Authors: Neal Shusterman
Challenger Deep (29 page)
“But how . . .”
The captain puts up his hand, knowing what I’m about to say. “You would not have made it this far, were you not meant for this,” he tells me. “A method will present itself.”
I offer him a sly grin. “A method in the madness?”
He does not smile back. Instead he chastises me. “The parrot spoke of madness, but for men like you and me, it is as science.”
“Science, sir?”
He nods. “Aye; the singular alchemy of transmuting that which mightn’t be, into that which is. ‘Madness,’ the parrot called it, but
to me, anything less is mediocrity.” Then he looks to me with a hint of desperation that he tries to hide. “I envy you,” the captain says. “All my life I’ve dreamed of the reward that lies in wait down there, out of my grasp until today. But you will call that treasure forth. You will fill our hold to the brim with booty beyond the imagining of the human soul.”
I wonder how I could manage to bring such treasure up from the deep, but I know the answer will be the same as the nature of my descent. The method in the madness will make itself clear.
And then the captain asks, “Do you believe me, Caden?”
I can tell he’s not asking this idly, or even asking for my good. He
needs
me to believe it, as if his own life depends upon it. It is in this moment that I realize that everything has shifted. He is no longer leading me—I am leading him. Not just him, but everything else in this world of his. I can even feel the Abyssal Serpent anxiously awaiting my next move. It is a heady and frightening prospect to be the king of all destinies.
“Do you believe me, Caden?” the captain asks again.
“Yes, I believe.”
“Do you forsake the parrot and all his lies?”
“I do.”
Finally he smiles. “Then it is time for you to be baptized by the deep.”
I climb into the dinghy, a copper rowboat so small, it doesn’t seem to be able to hold its own weight above the waterline, much less mine. The captain lowers it, and as it touches the sea, it makes not so much as a ripple. I peer over the side to find nothing but my own reflection in the mirrored surface of the sea. I know that face is mine, and yet I don’t recognize myself.
Each time I peer overboard, I half expect the Abyssal Serpent to launch itself out of the water, clamp onto my head, and take me down. What does the serpent wait for? I wonder.
“Godspeed to your reward,” the captain says. I free the dinghy from the pulleys, and take to the sea alone.
I row a steady pace toward the scarecrow, listening to the rhythmic squeak of the oar sockets that complain with each stroke. I face the ship as I row, for one must always row with one’s back to one’s destination. The ship seems to shrink quickly as I leave it. The green metallic vessel that felt so massive when I was on it appears little more than a toy boat now. I cannot see the captain.
At last I come up alongside the scarecrow. I expected it to be on a floating buoy, but the pole is actually a wooden post that drops into the depths, presumably all the way to the bottom almost seven miles below. No tree has ever grown long enough to birth such a pole. It is encrusted with mussels and barnacles growing a foot above the waterline, coming almost close enough to touch the scarecrow’s work boots. His jeans and his plaid flannel shirt seem
out of place in such a tropical environment, but what am I thinking? Everything about him is out of place here.
He wears my father’s white straw fedora. His nose is the broken red heel of my mother’s shoe. His eyes are the large blue buttons on Mackenzie’s yellow fleece coat. If he were set free from his pole, I wonder, would he walk on water like Calliope did? Is there anything to his limbs besides fabric and stuffing? There is only one way to find out.
“Can you speak,” I ask, “or are you just a scarecrow after all?” I wait, and when he doesn’t respond I begin to feel that maybe I’m on a fool’s errand. Perhaps I’m doomed to sit in this boat in the shadow of this splayed figure until nightfall and beyond. Then with a slight rasp of his canvas skin, he turns his head to me, and his blue button eyes rotate slightly, like binoculars seeking focus.
“So you’re here,” the scarecrow says, as if he knows me and has been waiting for me to arrive. His voice is subdued, yet loud, made of many tones, like the voice of a whispering chorus.
I tell my heart to cease its sudden pounding. “I’m here. Now what?”
“You quest to achieve the bottom,” he says. “There are many ways to accomplish this. You could tie the ship’s anchor to your leg and let it take you down, perhaps.”
