‘Who says I’m going to stay here? I’m the one who’s going down today,’ she replied.
‘You? You don’t even know how to dive!’ cried Max, trying to wind his sister up.
‘If you call what you did the other day diving, no, I don’t,’ responded Alicia, not wanting to start a war.
Roland continued rowing, staying well out of their argument. Finally he stopped the boat some thirty metres from the shore. Beneath them, stretched out on the bottom of the sea, the dark shadow of the Orpheus waited like some gigantic shark lurking on the sand. Roland opened one of the baskets and pulled out a rusty anchor attached to a thick, frayed rope. When Max saw the state of the equipment, he assumed that all these bits and pieces were part of the batch Roland had bargained for in order to save the miserable rowing boat from a dignified and fitting end.
‘Careful, it’ll splash!’ cried Roland, as he threw the anchor into the sea. It plummeted in a vertical line, raising a small cloud of bubbles and taking with it most of the rope.
Roland let the current drag the boat along a few metres, then fastened the end of the anchor rope to a ring that hung from the prow. The boat swayed gently in the waves and the rope tensed, making the wooden structure creak. Max threw a suspicious look at the joints of the hull.
‘She’s not going to sink, Max. Trust me,’ Roland said, taking the underwater window out of its basket and placing it on the surface.
‘That’s what they said on the Titanic,’ Max replied.
Alicia leaned over to look through the box and for the first time saw the hull of the Orpheus lying on the bottom of the sea.
‘It’s incredible!’ she gasped.
Roland smiled happily and handed her a mask and a pair of flippers.
‘Wait till you see it close up,’ he said as he put on his gear.
The first to jump into the water was Alicia. Roland, sitting on the edge of the boat, gave Max a reassuring look.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on her. She’ll be all right,’ he said.
Roland jumped into the sea and joined Alicia, who was waiting for him about three metres beyond the boat. They both waved at Max and a few seconds later disappeared beneath the surface.
*
Under the water, Roland took Alicia’s hand and guided her over the wreck of the Orpheus. The temperature was lower than the last time he’d dived there, and he knew that the further down they went the colder it would be. Roland was used to this phenomenon. It happened sometimes during the first days of summer, especially when cold currents from the open sea flowed strongly below a depth of six or seven metres. In view of this, Roland decided that he wouldn’t allow Alicia or Max to dive down with him to the hull of the Orpheus that day. There would be plenty more days in the summer when they could attempt it.
Alicia and Roland swam along the length of the sunken ship, which lay in the spectral light of the seabed. Every now and then they stopped to come up for air and have another look at her from the surface.
Roland sensed Alicia’s excitement and didn’t take his eyes off her. He knew that if he wanted to enjoy a peaceful dive, it would have to be on his own. When he went diving with someone, especially with beginners, he couldn’t help behaving like an underwater nanny. Still, he was particularly pleased to share with his friends the magical world that for years had seemed to belong only to him. He felt like a guide in some bewitching attraction, leading visitors on an incredible journey above a submerged cathedral.
The watery scenery offered other incentives too. He liked to look at Alicia’s body moving under the surface. With each stroke, he could see the muscles on her torso and legs tense beneath her pale skin. In fact, he felt more comfortable watching her like this, when she wasn’t aware of his gaze. The next time they came up to the surface for air, the rowing boat was at least ten metres away. Alicia smiled excitedly. Roland returned her smile, but deep down he felt that the best thing to do would be to return to the boat.
‘Can we go down to the ship and go inside?’ Alicia asked, gasping as she spoke.
Roland noticed that her arms and legs were covered in goose pimples.
‘Not today,’ he replied. ‘Let’s go back to the boat.’
Alicia saw a flicker of anxiety cross Roland’s face.
‘Is anything the matter?’
Roland smiled calmly and shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about five-degree underwater currents just then. But suddenly, as he watched Alicia swim off towards the boat, his heart skipped a beat. A dark shadow was moving beneath his feet along the bottom of the bay. Alicia turned to look at him. Roland signalled to her to go on and then put his head in the water to inspect the ocean bed.
