The Undercurrent by Michael Burnett
Prologue
This was how it often panned out for Curtis: surrounded by hundreds of people, but starkly aware of having not a scrap in common with them. That dark, dull sensation rooted stubbornly just below his sternum, as familiar as anything he could imagine, reminded him of his status as a tolerated outsider, always admitted but never welcome.
He wasn’t alone at the terrace table, although he would perhaps have preferred to be so. As it happened, he had ended up sharing the table with four other teenagers, each one the son or daughter of a wealthy businessperson or high-profile public figure. One by one they had drifted towards the outcasts’ table, more out of inertia than any active desire to socialise. And now here they all were, and none of them knew what to do next. Curtis chewed listlessly on his fingernails, feeling the nervous tension in the air like a soft but unwelcome pressure on his skin.
A vast, ornate Elizabethan-style mansion loomed above them; the black panes of its rows of high, narrow windows stood out in stark contrast to the clean, sandy-yellow of the brickwork that betrayed its true age – an elaborate folly, less than twenty years old. Spread out before him, on the terrace and the endless manicured lawns beyond it, the rich and powerful milled about, drinking high-end champagne and eating beluga caviar on tiny little crackers, laughing uproariously at their own jokes. The warm evening sun shone gently down on the little table of malcontents sat amidst a sea of feather boas, dinner jackets, real diamonds and fake accents, each one scowling with boredom and disdain. Curtis looked across at Cassie-Judith, the daughter of an eccentric aristocrat from somewhere in the Home Counties. He was surprised to see that she was already scrutinising him, her small mouth turned down slightly at the corners.
“What?” Curtis said, his voice coming out more apathetic than annoyed.
The girl, sullen and slumped in a golden evening dress worth at least a five-figure sum, addressed him in a sneering voice, her upper-crust accent ringing out like a tin bell.
“You’re Curtis Knight, right? Knight Casinos?”
“Yeah,” Curtis replied languidly. It was the first time any of them had spoken in several minutes. He looked around; no one else was really paying attention. Yulia Sokolova, heiress of some Russian oil company and the richest person at the table by at least an order of magnitude, glanced up briefly, blue eyes flashing under even bluer mascara, then flicking back down again. Curtis thought he heard a quiet tut of derision from her but couldn’t be sure.
“Classy,” Cassie-Judith continued. “Didn’t know they were letting in just anyone these days.”
Curtis tried to think of an intelligent comeback but came up empty. She was right of course: it wasn’t classy. His Dad – James Leonard Knight – was an unspeakable bastard, and that’s why he’d chosen the gambling industry as his route to becoming disgustingly rich. But hey, it wasn’t all bad: at least he could drown his sorrows in a £1,000 weekly allowance. He could have anything he wanted; in theory, at least. Ignoring the bait, he looked away from his companions and towards the inner gates, noticing that they had just started to open. An ivory-inlaid carriage rumbled through them, drawn by eight jet black horses, wheels crunching loudly on gravel as it went. Almost everyone had turned to look. He guessed that that must mean the host had finally arrived. Lorenzo Bianchi: a big fat famous opera singer from thirty years ago. Yawn. He shrugged and returned his attention to the table.
“Hey, at least our parents worked for their money, you snooty bitch.”
Curtis looked at the speaker properly for the first time, despite having been sat opposite him for almost an hour. This was Max Carlisle, son of Justine Carlisle, an actress in some of the most pretentious films he’d never seen. He had a thick dark ponytail and the sides of his head were shaved. It was certainly a statement of some kind. Curtis didn’t care much for what the statement was but felt relieved, at least, that someone had taken his side. Max leaned forward, mock-aggressively, hand grasping at a beard that wasn’t completely there. His eyes glared menacingly, but something about his general demeanour told Curtis that he was only arguing because he had nothing better to do. Cassie-Judith merely rolled her eyes.
“Uchh…suka blyad,” the Russian heiress sighed heavily, clearly unimpressed. The teens looked up at Yulia who, aware that she now had the attention of everyone at the table, paused for dramatic effect, then spoke in an American-tinged Muscovite accent.
“You,” she eyed each person in turn. “Poor little rich kids. Bored, are you?” she pointed an index-finger at Max. “You, bychit? Like a bull? Afraid of nothing, bad boy?”
