Her mouth doesn’t move. Her smile remains.
‘Where?’ I ask hoarsely.
I’m exhausted.
Perhaps, yes, half dead.
I remember now; the sudden surge of energy.
It blew all the energy sources of all the droids, mine included.
Has this girl brought me back to life?
No…no, I don’t think so.
I’m more human than any previous class of droid. More so, even, than my sisters down in the Rooms of Pleasure.
It’s the biological elements of my body that I’m living off now; they’re my sole source of energy.
I might as well be dead.
I will be soon.
The droid part of me – its energy source at least – is dead, and I’m not really sure that my biological components will provide enough energy to fully support me.
‘Why can’t I just stay asleep?’ I demand drowsily.
‘Because you’re about to be dropped into the sea a little earlier than usual,’ she smiles in reply.
*
The hovering droid cuts off the power to its magnetic fields.
I and all the other droids, released at last, fall away from its base.
The other droids fall limply, giving the weird impression they’ve accepted their fate.
Me, I’m flailing out with my arms, my legs. Instinctively wanting to cling onto what little life I have left.
All uselessly, of course.
It’s hardly going to help me fly off to safety, is it?
The sea we’re plummeting towards is storm tossed, the wind shrieking hatefully, the waves surging aggressively high.
I hit the water hard.
The heavier droids hit it harder still, limbs that were already broken or smashed finally being torn away from their bodies.
The force of hitting the water, together with the extra pummelling hit of its ridiculously cold temperature, forces me to fully wake up from my previous stupor. After such a long fall, however, I can’t help but plunge deep beneath the soaring waves, the thick green curtains of the waters rapidly closing over me.
The dead droids, lacking the high percentage of more buoyant biological elements that I possess, sink swiftly around me. Were they still alive, ironically this wouldn’t present much of a problem for them; they wouldn’t need to breath, and so they could simply begin walking back to shore along the seabed.
I do need air, however; it’s all part of my organic energy sourcing and circulation.
In this situation, my more human qualities are a disadvantage.
I’m deeply submerged before I begin to sense that the momentum of my fall is at last ebbing away. Looking up towards the darkly pitching surface, I strike out for it with a swing of my arms; only to be surprised that I’m still being dragged under, still going down despite my efforts to rise up through the rolling waters.
Something’s tangled around my leg, I realise; something incredibly heavy.
I glance down through the waters, my vision naturally badly blurred by the salty sea.
It's the muscular man, the one who’d been attempting to clamber over me as he’d died.
He’d lost his grip on my arm.
But his grip on my leg is firmer than ever, his grasping fingers now firmly locked into position.
He still has the agonised grin he’d died with; like he’s have one last laugh at my expense as he continues to drag me ever deeper beneath the stormy waves.
*
Chapter 27
It’s not until we shrike the seabed that the over-muscled droid finally let’s go of me, the jolt forceful enough to cause him to slightly release his grip, to topple away from me.
I look up hopefully towards a surface so far away I can no longer see it.
My hope instantly dies: I’m too short of air, too exhausted, to swim such a ridiculous distance.
The ghostly girl is standing just off to one side of me.
She’s smiling, of course.
It’s a smile saying, ‘Why are you still standing there?’
*
Turning slightly, the girl points off to a looming shape, a huge, angular rock covered in a lustrous garden of sea plants.
With a kick of her legs, she rapidly flows over towards the rock; then vanishes into it.
With a kick of my own legs, a pulling back of outstretched arms, I follow after her, seeing that I really have no other option. As I draw closer to the rock, I see amongst the brightly coloured growths a darker area, what seems to be an opening into what must actually be a cave.
Despite its covering of fauna, however, the gap strikes me as being strangely regular in shape, almost square.
With an extra, desperate kick – my lungs, I think, are larger than a human’s, but I’m already suffering from ripples of pain pressing hard against my chest – I slip through the cave’s opening. It’s darker than ever in here, impossible to see where I am, let alone where I’m heading.
But the girl is waiting for me, directing me once again, this time indicating that I should head off towards her right. There’s enough of a glow emanating from her to light my way as, with another languid rising up from her feet, she swims ahead of me, leading the way.
The cave is incredibly narrow here; I can see the sides reflecting her glow.
Once again, I’m struck by the strange regularity of this cave. If it wasn’t for the various plants that have affixed themselves everywhere in here, the walls could almost be said to be flat.
We’re heading upwards a little, the ceiling of the tunnel quite bizarre in the way it could have been carved into a series of uniformly shallow horizontal and perpendicular planes.
Cutting off my rise at a sharp angle, the celling once more becomes a virtually flat surface. Then we’re rising at an angle again, beneath another stepped ceiling, but this time one that’s much wider, stretching out beyond even the girl’s remarkably ethereal glow.
My lungs are straining, close to bursting.
I’m beginning to panic, wondering if the girl is leading me deeper into trouble.
