“Step forward. It’s fine.”
Jon Yang lowered his foot, clad in a rubber flipper, into the ankle-deep water of the platform. It didn’t feel strange, as he expected it might. Mildly warmer than the ocean outside the boat shed, which he had swum in that very morning beneath a brilliant red sunrise, but in every other respect it was normal.
“It’s quite warm,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Hunt, who nodded with a smile.
The lean, tanned Englishman was feeding a cable which snaked into the back of Jon’s diving helmet. It was a cumbersome, antiquated thing; much bulkier than the sleek designs common to other surface-supplied dives Jon had witnessed in recent years. His voice echoed around the cavernous interior of the ungainly headpiece, and he heard the disorienting, slightly delayed audio of his own voice repeating through the speaker array on the nearby desk. Hunt was dressed in a light linen shirt and peach-coloured swim shorts which accentuated his disproportionately long, limber legs. His casual attire radical contrast to the stuffy attire of the technicians and researchers who crowded in the room.
“Unusually warm, yeah,” Hunt replied. “But everything else is more or less normal. The chemical makeup of the water is ever so slightly different to seawater on our side, I’m told. It feels the same when you’re down there.”
The handful of researchers in the room said nothing, focusing mostly on the banks of equipment which surrounded the long rectangular opening in the faded linoleum floor. One woman was squinting at a laptop perched precariously on a tall stand next to the water. A man tinkered with the low, heavy metal railing which encircled the water, ensuring the shielded cables which twisted from it across the floor and up the walls were properly secured. Dr Carr sat in his plastic chair near the large double doors at the entrance of the shed, lost in a sheaf of documents, barely looking up. The old professor looked out of place in his shabby grey suit, which hung off his bulky frame like an old potato sack.
“This really is an odd bit of gear,” Jon said, adjusting the heavy helmet on his shoulders, which had already begun to ache from supporting it.
“It takes a bunch of measurements as well as voice comms, as I understand it,” Hunt replied. A nearby researcher grunted in agreement.
“Will I have to go very deep?”
Hunt shook his head. “It’ll be plainly obvious almost as soon as you’re down there, trust me.”
Jon looked back forward, making a few last spot checks on his diving suit, which was mercifully less awkward than the helmet. Barely an hour had passed since Carr had briefed him on the most incredible thing he had ever heard, and he was about to quite literally immerse himself in it. Were he not being paid the sum he was for this little expedition, he would have turned right around, ordered an Uber to the airport, and gone straight back to Sydney. Big money projects were utterly alien for a marine biologist, outside of sporadic grants from idle, rich bleeding hearts from down south who wanted to do something about coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. The kind of people who probably wouldn’t go north of Byron Bay unless they were under some kind of duress. PR jobs like that weren’t Jon’s thing, anyhow.
Raising his hand in signal, he stepped off the platform and plunged in, ensconced in a flume of bubbles as the momentum propelled him downward. As his eyes adjusted to the endless, empty blue sea around him, he spun around in a reflexive effort to disprove the nonsense Hunt had told him above.
But the diver was right.
Instead of the Cairns beachfront, which should have been ten metres behind Jon, there was… nothing. An infinite expanse of blue, reaching out into forever. Nothing floated nearby with which he could establish any sense of scale, but in his gut he sensed the vastness around him spread for thousands of kilometres, hundreds of thousands. Millions, perhaps. He looked up. The rectangular opening in the floor of the boatshed was suspended unmoving above him, its blade-sharp angles even more alien than the endless seascape it cut into. The ceiling of the structure swum blearily through it, distorted by the natural disturbance of the water’s surface. Researchers peered down at him, mouths moving without sound.
There was a click, and Jon heard Hunt’s voice crackle in his earpiece. He must have been speaking through the microphone Jon had seen propped up on the bench. “Crazy, right? Swim down a bit further, mate. Something will pop up soon enough.”
“What the hell is this?”
