Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [99]
“It’s all right,” Tim said, “it’s going away.”
“Please God please God please God please please …”
Whose voice?
A great sucking of the sea took the creature down. A light flickered far away, the captain’s boat.
“It’s gone,” said Dan.
fter that there was no more sense. What remained was brighter and realer.
The sea changed constantly. I could focus and unfocus at will, soften it here, sharpen it there, make it slide and swoop and shift. For days I drifted like this. Once I heard, faintly, a girl’s voice singing far away. The sky? The sea? I don’t know. It was sad and soft, and you couldn’t hear it and not cry. Who she was I don’t know. Love lost. Impossibly gone. I could have slipped over the side, swam to her, if I’d not been a weakling. She sang through the sound of the sea and the wind all morning, fell silent at noon. After which a shark, wonderful, came swimming between the boats, out of reach. Two sharks! Sharp black fins, cutting the sea in lines. Food. Us to them, them to us. We should have kept Yan for bait. It wouldn’t mean anything to him now, would it? I saw Yan’s face as I last saw him, the wide-parted lips, the look of a shrunken head beginning, because of the way his lips had retreated from his long teeth. His gums were white, like bone. The black fins accompanied us, stirring the sea all day, circling, approaching, retreating. Wilson Pride was getting sick now, and Dag. Poor old John was the worst though, pulling himself up, talking nonsense, falling down again.
He’ll be next.
Gabriel gave me a prod. My watch. Dragged. Dizzy. Stood on Skip’s foot. “Fuck you to hell!” he snarled.
“Fuck you too!”
He kicked out with his bare foot but missed.
My watch:
I forgot why I was there. My eyes were very old by now, slitted, able to look into the brightness. I felt like a fly on a ceiling. As if I was upside down and the sky was under and the sea was up, and there was no difference between the two, and no beginning or end to each. I wasn’t troubled, not then, not really, though I was starting to quiver, the small hairs pricking up all over my arms and the back of my neck. I couldn’t say I was troubled, no such thing, too much for that, what was coming was bigger, for there was something invisible rising, resounding like the feeling in the air before lightning, bigger than the sea and sky and covering everything. There was a small, thin sound in the air, a living tone that came closer, moved palpably in my head, then flew far up and diffused, as if a crowd of children babbled beyond the sky.
“But true,” said Skip, “there is something out there. You can hear it too.”
His breath stank.
Hearing isn’t quite the right word.
But, “Yes,” I said, “I can.” I was feeling faint. “What is it?” I asked.
He smiled mysteriously.
“You don’t know any more than I know,” I said.
“Did I say I did?”
“I don’t know. I thought you did.”
“I do know some things.”
He crouched by me, hugging his legs. His breeches were ragged and ripped and both his knees poked through, sharp and bony. As he spoke he picked cruelly at a hanging scab on the right one, sucking in breath through his teeth with a hiss. “It’s wild,” he said. “Very, very wild, Jaf, very, very wild indeed.”
The sound was a hum now, changing, scarcely, slightly, all the time. Blood burst up out of Skip’s knee, a shiny red bubble. He licked it.
“And very, very old.”
More blood came, a sticky ooze. It smelled like liver, like kidneys sliced ready for the pan.
“Old like millions and millions of years, and it walks on the tips of its hooves.”
My dream, the dragon walking on tiptoe on the sea.
“If it comes,” he said, “try not to look. Some things you shouldn’t see.”
“I’m scared,” I said.
He looked at me very closely.