A black shape – it looked like a large fish – was gliding with sinuous movements around the hull of the Orpheus. For a moment Roland thought it might be a shark, but after a second glance he realised he was wrong. He swam after Alicia, constantly looking back at the strange creature that seemed to be following them. The silhouette twisted and turned in the shadow of the Orpheus, avoiding exposing itself directly to the light. Now Roland could make out a long body, rather like the body of a large snake, enveloped in flashes of deadly luminosity. Roland looked up towards the boat. It was still some distance away. The shadow underneath him seemed to change direction and Roland saw that it had come into the light and was rising towards them.
Praying that Alicia had not seen it, he grabbed the girl by her arm and started swimming as fast as he could towards the rowing boat. Startled, she gave him a puzzled look.
‘Swim to the boat! Quickly!’ shouted Roland.
Alicia couldn’t understand what was happening, but there was such panic on Roland’s face that she didn’t stop to argue. Roland’s shout alerted Max, who watched his friend and Alicia swimming desperately towards him. A moment later Max noticed the dark shadow rising beneath the water.
‘Dear God!’ he whispered.
In the water, Roland pushed Alicia towards the hull of the rowing boat. Max rushed to grab hold of his sister and tried to pull her out. Alicia kicked her flippers as hard as she could and with one last pull from Max she managed to fall into the boat on top of her brother. Roland took a deep breath and prepared to do the same. As Max offered him a hand, Roland could see the terror on his friend’s face at what was emerging behind him. He felt his hand slipping from Max’s grip. Something told him he wouldn’t get out of the water alive. A cold embrace wrapped itself around his legs and, with unimaginable strength, dragged him down towards the depths.
*
After the first few moments of sheer panic, Roland opened his eyes and saw what was dragging him down to the ocean bed. For an instant he thought he was hallucinating, for what Roland saw was not a solid form, but what seemed to be some highly concentrated liquid, a feverish moving sculpture that was constantly changing as he tried to free himself from its mortal embrace.
The water creature twisted round and Roland was confronted with the ghostly face he had seen in his dreams, the face of the clown. The clown opened up two enormous jaws filled with long jagged teeth as sharp as butcher’s knives, and its eyes grew in size until they were as big as saucers. Roland was running out of air. The creature, whatever it was, could change into whatever it wanted and its intentions seemed clear: it wanted to drag Roland inside the sunken ship. As Roland wondered how long he’d be able to hold his breath before giving up and breathing in water, he realised that the light around him had disappeared. He was inside the bowels of the Orpheus, surrounded by total darkness.
*
Max swallowed hard as he put on his mask and prepared to jump into the water in search of his friend. He was aware that a rescue attempt was absurd. For a start he barely knew how to dive, and even supposing he did, he couldn’t begin to imagine what would happen if, once he was underwater, the strange thing that had trapped Roland came after him. And yet he couldn’t just sit in the boat and let his friend die. As he put on his flippers, he thought of a thousand reasonable explanations
for what had just happened. Roland had suffered a cramp, or he’d had some sort of fit because of a change in the water temperature … any theory was better than having to accept that what he’d seen dragging Roland to the depths was real.
Before jumping in, he exchanged one last glance with Alicia. His sister was clearly caught between her wish to save Roland and panic at the thought that her brother might share the same fate. Before common sense could dissuade them both, Max jumped into the waters of the bay above the hull of the Orpheus. He kicked his flippers and swam in the direction of the ship’s prow, the place where he’d last seen Roland before he vanished. Through the cracks in the hull below, Max thought he could see flashing lights moving towards a space that gave off a faint glow: it was the breach opened by the rocks in the bilge twenty-five years before. He swam towards it. It looked as if someone had lit hundreds of candles inside the wreck.