“Swim down.”
Complying, Jon descended slowly, staring down at his lazily kicking feet as he used his arms to push himself downward. He felt the tug of the thick cable against his helmet. In this featureless blue plain, it was virtually the only thing keeping Jon oriented.
Looking to his right, he saw the source of the light illuminating the ocean surrounding him: a distant yellow circle which shone through the emptiness. Beams of light caught particulate matter suspended in the salt water, creating vast fields of dimly luminescent fog. Staring at it too long stung Jon’s eyes, even though the curved panel of his helmet. He noted hundreds of other distant pinpricks of light – none nearly large as as that one globe – filling his field of vision.
“See anything yet?” came Hunt’s voice, crackling in his headset. “Give it time.”
“I see… a light… a big yellow light, I’m staring at it right now.”
“Yes,” Hunt said, almost irritably, as if Jon was wasting time on simple, useless observations. “The light, yes. Go a little deeper, we’re giving you some more line.”
“I don’t see –” he started to say, but then he stopped. He could see something.
A familiar form he had seen a million times before, but larger. Far larger. It was a jellyfish – but a jellyfish no smaller than a four-wheel-drive , its protean surface undulating gently in the imperceptible currents of the water, a short array of wispy tentacles ringing its underside. It looked like an enormous moon jelly, with a billowing, membranous surface and a quadruple set of horseshoe-shaped gonads nestled within its body. The creature’s sheer size made its expansive surface appear like a great transparent cloak; every minute movement translating into a hypnotising sequence of surface variations, like the jelly was a miniature ocean unto itself. As Jon watched it drift listlessly in the gentle current, another revealed itself through the blue haze some twenty or so metres behind it. Then another, below his feet, emerging like a ghost from behind a shimmering veil. Soon enough he felt he was surrounded by a watchful guard of these silent, floating beings.
Jon froze, unable to move. No jellyfish he had ever seen approached that size, not remotely. They were obviously alien, but at the same time remarkably similar to the organisms he had dedicated his life to understanding. More and more of them emerged from the distant blue ocean, their parallel movements in the current like a synchronised, oscillating dance. He craned his neck to look around. Hundreds of them now fenced him from all sides. They varied greatly in size: one appeared no larger than a bowling ball, whereas one titanic specimen approached the proportions of a train carriage. None were so close as to pose any immediate danger, though he felt in the pit of his gut that approaching any of the larger jellies would be a bad idea. He could imagine himself pulled slowly into one, digesting over the course of days, his slowly decomposing body visible through the creature’s translucent bell.
Startled from his stunned observance, Jon felt a tug on the cable and heard the crackling whisper of Hunt’s voice. “Pretty spectacular, huh?” the Englishman said. “I’ve been on thousands of dives and I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Come on up.”
“Coming… I’m coming.”
With a few hard kicks from his flippers, Jon ascended, his head breaking the surface of the water. He was back in the boat house. The group of people clustered around the edge of the water murmured among themselves, one winching Jon’s cable back up. Carr stood among them now, his arms crossed, far more interested in proceedings, a wide smile on his pudgy face. Jon hoisted himself out, sitting on a chair and sliding his mask back over his face. “Far out,” he managed.
Hunt offered his hand, and Jon took it, letting himself be hoisted from the water, nearly losing his balance in the bulky suit. He kicked off his flippers. “What is that big yellow light down there?” he said, as a pair of researchers pulled the helmet from his head. He remembered the warm glow emanating through the depths.
It was one of the researchers, a short, dark-haired woman with a pale face, who spoke. “We think that’s a sun.”
The sticky heat lingered into the evening as Jon and Hunt drank on the deck of the pub, looking out over the gentle waves as they rolled onto the shore. The green, weathered boathouse was plainly visible from where they sat, perched at the beach’s edge not far from the pier. It was small and nondescript and entirely unbefitting its otherworldly contents. A few children played under the bleached struts which supported the structure. Dying sunlight danced on the water as the remaining locals and tourists packed up their things on the sand. The sky was a bloody battle of tropical reds and oranges.
