‘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.