Chapter Twenty-eight

SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU can’t explain what is happening around you, it feels like you are drifting through a dream. Everything you thought you knew about the world and how it works is challenged, and that can be kind of scary. But if you don’t let that fear get the best of you, it can also be pretty exciting.

We had left Penelope on her rock, wrestling with the beautiful statue in the sand. We were sailing towards Crete, only seventy-five miles south. It was a moonless night and very dark. Darkness on the sea always seems darker than on land. But the sea was calm, and Hollie and I were leaning against the hatch, watching the stars, which were sparkling more than usual in the absence of the moon. We were cruising at sixteen knots when I thought I heard a beep. I listened for a second one. There wasn’t one.

“Did you hear that, Hollie?”

Hollie looked up at me, wanting to please.

“Did you hear the radar beep?”

He squinted and looked around in the darkness and sniffed the midnight air. I yawned.

“Oh, well, I suppose we should go in and take a peek. It’s probably nothing.”

I climbed inside, put Hollie down and went to the radar screen. The radar swept its wave around the screen but nothing lit up and nothing beeped. I stared for a few minutes, yawning, and was about to go back outside when the sonar screen caught my eye. The sea floor between Thera and Crete was deep, between six and seven thousand feet, but the sonar was showing three hundred.

“That can’t be right.”

I reached for my charts. No, there was no indication of an underwater ridge between Thera and Crete. I stared at the sonar screen, then watched wide-eyed as the sea floor rapidly fell from three hundred to six thousand feet. The numbers dropped so quickly it was like falling off a mountain. I grabbed my charts again and pored over them very carefully.

“No. No, there’s nothing there!”

I stared back at the sonar screen. The sea floor was sixty-two hundred feet below us. Five minutes later it was still the same.

“Whoa! Wait! Okay, what’s going on?”

I stopped the sub. Hollie barked and wagged his tail. He could feel my excitement.

“Let’s go back, Hollie. I want to check that depth again.”

I turned the sub around and headed back the way we had come. Watching the sonar screen the whole time, I waited to see the sea floor rise. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, fifteen, but the sea floor stayed the same. I stopped the sub, climbed out and looked around. Seaweed was sitting on the bow.

“Hi, Seaweed. Just checking our depth.”

Seaweed didn’t see any food in my hands so he didn’t care.

I went back inside, looked at the charts once more and stared at the sonar. The sea floor was well over a mile down. Was it possible the sonar had malfunctioned? Was it possible a very large submarine had passed slowly beneath us at three hundred feet? But that wouldn’t explain the mountain-like wall I had seen on the screen. I shrugged, started the engine and sat down to watch the sonar screen as we sailed over the area once again. Ten minutes later the radar beeped. Something was outside, right beside us! I raced up the portal, looked around in the darkness for a light or something, but there was nothing. The radar beeped again. I rushed back inside. The sonar indicated a depth of three hundred feet. I reached for the switch and cut the engine. We drifted slowly to a stop. Then, from the observation window came a faint blue glow. There was light underneath the sub! My mouth dropped. Something about the light was weird. It wasn’t bright and yet it was sparkling, like stars. I didn’t rush now; I was too mystified. I went to the portal and climbed up the ladder. Part of me wanted to look, and part wanted to hit the engine switch and sail away as fast as possible.

I raised my head out of the portal and saw a shiny blue light in the water all around us. At a glance, the light had a radius of about a quarter of a mile. It was such a strange light. It didn’t seem to be coming from any one spot, but from everywhere. I had the strange sense that the light was somehow lifting us up in the air. But it wasn’t. Certainly the space occupied by the light was far too big for it to be any kind of human-made object. Besides, it wasn’t really a light as much as a glow. Suddenly, I thought maybe I knew what it was! Luminescence! I had read about strange sightings at sea of weird light phenomena that were caused by a special kind of algae. The blue glow could be coming from billions and billions of tiny algae, each emitting its own little luminescent energy.

This was a comforting theory. I started to relax. The blue glow was very beautiful to look at. It was almost a mirror of the stars. It was the most mysterious thing I had ever seen.

But a luminescence didn’t explain the sonar reading. I went back inside and looked at the screen — three hundred feet. That was impossible. I wished I had a depth cable that I could lower three hundred feet and see if it touched bottom. I started the engine and slowly sailed out of the luminescence, and as we left the glow, the sea floor dropped to sixty-two hundred feet once more. Darkness surrounded us. Well, at least I could tell that the luminescence seemed to be causing the bizarre change in depth. But then I remembered that on our first trip over the area, the sonar read three hundred feet and there had been no glow in the water. Neither had we encountered three hundred feet on our way back. I was confused. Was it that we’d only see the luminescence when we were sailing slowly or were stopped? I turned around and went back slowly, fully expecting to see the lovely blue glow. But it was gone. The sonar revealed a sea floor sixty-two hundred feet below.