Something in the heiress’s diction had managed to exaggerate the insult; the girl had evidently gotten under Max’s supposedly thick skin. Outspoken barely moments ago, the boy had been rendered speechless, his face tingeing a slight red under his dark brow. The Russian heiress, sensing his discomfort, pressed on, her mouth seeming unable to entirely suppress a mischievous smile.
“You prove it, then, bad boy. Take this. No more boredom for you.”
The girl reached an alabaster-pale arm under the table, slipping her jewel-encrusted hands into a Balenciaga bag. Curtis, mostly because the Russian heiress was attractive and he couldn’t quite help himself, followed the girl down with his gaze, hoping to see a little more skin as she leant forward. He raised his eyebrows with surprise, however, to see, attached to the inside of a ruffle on the neckline of the girl’s evening gown, a small, cheap pin badge of an orange starfish. Oddly out of place, considering her ostentatiously expensive outfit.
After a moment, Yulia produced what looked like a small perspex case with a brightly-coloured object inside, placing it in the middle of the table and sitting back an enigmatic smile on her face. The apathy and resentment at the table evaporated in an instant. Everyone craned their necks towards the object, forgetting the hustle and bustle of guests around them. There was a collective gasp. Curtis’ eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. The case resembled a kind of closed Petri dish, four inches in diameter; the coloured ‘object’ was in fact a tiny creature, iridescent and moist. About the size and shape of a two-pence piece, brightly patterned in pink, yellow and red, the little thing resembled a sea slug more than anything else he could think of. Dark, shining bristles extended across its whole body from top to stubby tail. At what he supposed was the head area, two slender appendages moved furtively about, skimming across the half-centimetre of water in which it sat and feeling for the edges of its transparent prison.
“What the fucking hell is that supposed to be?” It appeared that Max had finally found his tongue, finding it just as coarse as ever.
“Is that…no, it can’t be. There’s no way those things are real!”
The other girl at the table had finally piped up, probably for the first time that day. She wasn’t known to be talkative. This was Clarabell Addington, daughter of the Minister of Defence. Her hands seemed to tremble a little as she spoke. Her green eyes were wide under a broad auburn fringe, the fine hairs shuddering above translucent eyebrows with every syllable.
“Look closely. Touch him, if you like.” The Russian heiress was now visibly enjoying the attention. “I have many more just like this.”
Curtis was dumbfounded. He had to know more.
“What is this thing?” he said, leaning forward to get a closer look. “Some kind of a slug?
“…is it safe?” stuttered Max Carlisle.
“Very popular in Moscow. You can get high as much as you want. No one will know.”
“It’s Saccoglossans pyasinskii. It was supposed to be a tool for interrogations, but it never got past the early prototype phase. I thought that it was just a myth.” Clarabell had spoken for the second time in less than a minute; completely unprecedented, if the media was to be believed. She blushed under the attention but continued regardless, fine beads of sweat appearing on her narrow forehead. “Supposedly, the Moscow elite use it recreationally. I guess now we know. Subjectively, the psychedelic experience lasts for hours. Days, in rare cases. But on the outside, no time passes at all. Isn’t that right, Yulia?”
“Correct. Hey, bychit,” she pointed her finger at Max once again, the blue-polished nail aimed right between his eyes. “You first.”
Max quailed visibly. It was apparent to all at the table that he hated the way that Yulia was humiliating him, but was by now too frightened to hide it. His parents were devout Catholics; presumably, he’d be severely punished if they caught on that he’d ever taken a psychoactive drug. And then there was his reputation as a casual racist, Yulia being Russian and all. The young heiress turned her attention suddenly to Curtis, her cold expression thawing a little. She quickly glanced down at her neckline, and Curtis felt his face heat up slightly. She had noticed.
“I’ll do it,” said Curtis, feeling suddenly and unaccountably bold, a surge of adrenaline racing through his body. “Screw it. You only live once, right?”
Yulia laughed roundly, the first sincere reaction from her that anyone had seen that day, probably.
“OK, Mr Casino! You’re the real man here, then, ha!”
