Kid vs. Squid (13 page)

Anxious to escape worsening weather, we dove into the museum just as a crack of thunder shook the
building to its foundations. Rain clattered against the roof like a million bullets.

“Where'd you stash the witch?” Trudy said, wiping a sleeve across her face.

“In a pillowcase under my dirty laundry. I figured the smell of my socks would keep people away.”

“Good thinking.”

Sinbad yowled in irritation as I shooed him off the pile of my stinky, unwashed clothes. To my relief, I found the lump of Skalla's head where I'd left it, but knowing the ruse I'd pulled with the cannonball-filled
What-Is-It??
box, Trudy insisted we look inside the pillowcase to be sure Skalla's head really was inside. It was. The duct tape still covered her mouth, but her eyelids were twitching, and the sound of her dry lips struggling to move sounded like a cockroach scuttling over sandpaper.

Back in the exhibit room, Sinbad poked his head out from behind one of the sawhorses holding up the mummy. I said his name, but he wouldn't come over.

“He seems spooked,” Trudy said.

“Maybe he's just hungry. Griswald must be so busy drinking beer with the seagulls, he couldn't be bothered to feed him.” I turned to the kitchen to get Sinbad a can of minced fish guts when I heard a clatter, and the sound of big things falling over, and a muffled scream.

I was starting to get used to sounds like these. It's like working in a bell factory. After a while, you barely notice all the ringing.

Another series of sharp thumps and a gruff cry, and Griswald's bulk crashed through the wall in an explosion of plaster and wood. He lay on the floor in a cloud of dust, blinking at the ceiling. His hand gripped a long brass tube studded with little switches and buttons. Affixed to it was a lethal-looking harpoon tied to a coil of rope.

“Monsters in the tunnels,” Griswald said with a cough. “Help me up.”

We managed to get him up on his one foot. Using his harpoon contraption in place of a crutch, he started thanking me and seemed in danger of trailing off on a story about tuna fishing near the Great Barrier Reef, so I cut him off.

“Now would be a good time to tell us about the monsters in the tunnels, Uncle Griswald.”

Trudy snapped a picture of the Griswald-shaped hole in the wall. “Start with the tunnels,” she said.

“Are you kidding? Start with the monsters!”

It turned out Griswald didn't have to. The monsters had followed him. A school of puffer fish on legs swarmed through the hole in the wall, and I almost laughed; they looked ridiculous, no bigger than birthday balloons, with bulging eyes and puckered fishlips.
Their tails wiggled as they ran around us like excited dogs. But then one inflated to full size, expanding to a huge globe of lethal spikes, six feet across. It shoved me against a wall and mowed over Trudy.

“Stand clear!” Griswald shouted, swinging the harpoon gun around. But in the cramped quarters of the museum, he couldn't get off a shot and only managed to knock things over. Meanwhile, Trudy battled with six or seven little puffers to hold on to the pillowcase containing Skalla's head. I swung my sword at them like a golf club and sent little fish flying. But they didn't stay little. They blew themselves up like hot-air balloons. Display cases went crashing, glass exploding. A fish rolled over me, knocking my wind out and leaving me with dozens of little holes.

Woozy, I lifted myself up on my elbows, only to see the puffers deflate back to their soccer-ball-sized form and jump through the gap in the wall. One of them dragged the pillowcase along with it.

“Get them!” I screamed, and the three of us charged after them through the wall.

A bare bulb cast lemon-colored light down a narrow set of sandstone stairs diving a long way down. The bottom of the steps opened to a cavern bigger than my school's cafeteria. Crates were stacked against the walls. I read a few of the stenciled labels:
Miscellaneous Teeth. Random Severed Tentacles. Green
Things with Spines That Smell Like Oyster Juice, Some of Which Have Tongues
.

I saw no sign of the puffers. If they stayed deflated, they could be hiding anywhere.

“What is this place?” Trudy asked, her flashlight beam roaming.

“Shanghai tunnels,” said Griswald. “Los Huesos is honeycombed with them. Before the boardwalk, there used to be nothing but saloons above, and not the nice kind where they clean the urinals once a week. Customers would belly up to the bar and the barkeeper would pull a lever that opened a trap door to the tunnels down here. Next thing the poor sap knew, he'd be forced to crew a schooner to Shanghai.”