Hunt smoked a cigarette; it smouldered near his knuckles. “I’ve only been on-site a week,” he said, after a long drink from his schooner. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “It is absolutely remarkable.”
Jon shook his head. “I feel like all I can do is laugh or I’ll go completely insane.” He had only bought this round minutes earlier, but already he could feel the humid air seeping into his beer, leaving the glass soaked with perspiration. “How the hell did you get involved?”
“I’m a diver by trade,” Hunt replied. “I have over eight thousand recorded — caves, mostly. Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, you name it. Do you remember those trapped Thai lads, the soccer team in the cave?”
Jon nodded.
“I was there for the rescue. I’ve worked with some BBC crews on various deep sea submersible operations too for documentaries. David Attenborough’s latest Blue Planet, I was on that too. If you’re in the area and know your stuff, there’s never a shortage of work. I’m based here in Cairns now, mostly for the reef. I do some work for the tourist operators while I wait for producers to call me. That rhythm suits me just fine these days. Besides, I may as well get my fill before the rest of the reef bleaches out. The climate agrees with me, too.”
“So you don’t work for Carr normally?”
“No. I got a call saying some biologist was doing work right here in the area, and he needed a local diver or two. And he was paying big. So I said what the hell.” He chuckled. “What the hell indeed. Do you know him? You’re in the same line of work, I understand.”
“We’ve crossed paths a few times.” Jon bit his tongue. Yes, he and Norman Carr were both biologists, but saying they were in the same line of work was akin to saying a doctor was in the same line of work as an Igbo medicine man. New Scientist had once characterised him as the “Aleister Crowley of evolutionary biology” and “more akin to an alchemist than a professor” – an eclectic thinker whose theories teetered on that thin precipice between genius and total derangement. Recently, his frenetic cross-disciplinary work had focused (monomaniacally, some would argue) on the study of carcinisation. It was a curious process of convergent evolution by which organisms had developed into crab-like forms in five independent instances across billions of years of natural history. Something about the bug-like, hardshell form of the crab, the theory went, was particularly desirable to whoever or whatever was pulling the evolutionary levers. Carr cornered Jon at a conference in Florida a few years earlier and expounded on the phenomenon at length, relating it to Jon’s own work. “From jellyfish into crabs,” Carr had said in his cheery American accent, poking Jon in the chest. “That’s how it goes. Everything else is a brief detour.”
“Right,” Hunt said, in between thirsty gulps of his lager. “They don’t really talk about what’s going on at all, but I get the sense it’s definitely government. The team is a mix of Yanks and Aussies. Another Brit too, aside from myself. There’s always strange, official types coming and going. Spooks, was my thinking. I mean, whatever…this is would have to be some security risk.”
“Sure, I can see that,” Jon said, with some uncertainty. Carr working with the government – any government – made little sense.
Not that he was giving earthly theorising much thought at that moment. His mind was fixated on those enormous jellies as he talked. The way the blue light danced on their surfaces. He felt an urge to go back and be among them, to study them, to connect with them. His daydream was interrupted by one of the young bar staff, who brought out a pair of beef burgers and laid them on the narrow, high bench the men were sat at. She took their plastic table number as she went.
Hunt went on. “I’m told you’re a bit of an expert on jellyfish. In Sydney?” He seemed rightfully nonplussed, like it was an unusual place to pursue that interest, if one were to pursue such an interest at all.
Jon nodded. “I actually used to be up here for years and years, at CQU. But Sydney Uni are developing their marine science department, and they made an offer which was very hard to turn down. It’s mostly teaching, not a whole lot of research work, but whatever.” He looked out at the water, his gaze wandering to the horizon toward the reef. “It’s nice to be back up north though. This is where the really interesting stuff is, obviously.”