The atmosphere at the table seemed to change then, the excitement turning to breathless apprehension. Yulia slid the perspex dish across the table’s polished surface towards him. The creature sensed the sudden movement and withdrew its feelers into its body. Curtis looked around furtively, just like the slug, suddenly aware of how exposed he felt. But none of the adults had noticed. Some of them had begun to walk chattering to the formal gardens, where an orchestral ensemble was setting up.
Curtis looked into the glass dish one more time, then carefully unscrewed the cap. He realised, to his mild embarrassment, that his hands were clammy with moisture.
“So, what do I do, then? Please don’t tell me I have to eat it.”
“Place your hand, palm open, on the table in front of him.” Yulia mimed the action with a hand as she spoke. “Give him time. Let him choose. You will know when he is ready.”
Clarabell Addington was becoming increasingly agitated. Curtis wondered if she was about to make a dash for it, tell her father that a Russian chemical weapon had been smuggled into one of the highest-profile parties in the western hemisphere. But she sat motionless, bolt upright, staring like a woodland animal in truck headlights.
“OK then. Here goes. Wish me luck.”
But nobody wished him luck. None of the teens uttered a single word as Curtis placed his open hand onto the table, the tips of his fingers coming to rest a half-centimetre in front of the slug’s feelers. The slug hesitated, drawing its feelers across Curtis’ fingertips from left to right and back again. Then, seeming almost to glance up at him, the slug crept onto his open palm, leaving a faint trail of slime behind it. Curtis couldn’t help thinking that the thing was kind of friendly; already strangely comfortable with him despite the circumstances. The slug positioned itself right the centre of his palm then raised its mantle up like a cobra, revealing a dull red spike, about a centimetre long, protruding from the soft flesh underneath. Curtis braced himself against the fear that rose instinctively within him.
The teenagers assembled at the table around him were now staring at the slug with rapt attention. Clarabell and Max looked horrified. Cassie-Judith had become albino-pale, her mouth hanging partway open. And Yulia, sitting back in her chair, positively glowed with satisfaction. Like she was in complete control.
The slug drew back its head sharply, then lunged downwards with the speed of a sprung mousetrap. Curtis gasped as he felt the spike entering his palm; he felt a surge of trepidation, then a wave of nausea. Gripping the table with both hands he steadied himself, looking quickly from one face to another. The hubbub of conversation beyond the table, so easily forgotten moments before, seemed to have become a din.
Each voice clanged and crashed like metal, each word audible simultaneously, each conversation identifiably separate from the next. He stumbled backward out of his chair, falling hard onto the polished marble floor of the terrace. Trying but failing to struggle back to his feet, his limbs losing all their strength, he looked back up at the table. His companions’ features had started to melt like wax, the colours running together, grey pools forming and expanding outward under each liquefied face.
A voice roared behind Curtis’ head, the sound assaulting his senses like a physical force.
“THE POISON, THE STENCH, THE CACOPHONOUS SOUND. THE DEFILERS TRAMPLE OUR HOMES, POISON US, DROWN US IN THEIR FILTH. BUT EVER FASTER DOES THE GREAT WHEEL TURN.”
Curtis strained to find the source of the voice, his neck twisting bonelessly one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and continuing to sway ever so slightly against his will. His hands turned to liquid, pouring like treacle to the floor, and his back sank downward until it created a vacuum against the stone.
He began to move across the terrace and away from the table, sliding onwards at a glacial pace as the party guests talked and laughed, the words now losing form and feature by degrees until the sounds coalesced to a uniform drone; a fleet of speedboats racing overhead. The whales had been singing to each other, all this time. Why hadn’t he noticed? But it was too late now. The songs had turned to screams: the droning escalated, louder, louder, louder. His whole body felt the sound as it resonated through him like an earthquake, shaking him to the core. No chance to run. His single foot could go no faster than an inch or two a second.
“THE PALACE OF A THOUSAND CHAMBERS, OUR REFUGE AND GREATEST TREASURE, TURN-ED TO DUST AND BONE. THEY SCORCHED IT, TURNED IT WHITE; STRANGLED IT WITH FORMS UNKNOWN. BUT WE HAD NOWHERE TO GO. WE STAYED LIKE VAGRANTS, CLINGING TO WHAT WE ONCE HAD.”
When had it become so dark?