Treading lightly across the cave, I caught sight of a crate labeled
Strange Secrets from Deep Sea Trenches Best Left Buried
. From cargo nets overhead were suspended bundles of spiral narwhal tusks, and a giant nautilus shell the size of a minivan with portholes and a mangled propeller.

“What
is
all this stuff?”

“Hmm? Oh, you mean the collection?”

“Why, yes, Uncle Griswald, I do mean the collection.”

“The beach regurgitates a lot, Thatcher. There's no room for it all upstairs, so we Keepers use the tunnels for storage.”

I was glad I'd never had to dust down here.

I pointed at the shell with the propeller. “That's a submarine,” I said.

“Oh, aye, she's called the
Other Nautilus
. And a fine vessel she is. She's not seaworthy, but for a death trap, aye, a very fine vessel.”

Padding down the tunnel, we continued to search for the puffers, pulling crates aside and pushing barrels out of the way. Every time I nudged a coil of rope or kicked away a canvas tarp, I expected a ball of puffer spikes to leap at my face. What I didn't expect, though, was the fully inflated puffer fish that thundered by on fat, spiky legs. I managed to jump back into the wall just in the nick of time, so instead of impaling me on its spikes, it only gouged a few more shallow holes in my flesh.

“That one's got the head!” shouted Trudy.

Griswald aimed the harpoon cannon. He appeared to have a clear shot. Unfortunately, it was a clear shot at my head, so I yanked the gun out of his hands before I became Thatcher, the Amazing Boy with the Harpoon Through His Skull.

“Come on, you two! It's getting away!” Trudy's flashlight pushed against the darkness as we gave chase, leaving hobbled Griswald behind. The sound of surf echoed through the chamber, and a moment later we heard a great splash. We rounded a bend in
the tunnel and came to a cave opening, just in time to see a swollen globe of spikes go under the water.

“Too late,” Trudy said, along with some curse words she must have picked up from Griswald.

“No,” I said. “Not this time.”

I hefted the harpoon gun to my shoulder. There wasn't any point in aiming because I didn't know how to aim a harpoon gun, so I just turned it in the general direction of the puffer fish. I squeezed the trigger and the harpoon shot out with a great kick. The rope unspooled until it hit its target and then went taut.

Trudy saw what was happening before I did. Even with the harpoon in its hide, the puffer was still swimming strong.

“Thatcher, let go of the cannon!”

“Um?”

Holding the gun in a death grip, I was yanked off my feet and dragged across the tunnel floor. Sandstone crumbled as I dug in with my heels, trying to slow myself, but it was no use.

“Thatcher! Let go, you idio—” And that was the last thing I heard before knifing into the water. I was not going to let go, even as the puffer towed me out to open sea. Skalla's head was responsible for every nasty thing that had happened to me and my friends.

My finger found a switch on the harpoon gun that reeled the rope in, drawing me closer to the puffer.
I held on, into the dim murk, with pressure stabbing my ears, my lungs begging for air. My mind clouded with darkness, cold, and pain. And then there was a greater darkness, a tunnel of black rushing toward the puffer. Maybe this was Skalla's dark magic, or maybe this was Death. Maybe there was no difference between the two.

The darkness surrounded me and overtook me and closed in on me. Also, there were a lot of bubbles that smelled like fish farts.

I found myself lying facedown on a bed of slime. It stank, of course, as slime has a tendency to do. But this particular stink was familiar. It was the smell of weird monster fish. My fingers fumbled with the switches built into the gun until a flashlight attached to the barrel cast a cone of light. I was in another tunnel of some kind, pink and red and wet. Little fish skeletons and crab shells littered the ground, and ahead of me, the puffer fish lay on its side, gawping sadly. It drew in its knees and sucked its thumb, the pillowcase containing Skalla's head forgotten at its side.

A bigger fish had swallowed us both. A
much
bigger fish. Bigger on the inside than on the outside. I could stand inside it. I could even breathe inside it.

I forced myself to my feet. The walls and floor and ceiling undulated with nausea-inducing motion.

