Her dad looked surprised. “Oh! You’re up. Did Dairine—”
“She told me,” Nita said. “Is there time to eat something?”
“Sure. I guess she told Kit too then—I just looked in his room, but he wasn’t there. The bed was made; I guess he’s ready—”
Nita cheerfully allowed her father to draw his own conclusions, especially since they were the wrong ones. “He’s probably down at the beach killing time,” she said. “I’ll go get him after I eat.”
She made a hurried commando raid on the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove for her mother, who was browsing through the science section of the New York Times and was ready for another cup of tea. Nita’s mother looked up at her from the paper and said, “Neets, where’s your sister? She hasn’t had breakfast.”
That was when her sister came thumping into the dining room. Nita saw her mom look at Dairine and develop a peculiar expression. “Dari,” her mother said, “are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine!” said Dairine in an offended tone. Nita turned in her chair to look at her. Her sister looked flushed, and she wasn’t moving at her normal breakneck speed. “C’mere, baby,” Nita’s mother said. “Let me feel your forehead.”
“Mom!”
“Dairine,” her father said.
“Yeah, right.” Dairine went over to her mother and had her forehead felt, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “You’re hot, sweetie,” Nita’s mother said in alarm. “Harry, I told you she was in the water too long yesterday. Feel her.”
Nita’s dad looked slightly bored, but he checked Dairine’s forehead and then frowned. “Well…”
“No ‘wells’, Dari. I think you’d better sit this one out.”
“Oh, Mom!”
Nita was filled with admiration for someone who could sound so utterly stricken over something she hadn’t cared about one way or the other mere minutes ago.
“Cork it, little one. You can come fishing with us in a day or two.” Nita’s mother turned to her. “Neets, will you stick around and keep an eye on your sister?”
“Mom, I don’t need a babysitter!”
The scorn and anguish dripping from every word made Nita wonder, not for the first time, if her sister had a career in acting waiting for her down the road. “Enough, Dairine,” her mom said. “You go lie down now. No buts! Nita, we’ll take you and Kit with us the next time. But your dad really wants to get out today.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Nita said, dropping what was left of the smile so that she would look decently disappointed (though the smile really now wanted to stay on). “I’ll keep an eye on the junior Jedi.”
“Do not call me that!”
“Dairine,” her father said again, in that patented don’t-try-my-patience tone of voice.
Nita’s little sister made a face at all of them impartially and left, again at half the usual speed.
As soon as she could, Nita slipped into Dairine’s room. Her sister was lying on top of the bed, cuddled back into a pile of pillows and starting to read her way through a pile of X-Men comics. She looked incredibly flushed. “Not bad, huh?” Dairine said in a low voice as Nita came in.
“How did you do that?” Nita whispered.
“I used the Force,” Dairine said, flashing a wicked look at Nita.
“Dari! Spill it!”
“I turned Dad’s electric blanket up high and spent a few minutes under it. Then drank about a pint of hot water.” Dairine turned a page in her comic book, looking blasé about the whole thing. “Mom did the rest. She’s so dependable that way.”
Nita shook her head in admiration. “There are days you really justify your existence. I owe you one.”
Dairine looked up from her comic at Nita. “Yeah,” Dairine said, “you do.”
Nita felt a chill. “Right. I’ll hang out here till they leave. Then I have to find Kit—”
“He went down to the general store just before you got up,” Dairine said. “Think he was going to call somebody.” This had been one of the recurring themes of their stay so far: the cellphone coverage out here was infuriatingly iffy, coming and going without notice.
“Right,” Nita said again.
There was the briefest pause. Then: “Whales, huh?” Dairine said, very softly.
Nita got out of there in a big hurry.
***
The sign on top of the building merely said, in big, square, black letters, TIANA BEACH. “‘Tiana Beach’ what?” people typically said, and it was a fair question. From a distance there was no telling what the place was, except a one-story structure with peeling white paint.
The building stood off the main road, at the end of a spur road that ran down to the water. On one side of it was its small parking lot, a black patch of heat-heaved asphalt always littered with pieces of the clamshells that the gulls liked to drop and crack open there. On the other side was a dock for the people who came shopping in their boats.
The dock was in superb repair. The store was less so. Its large multipaned front windows, for example, were clean enough outside, but inside they were either covered by stacked-up boxes or with grime; nothing was visible through them except spastically flashing old neon signs that said “Pabst Blue Ribbon” or “Cerveza BUDWEISER.” Beachgrass and aggressive weeds grew next to (and in places, through) the building’s cracked concrete steps. The rough little "U.S. Post Office" sign above the front door had a sparrow’s nest behind it.
