paused dramatically.
“And some say that ‘fish-people’ came to them through the waterfall pool and took them away to safety.”
“Fish-people?”
Luke and Josh both examined my expression carefully, as Josh nodded seriously.
“Like in swimming underwater without oxygen?” I whispered.
Josh nodded.
A chill raced up my spine in spite of the warm afternoon sunshine. I fought to fix the mask of normality on my face, staring at my fishing line intently, because inside I was screaming in terror as snapshots of my nightmare forced an unwelcome entry into daylight.
I’d been underwater for five minutes, and hadn’t drowned.
The memory of that capsule of time had, until now, eluded me in my waking hours. I’d spent countless hours in my therapist’s office trying to remember the sequence of events that’d led up to Brent’s drowning, the theory being that once I faced the horror, I’d be able to move on. None of the techniques she’d applied had worked, the memory remaining vague and wavey, just out of my reach.
Now, cocooned in sunshine and the smell of summer, I was having tiny, fragmented memories of that time.
I remembered the throb of the creepy crawly, the taste of chlorine in my mouth. There’d been a silky sensation on my exposed skin, as if the water were more than just liquid. For a moment I remembered the pain. It wasn’t like my nightmare though, I didn’t feel the pain as I did in the nightmare, but I remembered it, as one remembers a toothache.
It was what I didn’t remember that was the most significant. In all that time, I’d never once worried or even thought about the need for oxygen…
“What does this have to do with our parents’ trip into the Injisuthi?” Luke’s question jolted me back to reality
“Your parents went camping in Injisuthi twenty years ago,” Josh replied.
“Allan and Maryka –” he pointed at Luke, “and Tom and Talita –” he pointed at me “were meant to spend two weeks hiking through the Injisuthi. They were our age, and from everything I’ve heard, very happy, normal teenagers.” He paused, his eyes glinting with the excitement of the tale. “Four days into the trip, Tom came running into town in the early morning shouting for help at the top of his voice. He claimed Talita had disappeared and was worried that she’d been swept downriver. There’d been a massive storm the night before, and they had been camping near the river. Tom woke at about midnight, to find Talita gone.”
“So she was washed downstream?” Luke asked.
Josh shook his head. “That’s what everyone thought initially, but there were issues with that story. The others had been less than a metre away from her, so unless she’d got out of her sleeping bag and wandered towards the river, the others should have been washed away too.”
“So what happened?” I asked, still feeling shaken by the intense response I’d had to the story of the fish-people.
“Our people say she was taken… by them,” he replied, his voice laden with intrigue.
“Why would they take her?” I asked.
“How should I know?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“It came out later that she was being abused by her father, and others thought she’d committed suicide instead, you know, thrown herself into the rushing river.” Luke filled me in on the little he knew before turning back to Josh. “So your grandfather really believed they took her?” There was huge scepticism in his voice.
“Stranger things have happened, Luke,” Josh replied defensively.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like Mokele-mbembe.”
Luke burst out laughing, shaking his head and muttering about stupid superstitions.
“The what?” I asked Josh.
“Mokele-mbembe is supposedly Africa’s version of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster,” Luke butted in still giggling.
“There are dozens of cave paintings proving its existence, Luke,” Josh replied angrily.
Luke laughed again. “Well, at least you have that with Mokele-mbembe, what do you have on the fish-people? Nothing.”
“So what you’re saying is that you won’t believe it unless you see it?” I asked him, not liking the way he was treating Josh at all.
“Yeah something like that,” Luke replied.
“So then, the wind doesn’t exist?” I shot back, my voice laden with sarcasm.
He laughed, some of the tension easing. “What does the wind have to do with anything?”
“Well, you can’t see the wind,” I replied, smiling to take the bite out of my words.
“Of course you can,” he replied, still smugly assured of his argument.
“No she’s right,” Josh interrupted him, “you can only see the effects of the wind, not the wind itself, so by your argument the wind doesn’t exist.”
Luke harrumphed, looking fed up. I didn’t want to upset him, the tentative thread of friendship still a lifeline I was holding on to.
“What if we go and look for evidence,” I suggested, trying to placate both of them.
“Where?” Luke asked, sounding incredulous.
“Well, for one we could try the internet,” I suggested. “Surely if the fish-people have actually been around for hundreds of years there would be some reports or sightings of them. If there’s nothing on the net, they probably don’t exist.”
“Not a bad idea,” he replied thoughtfully, “but I’m going for a swim first.”
“Me too,” said Josh, leaping up and packing his fishing gear away.
I trailed behind the boys, my mind spinning with the intriguing legend Josh had related.
I didn’t doubt that the possibility existed for such creatures to inhabit the planet with us. The few times my family had gone to the beach, I’d been utterly fascinated with the sea, spending ages staring at the ever-changing blue and wondering what secrets it held. From a tiny child I’d had dozens of books on ocean life, and as many documentaries, each new piece of information sparking more and more questions about the creatures that inhabited the alien world that covered most of the planet.
It was, in my mind at least, entirely possible that humans weren’t the only sentient life on earth, and that there were creatures equally as intelligent as humans that lived in the ocean. After all, we know so little about that world, only able to spend, at most, an hour or so under the water.
The question I couldn’t answer was what on earth they were doing four hundred kilometres from the sea?
Luke
