The Stars Down Under by Sandra McDonald

Author:Sandra McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Falling off a cliff took forever.

One thousand, two thousand …

Wind rushed at him. The dark and ominous sea expanded beyond the edges of his vision. The sharp rocks below waited for him with hardened teeth and jagged claws. Myell saw his death, clear as the sky: his body slamming into stone, bones cracking and splintering under the strain, his lungs punctured and skull shattered like an egg.

Three thousand, four …

The terror of the cliff had been replaced by a strange, cold calm. No sense worrying about the inevitable. In a few seconds everything would be over, and if anything lurked beyond the blackness of death he’d find out.

Still, calm notwithstanding, he scrabbled for some kind of purchase in the air, anything to grab on to, anything at all.

Five thousand, six, the pull of gravity, the onrushing rocks, awareness that the Bunyip had already gone into the water and had not surfaced, the fleeting lament Jodenny, and he hit.

* * *

Cold. Shockingly cold, and dark, and his mouth and nose and lungs and chest and body were full of water, a torrent of it flooding into him, making breath and life impossible. In terror and desperation he tried to suck in air, air that didn’t exist, his chest muscles paralyzed, his lungs turned to stone, and his heart beat wildly out of control in a battle that was already lost, already far beyond his control.

He didn’t remember sinking, but here he was deep in salty blackness, unable to see, unable to focus, his limbs heavy and fingers slack, freezing cold, bitterly cold, no sense of up or down, no way back to the surface, all lost, so lost, and when seaweed brushed against his lips he couldn’t even recoil, because the water carried him and drowned him and he was dimming, all of him was dimming, and going into the darkness.

Come, a woman’s voice said, a voice like a song. Open your eyes.

Impossible, but he did it anyway. His vision was a blurred landscape of black and dark blue and there, a woman’s silvery face. She shimmered in the darkness like a beacon. Her eyes were tiny burning fires of green, her smile full of sharp gray teeth. Her hands slid over Myell’s arms and up to his throat and cupped his face, oh so cold, and slimy like a fish.

Come and live, she coaxed.

Her lips brushed his. Her tongue slid into his throat, a violation that brought blessed air. Myell choked, gasped, and bolted upright on a damp bed of rock. Around him, the walls of a sea cave shone green with luminescent plants. He clutched his throat, sure that he couldn’t breathe, but air flowed freely down into his chest, where a residual ache told him that he hadn’t dreamed the ordeal. He had jumped from a cliff into the ocean and lived to tell the tale.

Unless this was some odd kind of afterlife, an afterlife that was wet and salty and cold, and in which he was naked again.

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