Nita headed for the open door. It always seemed to be open, whether Mr. Friedman the storekeeper was there or not. “On the off chance,” as Mr. Friedman usually said, “that someone might need something at three in the morning… or the afternoon…”
Nita walked into the dark, brown-smelling store, past the haphazard shelves of canned goods and cereal and the racks of plastic earthworms and nylon surf-casting line. By the cereal and the crackers, she met the reason that Mr. Friedman’s store was safe day and night. The reason’s name was Dog: a whitish, curlyish, terrierish mutt, with eyes like something out of Disney and teeth like something out of Transylvania. Dog could smell attempted theft for miles, which was possibly the reason it was safe for that door to be open all the time. When not biting people in the line of business, he would unfailingly threaten to do it on his own time, for no reason whatever.
“Hi, Dog,” Nita said, being careful not to get too close.
Dog showed Nita his teeth. “Go chew dry bones,” he said in a growl.
“Same to you,” Nita said pleasantly, and made a wide detour around him, heading for the rear of the store. Against the back wall, between the cold case where the beer and bait were kept and the so-called emergency exit (also always open), was a phone booth so ancient that it actually had a door; it could have been used as a spot for mild-mannered reporters to pull their shirts open and turn into superheroes. Right now, though, it contained Kit, who had apparently managed to reach the person he’d been intending to call.
“Right,” Kit was saying, his voice slightly muffled by being in the booth. “Something about ‘The Gates of The Sea.’ I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those ‘restricted’ notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—”
Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, pulled the door open, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words “Tom and Carl.” She nodded, squeezing into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. “Hi, it’s Nita—”
“Well, hi there yourself,” Tom Swale’s voice came back. “I see you too are suffering from the curse of nonfunctional technology…” He would doubtless have gone on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn’t begun screaming “HELLOOOOOOO! HELLO!” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room.
This was Tom and Carl’s intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for short. Wizards’ pets tended
to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at one moment deliver the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of any major newscaster you pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.
“Cut that out!” Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one with a more New Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. “Look out!—She’s on the stove. Get her—oh, Lord. There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—”
“Next time you should try using the manual’s messaging section,” Tom said. “No ‘black spots’ for reception there. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual around here, as you can tell.”
“Not for us, though,” Nita said.
“No, I get that sense. Especially if you’re calling at this hour. Kit, just hang on a minute: Carl’s getting the information released for you. Evidently the Powers That Be don’t want it distributed without a Senior’s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now, which is news to me. Something must have come up in a hurry.”
“Yeah.” Nita spent a few minutes telling Tom some of what S’reee had told the two of them the day before, while in the background Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them—or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well—the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time—say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to have them around.
“The link’s busy,” she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. “Oh, never mind, there it goes. Look,” he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals, “we need an intervention authorization for an offshore area—yeah, that’s right. Here’s the numbers—”
Kit had his manual open to the spot where he’d found the notification. Nita looked over his shoulder and watched the box that said restricted information suddenly blink out, replaced by the words SEE CHART PAGE 1096. “Got it?” Tom said.
“Almost.” Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found herself looking at a map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily indicated. The map was primarily concerned with the ocean.
“Okay, I’ve got it in my manual too,” Tom said. “All those lines in the middle of the water are contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren’t many lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The bottom isn’t much deeper than a hundred feet within that distance. But then—you see a lot of contour lines packed closely together? That’s the edge of the Continental Shelf. Think of it as a cliff, or a mesa, with the North American continent sitting on top of it. Then there’s a steep drop—the cliff’s just a shade less than a mile high—”
“Or deep,” Nita said.
“Whichever. About a five thousand foot drop; not straight down—it slopes a bit—but straight enough. Then the sea bottom keeps on sloping eastward and downward. It doesn’t slope as fast as before, but it goes deep—some fifteen thousand feet down; and it gets deeper yet farther out. See where it says ‘Sohm Abyssal Plain’ to the southeast of the Island, about six or seven hundred miles out?”
“It has ‘the Crushing Dark’ underneath that on our map,” Nita said. “Is that the whales’ name for it?”
“Right. That area’s more like seventeen, eighteen thousand feet down.”
“Bet it’s cold down there,” Kit muttered.
“Probably. Let me know when you get back,” Tom said, “because that’s where you’re going.”
Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock. “But I thought even submarines couldn’t go down that far,” Nita said.
“Most can’t. Neither can most whales, normally—but it helps to be a wizard,” Tom said. “Look, don’t panic yet.”
“No, go ahead, panic!” screamed Picchu from somewhere in the background. “Do it now and avoid the June rush! Fear death by water!”
“Bird,” Carl’s voice said, also in the background, “seriously, you’re honing for a stretch in solitary if you keep this up.”
