Six Feet Underwater

The many shades of impossibility weren’t worth pondering. They were, of themselves, impossible. It was pointless to consider all the things he would never have the chance to do, now that the nameless entity had arrested his life. Its tendrils had spread further and further, swelling and tightening like growing vines. After ten years of climbing all around him, they had thickened into a cage.

That was why it needed to be nameless. He couldn’t admit those two, sharp syllables that had so much potency in themselves, and then align them with an already unstoppable force.

Although, now that it had come to this, why not?

Unstoppable was unstoppable, which was to say that it was not.

‘It’s a kraken,’ he said. Hands shoved deep into his pockets, he faced the horizon. The sea spread out there, its ranks of waves advancing on the sharp rocks that were his battlements. The response came from behind him.

‘It is.’

These hands were in their pockets, too, but the pockets hovered higher in the air, for the speaker was taller. His unburied forearms were covered in a thick smattering of scars. On top of them was a tattoo. Its stain had contorted over time, as the skin it swam against split and reformed as surely as any restless tide. It was an unmistakeable image, with limbs like serpents’ tongues, and eyes that were piercing even in imitation.

The sinews under the kraken tightened, making it crawl. The tattooed man, whose sleeves had been bunched up over his biceps, was tugging on a rope, which ended in a loop and a knot. It was not a noose, for this was not the end. It was simply a turning point. The knot fastened about the waist of the man standing at the edge of the cliff. He had until recently been called a boy. He was slight, maybe nineteen or twenty, but he could swim.

It had to happen this way. Only one of them could pull the other to safety.

‘You’ll only have about twenty minutes before the air runs out. The helmet will be enough weight. It should make you sink, sure as any stone.’

‘That’s lucky,’ said the young man, bitterly. He gasped when his spine was wrenched, and his breath squeezed out of him.

‘There are degrees of fortune.’

Stretching to test the rope, the man clambered into the cumbersome suit that had been laid out for him. Once he was inside it, he bent down and collected the iron helm off the rock that was his dressing table.

There was a round window in the front, but the glass was already misty. He hoped the icy water would clear it. His jet black hair had already been cropped, so that there would be no chance of it flopping forward and blocking his view. The helmet was heavy in his hands, as heavy as another object had been once.

It was memory, more than anything else, that would be the biggest threat to his vision. For a moment, he just stood there, letting the round weight sag in his arms with all the gravity of a dying star.

‘Did you know it would come to this?’ he asked.

‘What, when I cast the damned thing into the sea?’ The older man’s voice it was gruff. It was the only kind of a voice a mountain of muscle and toughness was capable of. ‘I didn’t know, then. I thought, well, with a good enough coffin, I might send the cursed scrimshaw to a watery grave. It was only after your lot happened that I put the pieces together. There’s sounds what men can’t hear, for hearing by things that don’t have ears.’

The old man shook his head, ridding himself of unwanted philosophy. An expert in survival, he knew better than to get bogged down.

‘It was a blessing we met. If I hadn’t been patrolling that patch of sea ever since I saw it in the papers–’

‘Then I wouldn’t be taking your advice by becoming a human anchor.’ The young man grinned. ‘There are degrees of fortune.’

He couldn’t say anything else. The metal bulb fitted over his head, making him appear alien. Its edges dug into his bony shoulder blades. He was eager to get into the water, just to have that pressure lifted from him.

Shambling awkwardly, he turned and faced the edge of the cliff. Then, he nodded, and the two men too k the steps down the side of it, away from where the waves begged like scavengers, to where the islet’s sinkhole lapped.

To retrieve the casket, that was their mission. They would retrieve it, and then they would destroy it. Abraham was certain he knew how. Once the idol was disposed of, there would be no more lure for the kraken, and no more nightmares for its children, whom it terrorised so. Whatever psychic wavelength the behemoth listened on, it also used to emit a signal that drove lessor beasts insane.

Erasmus should have known as soon as he saw it on the beach, that the giant sprawled there wasn’t a monster. It was just a blighted soul like he was, a living, breathing fish out of water, as bizarre in appearance then as he was now.

Who knew how long it had been haunted? Who knew what madness drove it to beach itself on the dry land that was its drowning pool?

It had wanted to be torn apart, just as he had once wanted to be crushed.

Yet, by magic, or a stroke of chance like the one that had struck him, it had not been permitted to die. That was why it had twitched in its cell at the museum, and smashed itself on the cold, hard tiles. As it expired, its roaming eye found him. It moved the only part of its body with which it could hope to communicate.

That creature had not winked conspiratorially. Its aim was not to intimidate.

It had only blinked painfully, pleading for mercy.

Today, he resolved, he would finally give it rest.