Feeling lower than a slug's belly, I figured that I could at least try and catch up on some sleep. I plastered some more of that stinking kelp and curled up in a ball and listened to the storm crashing about outside.
I woke, not at all refreshed, from an uneasy dream filled with broads, heavies, dames and missing dudes, crashing waves and murky water filled with krill and it took a few minutes to figure out what was reality and another few to nut out which way was up.
It was dark, not quite night. I could tell because the krill were still doing that nattering they do in the twilight. That's one of the curses of being a sleuth: your senses get so accustomed to picking up the smallest of details that you can't stop it, even when you're alone, dozing in your hole.
Tired of sleeping but still exhausted is no way to be. You get to being so that you think you can sleep but you can't or that you try and get your thinker ticking but it won't so much as wheeze.
Nothing was working, so I decided to head out and clear my head.
Moping about in a hole wasn't about to get me anywhere.
You know something? That was actually one of the calmest moments I'd ever experienced. I knew I was without a job and I guess that's why I was feeling so swell. There's a revelation for you: those vagrants have it right. With no decisions to make, no one leaning on me, I had no responsibilities.
For the first time since I was a squirt, I didn't have anything weighing me down.
Up the wall and across the way, I took the time to take in the twilight. The shoalfish up above were twisting and turning, catching the krill that had been swept in. The light of the Great Silver Pearl flashed with every turn.
I remember, as a pup, I used to look up and wonder what it would be like to reach that ball, to hold that pearl in my tentacles and turn it over and over and over. Such a treasure!
It shines down on everything, illuminating everything. All the secrets of the reef, of the ocean, all of them would be revealed if I had that Pearl.
You can keep the Golden Pearl. That only sees the daytime affairs, the commonplace, the polite, the civilised. You want the truth? The truth comes out when no one is looking. The truth comes out in back alleys, in crevices, in kelp forests where spuds think that their actions belong to themselves and no one else.
No one except the Silver Pearl.
Ah, when you're a squirt it all seems so easy, it all just makes sense. You get these great ideas about life and the world and then, bam! Along comes reality and inks all over it.
I swept down past the foundation's anemone gardens. They were still feeling the water with their colourful tendrils, snapping up any of the specks of food that happened to come through open-water.
I shuddered at that thought.
Open-water is where the Hammers live, the barracudas, the rays and jellies. Anything that gets caught and dragged out into open-water gets chewed and chomped and falls down, down to the darkness that underpins everything.
The Abyss.
Stuff goes into the Abyss. Stuff goes in. See? It's not supposed to come back out. That's why it's the Abyss. And yet there it was, wafts of infinitesimal dust made out of who the heck knew what, floating up out from the inky blackness to feed the anemones, the krill, the minnows, the clams, mussels, crabs, lobsters, urchins, starfish and gobies.
And what, I ask you, do we eat?
Exactly. That's some kind of sick circle of life right there. Didn't I say the Great Spud has a sense of humour? Turns out it's a dark one.
I shuddered again, determined not to lose that crab I had earlier. It's a heck of a thing, figuring out how stuff works. I don't know what wave was crashing over my rock the day I hatched, only that it was cursed with the insufferable desire to get to the bottom of things, no matter how bitter the conclusion.
I don't know how many times I followed a trail to the end, only to find my guy fed to the Hammers, or ground to a pulp, or cut into pieces and cast into the void. At least I was able to give closure to the loved ones. Whatever that means.
Thing that really gets me is that, no matter how hard I try to avoid it, I can't stop thinking about the why. Why was I put in this watery prison with my brain working against me? Why was I destined to trawl through the wakes of others, sniffing out the titbits from the rest of their buff, piecing together their dirty deeds in order to find the answer to a riddle that was already concluded?
Don't get me wrong. Once or twice I managed to get to my mark before he got done in, but that didn't make it any more bearable. Turns out the guys I've been sent to look for are generally bad fish themselves, worthy of becoming shark food.
There's no real satisfaction.
Satisfaction, yeah. That's the word. Doesn't matter how hard I try, I can't get satisfied. I can't sit still. I can't just chill out and enjoy a darkwater brew. I get itchy, fidgety.
That's what brought me down that last time. I don't like to talk about it.
Look, if you have to know, it's like this. I pushed myself too far, searching for something that just wasn't there. Oyster rustling, it was. Nasty characters, lots of clams on the line, all of that. I'd found the trail, I'd done the hard-yards and I'd found the rancher, or what was left of him, smack-dab in the middle of Long Arm Pepe's hideout.
