Darkness Creeping (11 page)

“Dolphins,” says Greaty, as if reading the fear in my face.

Sure enough, he is right. Dolphins are riding along with the boat. As I look into the distance, I see dozens of them, all running in line with us, as if it is a race. And then suddenly they stop.

I go to the stem of the boat and look behind us. The dolphins are still there, but they wait far behind. The bottle tips of their noses poke out of the water, forming a line a hundred yards away, like a barrier marking off one part of the ocean from another.

I look down at the waters we’ve come into and could swear that, as black as the waters were before, they’re even blacker now. And the smell of the sea has changed, too.

Greaty stops the boat.

“We’re here,” he tells me.

He gets out his fishing rod, and one for me. Then he pulls out bait, impaling the small feeder fish onto tiny barbed hooks.

Suddenly the boat pitches with a wave. It goes up and down like an elevator—like a wild ride at an amusement park. My stomach hangs in midair and then falls down to my toes.

The water rises around the boat, almost flowing in, but the boat rises with it.

“You know why a boat floats?” he asks me.

“Why does a boat float, Greaty?”

“Because it’s too afraid of what’s under the water,” he says, completely serious.

Greaty throws his line in, and we wait, he sitting there calmly, and I, shivering, with sweaty palms. I watch lightning strike in the far, far distance.

Greaty knows what he’s doing,
I tell myself.
He’s been fishing his whole life. He knows how close you can get to a storm and still be safe . . . doesn’t he?

I haven’t thrown my line in yet. It’s as if throwing a line into the water brings me closer to it, and I don’t want to be closer to it. I watch my feeder fish, sewed onto the steel hook, writhe in silent agony until it finally goes limp. Greaty watches the fish die.

“Dying is the natural course of things, you know,” he says.

“Bad thing about dying, though, is having to die alone. I don’t want to die alone.” Then he turns to me and says, “When I go, I want someone to come with me.”

He takes my line, casts it into the water, and hands me back the rod. I feel the line being pulled away from the boat as the hook sinks deeper and deeper. Lightning flashes on the distant horizon.

“The person who dies with me, though, ought to be someone I care about. Someone
special
,” he says.

“I gotta use the bathroom,” I tell him, even though I don’t have to. I just have to get away, as far away as I can. I have to go where I don’t see the ocean, or the storm, or Greaty.

I go down to the cabin, and there I feel something cold down on my feet. I look down and see water.

I race back up top. “Greaty,” I say. “There’s water down below! We’re leaking.”

But he isn’t bothered. He just holds his line and chews his tobacco. “Guess old
Mariana
decided she’s not so afraid of the ocean after all.”

“We gotta start bailing! We have to do something!”

“Don’t you worry, Tommy,” he tells me in a soft, calm voice.

“She takes on a little water now and then. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

Then Greaty’s line goes taut, and his pole begins to bend. He skillfully fights the fish on the other end, letting out some line, then pulling some in—out, in, out, in, until the fish on the other end is exhausted.

In the distance behind us, the dolphins watch.

I hear the snagged fish thump against the boat, and Greaty, his old muscles straining, reels it in.

At first I’m not sure what I’m seeing, and then it becomes clear. The thing on the line is like no fish I’ve ever laid eyes on. It is ugly and gray, covered with slime rather than scales. It has a long neck like a baby giraffe, and its head is filled with teeth. It has only one eye, in the center of its forehead—a clouded, unseeing eye.

Greaty drops the thing onto the deck, and it flops around, making an awful growling, hissing noise. Its head flies to the left and then to the right on the end of its long neck, until finally it collapses.

Greaty looks at it long and hard. Far behind us, the dolphins wait at the edge of the black waters.

“What is it, Greaty?”

“It doesn’t have a name, Tommy,” he tells me as he heads into his tackle room. “It doesn’t have a name.”

He comes out of the boat with a new fishing rod—a heavy pole, with heavy line and a hook the size of a meat hook. He digs the hook into the thing he caught and hurls it back into the ocean, letting it pull out far into the dark waters.

What could he possibly be trying to catch with something that large?

“Greaty, I want to go home now.” I can hear the distant rumble of thunder. The storm coming toward us is as black as the sea. When I look down into the cabin, the water level has risen. There is at least a foot of water down there, and the boat is leaning horribly to starboard.

“Greaty!” I scream. “Are you listening to me?”

“We’re not going home, Tommy.”

I hear what he’s saying, but I can’t believe it. “What?” I shout at him. “What did you say?”

“Don’t you see, Tommy?” he tells me. “There are places out here—wondrous places that no one has ever charted. Places deeper than the Marianas Trench! Bottomless places where creatures dwell that no man has ever seen.”

The boat pitches terribly. Water pours in from the side.

“We’re going to be part of that mystery, Tommy, you and me, together. We’re going to rest deep.”

“No!” I scream. “You can’t do this! I don’t want to die out here!”

“Tommy, you’re not doing anyone else on this earth any good,” he explains to me. “You won’t be missed by many, and even then you won’t be missed for long. I’m the only one who needs you, Tommy. So I won’t be alone.”

“I won’t do it!”

Greaty laughs. “Well, seeing as how the boat is sinking and a storm’s coming, it doesn’t look like you have much of a choice. Not unless you can walk on water.”

A wave lifts the boat high and water pours in, filling the cabin. And then something tugs on Greaty’s line so hard that it pulls the rod right out of his hand. It disappears into the water.

“I think it’s time,” he says.

I scramble into the flooding cabin and find a life jacket. I put it on, as if it can really help me.

