The Prince Of Mist

13

Hours later, when Max had eaten some food and was only ten pages away from the end of his book, he heard the sound of bicycles entering the front garden. Then came the soft hush of Roland and Alicia’s voices, as they whispered for almost an hour on the porch. Around midnight, Max returned his book to the bedside table and turned off the lamp. Finally, he heard Roland’s bike setting off down the road and Alicia tiptoeing up the stairs. His sister’s footsteps paused for a moment outside his door, then continued along the short distance to her own bedroom. Max heard Alicia dropping her shoes on the wooden floor then a creak as she lay down on the bed. He recalled the image of Roland kissing her that morning on the beach and he smiled in the dark. For once, he was certain that his sister would take much longer getting to sleep than he would.

*

The following morning, Max decided to rise before the sun and by dawn he was already cycling towards the bakery. He wanted to get something delicious for breakfast and prevent Alicia from preparing her speciality – leftovers of bread, jam and milk. In the early hours, the town nestled in a calm that reminded him of Sunday mornings in the city. Only a few people out for a quiet walk broke the sleepy mood of the streets, in which even the houses, their shutters closed, seemed to be dozing.

In the distance, beyond the harbour wall, the few fishing boats that made up the local fleet were gliding out to sea and would not return until sunset. Max was greeted by the baker and his daughter, a shy young girl with rosy cheeks who stared at him as if he were some kind of prize. While they served him from a mouthwatering tray of sweet cinnamon buns just out of the oven, the baker asked after Irina. Clearly the news had spread: the local doctor obviously did more than take his patient’s temperature when he made home visits. As his father liked to say, in small towns news travelled at the speed of boredom.

Max managed to get back to the beach house with the breakfast buns still irresistibly warm. Without his watch he wasn’t sure what the time was, although he imagined it must be close to eight o’clock. The thought of having to wait for Alicia to wake up so he could have breakfast was not tempting, so he came up with a clever plan. With the excuse of giving her a hot breakfast, he prepared a tray with his booty from the bakery, milk and a couple of napkins and went up to Alicia’s bedroom. He rapped on the door with his knuckles until his sister’s sleepy voice gave an unintelligible mumble.

‘Room service,’ said Max. ‘Can I come in?’

He pushed the door open and stepped into the room. Alicia had buried her head under a pillow. Max looked around at the clothes hanging over chairs and her huge collection of random possessions. A girl’s room was always a bewildering place, thought Max, a complete mystery.

‘I’ll count to ten,’ he said, ‘then I’ll start eating.’

His sister’s face peeped out from under the pillow, scenting the sweet aroma in the air.

*

Roland was waiting for them by the edge of the beach, wearing just a pair of old trousers cut off at the knees. Next to him was a small boat that couldn’t have been more than three metres long and looked as if it had spent at least thirty years bleaching in the sun; the wood had acquired a greyish hue, visible under the few remaining smudges of blue paint. Despite all that, Roland seemed to be admiring his boat as if it were a luxury yacht. As Max and his sister walked down towards the shore, negotiating the stones on the beach, Max noticed that Roland had inscribed the vessel’s name on the prow with fresh paint, probably that very morning: Orpheus II.

‘Since when did you have a boat?’ Alicia asked, pointing at the ramshackle tub into which Roland had already loaded the diving gear and a couple of baskets with mystifying contents.

‘Since three hours ago. One of the local fishermen was about to break her up for firewood, but I convinced him to give her to me in exchange for a favour.’

‘A favour?’ asked Max. ‘I think you’re the one who’s done him a favour.’

‘You’re welcome to remain onshore if you’d prefer to have first-class accommodation, sire,’ retorted Roland. ‘Come on, all aboard.’

Max decided to keep his mouth shut and not wrestle with Roland’s pride. As far as he was concerned, the expression ‘aboard’ seemed inappropriate for the vessel in question. However, once they’d covered the first fifteen metres and he could see they were still afloat, Max thought better of it and opted not to judge the boat by its hopeless appearance.

‘Well, what do you think, my lord?’ joked Roland.

‘Fit for a prince, cabin boy.’

In fact, the boat moved swiftly in response to Roland’s energetic rowing and clearly had a lot more life in it than Max had originally imagined.

‘I’ve brought along a small contraption that may surprise you,’ said Roland.

Max looked at one of the covered baskets and lifted the lid a centimetre or two.

‘What’s in here?’ he murmured.

‘An underwater window,’ Roland explained. ‘Really it’s just a box with some glass at one end. If you place it on the surface of the water, you can see to the bottom without diving in. That’s why it’s like a window.’

Max pointed at his sister Alicia.

‘This way, at least you’ll be able to see something too,’ he said, teasing her.

‘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.