JELLYFISH

10:00

 

After hours of waiting for a decent wave, Ahmed finally gave up. The sun was going down, and the water was getting cold. He sighed, and turned his surfboard back towards the beach—then his breath caught in his throat.

He had thought he was only forty or fifty metres out. But the shore was almost a kilometre away.

Ahmed peered over the edge of his board, expecting to see the ocean floor only a metre or so below. Instead, it was five or six metres down. Dark coral structures pointed their fingers up at him, as though accusing him of something.

Ahmed was always warning other, less experienced swimmers about rip currents, which could pull people out further and further without them even noticing. Now it had happened to him. He felt stupid. At least no-one was around to see. The beach was deserted. The lifeguard’s hut empty.

But that meant no-one was here to help him, either.

On this stretch of coastline, the water temperature plummeted at sunset. It was getting colder every second. If Ahmed didn’t get back to dry land soon, he would freeze, even with his wrist-length wetsuit.

Don’t panic, he told himself. Panic got people killed.

Ahmed turned his board—he secretly called it Linda— parallel to the beach and started paddling. You couldn’t swim directly against the flow of a rip; the current was too strong. But if you swam sideways, you would soon be out of it.

09:05

Debris floated around him. There was seaweed, driftwood, and a pink, plastic bucket. Rips often sucked in objects from close to the shore and spat them out again on the other side of the sandbar. If Ahmed had noticed the floating junk earlier, he wouldn’t have been pulled in. But he had been watching the horizon for the next big wave.

He was like that, even out of the water. Mum often caught him staring longingly out the window at the ocean when he should be doing his homework. Right now, he was supposed to be writing an essay about Alexander the Great. But who could focus on a dead king when the surf was so good?

Paddle, kick, paddle, kick. Ahmed was making progress, but his limbs were already getting stiff in the cold. He hoped he would have the strength to—

‘Ow!’ He snatched his hand out of the water. There was a red welt across his fingers, like he’d been burned.

Ahmed peered over the edge of the board. For a second, he thought he was looking at a plastic bag . . . then he saw all the tentacles, trailing behind like spider silk.

It was a jellyfish.

08:05

Ahmed quickly lifted his legs out of the water, crouching on his surfboard. The jellyfish had a pale, bell-shaped head about thirty centimetres wide, swelling and shrinking like a lung. It had no eyes, but Ahmed still felt like it was watching.

The tentacles were longer than his board, floating around everywhere. He couldn’t resume paddling until the jellyfish went away. But how long would that take?

Ahmed’s hand felt like it was on fire. Careful to avoid the stinging tentacles, he scooped up a little seawater and splashed it on the wound. It helped, but not enough. The pain would keep getting worse until he treated his hand with vinegar or hot water.

And the pain wasn’t the only issue. Certain jellyfish could stop the victim’s heart from beating, or explode an artery in their brain. Sometimes death came as little as ten minutes after the sting.

Ahmed stood up, wobbling on his surfboard, hoping to get a better look at the beach. He still couldn’t see anybody.

When he looked down again, he gasped.

It wasn’t just one jellyfish anymore. Now there were hundreds, a seething mass of semi-transparent heads and deadly tentacles, turning the ocean beneath him white. Occasionally a gap would open up between them, like a dark mouth, but it closed again just as quickly.

Ahmed was so scared he almost fell off his board. He crouched down, pressing his palms flat against it to stop the wobbling. The rip must have brought the cluster of jellyfish—a bloom, it was called—to the surface. If he tried to paddle away, his hands and his feet would be stung dozens of times. But he couldn’t wait here, because his injured hand needed treatment. What was he going to do?

Then things got much worse. Something moved in his peripheral vision. Ahmed turned his head and saw the wave he’d been waiting for all day.

07:29

It was a monster. The sort of wave that capsized boats. Ahmed had never seen one so big, outside of movies about nuclear explosions and asteroid impacts.

His board was sideways. When the wave hit him, it would knock him down into that lethal tangle of tentacles.

Heart racing, Ahmed stood up and wiggled his hips, trying to twist the board without putting his hands in the water. It was working, but too slowly. He could hear the wave coming. A faint rumble building up to a roar, like an approaching freight train. It would be here in seconds.

‘Come on,’ Ahmed muttered. He twisted the board further. He was facing the right way now. But he couldn’t catch the wave, not without paddling—

The wave hit and the board lurched up under him. Ahmed dropped into a crouch as the sea crashed down onto his back, filled with jellyfish. He screamed as their spongy heads bounced off his neoprene wetsuit—

06:40

There was a sudden crunch from beneath him. The board had caught on something. Ahmed fell forwards, landing on his belly and clinging to the edges of the board—

Then it was over. The wave surged away towards the beach, leaving Ahmed alive, but still stranded.

Amazingly, he hadn’t been stung. The jellyfish tentacles had only touched his wetsuit, not his exposed hands, feet, or head. He wouldn’t be so lucky a second time.

Looking down, Ahmed saw that his board was stuck on the tip of a protruding rock. The top was a metre wide, black and sharp-edged. Shells encrusted the sides. It was above the surface of the ocean, but wouldn’t be for long. Ahmed knew the tide was coming in. Soon this rock would disappear beneath the waves.

