Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (24 page)

20

THE FATE OF LEBRET

Attend. It is needful that we pause at this point in our narrative, and move backwards in time a little way – to return ourselves to Lebret, in the flooding mess, immediately after he had been shot in the mouth by Billiard-Fanon. Lebret was not unconscious for very long.

The
Plongeur
rolled, and water sprayed and swirled all through the mess.

He woke abruptly, and cried out; although his voice was inaudible against the maelstrom roar of water and wind, of the clatter of metal. The whole submarine rolled on its side.

As a door on its hinges so he in his bed,

Turns his side and his shoulders and his heavy head.

His jaw was broken. He could feel it. The pain in his face, on the right side, was fierce and persistent, and when he touched it, it roared. The vessel rolled once again, and shook him from his back onto his front. The water was warm. He wiped a hand over his eyes to clear his vision from the spray, but it was all around him. There was no escaping it. His hand came away red. He was bleeding from the mouth.

What had happened?

A flash of memory – Billiard-Fanon’s expression as he raised the captain’s pistol and aimed it. He
had
fired.
He shot me,
Lebret thought. I should be dead. But the fact that the hard pain in his jaw was so unremitting rather persuaded him that he was still alive. He tried to steady himself on all fours, and reached a
finger inside his mouth. Everything felt unnaturally slippery. He half-expected to discover a bullet, lodged in his soft palate, but there was nothing here. His tongue lolled against the digit; he felt it against the finger but not in the tongue itself. How could his mouth simultaneously be numb
and
in such pain?

The
Plongeur
rolled again, and Lebret was slammed against one of the inner struts. ‘Ah!’ he gasped. Something fell from his mouth – a tooth, or part of one – and pinged noisily off the wall. He felt inside his mouth again. On the bottom, to the right, where once he had possessed a neat row of white teeth, now there was a broken battlement. An exposed nerve screeched when he poked it – the pain was so intense it nearly made him vomit.

One tooth had been completely removed; the one next to it sheared off. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned.

He got onto all fours as the vessel rolled and swayed, and spat great blobs of blood and sputum onto the floor. His tooth raged, unremittingly, and inside his jaw a different sort of pain nested, fiery and less specifically focused.

He looked about him. There was a gap in the wall, roughly triangular in shape and large as a tea-tray. Some water was spraying in through this, but – weirdly – the ocean outside seemed almost to form some kind of skin. Its flow and ripples were visible through the rent.

Lebret looked to the hatch that led through to the bridge. Shut. He got to his feet, acting almost on instinct, thinking to stumble across to it. But the pain in his jaw sang inside his skull.
And then what
? he asked himself.
Get through to the bridge
–
and have Billiard-Fanon shoot you again
?

The whole ship shook. It was fantastic – the ensign had shot him in the mouth, and the bullet had ricocheted off his teeth, to pierce the skin of the submarine! What odds of such an occurrence? Lebret would not have believed it possible, if there were not such intense pain bunched in at his jaw.

The white noise of gushing and swirling water surrounded him.

He looked again at the breach in the side of the vessel. How
had a single bullet-hole mutated into such a large gap? It was impossible.

And as he looked, he saw what Billiard-Fanon had seen – a talon. More than a single claw, a bunch of three, reaching in through the gap – a monster’s paw, groping in at the space. The skin of it was profoundly purple in colour, and the claws themselves a pale green. It scooped at the air and drew a bubble out, wrenching back more of the
Plongeur’
s plating in the process, widening the hole.

Just for a moment – no longer – Lebret’s terror blotted out his pain.

Then his senses returned, or at least some of them. His mouth flared and throbbed in agony. ‘Oxygen,’ he gasped, spitting out red pearls and blobs with the words. ‘The creature is scooping the—’

The vessel rolled again, with a great metallic groan, and Lebret was thrown hard on his back. He cried out with the impact. The agony in his face made him sob like a child.

The hole in the side of the vessel was now as wide as a manhole. By all rights, water ought to be flowing in – the whole mess ought to be flooded. And some water
was
coming in, spraying and swirling to join the crazy internal monsoon. But the bulk was being held out, as if by an invisible force field. Through the shimmery window formed against this breach, Lebret saw something move – something indistinct, and large, slithering by.

‘Worry later,’ Lebret told himself, although it was painful to move his jaw. Globules of blood scattered from his mouth to join the larger swirl. ‘Get out now.’

Something was giving him a moment of grace, but the mess would eventually flood entirely. If he got through the hatch and into the bridge, he would have to confront Billiard-Fanon again. But there was the other hatch, that led forward. There wasn’t much there, but at the moment it seemed a preferable direction.
I’ll need to fix this tooth
–
or kill the nerve
, he thought.
This pain will drive me out of my wits
.

He thought – alcohol. Would he have time to snatch a bottle from the kitchen before getting away?

Lebret got to his feet, unsteadily. The pain in his jaw scorched his senses, and made it hard to coordinate his actions. The hatch through to the kitchen was not as solid as the main hatchways that separated the successive chambers running the length of the
Plongeur
– but perhaps it would hold? Should he sequester himself in there? But that thought was chased down hard by a
why
? What good would it do, prolonging his life by some hours, or even days – to cling on to life in agony – only to die in the end?

What to do?

The thought of a drink decided him – to take at least the edge off his raging jaw. He started towards the kitchen, fighting through the swirling internal rainstorm, his legs sloshing through an increasing depth of water.

Then the world turned upside down – the vessel rolled through a half-turn and Lebret’s legs swooped round and over his head. He cried out, a single syllable, and fell – plummeted straight down.