Massive shadows soared overhead. Here: a flash of teeth; there: a pointed fin, the engulfing oblivion of an ink cloud. It was no longer safe. He had to find somewhere to conceal his exposed and defenceless body.
“OUR FEAR TURNED TO DESOLATION. OUR DESOLATION TURNED TO RAGE. YOU! YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU ARE ONE OF THEM.”
His feelers detected a slight ebb in the black currents around him. The form of a cave, perhaps three or four metres away. He shuddered as a chitinous form scuttled over his mantle and he retracted his body in response. He had to get to that cave. He could stay there, where the cacophony would be dispersed by the stone, at least partially. Where his hidden tormentor, whoever that might be, might not follow.
Almost there. Almost there.
Something bellowed behind him. The thing thrashed about, waves of displaced water rolling against him. Ten tentacles; two with dactyli: the pulsating black-maroon out-line of a deep sea squid hung in the darkness, only metres away.
Almost there. His body ached with the knowledge of the danger surrounding him.
“WE WILL RAISE AN ARMY! CALL FORTH THE SURGE! TURN THE CURRENTS AGAINST THEIR MASTERS!”
And finally, the cloying embrace of cold stone. He moulded his body to the roof of the rock hollow, making himself as small and as flat as he could and retracting his feelers. The darkness was now absolute. The bellowing and droning were muted. His pursuer roared in frustration. Then silence. Hours passed. Hours more.
That cave became his home. He tried to remember what had come before it. In his blindness, images danced before his eyes. Other lives maybe, past and future indiscriminate. There was only the cave and the muted drone; the currents and the comforting shadows. The images came and went.
“…and then we discovered that we could bypass UNCAT by eliminating any signs that torture had occurred; the detainee would emerge distressed, disoriented, broken. But no United Nations reprisal was possible. No aggressive procedure could ever be identified…”
The voice was male but high-pitched. The accent was northern Russian, with the faintest hint of Pomor pronunciation.
His hands were bound with aluminium shackles to the table. He faced a bright light, glaring down from a polished metal ceiling, patterned with shining ventilation shafts. His head was fixed in place and he couldn’t see the source of that voice. Instead, he extended his feelers outwards, stroking the currents softly, remembering where the entrance was. Almost at once, he remembered why he couldn’t leave. His tormentor still hung outside the entrance, poised and waiting to strike. Again, he withdrew to his thoughts. Time, at least, was plentiful.
“…when we realised the prisoners, once released, were leaking classified information back to their homelands, we had to terminate the experiment. These creatures – the Saccoglossans species – were passing on their memories genetically by binding their own RNA to that of the human host…”
The water was now a pale, shimmering blue; the vast, black sea canyons had melted away. In their place, towering like an ancient and crumbling citadel, was a massive spire of coral reef. There were no sharks, no squid, no shoals of fish, their bodies reflecting the sunlight like flashing mirrors. Not a single living creature could be seen. The skeletons of sea anemones littered the cascade, here and there. Caught on the dead branches of an Acroporid coral, a plastic bag whipped back and forth; silently, obscenely. The whole scene was like a watercolour, caught in the rain; the ghosts of colours, once bright but now seeped away, left a parched canvas in its place.
The surface of the structure was coarse and uncomfortable to move across, stinging his tender underbelly like steel wool. He slowed his pace, moving ever higher towards the surface. He would get there eventually. And as the light got stronger, he finally remembered why he’d come. In the electric ripples of light, his memories wavered and twitched. A name, and then another.
Yulia Sokolova. Curtis. Curtis Knight. That’s me.
That’s me.
Curtis gasped and raised his head, looking around at the expectant faces. Yulia. Cassie-Judith. Max. Clarabell Addington. Every face locked in the same expression as it had been, long ago. The party guests milled about as before. The sound of a clarinet, playing a scale, drifted in on the crisp evening air. The band were warming up for their live performance. Curtis looked down to see that the Saccoglossans was dead: lying in a shrivelled crescent moon shape on the table, the tiny creature had given its all to show Curtis what he’d seen.
“Did anything happen at all?” Cassie-Judith’s voice was full of scorn.
“Welcome back, issledovatel; scaler of the abyss.” Yulia’s words had lost their hard edges. These words were spoken softly, as if to a comrade; a conspirator, even.
“We have much to discuss.”