Very interesting, it seemed.
“I bet, I bet. So, thoughts? What do they look like to you?”
“They seem very much like the moon jellies you’d find in basically any sizeable body of water on the planet. Aurelia aurita. Obviously much, much bigger. And different. Though I’d need to study them longer to understand exactly how.”
“Sure. Did you notice any behavioural differences, just eyeballing them?”
“Moon jellies don’t really have behaviours – not as we understand them, at least. Their motion is very limited; they basically go with the current. The movements of the ocean dictate their entire lives. They eat what drifts their way. But I didn’t see anything the jellies could be eating, aside from each other.”
“I’ve been down about fifteen times total this week, and I’ve seen nothing but them. Sometimes there are tens of thousands of them, it seems like. But never anything else.”
Hunt spent the next new minutes recalling the general course of the week’s activities, pausing occasionally to light up a fresh cigarette. As far he could tell, the team was doing their own thing completely aside from his dives, and they were barely interested in what he had to say besides the most basic subjective observations: what he felt, whether he could perceive anything the helmet-mounted camera wasn’t picking up, and so on. They would ask him to swim to certain positions under the gateway. They would request he get closer to the jellies, though he was generally pretty reluctant to get any closer than a few metres away. Ultimately, Hunt contended, it was a strangely aimless research project — almost as if those involved were at a complete loss on how to apply the scientific method to something so manifestly alien. The boat house was a poor site for inquiry, too. The opening in the floor, at roughly two metres squared, was often too small to work with. Hunt had suggested they get their hands on some small drone watercraft, but the researchers brushed off that suggestion like they did all his others. Overall, it was a peculiar and often maddening arrangement — one Hunt likely would not have tolerated were it not for the substantial money on the table.
Jon nodded along until the elephant in the room could no longer be ignored. “What the fuck is that place?” he asked.
“God only knows,” Hunt said with an impish grin. “I’ve only heard snippets here and there from the team. Like I said, they don’t tell me much. But they do agree it appears to be a parallel universe filled entirely with water.”
“A whole universe?”
“Yes. Just filled with trillions of light years of water in every direction instead of… well, nothing. The lights you saw down there are suns and stars submerged in the sea. And if there are stars, there could be –”
“Planets.”
“Yes, planets. But how will we ever know? We have no submarine that can traverse the kinds of distances being speculated on here. And the water is too hazy for telescopes or other optical instruments. If they’ve got a plan, I’m not aware of it.”
Jon contemplated what Hunt was telling him. He imagined the vast gulf of space. An empty blackness punctuated by giant celestial bodies, titanic balls of fire, black holes. Alien intelligences, maybe. Then he imagined that same mind-boggling expanse filled with water in a great unending ocean. The jellies floating silent guard. “So there’s a portal to another world sitting in an old boat house on a beach in Queensland. Tourists walking past and everything. A whole universe filled with water, here in Cairns. Right? Was it always here?”
“Perhaps. Maybe there’s a thinness to it, like the water here is particularly well suited for passage. Maybe people slip through sometimes; a little crack in the door. We lose swimmers down on that beach more frequently than you’d imagine. I feel like there’s one in the paper every couple of months. They always say the rips take them. I’d say our friends here – Carr and whoever he’s working with – got wise to it, and they pushed the door open entirely with all that equipment they’ve got down there.”
“Does that worry you? Worries me.” Jon said. He pictured the doorway tearing open and all the water exploding out in a biblical deluge, flooding the entire planet in a series of violently rising tides. The skylines of the world’s cities underwater, blimp-sized jellies bobbing and threading between barnacled skyscrapers. The corpses of millions dead floating past like driftwood. Earth, a pearl adrift in a silent cosmic ocean, illuminated sickly green by a drowned sun.
“Not particularly,” Hunt replied. “I have to imagine they know what they’re doing. They don’t seem that amazed by it all, to be quite honest. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve dealt with this sort of thing before.”