But then, just how much more trouble could I be in?
My vision – already blurred, my eyes stinging with effort of trying to see through murky water – fades all the more, everything around me seemingly growing darker, less clear.
Then, with a gasp of surprise, of relief – of gloriously wonderful, lung-filling air – I break the surface of the water.
*
Chapter 28
The air in here must be sour, but to me it’s the most beautiful air I’ve ever breathed; the breath of life.
I can’t get enough of it, breathing in as much as I can after the claustrophobic experience of swimming underwater through darkened tunnels that could have been leading me to my death.
I’m coughing. Spluttering
Giggling with relief.
At last, I regain enough sense to look about me, to take in the dark waters spreading out and away from me on all sides. Angular islands rise up here and there, each one of differing sizes and heights.
Where am I?
My ghostly companion is still with me, casually sitting on one of the islands, innocently letting her feet dangle in the water as if she were on some seaside holiday. It’s the light she’s emanating that allows me to take in my surroundings: which don’t seem to stretch very far, going by the way the dimmer edges of her sphere of illumination seem to be striking what seems to be wooden walls.
The island she’s sitting on is also made of wood, in this instance large, upended crates lying together in a jumbled, chaotic pile.
I swim towards the island the girl’s seated on, clambering up alongside her.
She smiles, naturally.
‘Thank you,’ I say to her, recognising that I’d be dead if it weren’t for her.
I glance about me once more, trying to make sense of this weird, enclosed lagoon of tumbled crates.
The crates shouldn’t be here I realise, not like this, least ways.
/> They were originally neatly stacked on what now passes for our ceiling but was once the floor.
I’m in a sunken, upturned ship; alive only because some of the air remained trapped beneath its hull.
*
Inspiracion.
That was the name of this unfortunate ship, I discover when – after falling sleep for awhile, a result of the mingling of exhaustion and relief that I’m still alive – I begin to explore my new world.
The ship’s name is printed on an enamelled and engraved metallic plaque affixed (upside down to me, of course) to one of the hold’s walls, a sign in French informing the sailors that everything has to be stacked neatly, securely, and uniformly balanced.
I can only hope that the crew survived whatever calamity struck the ship. I wouldn’t, for sure, want to come across the remains of one of them floating around my new domain.
The stacks of crates seem firmly embedded enough to form a solid base for me to feel secure on, though a few partially smashed and virtually entirely emptied cases drift around like miniature icebergs.
Many of the crates have been broken as they tumbled around the hold, or have partially rotted away. It allows me to delve around inside them and withdraw anything I might think useful, including cans of what looks like food (the labels have dissolved away to almost nothing) and a few iron tools I can hopefully use to prise them open when I’m hungry.
Water will have to come from the moisture that gathers on the metallic surfaces, where the salt is left behind as a brightly sparkling crystal formation.
My smiling friend, unfortunately, doesn’t seem capable of talking after all, despite the few times I’ve sensed her alerting me to something important; a crate containing fresh food, clothes even, or sometimes ensuring I avoid a stack that’s close to dangerously tumbling. She’s not always with me, either, drifting away whenever I’m feeling sleepy, so that her light doesn’t keep me awake.
It feels odd when she’s no longer close; once she’s departed, it hits me that I’m all alone in the world, a prevailing fear that strangely doesn’t trouble me whenever she’s with me.
I’ve asked her for help solving the question she seems to have set me: just what does this crimson worm in Jonah mean?
When I ask the question, I’m hoping that she’ll smile, that somehow I’ll hear her whispering the answer to me.
Instead, she just stares intently into my eyes, like she’s urging me on to find out the answer for myself.
‘Okay, so is there a Bible around here?’ I ask, realising that she might, at least, be able to help me in that matter.
She smiles, shakes her head sadly.
In a way, I’m glad; it’s not like a need another instruction booklet, is it?
Besides, even if I simply tried to find the relevant passage; it’s not like Bibles come with indexes, is it?
Okay, okay; so I know I shouldn’t be speaking so derisively about a book that so many people believe is the word of God.
I apologise.
Yeah, I feel like a worm.
It’s just that; why does my ghostly friend think this is such an important question for me to seek an answer to?
Surely, yeah, there are far more important things in the Bible to reflect over?
Why has she raised this question in my mind, only to more or less abandon me when I’m trying, at last, to resolve it?
Like she’s somehow sensed what I’m thinking, the girl’s eyes widen, she pulls her face a little closer to mine; that expression, that sign, when someone’s sort of saying, ‘Yes, yes – come on, just think a bit harder about that!’
About what?
About the question?
About being abandoned?
Her eyes briefly widen again.
Abandoned?
The worm’s something to do with being abandoned?
*
Chapter 29
Wow: now I’m just more confused than ever.
This thing about the worm, about being abandoned, swims through my mind almost constantly now.
Nagging me.
There’s only one other mention of the crimson worm in the Bible.