Open and shut.
My job was done. I should've informed the authorities. I should have slipped away, collected my clams and lived to fight another day. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Phooey!
Instead, dissatisfied with living in a middle rock in the middle of the reef, I figured it was high time I got something more fitting to what I was deserving and this dumb spud went and confronted Pepe and tried to cut a deal.
That's right. Your Tedrick was going to have a go at being a bad guy for a change. Why not? They get all the clams, all the gals, the best rocks and eat crabs for breakfast. I, on the other mitt, busted my frequently bruised hump for the chance to live another couple of tides at most.
Think about it: A private-eye is only useful if spuds are up to no good. I made a living on the misery of others. Remove the misery and I was out of a job. Anyway, I digress.
Where was I? Ah, cutting a deal with Pepe. It was just oysters, and there was plenty to go around so why not, eh?
Well, you can imagine the end of it, can't you? Pepe strung me along, promised me this and that – man, if I could go back in time and slap myself around – in the end, he bailed me up in a dark crevice and three of his goons beat me senseless.
Last thing I remember was the water stained blue with my blood, the thuds of my head on the rocks and the yells of Pepe to 'it 'im 'arder! 'It 'im 'arder!
When you're beat like that, you still see stuff going on. You feel the pain, you feel the bruises and the abrasions, but you're powerless. Utterly powerless. It's like you're outside your own body, looking down on yourself getting the snot bashed out of you. You cringe with every slam, you can smell your own blood, you recoil from the crunching, but there's not a single thing you can do about it.
How I survived, I have absolutely no idea. Everything from there is a blur.
You see, stuff rolls from high to low, that's the natural order of things. I'm not one to buck a trend. I kept on going and going until I found myself looking out over the edge of the Abyss, staring down into where light goes to die.
Nothing stopped me. I rolled off the edge, just like that, falling down to be swallowed by the blackness.
I went over. I actually went down into the Abyss. It wasn't a dream, I was on my way to discover for myself whether the demons of the deep were real.
Madness? Sure. That's one way to put it. Fate? A miracle? I don't know, I truly don't. All I do know is that I can't remember a thing, not a single thing, between when I rolled off the edge and when I woke up in Doc's surgery.
I lost my rock. I lost my friends, well, all the ones who didn't want to stick around with a dead-weight so that's not such a bad thing.
I wound up scrounging for any scrap of mollusc I could find just to keep going. Should've given up. That would've been the smart thing to do. Head back to the Abyss and do it right. Only there's something in the Gritswell blood that stops you from doing that. You just have to keep going.
And I did keep going. Only not in the detective gig.
I held on, scraping out a living, dragging myself up, forcing myself to try that little bit harder, hang on just a little bit longer.
I'm glad I did. I got a job sifting sand. I worked hard, real hard. Got paid in enough clams to get some eats. Next few tides, I scraped up enough to rent a pad, small but secure. With my eyes down and my tentacles occupied sifting sand, I kept out of trouble.
Speaking of trouble, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I whipped around, taking a defensive stance.
“Hey, cool it, Tedrick. It's just me. Wow, you sure are jumpy,” said Dewey. “What's cooking?”
“Me. You following me or something?”
“Whoa,” he said, looking at my eye. “Looks like someone did a number on you.”
“A number three with a side of krill-fries.”
“Who was it?”
“I don't know. He never said his name.”
Dewey swam along with me. He was off-shift, no surprise considering I had never seen him actually doing work, and keen for gossip. That's the thing about cuttlefish, they can't stop with the gab. It's like a drug to them. Even while they're asleep they'll prattle and posture and pose. You can lose an eye if you're stupid enough to try and wake a sleep-talking Sepiant.
Wasn't sure if I wanted the company. Then again, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be alone.
“What did he look like?”
“Not very big. He was an Unome,” I said. “I could have whipped him in a fair fight.”
Dewey laughed, “Let me guess, there were two of 'em?”
“Three. Him and two Collosi. Not the sharpest shells in the sea, but strong enough.”
He whistled and flushed.
“Did you get anything in exchange for those bruises?”
“Maybe.”
That got him riled, “Come on! You got something or not?”
“Doesn't matter.”
“Sure it does! Drop it, Ted, what's the scoop?”
“Nothing much new, really. I mean, I guess I got confirmation that there's something rotten around Taniel's.”
“Taniel's Rock?”
“Yeah. There was a gal with Belvedere just before he disappeared. Seems like she had something to do with his state of being missing.”
“Uh-huh. What, she off him?” he asked. “Is he dead? Did that Unome do it?”