“This is crazy!”

I turned around and went over the area again. No sign of luminescence and no change in depth. Perhaps we had drifted west with the current. I crossed the area again, correcting for a small amount of lateral drift. Nope. Nothing.

By the last hour of darkness we had crossed the area a dozen times and found nothing more. I was beginning to wonder if my mind had been playing tricks on me all along. And then something happened that sent a shiver right up my spine.

There was a splash outside and a thumping on the stern, as if something heavy had come out of the water and landed on the hull. Then, it took what felt like a step, and then another one. I froze. I held my breath and listened. It was absolutely silent.

“Seaweed?” I called.

The thought that Seaweed was out there by himself made me move towards the ladder. Then something jumped from the hull, and there was another splash. I climbed the portal and stuck my head out. There was nothing on the stern. When I turned and looked at the bow, Seaweed was gone!

There was something in the water. I could sense it. It’s just a feeling you get, like something is staring at you. And then, I heard it. It came straight towards the sub, racing through the water like lightening. It jumped … and went right over my head! It came so close that I could have reached out and touched its tail. Now I knew what it was. I flicked on the sub’s floodlights and swept them across the water. Dolphins! The sea was full of them.

I smiled. Dolphins are really smart. And they like to play. I couldn’t help wondering if they thought the sub was some kind of “dummy” dolphin, with our new nose and paint. Maybe they wanted to play with us. Hollie whined at the bottom of the ladder. He wanted to come up. I went down, picked him up and carried him up the portal. His belly was already vibrating like a tiny motor and his teeth were chattering with the quietest growl imaginable. It always sounded like he wanted to growl but didn’t want anyone to know he was doing it. I doubted that a herd of dolphins was going to be afraid.

Then, Hollie surprised me. He barked. It was a brave attempt to defend his territory. He was used to barking at seals in the boathouse. Maybe he thought these were seals in the water. The dolphins started calling back. Their calls were like soft screams. They were friendly. Hollie barked a few more times and the dolphins screamed back. Then there was a different sound, but it wasn’t a dolphin. It was also a kind of scream but it wasn’t soft or particularly friendly. It came from further away. It was a strange and frightening sound; I had never heard anything like it.

Holding Hollie tightly in one arm, I turned the floodlights toward the scream. The water was tossing with movement. Silhouettes of dolphins crisscrossed in front of the light but it was very hard to see anything else. Suddenly, a dolphin came sailing through the air and went over our heads. Splashes of water fell on us. I grabbed the floodlights and spun them back. As they cut an arc through the water they passed over something unbelievable. I mean, I saw it … but I didn’t believe it.

My eyes were playing tricks on me. I swung the lights again. Four or five dolphins were racing towards us. They were diving in and out of the water and picking up speed. I couldn’t coordinate the lights well enough to follow them but all of the dolphins went over us, and something was riding on the back of one of them. It just couldn’t be what I thought it was … It looked like a little boy.

My mind raced. I knew what Sheba would say, because she believed in mermaids. Well, I didn’t believe it could be a boy riding a dolphin, and so I tried to figure out what else it could be.

Dolphins, like fish, are always in danger of swimming into garbage in the water — plastic rings and things like that. Sometimes they get trapped in them and drown, which is really sad. Sometimes they are able to swim away, and they carry the garbage attached to their bodies for the rest of their lives, or, sadly, until it slowly strangles them. Was that what I had seen, a piece of plastic wrapped around the body of a dolphin so that it looked like a little boy?

That was a good answer. It made sense. It made me feel better. But something was nagging me. And I knew what it was.

Darkness was fading. The water grew calm. The dolphin herd had moved on as quickly as they had appeared. I looked up in the sky for Seaweed but it was still too dark to see him. Then I saw something lying on the back of the stern, something small. Putting Hollie down inside, I strapped on the harness and climbed out onto the stern. I picked up the object. It was a small branch from an olive tree. There were three leaves on it. How strange. Then Seaweed dropped out of the sky.

“Hi, Seaweed. Did you drop this?”

He shook his beak. He probably did. He loved to pick things off the water and drop them in the sub. I looked around in the growing dawn. Inside of me a question was burning to get out, to shout to the sea all around me. And yet I couldn’t even say it out loud. I was afraid. But I could think it.

Were we in Atlantis?