Keeping the harpoon gun level, I grabbed the pillowcase, then backed away. “Gotcha!” To keep my hands free, I tied the ends of the pillowcase around my belt, letting the head dangle around my knees.

“Thatcher?”

A voice, so faint I wasn't sure I'd actually heard it.

“Hello?” I called back.

Nothing.

Probably just my imagination.

“Thatcher? Is that you?”

I knew that voice.

“Shoal!”

Drawing my sword, I took off at a run, heading deeper into the fish.

I didn't know anything about fish anatomy, but I was pretty sure this wasn't what the inside of a fish was supposed to look like. A fish like this could only be the product of Skalla's magic. Breathing through my mouth and trying not to touch the walls, I passed through shiny, wet corridors, stepping around other things the fish had swallowed: a motorcycle helmet, a boat anchor, truck tires and safety cones, a toilet, and gelatinous blobs of undigested leftovers. But no sign of Shoal.

“Hey there, Thatcher.”

I pointed my light and saw my own reflection staring back at me in the glistening meat of the fish-wall.
It wasn't alone. There were dozens of funhouse-mirror versions of me, round and squat, or stretched long and thin like a piece of chewing gum, or ruffled like a potato chip.

“C'mon, nothing to say?” said one of my reflections. “Fish got your tongue?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” I said. “You should have said ‘
Catfish
got your tongue.' See,
that's
funny.”

“Not very,” said my reflections. “Tell you what, Thatcher. Why don't you put down the sack and leave Skalla in here? Then we'll spit you back out. Promise.”

“Thanks, but I think I can find my own way out.”

My reflections laughed. It was my laugh exactly, just multiplied. “You have no idea where we are, Thatch. This fish—me, us—isn't just any old jellyfish boy or lobster man. This is one of Skalla's oldest creatures. One of her strangest. We're so bizarre and magical that we're hardly even a fish anymore. We're a pure reflection of strange things. Like you. You've come to a very bad place. Surrender her head, and we'll let you out. What do you say?”

I raised the sword. “Maybe I'll just let this do the talking.”

“You'd have to chop for a very, very long time, Thatch. And time is something you've run out of.”

“A guy can chop a lot in three weeks.”

The reflections snorted. “Three weeks? Did the
king's sorcerer tell you that? Fin's a math weakling. You don't have three weeks. The planets are in alignment
now
. The currents have already converged. And Skalla is rested. Three weeks? Thatcher, you don't have three
hours
.”

I thrust the sword down into the slime floor. It was like trying to puncture a bicycle inner tube with your thumb.

“Aw, come on, you know it can't be that easy. This is a bouncy, rubbery kind of fish-gut fun-house labyrinth. If you could just cut your way out, everyone would do it.”

“Let's just see.” With a sweeping arc of the sword, I sliced into the meat mirrors, right across the middle of the reflections. The blade didn't exactly cut the fish gut. Instead, things got rearranged, and my mirror-selves blurred into one another, forming a single, distorted reflection. A mouth wider than a banana sneered back at me. It was ugly, and it looked like me.

“Did that make you feel better?” the
me
said. “You're still trapped in here.”

“I'm ignoring you.”

“You can't ignore me. I'm inside you. You're inside me. I
am
you. Everything you do, all your weaknesses, your fears, your hopes, your desires, your secrets, your disgusting habits, your really lame jokes …”

“Why are you even bothering?” I said. “If you're really all that deep inside my head, then you know I only care about one thing right now. I'm getting Shoal out of here.”

“Right, because you're all about helping your friends. Like you helped Shoal by chasing her in the first place when she ‘stole' the box that didn't belong to you anyway. And like you helped Trudy by mouthing off to the witch and getting the curse cast on her. And like you helped the Flotsam by doing… well, nothing.”

I opened my mouth to say something back, but no words came to me.

“You think it's bad now,” the reflection continued, “but it's about to get so much worse.”

The reflection kept talking. I knew what it wanted. It wanted me to talk back, to defend myself, and while I was doing that, the clock would tick even closer to disaster.

I hated every word it said because every word was true.

Well, okay. If it wanted to tell me the truth, then maybe I could get it to tell me the
whole
truth.