Worse still, it had left a crack in his board. If he put his weight in the wrong spot, it would split down the middle, leaving him in the water. With all these jellyfish still on the surface, he’d be mummified in stinging tentacles.

05:11

Ahmed looked towards the beach, hoping someone had turned up. His jaw fell open. The monster wave must have grown as it approached the shore, and now the whole beach was awash. No sand was visible. The lifeguard’s hut had collapsed. Further up, trees were drowning in water. No-one would be coming for a late swim.

Something washed onto Ahmed’s board, brushing his leg. He screamed—but it wasn’t a jellyfish. Just the seaweed he’d seen before, the cheery pink bucket still tangled in it.

04:05

When he reached for it, he saw that the welt on his hand had gone purple. A tingling numbness was creeping up his arm. His teeth chattered, and not just from the cold. He’d never seen a jellyfish sting turn purple before. He wasn’t a doctor, but this seemed like very bad news. And soon the rising tide would bring more stings.

His vision blurred. He was going to die on this rock, and his body would be washed away. His family would never know what had happened to him. If only he had something to write with, he could drop a message into the bucket and hope it eventually floated to land—

The bucket. The bucket!

Ahmed lunged for it before it could drift away. He caught one of the plastic handles just before it was out of reach.

He’d remembered a story he’d read about Alexander the Great. A story that had seemed too strange to be true. But one that could potentially save his life. Anything was better than standing here and waiting for the tide to draw in his executioners.

Balancing on the rock, Ahmed untied the surfboard from his ankle and lifted it out of the water. The strip that ran along the centre of his board from nose to tail was called a stringer, and it was made of fibreglass. The foam parts of the board might crack, but the woman at the surf shop had told him that the stringer never would. Ahmed hoped she was right.

‘Sorry, Linda,’ he muttered, then slammed the nose of the surfboard down on the rock. He did it over and over, right into a fault line near the edge of the stone.

As he worked, he kept one eye on the ocean, where the choppy water was creeping dangerously close to his refuge. His guts were churning, maybe from fear, or maybe from jellyfish venom. ‘Please, please, please—’

03:33

Crack! The fault line, which might have held for thousands of years, finally widened. A chunk of stone about the size of a softball split away, and Ahmed dropped his shattered board and grabbed it before it sank. It was heavy. He squeezed it between his knees, hoping it would weigh him down enough.

Then Ahmed watched the swirling jellyfish, gripping the handles of the bucket, waiting for another hole to open up between the deadly tentacles.

The last gap had been about a metre wide, and it had only lasted a second. But he had seen the darkness of the ocean floor underneath. If another one appeared, he could—

There! A black circle materialised. Ahmed didn’t hesitate, didn’t give himself a chance to rethink. He held the bucket over his head and jumped.

His feet hit the water, right in the middle of the hole. Thanks to the rock between his knees, he sank. The bucket trapped a pocket of air around his head so he could breathe. The water lapped at his chin. The pink plastic faded to black as he descended. His ears popped. Ahmed gritted his teeth, waiting for something to sting his ankles.

But nothing did. He’d been right. The jellyfish bloom was only on the surface. The deeper water was clear.

Suddenly his feet hit the ocean floor. Ahmed’s legs buckled and he nearly fell. Some air escaped from under the bucket and he tilted his head back to keep his mouth above water.

He couldn’t see the seabed—or anything else—but he could feel it, a prickly mix of sand and crushed shells. It was painful to walk on, but that was the least of his worries. He had to get out from under the cloud of jellyfish before his air ran out.

02:55

He trudged across the ground, his breaths echoing inside the bucket. He could feel a slight uphill slope. That meant he was headed for the beach.

He’d read that Alexander the Great had explored the Atlantic like this, walking across the ocean floor with a diving bell on his head. It hadn’t seemed possible, but here Ahmed was, doing it.

It wouldn’t work for long, though. He tried to keep the bucket level, but air kept slipping out from underneath. The water was rising. It had covered his mouth. Now he could only breathe through his nose.

01:14

He kept marching. The water crept higher, tickling his nostrils. And the bucket seemed to be getting heavier, like the water pressure was increasing. At any moment, the plastic could crack.

Soon the water swallowed his nose and he couldn’t breathe at all. Ahmed kept stumbling uphill, panicked. He didn’t know if he was out from under the bloom. Was it safe to swim to the surface? He had to. He was running out of air. He pulled the bucket off his head, ready for the water to rush in—

But it didn’t. Instead the water level fell, and Ahmed found himself standing chin-deep in the ocean. The beach was right in front of him. The giant wave had finally receded, and the sand was visible once more. There were no jellyfish in sight.

And there was a car in the car park at the top of the hill. Mum’s car. His parents were here looking for him—he could see them wading around at the far end of the beach.

Ahmed waved frantically, the sting still burning his hand. He staggered into the shallows and up onto the muddy sand, feeling dizzy, but victorious.

00:00

‘Ahmed the Great!’ he croaked, as his parents ran towards him. ‘Ahmed the Great!’