“This sort of thing.” Carr was undisputably a kook, Jon thought, but not some sort of interdimensional wanderer. Was he?
“Other dimensions, other places. We’re just a couple of local boys along for the ride.”
“Maybe. Why us? Surely they have people.”
He paused, thinking. “I’m not entirely sure,” he said eventually. “Guess they need expertise, and it’s not like anyone will ever believe something as plainly crazy as this. Convenience, I suppose.” He didn't sound entirely convinced. Then he brightened.
“My shout.”
Midnight approached as Jon arrived back at one of the resort towers which stood a couple of blocks back from the beach. They had put him up in a nice suite on the sixteenth floor, outfitted with two double beds, a large TV, and a balcony overlooking the ocean and the mountains past the headland. The decor was suitably oceanic: all blues and greens and framed photos of palm trees. The universal Airbnb aesthetic by way of the subtropics. Below gleamed the blinking neon lights of the casino – the only establishment in the Southern Hemisphere which could lay claim to having a crocodile tank right on the gaming floor. Jon had never been, not even when he was living up here. He couldn’t see the appeal of feeding notes into the Queen of the Nile while an ancient saurian eyed him off. Terrible vibe. People filled the streets below, flitting restlessly between the beachfront, the hotels and the casino in an endless three-way flow. Their indistinct conversations bounced up the tower as a low hum.
No sooner had he dropped his things on the bench in the tiny kitchenette, preparing to surrender to the heavy weight of his eyelids, when a heavy knock sounded at the door. Greeting him as he opened it was the jovial grin of Dr Norman Carr.
“Hello hello, Dr Yang, hello,” Carr exclaimed, bustling into the suite. Jon felt himself pushed aside by the professor's sheer energy. The stout, balding man had substituted his baggy grey suit for a white polo and cargo pants. He wore a plain backpack. “I trust you’ve settled in well? Thanks so much for your appearance on short notice, and apologies for my rudeness on the site today – and for disappearing so quickly. I have quite a lot on my plate.” He chuckled.
“No doubt,” Jon replied, amused despite himself. He watched Carr perch his stocky body on one of the high wicker stools which stood before the faux marble kitchen bench, wiping sweat from his flushed brow. “I’m sure you understand I have plenty of questions.”
“Yes! I’m sure you do. I know our briefing this morning was scant on specific detail, but I thought you’d do better just seeing it for yourself.”
“A whole fucking universe, Norman,” Jon said, fumbling for words, as a million questions jostled to exit him at once. “That’s… completely beyond my expertise. Beyond my comprehension, actually.”
Carr beamed, his light blue eyes glittering like bright beetles, clearly pleased beyond measure that he had someone new to share his discovery with. “Oh yes. A parallel universe not unlike our own, only with quintillions of litres of saltwater substituted for the empty space between things. You’re familiar with the universality of the flood myth between world cultures?”
“No, I don’t.” This was pure Carr – leaping between esoteric subjects like a frog between lilypads. Talking to him was like descending down an aimless Wikipedia rabbit hole.
He pressed on, like he was giving one of his YouTube lectures. “The flood in Genesis, of course. The Chinese speak of their own Great Flood, as you’re perhaps aware, when the Yellow River and Yangtze valleys burst their banks under a multi-generational torrent… the Mesopotamians, the Hindus, the Maya, the Norse, the Muisca, the Inuit – even some Aboriginal peoples down here – they all speak of a terrific deluge that rises up and washes it all away. Everything. Man, his cities, his sin, all of it. Some anthropologists say these myths correspond to a single event at some distant point in early history, passed on through oral tradition from our common ancestors and propagated and adapted as human cultures diverged and spread across the planet. Others argue these stories refer to a series of similar but distinct flooding events at the conclusion of the last glacial period, disasters so awesome in scale and destruction they left an indelible trauma on the scattered tribes lucky enough to survive them. My theory is different to anything proposed before. As you are no doubt piecing together yourself.”