(c) Michael Burnett 2020
Prologue
This was how it often panned out for Curtis: surrounded by hundreds of people, but starkly aware of having not a scrap in common with them. That dark, dull sensation rooted stubbornly just below his sternum, as familiar as anything he could imagine, reminded him of his status as a tolerated outsider, always admitted but never welcome.
He wasn’t alone at the terrace table, although he would perhaps have preferred to be so. As it happened, he had ended up sharing the table with four other teenagers, each one the son or daughter of a wealthy businessperson or high-profile public figure. One by one they had drifted towards the outcasts’ table, more out of inertia than any active desire to socialise. And now here they all were, and none of them knew what to do next. Curtis chewed listlessly on his fingernails, feeling the nervous tension in the air like a soft but unwelcome pressure on his skin.
A vast, ornate Elizabethan-style mansion loomed above them; the black panes of its rows of high, narrow windows stood out in stark contrast to the clean, sandy-yellow of the brickwork that betrayed its true age – an elaborate folly, less than twenty years old. Spread out before him, on the terrace and the endless manicured lawns beyond it, the rich and powerful milled about, drinking high-end champagne and eating beluga caviar on tiny little crackers, laughing uproariously at their own jokes. The warm evening sun shone gently down on the little table of malcontents sat amidst a sea of feather boas, dinner jackets, real diamonds and fake accents, each one scowling with boredom and disdain. Curtis looked across at Cassie-Judith, the daughter of an eccentric aristocrat from somewhere in the Home Counties. He was surprised to see that she was already scrutinising him, her small mouth turned down slightly at the corners.
“What?” Curtis said, his voice coming out more apathetic than annoyed.
The girl, sullen and slumped in a golden evening dress worth at least a five-figure sum, addressed him in a sneering voice, her upper-crust accent ringing out like a tin bell.
“You’re Curtis Knight, right? Knight Casinos?”
“Yeah,” Curtis replied languidly. It was the first time any of them had spoken in several minutes. He looked around; no one else was really paying attention. Yulia Sokolova, heiress of some Russian oil company and the richest person at the table by at least an order of magnitude, glanced up briefly, blue eyes flashing under even bluer mascara, then flicking back down again. Curtis thought he heard a quiet tut of derision from her but couldn’t be sure.
“Classy,” Cassie-Judith continued. “Didn’t know they were letting in just anyone these days.”
Curtis tried to think of an intelligent comeback but came up empty. She was right of course: it wasn’t classy. His Dad – James Leonard Knight – was an unspeakable bastard, and that’s why he’d chosen the gambling industry as his route to becoming disgustingly rich. But hey, it wasn’t all bad: at least he could drown his sorrows in a £1,000 weekly allowance. He could have anything he wanted; in theory, at least. Ignoring the bait, he looked away from his companions and towards the inner gates, noticing that they had just started to open. An ivory-inlaid carriage rumbled through them, drawn by eight jet black horses, wheels crunching loudly on gravel as it went. Almost everyone had turned to look. He guessed that that must mean the host had finally arrived. Lorenzo Bianchi: a big fat famous opera singer from thirty years ago. Yawn. He shrugged and returned his attention to the table.
“Hey, at least our parents worked for their money, you snooty bitch.”
Curtis looked at the speaker properly for the first time, despite having been sat opposite him for almost an hour. This was Max Carlisle, son of Justine Carlisle, an actress in some of the most pretentious films he’d never seen. He had a thick dark ponytail and the sides of his head were shaved. It was certainly a statement of some kind. Curtis didn’t care much for what the statement was but felt relieved, at least, that someone had taken his side. Max leaned forward, mock-aggressively, hand grasping at a beard that wasn’t completely there. His eyes glared menacingly, but something about his general demeanour told Curtis that he was only arguing because he had nothing better to do. Cassie-Judith merely rolled her eyes.
“Uchh…suka blyad,” the Russian heiress sighed heavily, clearly unimpressed. The teens looked up at Yulia who, aware that she now had the attention of everyone at the table, paused for dramatic effect, then spoke in an American-tinged Muscovite accent.
“You,” she eyed each person in turn. “Poor little rich kids. Bored, are you?” she pointed an index-finger at Max. “You, bychit? Like a bull? Afraid of nothing, bad boy?”