It’s in Psalms. One were David refers to himself as being a worm.
Wait a minute!
Where did that come form?
I look towards the girl.
She smiles, of course.
*
David feels that he’s been abandoned by God.
‘Why have you forsaken me?’ the Psalm begins.
And Jesus repeats that very same line when he’s suffering upon the cross.
And in Judaic practise, to quote the first line of a Psalm is to accept the whole meaning of the Psalm.
Which means Jesus is also referring to himself as being a worm.
What is this?
Again, I’m surprised by what I seem to instinctively know.
Is all this part of my original programming?
It would hardly make for scintillating conversation with my clients, would it?
Worse still, it’s not as if realising all this seems to help me work out the importance of this ridiculous question.
Jesus was a worm?
Now if you go around saying things like that, you’re going to upset an awful lot of people.
The girl smiles: like she’s happy I’m working things out; like she always does.
She doesn’t have to say anything to reassure me that everything will somehow work out okay for me.
Her presence alone is enough to help me fool myself into believing that all I have to do is make sure I’m making the best of my situation – using whatever materials I happen to come across in my new environment – and that will be enough to keep me safe until…well, when exactly?
I’m not at all sure, naturally.
Obviously, I can’t stay here forever.
At some point, the food I have will run out. Plus, it’s hardly a fabulous life, is it, sitting around on wooden crates in a freezing cold, almost spectacularly black lake?
Besides, I need to work out some way of getting back to Nevaeh; if only because I want to make sure that Joel is safe.
*
Chapter 30
Maybe all I have to do is swim back down the tunnels, then head for the surface?
Whereas I was too exhausted, too short of breath, to attempt that when I’d first ended up down here, I’m sure I would now be able to accomplish it.
Perhaps, too, I could take a corner of one of the shattered crates with me, upended so it captures a portion of oxygen for me to breath?
It’s as I’m seriously contemplating striking out for the surface once more that the sea takes matters into its own hands, as it were, a storm so violent that it even begins to stir the currents way down here on the seabed.
I can feel, hear, the wreck rocking ominously, the timbers, the steel and iron creaking and then shrieking as they fruitlessly try and resist the urging of the sea to capitulate to its urgent commands to move along with it, rather than remaining here as a substantial barrier to its surging flows.
The underwater waves batter the outside of the hull, the effect being a thunderous booming that on its own is enough to set my body uncontrollably trembling; but violent tremors are sent rippling through everything around me, such that the wood and iron seem to have been given a whole new form of horrendous life.
The islands of piled crates begin to topple, the uppermost rolling down like so many great boulders, an avalanche of splintering wood and chaotically spilt goods that plummet into the surrounding waters with a sickeningly dull splash, a gurgling as they sink, expelling trapped air.
Suffering a gradual weakening of its long held foothold on the sea’s base, the wreck begins first to jolt frighteningly, then rock, then roll. The pounding of the irresistible currents, however, is relentless and unforgiving; sensing the wreck’s wilting resistance, the sea only gains in confidence and strength in its determination to completely dislodge us from our already precari
ous position.
To avoid the worst of the falling crates, I’ve already made my way towards the metallic steps I’d entered the hold by. Of course, they extend far out of the water, stretching towards a base connecting with what was once the floor. They had appeared to stretch endlessly away from me on either side when I’d swam beneath them in the dark waters, but in reality they are quite narrow, with iron rails that had originally been invisible to me.
Crouching between these rails now affords me a modicum of safety, the nearest equivalent within the hold to something approaching a safety cage. I’ve strapped myself in with ropes and belts I’d salvaged earlier from amongst the crates; even though it means I won’t be able to avoid any crate falling directly towards me, it stops me from being too savagely battered from side to side, and helps me maintain my hold within the relative safety of my makeshift cage.
‘Iona.’
The girl; she’s with me, her light enabling me to steady my nerves, to see which crates are falling and which still appear to be remarkably stable.
I can sense her wishing to warn me to prepare myself for an experience far worse that anything I’ve undergone so far.
‘Be ready,’ she says with her sad little smile, her wide, knowing eyes.
*
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that some gigantic sea god is now furiously pounding us with his great fists.
It’s a merciless pummelling, the ship now shuddering violently with every vicious blow, roaring in anguish that such relentlessly unforgiving torture is being inflicted upon it.
There’s the deafening crack of something vast, something previously thought impervious, unbreakable, now effortlessly fracturing. There’s an agonised wailing, the sighs of the once powerful and formidable now vanquished.
It could be the greatest of trees, tumbling and shredding now as easily as if it were nothing but the most fragile of flowers.
The section I’m in jerks wildly, the ropes holding me in place put under such strain a number of them shred, snap. I have to use my arms and hands to cling on firmly to the rails to stop me from being thrown from side to side, but even then I’m badly hurt, badly (yes, it is real skin after all) bruised.