Six Feet Underwater

Six degrees of separation, he counted.

Maybe less.

The boy couldn’t concentrate in class. He only heard the schoolmaster’s voice in a distant way, like the white noise of the sea when it was out of sight. The skeletal marionettes dominated his thoughts, piercing him with their empty eye sockets. Swimming through space, dodging dust particles, they were miniatures of more cumbersome objects navigating an asteroid field. Huge cogs turned slower than planets in the boy’s mind, moving on a scale he couldn’t comprehend.

As they turned, they counted down.

They counted down to cataclysm, grinding with the sound of time brought to a halt.

He couldn’t tell his classmates that it was him who found the beast. They didn’t know what his brothers and older fathers did, other than that they worked on a ship. They had been fishermen, once. Lately, they had become something else.

The sea chest was hauled up in the big net, though it could not have come from the bottom of the bay, where there had never been a shipwreck recorded. It was old, but it wasn’t ancient. Barnacles crusted its lacquered lid, but there was no rust caking its hinges, or fusing it closed. It had unlocked easily, as if it wanted to be opened. As if it wanted what was inside it to be discovered.

Lying in on a velvet cushion, which had miraculously stayed intact, though sopping, was a statuette. The boy was on board that day, helping to sort from the caught fish those undersized ones that would need to be thrown back, or else sold as bait. Undersized himself, he was too small and stringy to be any use at heaving up the nets, hoisting the sails, or shifting the boxes of packed away catch.

When the idol came out of the box, held carefully in his father’s worn hands, he couldn’t help but think of it as just that– an idol.

This was not the kind of figurine that was purely aesthetic. It had some metaphysical significance, some ominous aura.

It was old, much older than the box that held it, as though its most recent owner had locked it in there and cast it away. Though it was ancient in some stylistic aspect the boy couldn’t place, it was intact. It appeared much less weathered than the man who held it. This was an idol made to last– from the beginning of time until the end of the world, which it would likely have a hand in.

Simultaneously, the boy backed away and leaned closer. He couldn’t have approached it physically, but he felt that, for as long as his eyes were fixed on the carving, a part of his soul was being sucked towards to it.

His brothers had muttered curiously, passing it around in their larger hands. As the shortest, had been skipped over as the thing migrated from man to man, but he saw it closely enough. More importantly, it saw him.

It had eyes that never closed, round as the wheels of futile progress, and a dozen twisted limbs like the ribbons of time that, driven mad, couldn’t outrun it. This flailing arms of legs snaked in and out of each other, looping into shapes occult sigil tried their best to imitate.

In the days that followed, the thing sat on their mantelpiece. The flames that crackled, consuming driftwood in the grate, grew many tongues for it to speak with. It always told horrible secrets, without beginning, middle, end or words. It spoke only in dimensions. Sometimes, when the firelight was dying, each ember a fading star, its malevolent outline would strike the boy where he dozed in an armchair, or on the hearthside rug.

On the cusp of sleep, painted in the colours of Hell, it seemed most potent. With paranoia, he concluded that it was a haunted object, a denizen of dreams. In the orange glow, the glint of those eyes, carved from some still unknown substance, seemed to confirm his suspicions.

He could never shake the thought, however impossible, that they were winking.

Then, a week after the idol had been found by, or had perhaps found, its newest owners, the monster washed ashore.

He was out of school that day. Everybody was. It was a Sunday, but his father and brothers were not in church. They were out on a fevered hunt, as they then always were, fishing for the treasure that must surely have sunk in that hitherto unnoticed corner of the ocean.

He hadn’t gone to church either. He was already in the habit of skipping any hours when sleep could be had. Only, he hadn’t gone to sleep that morning, when the sun had finally come up and the glaring embers had been extinguished at last.

Instead, the sea had called him with its siren call. A slave to intuition, he had watched as his feet carried him away, down from the piers outside his house, along the crescent beach that sparkled like a second moon when the light was low. He trekked the day’s first set of footprints in its pristine sand, from which every past trace of violence was erased. He rounded the rocky headland, with its boulders like the Devil’s marbles, and its cliffs crumbling into the determined waves.

Finally, he reached the hidden cove, silent as a grave. An impossibility was beached there, lily-white and surrounded by wreaths of rotting seaweed. The boy ran screaming to wake the sailors with what he found.

Two weeks after that, the museum tank smashed, and a leviathan looked at him. Its eyes were as wide then, unlidded with fleeing horrors, as his were now slipping closed. He had barely slept since the curator had sent him home with some pocket money for his trouble and the promise that he would be alright.

Yet, he was not alright.

Some of the horror that had left the monster corpse was his now. Perhaps it had been all along.

‘Erasmus.’

Slumped at his desk, strung between lost sleep and fear of dreams, the boy jerked upright. The schoolmaster was stern, not cruel. There was concern in his storm-grey eyes, which somehow managed to exude all the warmth of sun-touched stones. There was an older boy next to him. That boy had a satchel slung over one shoulder. In his hand, he held a piece of paper. It could only have been a note, and only important notes were ever delivered in school.

Instinctively, the boy stood, hearing rather than feeling the legs of his chair scraping against the rough floorboards.

‘Erasmus,’ the schoolmaster said. ‘This message is for you. I think you had better read it in private.’