His body was configured in an L-shape, legs straight and torso at ninety-degrees. He was in that rather awkward posture when he thumped against the wall – or floor – of the vessel. His head went straight through the breach, like a diver, into the water. But his gut thumped against the edge, and his legs clattered painfully against the internal wall.

Lebret felt a conflict of orientations. He felt as if he were simultaneously lying – from the waist down – prone on the floor, and – from the waist up – he felt as if he were hanging upside down in a pool. Then the
Plongeur
shuddered, and began to roll back.

And with that Lebret slipped all the way through, and out into the ocean.

Instinctively he grabbed at the lip of the hole, and his hands held on. His legs came out into the water, and his whole body swung about. Then he was smacked against the external curve of the
Plongeur’
s steel plating, and he let go. Worse, the collision knocked the breath from his lungs. Bubbles fled from his mouth.

The water was neither cold nor hot, and the sea was not black around him. He was aware of a faint blue-white glimmer all
around him. Something vast moved in the corner of his eye.
Focus
, he told himself.
If I don’t get back in through the gap, I will drown here
.

The pain helped him; it refused to release its clamp upon his jaw, and this in turn stopped him drifting away. He did not wish to drown. That was a fact solid enough to cling to.

He drew his knees up and lifted himself unsteadily. It was easier to see through this salt-less sea than in ordinary brine, but still the vision was hard to process. A great wraith-like, silvery-white shape was interposed between himself and the breach in the flank of the
Plongeur
. It looked so entirely like a ghost that it took Lebret a moment to recognise it for what it was – air! A great
blob
of air, a metre across, somehow not rushing towards the surface as an air bubble would do in a terrestrial ocean, but instead balancing itself and forming a slowly morphing protoplasmic shape upon the external surface of the submarine.

Lebret’s empty lungs spasmed. He pushed himself forward. His head passed from water to air, and he sucked in a huge breath; but then he was down again, on his stomach, and back in water.

Fighting the rising panic, Lebret struggled to his knees. The silvery twisting bulbous shape of the air bubble had moved a few yards away from the side of the
Plongeur
. Looking up, he saw his own face, slightly distorted, as if in a funfair mirror, in the side of the bubble. It was a strange sight – his hair floating in the water, trails and tendrils of blood dribbling from his mouth.

Breathe. He must breathe. He got to his feet, and his head broke through once again.

He panted. Gulped more air.

For the briefest moment he was conscious of the strangeness of his situation. He was standing on the
outside
of a submerged submarine. His legs were in the water, yet his head was inside a giant air-bubble. The walls of his temporary air-cell bulged and trembled, and that made it hard to see through them, but he could just about make out the long grey-black flank of the submarine (upon which he was standing) stretching away before and behind him. He brought both his hands out of the water and into the
bubble to wipe his eyes. He looked again. He had to get back inside the
Plongeur
. The breach must be nearby.

How his jaw hurt!

Then he saw it – a fold of metal plating, and the dark, irregularly spaced gap. Lebret emptied his lungs then took a deep breath, readying himself to scramble – somehow – across to that gap; to pull himself back inside and hope that he could get through the forward hatch before he drowned. He readied himself.

At that exactly moment, the leviathan – for whatever manner of beast it
was
swimming around, it was a being of prodigious size – knocked him down. It swept round the curve of the
Plongeur’
s hull, and stuck out a gigantic clawed-flipper. Even as he flew backwards, Lebret had the presence of mind to think: the creature seeks only to dissipate the oxygen! He is not interested in
me
. But what if it weren’t true? I am bleeding into the water. What if these beasts are like terrestrial sharks? Would they devour me? Would my oxygen rich haemoglobin drive them wild?

He had more immediate concerns, though. The leviathan’s vast flipper caught him in the chest and face, and as it knocked the larger air bubble into a million spherical fragments it also pushed him down. He skidded on the curving metal floor, scrabbled to regain his grip. But it was no good. He was falling – sliding round the curving flank of the
Plongeur
. Something was sucking him down – the vortex that had tried to claim Avocat and had in fact claimed de Chante! If he fell
off
the submarine, he would be dead in moments.

He hauled himself over onto his front with a slam and slapped at the hull with his empty hands. This did little to slow his precipitous slide, and he knew he must soon fall entirely off. At the edge of his vision he saw the belly of the leviathan rearing up, and caught a glimpse – did he? – of a pyramidic head, and two, gigantic, nightmarish human eyes, with whites and pupils, peering down at him. Then he felt the curve of the hull go vertical underneath him, and he was falling free.

His right hand struck some jut or prop, and grasped it. His shoulder complained, but he clung on, and his body executed a
slow, underwater monkey-swing. His left hand reached for the hold, and found it – the airlock hatch. He pulled himself up, set his feet against the side of the hull, and tried to turn it.

It was stiff, and he could hardly gain purchase, but his life depended on the effort, so he pulled again. It turned, turned a little more, and the hatch opened a sliver.

This was enough. He pressed himself through, like a letter going through a slot, and broke through into air.

Gasping, heaving air into his lungs, he pulled the exterior hatch shut behind him. Once again the weird physics of this place had somehow prevented the air in the airlock from simply flooding out, or the water rushing in. There was a spatter mist of water, like rain, swirling through the confined space, but he could breathe – thank Providence, he could breathe! Had the chamber flooded, as it would have done in any terrestrial ocean, he would surely have drowned before he could have opened the inner door. As it was, he collapsed against the side of the space (which was, on account of the orientation of the vessel, below him) and lay for a while simply recovering his breath. His heart was thumping in his chest; the pulse throbbed in his jaw, and this accentuated the pain in his jaw with every throb.