When he was vertically above the entrance to the vessel, he rose to the surface to take in more air, then dived down until he reached the hull. Descending over ten metres turned out to be much more difficult than he’d imagined. Halfway down he began to feel a painful pressure in his ears and he thought his eardrums were going to explode. When he reached the cold current all the muscles in his body tensed like steel cables and he had to kick his flippers with all his might so that the current didn’t drag him away like a leaf in the wind. Max held firmly on to the edge of the hull and struggled to compose himself. His lungs were on fire and he knew he was only one step away from panicking. He looked up at the surface and saw the rowing boat’s tiny form; it seemed to be miles away. He realised that if he didn’t act immediately, diving all the way down would have served no purpose.
The glow seemed to be coming from inside the hold. As Max swam towards it the ghostly landscape of the sunken ship came into view. It looked like a macabre underwater catacomb. He entered a corridor in which shreds of tattered canvas floated by like jellyfish. At the end of the corridor was a half-open hatch which seemed to be the source of the light. Ignoring the repulsive caresses of the rotten canvas on his skin, he grabbed hold of the handle and pulled as hard as he could.
The hatch led to one of the main compartments in the hold. In the middle of it Roland was struggling to escape from the water creature, which had now adopted the shape of the clown. The light Max had seen blazed from its eyes, cruel and disproportionately large for its face. As Max burst into the hold the creature raised its head and looked at him. Max felt an instinctive urge to flee, but the sight of his trapped friend forced him to remain, confronting the wild and angry eyes. The creature’s face changed and Max recognised the stone angel from the cemetery.
Roland’s body stopped writhing and went limp, and the creature let go of him. Without waiting for the creature to react, Max swam over to his friend and grabbed him by the arm. Roland was unconscious. If Max didn’t get him up to the surface in the next few seconds, he would die. Max pulled him towards the hatch, but at that moment the creature with the face of an angel and the body of a clown threw itself on Max, displaying two sharp claws and a row of fangs. Max pushed his fist through the creature’s face. It was only water but was so cold that mere contact with it produced a searing pain. Once more, Dr Cain was demonstrating his box of tricks.
Max pulled his arm away. The apparition vanished and with it the light. Using what little air he had left, Max dragged Roland down the corridor in the hold towards the outside of the hull. His lungs felt as if they were about to burst, and unable to hold his breath another second, he exhaled all the air he had kept in. Then, grabbing hold of Roland’s unconscious body, he flapped his way towards the surface, thinking he would lose consciousness himself at any moment.
The agony of those last few metres seemed endless. When at last he reached the surface, he felt as if he’d been reborn. Alicia threw herself into the water and swam towards them. Max took a few deep breaths, fighting against the sharp pain in his chest. It wasn’t easy to get Roland into the rowing boat and Max noticed that as Alicia struggled to lift the dead weight of his body, she scratched her arms on the splintered wood.
Once they had managed to haul him into the boat, they placed him on his side and pressed on his back repeatedly, forcing his lungs to expel the water he had inhaled. Her arms bleeding, Alicia seized Roland and tried to force him to breathe. Finally, she took a deep breath and, pinching the boy’s nostrils, blew frantically into Roland’s mouth. She had to do this five times before Roland’s body reacted with a violent jerk and he began to spit out seawater and go into spasms.
At last Roland opened his eyes and his skin began, very slowly, to regain its usual colour. Max helped him to sit up and gradually he began to breathe normally.
‘I’m all right,’ Roland stammered, raising a hand to try to reassure his friends.
Alicia burst into tears, sobbing as Max had never seen her do before. He waited a couple of minutes until Roland was able to sit up on his own, then took the oars and started rowing towards the shore. Roland was looking at him without saying a word. He had saved his life. Max knew that the look in those eyes, full of despair and gratitude, would remain with him forever.
*
They placed Roland on his bed in the beach hut and covered him with blankets. None of them felt like talking about what had happened, at least not for the moment. It was the first time the threat posed by the Prince of Mist had become so painfully real and it was difficult to find words with which to express the terror and anxiety they were all feeling. Common sense seemed to dictate that the best thing to do was attend to their immediate needs and that is what they did. Roland kept a basic first-aid kit in the hut, and Max used it to clean Alicia’s wounds. Roland fell asleep a few minutes later. Alicia watched over him, her face distraught.