Jon remained standing, signalling he wanted to keep this encounter relatively brief, even as Carr pressed on theatrically. “I don’t think I’m coming to understand anything, quite frankly. I don’t know why I’m here, or why you need me.”
“The jellies, man! The jellyfish! Your thing! I thought you might get a real kick out of that.”
“Are you throwing me a bone, Carr?” Jon couldn’t help but laugh. Some ancient species from a primordial sea outside of the universe, and Carr thought he might get a kick out of it. “Giving me something to write a paper on while you pick at the seams of reality?”
Carr, restless and fidgety as always, like his body was constantly surging with electricity, stood up and retrieved a small bottle of hotel-supplied Coke Zero from the fridge. “No, nothing like that. But you are sort of right. The jellyfish were an unexpected finding in the pursuit of something much larger and much more consequential.” A pained expression crossed his face. “Not that your area of study is inconsequential – I didn’t mean it that way at all. It’s just that we are on the brink of discovering something truly tremendous. The jellies were a very, very happy accident indeed, and I wanted you to be a part of that.”
“I’m flattered.”
Carr was in the process of pouring the chilled cola into two glasses he had pulled from a cupboard. From his backpack he pulled a little flask, from which he dispensed a generous quantity of brown liquor into each glass. “Have some.”
Jon didn’t argue. He took one of the glasses. He still felt pleasantly buzzed from his evening at the pub with Hunt, and one more couldn’t hurt. “Thanks,” he said.
“This is the missing link, you understand.” Carr had returned to his portentous mythologising. “Biologists will tell you that life dragged itself from the briny, protoplasmic seas anywhere from four hundred million to a billion years ago. Dragged being a dramatic verb, perhaps, for what was little more than thoughtless algae, but you understand. Drama is very welcome, it’s how we make sense of things we couldn’t begin to imagine otherwise. Terrestrial life has taken on all kinds of strange and wonderful forms since we crawled from the muck, but our ancestral home is the ocean – that is where our family tree begins. Or so the story goes. Yes?”
Jon nodded, nursing his drink. This was Biology 101, delivered with Carr’s trademark theatrics, but he tolerated it.
“What we’ve discovered completely invalidates that.” Carr was talking fast now, his already ruddy face reddening deeper, like he was delivering a sermon rather than a lecture. “Not the fact we came from the ocean. That is obviously true. What we’ve discovered invalidates the idea that we’re working on timescales as paltry and infinitesimal as the billions of years… and that it was our ocean from which we dragged ourselves. No, it was a different sea. A much older, more ancient sea which has roiled and frothed for aeons; a landless black sea in which our universe floats like a fleck of foam, careening to and fro, totally at the will of currents and tides much, much vaster than itself. The kind of sea that would render Leviathan itself as inconsequential as a mote of dust.”
Jon blinked slowly. He felt suddenly woozy, nauseous. His stomach swirled, and he sensed a greasy sweat worming from the skin at his temples, rapidly cooled by the air conditioning. His mouth went dry, and he slowly placed his glass back on the countertop. “Yes,” he murmured. “I think I get it.”
“No you don’t, my boy.” Carr’s face had begun to stretch and distort, gently ebbing and flowing as if viewed through a distended soap bubble. His voice sounded like it was coming from a distant hallway. “I wouldn’t expect you to get it immediately. But you will.”
Jon felt his legs collapse under him. Darkness came, and he dreamt of jellyfish suspended like ghostly chandeliers in the abyss.
The hot Queensland sun was blaring through the windows when Jon awoke groggily in his bed to the sound of his phone rattling feebly on the bedside table. He blinked, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and sat up.