Something in the heiress’s diction had managed to exaggerate the insult; the girl had evidently gotten under Max’s supposedly thick skin. Outspoken barely moments ago, the boy had been rendered speechless, his face tingeing a slight red under his dark brow. The Russian heiress, sensing his discomfort, pressed on, her mouth seeming unable to entirely suppress a mischievous smile.
“You prove it, then, bad boy. Take this. No more boredom for you.”
The girl reached an alabaster-pale arm under the table, slipping her jewel-encrusted hands into a Balenciaga bag. Curtis, mostly because the Russian heiress was attractive and he couldn’t quite help himself, followed the girl down with his gaze, hoping to see a little more skin as she leant forward. He raised his eyebrows with surprise, however, to see, attached to the inside of a ruffle on the neckline of the girl’s evening gown, a small, cheap pin badge of an orange starfish. Oddly out of place, considering her ostentatiously expensive outfit.
After a moment, Yulia produced what looked like a small perspex case with a brightly-coloured object inside, placing it in the middle of the table and sitting back an enigmatic smile on her face. The apathy and resentment at the table evaporated in an instant. Everyone craned their necks towards the object, forgetting the hustle and bustle of guests around them. There was a collective gasp. Curtis’ eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. The case resembled a kind of closed Petri dish, four inches in diameter; the coloured ‘object’ was in fact a tiny creature, iridescent and moist. About the size and shape of a two-pence piece, brightly patterned in pink, yellow and red, the little thing resembled a sea slug more than anything else he could think of. Dark, shining bristles extended across its whole body from top to stubby tail. At what he supposed was the head area, two slender appendages moved furtively about, skimming across the half-centimetre of water in which it sat and feeling for the edges of its transparent prison.
“What the fucking hell is that supposed to be?” It appeared that Max had finally found his tongue, finding it just as coarse as ever.
“Is that…no, it can’t be. There’s no way those things are real!”
The other girl at the table had finally piped up, probably for the first time that day. She wasn’t known to be talkative. This was Clarabell Addington, daughter of the Minister of Defence. Her hands seemed to tremble a little as she spoke. Her green eyes were wide under a broad auburn fringe, the fine hairs shuddering above translucent eyebrows with every syllable.
“Look closely. Touch him, if you like.” The Russian heiress was now visibly enjoying the attention. “I have many more just like this.”
Curtis was dumbfounded. He had to know more.
“What is this thing?” he said, leaning forward to get a closer look. “Some kind of a slug?
“…is it safe?” stuttered Max Carlisle.
“Very popular in Moscow. You can get high as much as you want. No one will know.”
“It’s Saccoglossans pyasinskii. It was supposed to be a tool for interrogations, but it never got past the early prototype phase. I thought that it was just a myth.” Clarabell had spoken for the second time in less than a minute; completely unprecedented, if the media was to be believed. She blushed under the attention but continued regardless, fine beads of sweat appearing on her narrow forehead. “Supposedly, the Moscow elite use it recreationally. I guess now we know. Subjectively, the psychedelic experience lasts for hours. Days, in rare cases. But on the outside, no time passes at all. Isn’t that right, Yulia?”
“Correct. Hey, bychit,” she pointed her finger at Max once again, the blue-polished nail aimed right between his eyes. “You first.”
Max quailed visibly. It was apparent to all at the table that he hated the way that Yulia was humiliating him, but was by now too frightened to hide it. His parents were devout Catholics; presumably, he’d be severely punished if they caught on that he’d ever taken a psychoactive drug. And then there was his reputation as a casual racist, Yulia being Russian and all. The young heiress turned her attention suddenly to Curtis, her cold expression thawing a little. She quickly glanced down at her neckline, and Curtis felt his face heat up slightly. She had noticed.
“I’ll do it,” said Curtis, feeling suddenly and unaccountably bold, a surge of adrenaline racing through his body. “Screw it. You only live once, right?”
Yulia laughed roundly, the first sincere reaction from her that anyone had seen that day, probably.
“OK, Mr Casino! You’re the real man here, then, ha!”