“Hey, slow down. Who's the detective here?”
“Spill.”
“I'm piecing it together, pal, but it's murky. There are way too many unknowns.”
“So who was the guy? Why'd he do a number on you?”
“He's with Sassam. Apparently Sassam don't want me feeling about none.”
“Sassam?” he said, flopping his tentacles about. “How does he come into it?”
“I don't know. That's what's eating me. I was about to find out, too, when I got misdirected and my informant got pulled away.”
“Ouch. Any chance you can get them back?”
“Don't know. I just don't know. I can't chance heading back to Taniel's unless I want them to finish what they started,” I said. “And my informant isn't the kind to be wandering around during the daytime.”
At the top of the next rock I stopped. Dewey ran into the back of me.
“Hey, what gives?”
“See for yourself,” I said.
You know when you see something, and you know damn well what it is, even though you don't want to admit to yourself what it is, and you say anyway, “What is that?”
Dewey didn't answer. I think his beak was savouring the rest.
A crowd had gathered. That's always a bad sign. You just don't get crowds in Borobo. They aren't safe, for starters and they make a convenient target for eels and barracudas.
There were murmurings bubbling from the throng, “Them damn Sepiants. Never had none of this before Tommy got here. I'll bet no one saw nothin'. Always the way. The Reef's going to the Abyss.”
I edged closer, pushing my way through the mob. The closer I got to the centre, the worse my feeling became. It's not until you see it with your own eyes that stuff like that registers and even then it's like a bad dream.
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“Stay back, please,” the sergeant on duty said, pushing me back. “This doesn't concern you.”
“Actually, it does.”
“You know her?”
There before me, mutilated, disfigured almost beyond recognition, was Wyra.
Two of her arms were only barely attached and each of her mitts had been cruelly cut off. Her sweet face had suffered under a barrage of cuts. They were clean slices, no ragged edges. She wasn't bludgeoned, she was held down and methodically cut with a razor-edge, maybe a stinger-barb or a honed iron-shell.
I can only imagine that she was tortured before they killed her proper, otherwise why bother cutting her up? It was clear why. This wasn't the simple case of a hooker getting beat by her Madam, this was extreme cruelty to achieve two purposes, the first of which was to find out just what she had done, how much information she had disseminated.
“Yeah. I know her.”
The second was to send a crystal clear message to the recipient patsy to leave well enough alone.
“Oh yeah? And who're you to her, then?”
“A friend,” I said.
“She had a lot of friends, pal, I know. That don't make you special. Now get outta here, this is a police matter!”
“Right you are,” I nodded, turned and left.
Dewey had held back from crowd and came rushing after me, his fins in a quiver.
“Hey, what was that all about? Who was that?”
“Leave it, Dewey.”
“Why? Who was that? Do you know her?”
“Leave it alone!” I growled. “She's no one!”
That wasn't true. She wasn't no one. She was a gal who had done it tough, hatched into a world where her only real choice was whether to join a brothel or run with a pimp. She was a gal I had promised to take care of and I'd let her down before I even knew who was after her.
Crazy, I know, but I felt responsible, like the whole thing was my fault, like if I hadn't been poking about, dredging up settled silt she'd still be here.
There was nothing I could do for her now. She had made her decision, she'd tried to break out and look where she ended up. Before the end of tide the authorities would have made their notes, done the obligatory and fruitless witness round-up, and then unceremoniously rolled the body over the edge as a present to the Abyss.
No funeral. No prayers. You don't say prayers for a recalcitrant hooker who didn't know her place in the world.
Same goes for a sand-sifter who thinks he's a detective. Their message was clear enough. That was going to be me if I didn't get back under a rock.
“Your colours are all over the place,” Dewey said. “Want to get some blackwater?”
“No!” I shouted.
“Hey, Ted, you're blowing your top. Can you cool it?”
I simmered down some, “Sure. Sorry. I'm smooth.”
“No you're not. You're rattled. Come on. A brew will do you good.”
“You go on, I've got some thinking to do.”
“You always got thinkin' to do. Help you forget your friend.”
“I don't want to forget her.”
“Help remember her, then.”
That settled it. If the least I could do was have a drink in her honour, then so be it.
At a bar in the middle-reef I brooded over my drink, fending off Dewey's rambling until he got bored and started chatting up the waitress, a middle-aged cuttlefish who outmatched Dewey's verbosity. I left them to exercise and looked outside.
