is invoked, I lose my power over the kraken forever. It will never return to its old ways. It will be a passive, weak shell of its former self.” He scowls in disgust.
“But the old days are gone,” I say. “Surely you can see that! We can’t cause death just to bring you jewels.” Then I add more quietly, “Not that you’re likely to even find a whole lot of jewels on that ship anyway.”
“So your ways are better, are they?” he snaps. “Only the guilty die in your world, do they? Only for ‘good’ reasons?”
“No, but . . .” My voice trails off.
He waves me away. “But I will not stand by and see this happen. You may be right. Perhaps we will find a different way. Let’s get that girl out of there.”
“What’s the rhyme?” Millie demands.
Neptune lifts his eyes to the sky.
“When old hatred’s rift is mended,
Thus the kraken’s power is ended.”
“That’s it?” my dad yells. “A nursery rhyme? That’s ridiculous! You said you were going to sort it out.”
“It’s not just a nursery rhyme, you fool!” Neptune bursts out. “The rhyme itself is not the solution.”
“Why tell us it, then?” I ask.
Neptune turns his angry eyes to me. “You asked how to mend the situation. The rhyme will do it — but only once its words have been acted upon. Only when the hatred ends, when the rift is mended, will the power of the kraken finally cease. Do I make myself clear?”
For a moment, there’s silence, then they’re all shouting again. But I move away. Can I do something? When old hatred’s rift is mended. I’ve hated Emily Windsnap for years. Maybe I don’t have to anymore. I could change this, do something good. Can I?
She communicated with the kraken just with her mind, didn’t she? Maybe I can do the same, somehow. I’m going to try it!
I close my eyes and think of Emily, then I force a thought into my mind:
I’m sorry.
I say it over and over again in my thoughts. And then I wait.
Nothing.
What was I expecting? More flashing lights? I should have known nothing would happen. Nothing ever does when I try to do something good.
She’s dead. The kraken’s killed her. And I never had the chance to say I’m sorry.
I can see her in my mind. A picture from years ago. We used to play on the pier together. We were almost best friends. Why did I let her slip away?
Years of sorrow well into a tight ball, pressing against my throat.
But then —
I forgive you.
What was that? Who said it? I look around. No one’s near me. They’re all too busy shouting at each other, arguing over where to find the old hatred that they have to mend. I swipe a hand across my cheek, wiping away tears and seawater as I listen hard.
I forgive you.
It’s Emily. It’s her voice. I can hear her, again and again.
And then the chasm opens. It’s starting again. It’s whirling, throwing water around everywhere, splashing us all. A giant wave heaves toward us, knocking me off the raft.
??
?MANDY!” Dad yells, lunging for me. He swims away from the current, grabbing the raft and heaving us both back onto it.
“Please, no!” he sobs. “Don’t let me lose you.” He holds me tight, clutching my face to his chest as we kneel together on the raft.
When did my dad last hold me like this?
Over his shoulder, I can see the ship — but it’s on the other side of the chasm. How will we ever get back to it?
As I stare into the raging water, all thoughts are suddenly swept from my mind. The monster’s coming out of the sea again. Its head bursts out through the surface, scratched and veined with black lines, pus oozing out of craterlike holes in its skin. Piercing sounds of agony fill the sky.
Tentacles lash everywhere — it’s out of control, screaming, on and on, the screeching siren sound. Roaring with anger, the monster lashes out again and again. And then I notice something in one of its tentacles. Emily! It’s got her, holding her tight, throwing her into the air, crashing her back down to the surface. She looks so tiny, like a little doll.
Please don’t kill her. . . . She’s my friend.
Instantly, one final piercing scream shoots out from the water, exploding like a bomb, sending color and water everywhere.
And it gradually quiets, slows. Stops. The giant waterfall stops raging. It’s just a giant hole, spreading and cracking in a line through the ocean.
The monster crashes down onto the water and lies still, tentacles like bumpy highways, bridging the long well, jerking slightly, its head half-sunk in the water. The sea fills with color, purple lights flowing out of the kraken, seeping into the water all around us.
No one speaks. We hover in the sea, in silence, focused on the sight in front of us: the monster lying still, no one moving an inch.
We’ve done it. We’ve really done it.
I was having the cruelest dream. It started off as a nightmare. The kraken had me. Trapped and half strangled, I was in its clutches under the water. Then I heard a voice: Mandy, apologizing. I thought, Yes, let’s make friends. I’m going to die any second now anyway.
And then it changed. I was above the water, in the air, thrown high by the kraken. But it let go of me and I came crashing back down onto the water, sinking, then rising back up to the surface.