Castle of Water: A Novel(62)
He sighed and relented, because he knew from experience that to do otherwise was utterly pointless.
“Fine. I’ll take you out in the boat tomorrow.”
“We can’t go today?”
“Damnit, Sophie!”
“What? You haven’t gone out yet today, why can’t I go with you?”
By this point fully and visibly agitated, Barry chucked a shell toward the water and swore under his breath. “All right, let’s go. You can help me push the canoe into the water.”
Sophie jumped to Barry’s side and kissed the rough prickliness of his cheek; he in turn gathered the net and tucked the utility knife into the waist string of his breechcloth.
“Merci, Barry.”
“De rien, Sophie.” And he was already smiling despite his sincere attempts not to.
*
The beach was still damp from an earlier rain, and the Askoy III slid effortlessly into the water. Barry helped Sophie in first, holding her hand as she climbed aboard, then waited until he was waist-deep before pulling himself up over the gunwale. Once situated with their paddles on their respective ends, they began stroking their way across the shallows. The rippled patterns in the seafloor echoed the tides below, while a strong breeze threw scales along the water’s surface. Barry sniffed at the incoming wind; he detected no storms, but the sky was disconcertingly cloudy. It was cooler than usual, too, and he was glad he wasn’t the one going for a swim.
At near one hundred yards, the reef showed through, its crinkled mass visible just below the surface. Barry and Sophie both pulled up their paddles and allowed their canoe to coast gently above it, passing into the deeper realm just beyond.
Then Barry slid his paddle breadthwise into their wake, dragging the craft to a gradual halt. Below them, twelve, fifteen feet, perhaps, a ghostly orchard of seaweed swayed in the current. And just a few paddle strokes beyond that … darkness. Ironclad darkness, total and profound. Where the seafloor ended marked the edge of the abyss.
Sophie slipped over the side of the Askoy III and into the water, steadying herself against the bamboo outrigger so she could peer down at the forest of seaweed. Her stomach contracted at the sight of all that green, waiting for her just a short dive away. A deep breath, a flurry of kicks, and she was gone, vanishing in a spurt of ripples and bubbles.
Barry’s eyes found her as soon as the water regained its clarity, disarmingly small and distant below. He could see her arms yanking seaweed stalks from their bed, an occasional air bubble fluttering up toward him. After a minute that felt much longer, she pushed up from the bottom in a dark puff of sand. She returned to the surface as casually as she had left it and slung a lank shock of seaweed into the boat. A relieved Barry leaned over across the gunwale to help.
“Everything go all right down there?”
“Bien s?r. Some of it is a little difficult to pull up, but I’m getting it.”
“Are you going down again?”
“One or two more dives should be enough.”
“Enough for how long?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see if the baby likes it.”
She smiled up at him, her chestnut hair plastered down her bright face, and he smiled uneasily back. Another deep breath and she vanished once again into nothing but ripples. Barry took his eyes off the water momentarily to check their position—he didn’t want to drift too far from the island.
That was when it happened. He felt it before he saw it. Like a cloud that casts a cold shadow when it glides past the sun, only this shadow maker slipped in from below. Barry shuddered first, glimpsed instinctively over the side of the Askoy III second, and then panicked—a railroad spike of fear hammered straight into his heart. It was huge and grotesquely silent; the convexity of the water only magnified its menace. A shark. A damn big shark. A creature of ungodly strength and unconscionable size. And it was blackening the water in the direction of Sophie.
As to whether it was going in for the kill or merely an inquisitive nibble, Barry would never know. Nor did it particularly matter. Before its intentions could be considered, or the wisdom of diving in after a fourteen-foot tiger shark taken into account, he was already plunging headfirst with his box cutter drawn, the interests of mother and child trumping all others. An explosion of cold water and he was beside it—the danger it emitted an almost palpable force. A force, as it were, that shifted in focus, veering suddenly upward and back toward him. There was no time to plan, no time to think; Barry was moving instinctually, his muscles motored by something even older than fear. It was flight or fight, and with his family on the line, the hand holding the blade seemed to have chosen the latter. He sliced twice and missed in a blind rush of bubbles, but with the third swipe, he felt the blade snick. Something dense as a boulder and rough as sandpaper raked across his side, followed by a haymaker of a tail swipe that caught him dead in the face. The stars and nausea lasted only a moment, then he was reaching downward for Sophie’s arm, so soft and giving compared with the almost geologic mass of that primordial fish.
They broke the surface coughing and spewing. Barry pushed Sophie up over the coconut-wood keel before he’d caught his first breath and tumbled in right behind her.
“Oh, putain!” gasped Sophie.
“Holy shit!” choked out Barry.
Their chests heaved and their hearts hammered; fear like some chemical still shot through their blood.