“Solitary! Oh, no, you’re not putting me back in there in the daytime, it’s a violation of my basic awwwwk!”
“Thanks, Carl,” Tom said, as silence fell. “Just leave the sheet over the cage until he sees the error of his ways.”
More ear-piercing shrieking in the background. “Are you crazy? You think this two-bit joint can hold me? I demand to see my lawyer!”
“Does somebody need even more of a time out? Three, two, one…”
“I am not a number! I am a free—”
Sudden silence. “Damping field,” Carl said in the background. “She can have five minutes. Coffee?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Now where were we? …Anyway, you two won’t just be going out there and diving straight down. There’s a specific approach to the Plain. Look back closer to the Island, and you’ll see some contours drawn in dotted lines—”
“Hudson Channel,” Nita said.
“Right. That’s the old bed of the Hudson River—where it used to run a hundred thousand years ago, while all that part of the Continental Shelf was still above water. That old riverbed leads farther southeast, to the edge of the Shelf, and right over it… there was quite a waterfall there once. See the notch in the Shelf?”
“Yeah. ‘Hudson Canyon,’ it says—”
“The Gates of the Sea,” said Tom. “That’s the biggest undersea canyon on the East Coast, and probably the oldest. It cuts right down through the Shelf. Those walls are at least two or three thousand feet high, sometimes four. Some of the canyons on Mars could match the Hudson—but none on Earth. And for the whale-wizards, the Gates have become the traditional approach to the Great Depths and the Crushing Dark.”
Nita bit her lip; the thought of canyon walls stretching above her almost a mile high gave her chills. She’d seen a rockslide once, when the family was out west on a holiday, and it had made her uneasy about canyons in general. “Is it safe?” she said.
“Of course not,” Tom said, sounding as this should have been no surprise. “But the natural dangers are Carl’s department; he’ll fill you in on what precautions you’ll need to take, and I suspect the whales will too.”
“Natural dangers,” Kit said. “Meaning there are unnatural ones too.”
“In wizardry, when aren’t there? This much I can tell you, though. New York has not been kind to that area. For one thing, after World War Two, a lot of supposedly expired munitions were dumped at the head of Hudson Canyon: even unexploded depth charges. Most of the dangerous stuff is marked on your map, but keep your eyes open, because the currents are strong and things get shifted around all the time. Also, the City dumped raw sewage into the Hudson Channel area for decades. Forty or fifty years ago, when people weren’t as clued in about the environment as we are now, they thought the water there was so deep that the dumping wouldn’t do any harm.” Tom sounded annoyed. “It has, though. A lot of marine life in that area, vegetation especially, was completely killed off. And some species that managed to hang on have been changed in nasty ways. The manual will give you details, but I doubt you’ll like them.”
Nita suspected that Tom was right. “Anyway,” he said, “let me sum up the rest of this. After you do the appropriate rituals, which the whales will coach
you through, the access through the Gates of the Sea takes you down through Hudson Canyon to its bottom at the lower edge of the Shelf, and then deeper and farther southeast—where the canyon turns into a valley that gets shallower and shallower as it goes. The valley ends just about where the Abyssal Plain begins, seven hundred miles off the coast and seventeen thousand feet down. Then you come to the mountain.”
It was on the map—a tiny set of concentric circles—but it had looked so peculiar, standing there all by itself in the middle of hundreds of miles of flatness, that Nita had doubted her judgment. “The Sea’s Tooth,” she said, reading from the map.
“Caryn Peak,” Tom said, “or Caryn Seamount, depending on whose map you’re using. Some of the oceanographers think it’s simply the westernmost peak of an undersea mountain range called the Kelvin Seamounts—they’re off the eastward edge of your map. Some think otherwise; the geological history of that area is bizarre. Either way, the mountain’s an important spot. And impressive; that one peak is six thousand feet high. It stands up sheer from the bottom, all alone, a third as high as Everest.”
“Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other,” Kit said, awed.
“A very noticeable object. It’s functioned as landmark and meeting place and site of the whales’ great wizardries for not even they know how long. Certainly since the continents started drifting toward their present positions… at least a hundred thousand years ago. And it may have been used by, well, other sorts of wizards, even earlier than that. There’s interesting history in that area, tangled up with whale-wizards and human ones too.”
Tom’s voice grew more somber. “Some of the wizards who specialize in history say that humans only learned wizardry with the whales’ assistance. Whatever the case, these days our styles of wizardry are different. It’s an old, old form of the Art they practice. Very beautiful… very dangerous. And the area around Caryn Peak is saturated with residue from all the old wizardries that whales and others, have done there. That makes any spell you work there even more dangerous.”