‘He’s going to be all right. He’s exhausted, that’s all,’ said Max.
‘What about you? You saved his life,’ said Alicia, her voice unable to hide her concern. ‘No one could have done what you did, Max.’
‘He would have done the same thing for me,’ said Max, who wasn’t ready to talk about it.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘The truth?’ Max asked.
Alicia nodded.
‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ Max said, smiling. ‘I haven’t felt this bad in all my life.’
Alicia hugged him tightly. Max stood still, his arms hanging by his sides, not knowing whether this was an outpouring of sisterly love or a reaction to the terror she had experienced earlier, when they were trying to revive Roland.
‘I love you, Max,’ Alicia whispered in his ear. ‘Do you hear me?’
Max didn’t reply. He was perplexed. Alicia released him from her embrace and turned towards the door of the hut, with her back to him. Max could see that she was crying.
‘Don’t ever forget it, little brother,’ she whispered. ‘Now get some sleep. I’ll do the same.’
‘If I fall asleep now, I’ll never get up again,’ Max sighed.
Five minutes later, the friends were sound asleep in the beach hut and nothing in the whole world could have woken them.
14
THE SUN WAS SETTING WHEN VICTOR KRAY stopped about a hundred metres from the beach house where the Carvers had taken up residence. This was the same house where the only woman he had ever loved, Eva Gray, had given birth to Jacob Fleischmann. To see the white facade again opened old wounds, just when he had hoped they had healed forever. All the lights were out and the place looked deserted. Victor Kray assumed that the youngsters must still be in the town with Roland.
The lighthouse keeper walked straight on, through the white fence that surrounded the beach house. The same door and the same windows he remembered shone in the last rays of sun. He crossed the garden towards the backyard and from there he walked out into the field behind the house. The forest rose in the distance and close to the forest’s edge stood the walled garden. He had not been back there for a long time and he stopped to observe it from af
ar, dreading what was hidden behind its walls. Through the dark bars of the gate a thick mist was spreading towards him.
Victor Kray had never felt so old, or so frightened. The fear that gnawed at his soul was the same fear he’d experienced decades ago in the narrow alleys of that industrial suburb where he had heard the voice of the Prince of Mist for the first time. Now, in the twilight of his life, that circle seemed to be closing and, with each new twist of the game, the old man sensed that there were no longer any aces up his sleeve.
The lighthouse keeper now advanced steadily towards the enclosure and soon the mist reached up to his waist. He thrust a trembling hand into his pocket and pulled out his old revolver, carefully loaded before he left the cottage, and a powerful torch. Weapon in hand he entered the walled garden, then turned on the torch. Its beam revealed an extraordinary scene. Victor Kray lowered the gun and rubbed his eyes, thinking he must be imagining things. Something had gone wrong – at least, this wasn’t what he’d expected to find. He sliced the beam through the mist once more. It wasn’t an illusion: the garden of statues was empty.
Disconcerted, he drew closer to examine the vacant pedestals. As he tried to put his thoughts in some sort of order, he heard the faraway rumble of a new storm approaching and lifted his head to scan the horizon. A blanket of dark murky clouds spilled over the sea like an inky stain. A flash of lightning split the skies and the echo of thunder rumbled towards the coast, a drum roll announcing the onset of battle. Victor Kray listened to the insistent growl of the storm that was gathering at sea and, remembering that he had gazed at that same vision on board the Orpheus twenty-five years before, he finally understood what was about to happen.
*
Max woke up drenched in a cold sweat and it took him a few moments to realise where he was. He could feel his heart pounding. A few feet away he recognised a familiar face – Alicia, asleep next to Roland – and then he remembered that he was in the beach hut. He could have sworn he’d only slept for an instant, although in fact he’d been asleep for almost an hour. He got up quietly and went outside for some fresh air. Harrowing images of a nightmare in which he and Roland were trapped inside the Orpheus began to recede from his mind.