Page 33 of The Dead of Summer

Flashlights whisk down the hall. We can run toward the whale tank, or away. Without even looking at each other, we both dash for the whale.

The tank is a massive half-moon dug into the aquarium floor, allowing visitors to look down at the sunken whale from above or meet it head-on through the observation glass below.

Right now, the thing is half-submerged, its blowhole exposed.

We scramble over the partition, holding on to the glass with just our fingers.

I don’t dare look down, but I can feel the hulking shadow just below the surface.

When the whale was working, which was hardly ever, a complicated mechanism would cause the entire thing to rise up, and then the upper half of the head to hinge open and expose the bristled baleen gums and pink tongue.

Now the idea of the thing moving at all is nightmarish.

“This is my worst fucking fear,” Elisa whispers at me, and the way her voice trembles tells me she means it. Flesh-eating coral? Fused-together zombies? Secret science laboratories? None compare to the simple, inexcusable reality of something very big hiding just below you in unclear water.

Footsteps approach, and the flashlights dip into the dark of the room. One beam lands in front of the octopus tank, where our snacks lie scattered.

Shit.

Feet first, I slip into the water as gracefully as I can, afraid even the tiniest splash will make the flashlights look our way.

Now I’m next to the whale, the skin of my arm brushing its slimy fiberglass hull.

I slide along it, hating every carved detail—its contemplative eye, the bristles of its massive lips, the plaster barnacles fused to its nose.

I grab for Elisa where she clings to the edge of the tank and put my full weight into dragging her down with me.

A woman’s voice asks the dark, “Did you hear that?”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

If we get caught, they’re going to test every molecule of moisture in our bodies until we’re as desiccated as the starfish in the rotting lagoon. I don’t wait to find out if they’ve spotted us. I dig my toe into the whale’s curved jaw and pry it open.

“Go!” I whisper to Elisa. The look she gives me could kill, but she takes a deep breath and dives for the gap.

I feel her wriggle through. I do the same the moment she’s inside, but without someone holding it open, the mechanism closes, clamping me in the whale’s lips.

Bubbles burst from my crushed chest, and I take in a lungful of the foul water.

Then Elisa’s hands crawl over me, find my hips, and pull.

I vanish inside, and the jaws muffle shut, but I’m not safe yet.

It’s pitch-black, and I need to breathe.

I grasp on to Elisa as she guides me to a pocket of air inside the puppet’s skull.

“Quiet,” she whispers, clamping a hand over my mouth even as I try to breathe.

Instead of coughing out the water, I swallow it down.

It tastes like pure poison, but I resist adding my vomit to the slurry we float in.

Our only light is a narrow beam filtering in from the blowhole, mostly blocked by a water pump used to create the whale’s iconic foul spray.

Together we breathe, and we listen. No doubt our pursuers are checking every tank, and there’s no way the water in this one had time to settle.

When voices suddenly become louder, I know we’re toast. Then there’s a crackle of a speaker somewhere in the display and the whale begins to sing.

I nearly shriek, expecting the machine to come alive and swallow us down, but Elisa keeps her hand against my lips.

Finally, the singing ebbs, and we can hear the voice of the woman from before.

“Would you look at that. Still works. Kinda,” she says to her colleague, who responds, “Always hated this thing. Come on, let’s get back to the director. She’s going to want to put out a search party.”

The light from the flashlights fades, leaving us once again in utter black. I cling to Elisa, but after a minute she slips away. Backward. Deeper into the whale. With a small splash, she’s gone.

“Elisa?” I whisper when she doesn’t come up after a few seconds.

“Elisa?” I ask again, after a minute.

No answer.

This, I think, is a new personal low for me.

As if the world dissolving into slime and bubbles wasn’t enough, I am now trapped in an animatronic whale.

Alone. Then Elisa punches back through the surface with something in her hands.

Something boxy and hard, which she snaps open.

I hear the crinkle of plastic and a tin-metal tap, and then there’s a crackle of light out of nowhere.

And Elisa holds in her dripping hands a tiny, dancing flame.

By its light I can see the heart-shaped lighter that’s produced it, and the plastic bin in which Elisa found it.

The bin is stuffed with plastic-sealed folders, wrapped so nicely that we can read the top one easily. We whisper the title to each other.

“The Slow Water Report: The Notes and Findings of Doroteia D’Oliveira.”