“That would kill me,” I point out.
The scarecrow shrugs as well as a scarecrow can. “Yes, but you
would
reach the bottom.”
“I’d like to get there alive.”
“Ah,” says the scarecrow. “That’s a different story.”
And then he’s silent, looking out toward nowhere, as I had found him. The silence becomes uncomfortable. I wonder if he’s already lost interest and has dispensed with me—but then I realize he’s waiting for me to make a move, although I don’t know what move I should make. Since I know I must do something, I maneuver the dinghy as close to him as I’m able, and I tie its leading rope around the pole, mooring it there, making it clear that I’m not leaving. I can wait as long as he can. I observe a small crab rising out of his shirt pocket. It looks at me, then it crawls back in.
The scarecrow turns his head slightly. The look on his canvas face is pensive. “Twister’s a comin’,” he says.
I look to the sky. The puffy clouds still move at a steady pace, but there’s nothing to suggest a storm of any kind. “You sure about that?”
“Very,” he says.
And that’s when the sea that has been as still as glass begins to move.
I spot a slight rippling to my right and I follow its path. Something has come to the surface. I see only glimpses of it. Sharp metallic scales. An undulating, vermiform body. I know this beast intimately. The Abyssal Serpent circles us, and I am terrified. As it increases its pace, the sea itself seems to resonate with its movement, beginning to revolve in a slow eddy, but quickly picking up speed. The waters begin to spin around the scarecrow’s pole, and the rope that holds the dinghy in place goes taut. Beneath the spinning waters I see the single glowing red eye of the dread serpent. It is as domineering as the eye of the captain. As invasive as the eye of
the parrot. It is the culmination of every eye that has witnessed my life and passed judgment.
“Twister’s a comin’,” the scarecrow says again. “Better take cover.”
But there is no place to take cover and he knows it. The serpent circles faster. The spinning water dips in the center, revealing more layers of sea life clinging to the scarecrow’s pole, which has become its own vertical reef. And as the dinghy rocks in the growing current, I see the rope holding it to the pole begin to fray against a cluster of sharp mussel shells.
I leap from the dinghy as it is torn away from the pole, and I cling to the scarecrow’s legs. The hapless rowboat circles the pole in the growing whirlpool and the pitch holding together its copper planks abandons it, spilling into the water like an oil slick. The dinghy falls to pieces. There are other things I see spinning in that water, too. I see bits of waterlogged parchment and bright feathers swirling with the malevolent black pitch. They stir round and round like the ingredients of a new cocktail.
As I cling tightly to the scarecrow’s legs, I look down, and I am dizzied by vertigo. The whirlpool deepens at alarming speed, and the spiraling water pulls away from us, until I am looking down a funnel that has no visible bottom. The whirlpool roars in my ears like a freight train. The taste of salt spray nearly gags me.
And the scarecrow says, “If you’re going, now’s the time.”
Until that moment, all I could think about was holding on. “Wait, you mean—”
“Unless you feel the anchor was a better idea after all.”
The thought of dropping into the center of a whirlpool only makes me cling tighter and climb higher until I’m at his shoulders.
If I commit to this dive, there’s no undoing it. There is no safety cable to slow my descent, no camera to document my fall. No one to catch me at the bottom and send me on my merry way. Yet I know I must do this. I must abandon myself to gravity. That’s why I’m here. So I fill my head with all the thoughts that have propelled me to this moment. I think of my parents and the horror of their helplessness. I think of the navigator, and his choice to be the sacrifice. I think of my sister, who understands that cardboard forts can become all too real, and I think of the captain, who has tormented me yet has trained me for this moment. I
will
be baptized by the deep. The parrot would call this the grandest of failures, I’m sure. Well, if this is the culmination of all failure, then I shall make a glorious success of it.
“Mind the pole on the way down,” says the scarecrow. “Bye now.”
I let go, and plunge into the funnel, finally ready to know the unknowable depths of Challenger Deep.
There are books I will never finish reading, games I will never finish playing, movies that I’ve started and will never see the end of. Ever.
Sometimes there are moments when we objectively face the never, and it overwhelms us.
