We had come to what appeared to be a kind of drop, the crevasse into which we had fallen widening out for some meters before stopping sharply at what, on sight, resembled a valley in the ocean floor. On taking a read from the sensors, however, I saw that what appeared to be a gentle dip was in fact a great break, a chasm in the ground beneath us like something shattered or pulled apart—vast staggers of basalt scattering downward into a chasm that appeared to fall some hundred feet beneath the point at which we currently sat. For several moments I tried to make sense of this, the idea that there could be somewhere deeper still beneath us, the idea of what the blackness of this new drop might enclose. But then, of course, I stopped trying, stopped reading from the sensors or expecting to make sense of anything at all.
During all this, you must understand, I had been aware and not aware of the burning smell that had dogged so much of our time below the water, aware yet not aware of the sound that had curled around our craft for so long, the sound we had heard so often and the voice inside that sound. You have to understand this, understand the way I sensed these things getting closer—the smell and the sound—or rather our growing closer to them, and yet did not put together an explanation for any of this. You have to understand that there was no way for me to know, no way for me to predict what I was doing, because how could I, really. How could I know something that simply could not be the case.
I remember I saw it—the eye, and then the face beyond the eye, the way it rose up from the chasm below us and kept rising, the way it filled the windows, filled my field of vision, seemed to fill the whole ocean by itself. I don’t know how to tell you this, really. I remember thinking of the octopus I had cared for, years ago at the aquarium, I remember thinking of the creatures I had seen in tide pools with my father as a child, the strange spiny things that raced for the water when the tide began to wane. I remember thinking that the first things had come from the water, which didn’t account for the things that had chosen to stay behind. I remember thinking all of this and then thinking that it wouldn’t help me and then thinking that the creature before us was still rising, that it now stretched up toward us, the eye rearing toward our ship. Somewhere beside me, Matteo might have made a sound, might have spoken to me, I couldn’t tell you now. I thought about Jelka telling me the thing she was hearing simply couldn’t be a ghost. I thought about this, and I tried to listen to what it was I was hearing, what this creature was saying to me—really tried to listen, to separate the fact of the voice from the words themselves. I remember that, but I don’t remember whether I understood anything, whether the words shaped themselves into anything like sense down there, in the place we shouldn’t have fallen to. I remember only the vastness of the creature rising up before us and a sudden certainty that it had been here all along.
The eye moved in, still closer, and somewhere beside me I felt Matteo moving back. Myself, I did not feel so much unable to move as lacking the energy to do so. I looked into that eye, now filling the entire view of the windows, and I felt, with an exhaustion that sat down inside me as though unable to support its own weight, that there would never be any way of knowing whether we had come here intentionally, whether we had been pulled down or pushed. I felt all this and then I passed my hand over the panel—the small etched image of an eye, which was not the Centre’s logo, which did not appear to stand for anything at all—and reached for the leather logbook and pen, which we kept beneath the central console, thus far untouched. I pulled these out and, without pausing to consider what I was doing, I wrote my name on the first page of the logbook and pressed it to the window, so that the creature could see.
MIRI
Sometimes, I imagine my mother and Leah meeting, though this is not a thing that ever actually happened. In the fantasy, if fantasy is quite the word, this typically takes place at my mother’s house by the sea, and perhaps my mother has never been ill, or perhaps she has but I haven’t failed her, I have chosen to take better care of her and this has saved her, in whatever impossible way. Most of the time, what happens is that she and Leah get along so well that they start having little jokes that exclude me and I enjoy this enormously. Some of the time, Leah takes my mother down to the beach below the house and tells her something she has told me many times before: we think of the place we live as important, but that a far greater percentage of the world is made up of the ocean and that most of the creatures that live on the planet live there. In this dream, if dream is quite the word, my mother tells her that that’s a terribly pretentious thing to say and this makes Leah laugh, which is what makes my mother like her.