From this viewpoint I could see a great section of lower-reef. Funnily, at that distance and in the twilight it actually held a kind of beauty. All the castings and rubbish that rolled down from above disappeared in a collection of colourful anemones and kelp and grass.
I guess that's one of the duties of dwelling in the lower-reef: making it look like there's nothing but frolicking fish to those looking down from above.
“Hey Ted!”
Dewey smashed his way back through my consciousness.
“Eh, what? What?”
“Meet Violette.”
“Violette?” I asked, immediately regretting it.
“Well, if you must know, her full name is...”
I closed my eyes to save my energy and begged him to stop.
“Let's stick with Violette.”
“Violette, this is Tedrick. You can call him Ted. He's a detective.”
I wiggled my tentacles in a half-hearted greeting and turned back to the window.
“Nice to meet you, hon,” she said, whispering to Dewey. “Ain't got much manners, does he?”
“Aw, don't mind him. He's in a funk. You know that dead body they found today?”
“Off the main?”
“That's the one. He knew her.”
“You don't say.”
“I do say. She got cut up bad. She must've known something about the case.”
“A case?”
“Detective work. Did I mention he's a private-eye? You know Belvedere Medici? Of course you do. Well she knew something she oughtn't or ought to. That's what I think. And I think she must've been something special to Ted because, seriously, he's been shut tight as a mussel on a dry -”
I exploded, “Keep your damn, blankin' sticky blicking beak out of my blickety-blank business, Dewey!”
I'm not proud of it. I know I shouldn't have gone off the handle like that, especially in front of good-natured people. I mean, he was going to gossip behind my back whether I liked it or not, and that outburst just gave them more to talk about.
Infuriated, I scuttled out of there and jetted off up-reef. I needed some time to myself, alone, without an annoying, blabberbeaked cuttlefish jamming up my thoughts.
When I looked up, I was at Meemberk Ridge, overlooking the jutting stony outcrop that formed giant claws that dripped down over the Abyss. It was a lonely spot. Barnacles clung to the knuckles and thin wisps of kelp wormed their roots between the cracks of the calcified protuberances.
Despite my anger, despite the events of the day, the rhythm of the Reef kept on beating. The Reef was just too big to care.
The Silver Pearl looked down at me through the swells above, listening to my thoughts, drinking them in. Well, good luck to it.
Wyra was dead. I didn't know her that well but, I don't know, maybe I did. She had been a little squirt once, full of hopes and dreams, full of aspirations. Life could have taken her anywhere.
She represented everything that was wrong with the Reef. She was just trying to make something of herself, dammit. That's what defines us as octopuses – either we accept our lot and drift along like uprooted seaweed or we make our own decisions and go to where we want to go.
A nice sentiment but hardly more than a platitude. What can one octopus do against the might of the Law, or the Outlaws, or the rulers?
Heck and ink.
I had grown up knowing that unless you had clams, there were only two choices in life: You can either wind up being flotsam or jetsam.
Now I was thinking weird. I was thinking that maybe, maybe there was another choice.
That was a turning point in my career, although I didn't know it at the time. I don't know how long I was brooding. All I know is that I was mad. Real mad. Not explode-and-yell-about-it mad. A good deal more than that.
I was mad at Dewey. I was mad at the Reef. I was mad at society and the Law and the Foreman and Coraline bloody Medici. I was mad at a world that reduced the brutal torture and murder of a girl to mere gossip that wouldn't last more than a tide.
I was so mad that I hit the point where, instead of being heated and blistered, a wave of pure clarity swept over me.
One spud can make a difference. Just has to be the right one at the right time with the right motivation. Look at Tommy Two-Tone. He upset the whole establishment. Sure, he had an army at his mitts, but he planned and assembled this army to a single conclusion, a conclusion that he had orchestrated.
No one had given him permission. No one had trained him up for it. He did it off his own bat.
One spud can make a difference, if only he stops worrying about what's going to happen to him.
OK, so I wasn't about to rock the underworld establishment and set up my own crew, that's not my style and I don't do the bad-guy thing all that well. What I was going to do was crack the case. I was going to find out who murdered Wyra and make them pay. If I re-established a reputation at the same time, that was a bonus.
If I died trying, so be it. Beats being a sand-sifter.
“Wyra, sweethearts, I didn't know you that well but believe me, you deserved better and it's a damn shame what happened to you,” I said to the blackness. “I'm not going to say sorry. You knew what you were doing. Still, that was wrong. If you can hear me, I want you to know that I won't rest until I get those bastards. I couldn't protect you. I can't change that but I can find them, and I'll make them pay. You can count on me.”