I tried to defy the overwhelming never once, when I realized there are songs in my own music library that I will probably never hear again. I went to my computer and created a playlist with every single song. There were 3,628 songs that would take 223.6 hours to play. I kept at it for a few days before my interest waned.
And so now I mourn. I mourn for the songs that will never reach my ears again. For the words and stories that lie on eternally unopened pages. And I mourn my fifteenth year. And how I will never, from now until the end of time, be able to complete it the way it should have been. Rewinding, and living it again, this time without the captain and the parrot and the pills and the shoelace-free bowels of the White Plastic Kitchen. The stars will go dark and the universe will end before I get this year back.
That is the weight chained to my ankle, and it is far heavier than any anchor. That is the overwhelming never that I must face. And I still don’t know if I’ll disappear into it, or find a way to push beyond.
I am falling into the eye of a whirlpool almost seven miles deep. I spread my arms like a skydiver, giving myself over to it. The ocean swirls around me, the spiraling force of the water keeping a vertical
tunnel of air open like a wormhole.
Through the raging walls of the whirlpool, I can see the Abyssal Serpent spiraling down with me, matching the pace of my descent, the same way it matched the pace of the ship. I wait for it to leap through the water to devour me, but still it does not. With the sun and sky just a pinprick far above, the light around takes on a dimming azure shade. Will the blue fade to black, leaving me in total darkness?
It should take three and a half minutes to fall to the bottom of the trench, but I fall much longer than that. The minutes stretch until they feel like hours. There’s no way to measure how long I fall, but for the popping of my ears as the air pressure increases. The weight of how many atmospheres is above me now? No barometer in the world could measure it.
“Those who speak of having seen the bottom lie,”
the captain had said. Now I know he spoke the truth.
Then below me I see a precarious sight, and I know I must be nearing the bottom. The jagged remains of shipwrecks poke through the walls of the whirlpool. I hit the tip of a mast and it breaks. I tumble through the tattered remains of an ancient sail, and then another and another, each one straining to catch me but failing, until at last I plunge into the silty gray ooze that lines the bottom of the world. Gray, not black. This is where the black pitch goes to die.
I ache, but I am not broken. The sails couldn’t catch me but they did slow me down. I stand up, forcing my wobbly knees to hold my weight.
I have done it! I am here!
The whirlpool still rages, but here within its eye is a wet moonscape fifty yards across. And to my astonishment I see that this moonscape is punctuated by pile after pile of gold and jewels. All treasure seeks the world’s lowest point. Here lie the riches of Challenger Deep!
Breathless and stunned, I wander the trove, struggling to walk within the muck that fills the space between treasure piles.
At a jangle of coins, I turn to see another creature with me. A small one. It clumsily tries to make its way over a pile. It’s about the size of a small dog, but walks on two legs. Its flesh is a sickly shade of pink. It has awkward arms but no hands. I do not recognize it until I hear it say, “Just rewards, just rewards. Nothing just about them.”
It’s the parrot, or at least his ghost, or maybe his undead remains; I can’t be sure. Without feathers, he looks malnourished and slight, like those little meatless game hens you get at the supermarket. His bullet wound oozes, but not with blood. It takes me a moment to recognize it as orange Jell-O. The kind with the little pineapple chunks in it.
I make my way over to him, ready to gloat. The captain was right; he was wrong. I chose wisely. Now I get to rub it in. Yet he looks at me mournfully with his unpatched eye as if I’m the one to pity.
“Saw this coming,” he says. “We can lead a horse to water—we can even make him drink. But to keep drinking, well, that’s up to the horse, the horse, of course, of course.”
He pecks for a moment at the scarecrow’s pole that rises in the center of the whirlpool eye, dislodging a tiny phosphorescent sea slug and devouring it. The tiny slugs I now see are everywhere, giving everything an eerie glow. Their light dances on the jewels and piles of gold, making the treasure that much more enticing.
“I took on the trench and conquered Challenger Deep,” I tell him. “So you can go back to bird hell, or wherever it is you came from.”
“Yes, you have achieved the bottom,” he says. “But the bottom gets deeper with each trip; you know that, don’t you?”