Six Feet Underwater

It was fifty degrees outside, which was why he had come into the museum in the first place. Buckets of rainwater sloshed off his coat when he peeled it away from his bony shoulders, pooling on the marble tiles. The entrance to the museum was cavernous. It was one of those rooms you could get lost in, the kind of room his schoolmaster would have said was for minds of another degree altogether.

It didn’t seem like the kind of place built for ordinary people, or for any animal the boy had ever encountered.

Today, he saw why.

They had strung it up, like the marionette seahorses and eel skeletons in the classroom, which orbited other mobiles of painted wooden planets, and birds with hinged wings that flapped as they bobbed. They had strung it up on chains thick enough for anchors, between the monolithic skeletons of a sperm whale and a fossilised plesiosaur.

The boy walked under them, his eyes getting lost in their open jaws as he thought about the prey they had swallowed. Those teeth had splintered far bigger bones than his. How many gallons of water had been swallowed by the throat that hung in that cosmic void? Many, many more than had poured off his coat.

A man among giants, he paced across the ponderous floor, his every footstep ringing in a silence that was not dead, but was rather something preceding the invention of life. He was sure it had been there since time immemorial.

Beside it, he felt so temporary. To the fossils that had lain dormant a hundred million years before coming back to haunt him, he was just a raindrop on the surface of the ocean. Barely skating the surface of the well of time, he couldn’t conceive of what lay at the bottom.

Then, a moment and a derailed train of thought later, he was under it.

There was the preserved body of the giant squid, hanging in a tank of glass so huge and heavy that if it fell on him, there would be no difference at all between its weight and the weight of six thousand feet of water. It was the most impressive thing he had ever seen, for reasons he didn’t have words to express.

The sailors called it kraken.

It was the kind of name that had tentacles, vile slimy limbs looping in all directions. It was a name that wriggled through your ears and past your skull, clamping itself, wet and slimy, to your brain. It was a wide-eyed, primeval, screeching name.

Sure enough, there was a beak to match it. The boy thought the water and its glass container must have acted as a lens, distorting its shape. But then, perhaps they only magnified it, making it clearer? The black horn, devilishly curling, was too terrible to be true.

In his imagination, he heard something that was worse than ancestral memory. A pure and audible fear, it dwelt in the shared subconsciousness of all life forms. It was a premonition, hissing and gurgling like the kraken itself.

There was a sudden click like a bullet chamber being unloaded. A link in one of the gigantic chains stretched, groaning in agony. It snapped.

The tank fell.

It seemed to plummet for an age, but the ceiling could not have been six thousand feet away. The whole box hung in free fall, as if to draw attention to its massive size. Deliberately, it paused a foot from the ground, forcing the boy to savour all its wholeness, its potential to be deliver force, to destroy and be destroyed.

It shattered.

There was a clamour like the tinkling of a million bells, and the crashing of a tsunami. In the boy’s memory, a violent, storm-tossed tide gouged a stony beach. Black pebbles, already rounded from eons of such punishment, clinked and clattered as they rolled over each other, clawed back into the depths.

He was more drenched than he had been outside, when he first thought of seeking refuge here. The water that soaked him was tainted with mucus. It smelled foul and fishy. On the floor, spread out on the tiles like a suicide victim, the thing that had spent its whole life plunging through depths had finally come to a rest. It lay deflated. A pane of glass had severed one of its fearsome limbs. The rest fanned out around it in a halo.

The spilled, icy water plunged the entrance hall into a localised ice-age. The boy shivered. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees. He hugged himself uselessly, teeth chattering, and hair plastered to his drowned, bloodless face.

It wasn’t the cold, but something else, that held his eyes wide. For an endless moment, they were the only part of him.

Two weeks dead, and two leagues from its own world, where only he stood close enough to witness it, a saucer-sized eye did something impossible.

It winked.