The atmosphere at the table seemed to change then, the excitement turning to breathless apprehension. Yulia slid the perspex dish across the table’s polished surface towards him. The creature sensed the sudden movement and withdrew its feelers into its body. Curtis looked around furtively, just like the slug, suddenly aware of how exposed he felt. But none of the adults had noticed. Some of them had begun to walk chattering to the formal gardens, where an orchestral ensemble was setting up.
Curtis looked into the glass dish one more time, then carefully unscrewed the cap. He realised, to his mild embarrassment, that his hands were clammy with moisture.
“So, what do I do, then? Please don’t tell me I have to eat it.”
“Place your hand, palm open, on the table in front of him.” Yulia mimed the action with a hand as she spoke. “Give him time. Let him choose. You will know when he is ready.”
Clarabell Addington was becoming increasingly agitated. Curtis wondered if she was about to make a dash for it, tell her father that a Russian chemical weapon had been smuggled into one of the highest-profile parties in the western hemisphere. But she sat motionless, bolt upright, staring like a woodland animal in truck headlights.
“OK then. Here goes. Wish me luck.”
But nobody wished him luck. None of the teens uttered a single word as Curtis placed his open hand onto the table, the tips of his fingers coming to rest a half-centimetre in front of the slug’s feelers. The slug hesitated, drawing its feelers across Curtis’ fingertips from left to right and back again. Then, seeming almost to glance up at him, the slug crept onto his open palm, leaving a faint trail of slime behind it. Curtis couldn’t help thinking that the thing was kind of friendly; already strangely comfortable with him despite the circumstances. The slug positioned itself right the centre of his palm then raised its mantle up like a cobra, revealing a dull red spike, about a centimetre long, protruding from the soft flesh underneath. Curtis braced himself against the fear that rose instinctively within him.
The teenagers assembled at the table around him were now staring at the slug with rapt attention. Clarabell and Max looked horrified. Cassie-Judith had become albino-pale, her mouth hanging partway open. And Yulia, sitting back in her chair, positively glowed with satisfaction. Like she was in complete control.
The slug drew back its head sharply, then lunged downwards with the speed of a sprung mousetrap. Curtis gasped as he felt the spike entering his palm; he felt a surge of trepidation, then a wave of nausea. Gripping the table with both hands he steadied himself, looking quickly from one face to another. The hubbub of conversation beyond the table, so easily forgotten moments before, seemed to have become a din.
Each voice clanged and crashed like metal, each word audible simultaneously, each conversation identifiably separate from the next. He stumbled backward out of his chair, falling hard onto the polished marble floor of the terrace. Trying but failing to struggle back to his feet, his limbs losing all their strength, he looked back up at the table. His companions’ features had started to melt like wax, the colours running together, grey pools forming and expanding outward under each liquefied face.
A voice roared behind Curtis’ head, the sound assaulting his senses like a physical force.
“THE POISON, THE STENCH, THE CACOPHONOUS SOUND. THE DEFILERS TRAMPLE OUR HOMES, POISON US, DROWN US IN THEIR FILTH. BUT EVER FASTER DOES THE GREAT WHEEL TURN.”
Curtis strained to find the source of the voice, his neck twisting bonelessly one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and continuing to sway ever so slightly against his will. His hands turned to liquid, pouring like treacle to the floor, and his back sank downward until it created a vacuum against the stone.
He began to move across the terrace and away from the table, sliding onwards at a glacial pace as the party guests talked and laughed, the words now losing form and feature by degrees until the sounds coalesced to a uniform drone; a fleet of speedboats racing overhead. The whales had been singing to each other, all this time. Why hadn’t he noticed? But it was too late now. The songs had turned to screams: the droning escalated, louder, louder, louder. His whole body felt the sound as it resonated through him like an earthquake, shaking him to the core. No chance to run. His single foot could go no faster than an inch or two a second.
“THE PALACE OF A THOUSAND CHAMBERS, OUR REFUGE AND GREATEST TREASURE, TURN-ED TO DUST AND BONE. THEY SCORCHED IT, TURNED IT WHITE; STRANGLED IT WITH FORMS UNKNOWN. BUT WE HAD NOWHERE TO GO. WE STAYED LIKE VAGRANTS, CLINGING TO WHAT WE ONCE HAD.”
When had it become so dark?
Massive shadows soared overhead. Here: a flash of teeth; there: a pointed fin, the engulfing oblivion of an ink cloud. It was no longer safe. He had to find somewhere to conceal his exposed and defenceless body.
