In Great Waters Read Free

been small, smaller than other boys his age, but this skinny creature made Whistle feel tiny. Most strange of all was the tint of his skin, a pink-red pale colour like you got in the first few feet of water below the surface, before descent into the depths greyed everything out to shades of blue and green and white. The man himself gasped endlessly for air, inhaling again and again, faster than the waves beating on the shore. Whistle watched the straight limbs of the man as he paced, bizarrely inverted with his body upright as if permanently breaking the surface. Salt was drying on Whistle’s skin and itchy sand stuck to him instead of falling away in the water; as he rubbed at them, he saw a shade of colour in his own webbed hands, on his own scratched arms, that was pinker than he had thought, pale, but closer to the pacing being’s redness than he had ever seen. It was not his own colour, could not be. This sight was worse than that of the gasping, striding creature before him, and Whistle sat frozen, still sick with oxygen, looking fixedly at his own arms as the man eventually lifted him up and set him atop the large creature. The smell of it was appalling: sensation flooded Whistle, new and horrifying, entirely alien to a nose used only to the mild salt of the sea and the beach, a rank, choking, red-coloured rush that jolted him almost as much as the animal’s motion as the man climbed up behind him and jerked them forward.
    Whistle sat as still as he could, making no move to grasp the judderinganimal, no response to the rumblings of the creature behind him, trapped and bewildered as they took him past the yellow-grey beach, on through fields, through lanes, through woods, stretching on for miles, dazzlingly bright, impossibly green.

    Whistle was brought to a towering rock, stiff-sided and grey, with a dark entrance like that of a cave. The man lifted him down and tucked him against his side. All of Whistle’s instincts were to struggle, but this place was unbearable, and if the man were to drop him, he would be lost on the blinding green ground, stuck on his crumpled fins with no molluscs to dig for, and then he would starve. This man must eat, and possibly would give him food if he begged. So Whistle turned his head aside from the reeking red skin and took a breath, and stayed still in the man’s arms, muscles rigid, as a smothering dark thing the man wore over his shoulders was draped over him and the man entered this dim, alien cave. Under the edge of the cloth he could see something grotesque, a stack of rocks, all just as straight-sided as this new edifice, and then the man was jolting Whistle again as he began to climb, stepping up and up. With no sea to cushion him, Whistle’s head rocked and bounced on his neck, shaking back and forth until it ached in the empty, thin-sounding air. The movement pressed on his bladder as well, and he released it as he would in the ocean, expecting nothing more than a drift of warm water that would dissipate cleanly into the salty sea. Instead he found scalding rivulets running down his limbs, a stinging sensation over his dry, rasped skin, and a loud exclamation from the deep-voiced stranger, who shook him in disgust. Entirely bewildered, Whistle kept his face turned away. He could think of nothing else to do.
    More strides and Whistle found himself in a room with narrow windows and stone walls, straight-sided and smooth to the touch, stacked up against each other in unthinkably neat lines. Regular shapes were not a new sight to Whistle, but he knew only the overlapping half-circles of a fish’s scales or the rounded hexagons of a sea urchin, and these four-cornered shapes were threatening: an endlessprofusion of boxes that dazed his focus with their stiff, enclosing order. At the window, a grim-shaped chink of light, were hard, straight objects in a cold substance he had never seen in the sea, barring him in. It was difficult for him to see beyond them: his sight had