When I come out, the water gets calm, and I feel something scraping along the bottom of the boat—something huge.

I look up to the sky, wishing that I could sprout wings and fly away from the sea. Then something rises out of the water in front of us—a big, slimy black fin the size of a great sail, and beneath that fin, two humps on a creature’s back—a creature larger than any whale could possibly be.

“Look at that!” shouts Greaty.

The fin crosses before us, towering over our heads, and then submerges, disappearing into the black depths.

It gets very quiet. Much
too
quiet. Greaty puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank you, Tommy, for coming with me.”

Somewhere below, I hear a rush of water as something coming from very, very deep forces its way toward the surface, getting closer and closer. The water around us begins to bubble and churn.

“No!” I scream, and climb up to the edge of the sinking boat.

I never thought that I would leap into the ocean by choice, but that’s exactly what I do. My feet leave the gouged old wood of the
Mariana
, and in a moment I am in the sea.

The water is icy cold all around me, salty and rough. I break surface and gasp for air. My life jacket is all that keeps me from sinking into this bottomless ocean pit. A wave washes me away from the boat.

Then I hear a roar and the cracking of wood. A great gush of water catches me in the eyes, making them sting. I turn back, and see it only for an instant. Something huge, black, and covered with ooze. It has sharp teeth, no eyes, and a black forked tongue that has forced its way through the hull of the boat, searching for Greaty like a tentacle . . . and finding him. The thing crushes the entire boat in its immense jaws. Its roar is so loud, I cannot hear if Greaty is screaming.

A wave hits, and I am under the water again. When I break surface, the beast, the boat, and Greaty are gone. Only churning water and bubbles remain where they had been.

Far away, I can see the dolphins waiting at the edge of this unholy water. I move my arms and kick my legs, teaching myself to swim.

Something huge and smooth brushes past my feet, but I don’t think about it. Something rough and hard scrapes against my leg, but I only look forward, staring at the dolphins lined up a hundred yards away. Those dolphins are waiting for me, I know. They will not dare come into these waters, but if I make it back to them, I know that I will be all right. They will carry me home.

And so I will ignore the horrors that swarm unseen beneath me. I will close my ears to the roars and groans from the awful deep. And I will get to the dolphins. Even if I have to walk on water.

I finally snapped on the day we found the quilt.

It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning as we drove in the van searching for garage sales. As usual, Timmy and Maddie, my twin brother and sister, were fighting like Velociraptors in the back of the van, gouging each other’s face, ready to draw blood. I knew the fight would go on until one bit the other hard enough to make them let out a scream that could shatter bulletproof glass.

Dad had the music turned up full blast. It was his defense against Timmy and Maddie’s little war. Today it was about their stupid yellow blanket. There used to be
two
stupid yellow blankets, but last year one got lost. Ever since, the surviving one was fought over constantly.

“Mom, can’t you shut them up?” I asked.

Mom turned around and said something totally useless to the twins, like “You stop that now,” then she went back to looking out the window for garage-sale signs.

“Mom, I swear, if they don’t stop screaming, I’m going to gag them with that miserable blanket,” I warned.

“Have some patience, Marybeth,” Mom said, as she always says. “They’re only five; they’ll grow out of it.” That’s what she said when they were four, and when they were three, and when they were—

Two minutes later, Timmy bit Maddie, who then let loose a wail that rattled my brain. And that’s when I did it: I grabbed their stupid yellow blanket, balled it up, and hurled it out my window. We were driving over a bridge, and the blanket went sailing like a comet over the edge of the guardrail, down to the creek below.

Now they both began to cry hysterically, and Mom looked at me, horrified. “Marybeth, how could you do that? How could you be so cruel?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it’s genetic,” I said. Mom had yet to come up with a good comeback line to that one.

We continued on in a whimpering sort of silence until hand-painted signs led us into a neighborhood I didn’t know. We found the garage sale at the end of the street.

A man and woman had all the leftovers of their life spread out on their driveway. They smiled when they saw us coming. People who give garage sales love when people drive up in nice big vans like ours. Vans can haul off a lot, and often we did.

It used to be that we mostly picked things up for the church thrift shop. But ever since Dad lost his job, we’ve been picking up things for ourselves. Usually people just get rid of junk at these sales, but every once in a while you can find something great. That’s how we found my piano last month. It cost two hundred dollars, but the same one would have cost at least a thousand in a store.

But there were few such bargains at this garage sale.

“Most of the stuff we just pulled out of the attic,” said the pale, thin woman who owned the house. “We hadn’t been up there for years. It’s funny the things you collect.”

Yeah
, I thought.
It’s funny the things people try to get money for, too.

Mostly it was clothes—old bell-bottom pants, stained blouses, moldy things that smelled of mothballs, and children’s clothing. In fact, there were all kinds of children’s things—toys, picture books . . . and a child’s quilt.

The quilt was just draped there, over a little white rocking chair, and my eyes were immediately drawn to its lively colors. At first I thought it was because the sun was hitting it, shining through the trees, creating a patch of bright light that made the quilt seem to glow. But then I realized that the morning sun was still behind the clouds.

I stared, unable to take my eyes off the bright colors of the little blanket.
How could someone have sewn something so beautiful?
I wondered. And then I remembered how my grandmother used to sit hour after hour, working on patchwork quilts in tranquil silence. I’m not a sentimental type—things that are cute or quaint usually make me sick. But that quilt went beyond being quaint . . . it was masterful.

“Have your children grown and left home?” my mother asked the woman who lived there. “Is that why you’re selling all of this?”

The woman just stared at her, blinking. “No, we don’t have any children,” she said.