His head ached dully, and he tasted the metallic tang of hangover at the back of his throat. He was still in the clothes he wore to the pub the afternoon before, now rumpled and streaked with sweat. At some point overnight the aircon had turned off, and the north Queensland summer humidity had worked its way into the suite like a soaking fog. Jon’s memory was shot. He remembered Carr’s visit – of course he remembered that – and his crazed, religious ramblings. The details eluded him, and his brain swam trying to piece them together into something coherent.
His phone continued sounding like a buzzsaw on the wooden surface of the table. He fumbled for it and looked at the screen, seeing Hunt’s name, and remembered that he and the Englishman had exchanged phone numbers before going their separate ways the previous evening. He also saw the time: nearly eleven a.m.
“Can’t hold your liquor, I hear?” came Hunt’s voice cheerily when Jon answered.
“I… no, I suppose I can’t. I thought I was done after the pub, but –“
“Yes, Norman told me. Said the two of you had a wonderful chat. Sorry to have missed the invite. You’re going to have to catch me up on the particulars. Compare notes.” He laughed. “Did the old man tell you any secrets worth knowing?”
Jon sat up on the bed , pinching the bridge of his nose with his forefingers. “I must have gotten properly drunk. I don’t really remember...” He trailed off.
“Things like that have a way of coming back to you. Why don’t you head down to the boatshed now? Carr’s acting like he’s figured it all out. Says today is a big one.”
Jon agreed and told the diver he’d see him soon. He managed to struggle his way through his brain fog and into some new clothes, which — in conjunction with some Panadol he found in the deep recesses of his toiletries bag — made him feel slightly more human again. As he changed in the suite’s tiny bathroom, he spotted something unusual. A thin red line ran down his chest, from just below his collarbone to his sternum. Around it were a constellation of raised red bumps in a mild rash. It looked like a mild scratch that had already healed over. He ran three fingers gingerly along the straight course of the line. The skin around it felt warm, soft. Feverish. Jon reasoned that he must have scratched himself while he was drunk. He forgot about it almost as soon as he buttoned his shirt.
As he made his way down to the beachfront, he recalled more and more of Carr’s speech. It came back to him in bursts. Wild, ancient oceans. Deep black water. Algae crawling from the primordial muck. The jellies, bobbing. Dead sprawl under an endless sea. The jellies, again, forever sentinels amid that silent blue. It all made him feel woozy again, seasick. The sun in the clear sky looked painfully bright. His ears rung.
Stumbling along gridded streets and onto the promenade, Jon found himself before the boatshed again, his sandalled feet sinking into the hot sand. As he approached the large double doors, they creaked open slowly, and Carr stuck his head out. He was beaming. “Come, come!” He beckoned. “We’re about to start.”
Jon stepped up the concrete steps and entered behind the professor. Inside, he saw a handful of researchers huddled around Hunt, who was dressed in a wetsuit which clung to his lean, muscular diver’s body. The bulky suit from the day before was discarded haphazardly with some of the other gear in the corner of the room.
The Englishman grinned when he saw Jon. “I’m first up, chap. Doing a free dive. Let’s see how far my lungs take me.”
Jon walked forward tentatively. Dr Carr walked at his side. The old professor was smiling, his movements alive with a kind of excited electricity. “Is that safe?” Jon asked, to no one in particular.
“We don’t see why not,” Carr said. “Now that you’re here, we thought we’d move along to the next phase of things. We spoke about it last night.”
“Did we?” Jon asked. His voice sounded much weaker than he expected. “I don’t recall.”
Hunt grinned again as he stretched out his arms, his legs. “It sounds like a lively conversation. Maybe we’ll have to stop by the pub again this afternoon and you can run me through it all.”
“It’ll be your turn after him, Dr Yang. Let’s get you back down there with your jellies. See if you can’t find out a thing or two about them,” Carr said. As he did, he ambled over to where Hunt stood preparing to dive in to the warm blue water. The researchers dispersed, returning to their equipment. Were they researchers? Jon found himself asking that question as he studied the clusters of staff. They were dressed strangely. What he had thought were blue coats and jackets were more like loose robes. Robes the same colour as the water. He could not remember if they were wearing those clothes yesterday, and whether it was something he would have noticed.