“OUR FEAR TURNED TO DESOLATION. OUR DESOLATION TURNED TO RAGE. YOU! YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU ARE ONE OF THEM.”
His feelers detected a slight ebb in the black currents around him. The form of a cave, perhaps three or four metres away. He shuddered as a chitinous form scuttled over his mantle and he retracted his body in response. He had to get to that cave. He could stay there, where the cacophony would be dispersed by the stone, at least partially. Where his hidden tormentor, whoever that might be, might not follow.
Almost there. Almost there.
Something bellowed behind him. The thing thrashed about, waves of displaced water rolling against him. Ten tentacles; two with dactyli: the pulsating black-maroon out-line of a deep sea squid hung in the darkness, only metres away.
Almost there. His body ached with the knowledge of the danger surrounding him.
“WE WILL RAISE AN ARMY! CALL FORTH THE SURGE! TURN THE CURRENTS AGAINST THEIR MASTERS!”
And finally, the cloying embrace of cold stone. He moulded his body to the roof of the rock hollow, making himself as small and as flat as he could and retracting his feelers. The darkness was now absolute. The bellowing and droning were muted. His pursuer roared in frustration. Then silence. Hours passed. Hours more.
That cave became his home. He tried to remember what had come before it. In his blindness, images danced before his eyes. Other lives maybe, past and future indiscriminate. There was only the cave and the muted drone; the currents and the comforting shadows. The images came and went.
“…and then we discovered that we could bypass UNCAT by eliminating any signs that torture had occurred; the detainee would emerge distressed, disoriented, broken. But no United Nations reprisal was possible. No aggressive procedure could ever be identified…”
The voice was male but high-pitched. The accent was northern Russian, with the faintest hint of Pomor pronunciation.
His hands were bound with aluminium shackles to the table. He faced a bright light, glaring down from a polished metal ceiling, patterned with shining ventilation shafts. His head was fixed in place and he couldn’t see the source of that voice. Instead, he extended his feelers outwards, stroking the currents softly, remembering where the entrance was. Almost at once, he remembered why he couldn’t leave. His tormentor still hung outside the entrance, poised and waiting to strike. Again, he withdrew to his thoughts. Time, at least, was plentiful.
“…when we realised the prisoners, once released, were leaking classified information back to their homelands, we had to terminate the experiment. These creatures – the Saccoglossans species – were passing on their memories genetically by binding their own RNA to that of the human host…”
The water was now a pale, shimmering blue; the vast, black sea canyons had melted away. In their place, towering like an ancient and crumbling citadel, was a massive spire of coral reef. There were no sharks, no squid, no shoals of fish, their bodies reflecting the sunlight like flashing mirrors. Not a single living creature could be seen. The skeletons of sea anemones littered the cascade, here and there. Caught on the dead branches of an Acroporid coral, a plastic bag whipped back and forth; silently, obscenely. The whole scene was like a watercolour, caught in the rain; the ghosts of colours, once bright but now seeped away, left a parched canvas in its place.
The surface of the structure was coarse and uncomfortable to move across, stinging his tender underbelly like steel wool. He slowed his pace, moving ever higher towards the surface. He would get there eventually. And as the light got stronger, he finally remembered why he’d come. In the electric ripples of light, his memories wavered and twitched. A name, and then another.
Yulia Sokolova. Curtis. Curtis Knight. That’s me.
That’s me.
Curtis gasped and raised his head, looking around at the expectant faces. Yulia. Cassie-Judith. Max. Clarabell Addington. Every face locked in the same expression as it had been, long ago. The party guests milled about as before. The sound of a clarinet, playing a scale, drifted in on the crisp evening air. The band were warming up for their live performance. Curtis looked down to see that the Saccoglossans was dead: lying in a shrivelled crescent moon shape on the table, the tiny creature had given its all to show Curtis what he’d seen.
“Did anything happen at all?” Cassie-Judith’s voice was full of scorn.
“Welcome back, issledovatel; scaler of the abyss.” Yulia’s words had lost their hard edges. These words were spoken softly, as if to a comrade; a conspirator, even.
“We have much to discuss.”
(c) Michael Burnett 2020