Carr put his hand on Hunt’s back. His team had looped a cable around the diver’s waist, and he let his hand tug at it. “Just pull on this if you run into any trouble and we’ll haul you right out, Hunt. Right out.”
“Got it,” Hunt said. He sounded eager. Like free diving into this strange watery dimension was exactly what he had been waiting for.
“That’s the spirit,” Carr said. As he did, he reached into his shabby suit jacket and withdrew something from the inner pocket. Before Jon could identify the object, he saw a something glitter under the halogen light in the roof, and the old professor drew it quickly across the diver’s neck. Hunt made a thick, wet choking noise, and a gout of blood came in thick rivulets down the front of his wetsuit. Jon tried to cry out, but he felt his knees collapse beneath him. Someone caught him under his arms from behind.
Hunt’s eyes were wide with shock and fear as he bled out from a deep wound in his throat. Carr held his weapon aloft, and Jon could see it clearly, even as his vision swam. It was a dagger, that much was obvious. A dagger with a long, curved handle and a honed blade that seemed to be made of sparkling pink coral, now stained dark red with blood. Carr smiled as the Englishman spasmed, the life beginning to flicker in his eyes. The professor let go of the cable, which he then gripped tightly in his palm, and let him fall forward into the water with a heavy splash. He began to sink, the water swirling with blood.
Jon could hear a murmuring now from the people who thronged the inner walls of the boatshed, a murmuring that became more restless as the body sank into the water. Carr grinned, his eyes alive with a strange and unearthly energy. “He has been so very helpful, Jon,” he said. “Helping us to get our bearings down there. It’s good to have someone who knows what they’re doing. We were just flailing around in that diving suit before we got Hunt on the phone. It’s the difference between theory and practice. But some kind of offering has to be made. You understand.”
From beneath the lapping water, Jon could hear something. It sounded like a distant foghorn from the deep. Or the call of a whale, low and resonant. It vibrated the walls of the structure around them. A great shadow seemed to pass below the water, the bloody water darkening, like something unimaginably vast had eclipsed the flooded sun. Jon found himself crawling forward, shaking hands pressed to the cheap linoleum floor. He wanted to look, and yet he knew that looking would be the end for him. It would obliterate his mind like a rowboat in a tsunami.
“Why am I here?” he heard himself ask hoarsely as he edged forward on his hands and knees.
The song — because that is what it was, Jon was coming to realise — was so deep now it was almost subsonic.
“I told you, Jon,” Carr said. The thick cable which had been affixed to the diver’s torso began to rattle, and then it began to uncoil itself rapidly, whipping against the floor. “I wanted to share with you a discovery. In the spirit of science.” He paused. “And then, well. While you were here, I thought I’d prepare you for something bigger.”
The cable went slack. Jon reached the edge of the water, and stared down through the cloud of blood in the water. The song blared, and he thought he saw, past a pulsing array of his jellies, something retreat into the blue gloom in the far distance. Something that made even the largest among them look as small as the moon jelly in the aquarium in his office.
It looked like the vast silhouette of a crab’s claw, kilometres across. Jon felt his mind crater.
“An offering has been made, Jon,” Carr was saying, though what was left of Jon could barely pass it. “There are processes that must be followed to the letter, as gauche as it might seem. Just think of it as drama, a stage play to make sense of something that is truly so very far beyond us. But now we move onto the main event. And I thank you so much for being part of it. Really, it takes a lot of bravery. But when you and I are sitting on a beach somewhere in a trillion years time, you’re going to thank me.”
In some dim recess of what remained of Jon Yang’s mind, he felt his chest throb faintly.
“From jellyfish into crabs, Jon. Everything else is a detour.”