The Drowned Life Read Online Free Page A

find another address and see which way the numbers ran. Then, if he found they were increasing, he’d have to turn around and head in the opposite direction, but at least he would know. Thrilled at his sense of purpose, he swept a clump of drifting seaweed out of his way and moved forward. He could be certain Rose would come for him. After thirty years of marriage they’d grown close in subterranean ways.
    Darkness was beginning to fall on Drowned Town. Angle-jawed fish with needle teeth, a perpetual scowl, and sad eyes, came from the alleyways and through open apartment windows, and each had a small phosphorescent jewel dangling from a downward curving stalk that issued from its head. They drifted the shadowy street like fireflies, and although Hatch had still to see another building number, he stopped in his tracks to mark their beautiful effect. It was precisely then that he saw Financial Ruin appear from over the rooftops down the street. Before he could even think to flee, the shark swooped down in his direction.
    Hatch turned, kicked his feet up, and started flapping. As he approached the first corner and was about to turn, he almost collided with someone just stepping out onto Bleeter Street. To his utter confusion, it was a deep-sea diver, a man inside a heavy rubber suit with a glass bubble of a helmet and a giant nautilus shell strapped to his back, which fed air through two arching tubes into his suit. The sudden appearance of the diver wasn’t what made him stop, though. It was the huge gun in his hands with a barbed spear head as wide as a fence post jutting from the barrel. The diver waved Hatch behind him as the shark came into view. It hurtled towardthem with a dagger-toothed lunge, a widening cavern, speeding like a runaway train. The diver pulled the trigger. There was a zip of tiny bubbles, and Financial Ruin curled up, thrashing madly with the spear piercing its upper palate and poking out the back of its head. Billows of blood began to spread, staining the watery atmosphere. The man in the suit lowered the gun and approached Hatch.
    â€œHurry,” he said, “before the other sharks smell the blood.”

• SIX •
    Hatch and his savior sat in a carpeted parlor on cushioned chairs facing each other across a low coffee table with a tea service on it. The remarkable fact was that they were both dry, breathing air instead of brine, and speaking in normal tones. When they’d both entered the foyer of the stranger’s building, he had hit a button on the wall. A sheet of steel slid down to cover the street door, and within seconds the sea water began to exit the compartment through a drain in the floor. Hatch had had to drown into the air and that was much more uncomfortable than simply going under, but after some extended wheezing, choking, and spitting up, he drew in a huge breath with ease. The diver had unscrewed the glass globe that covered his head and held it beneath one arm. “Isaac Munro,” he’d said and nodded.
    Now dressed in a maroon smoking jacket and green pajamas, moccasins on his feet, the silver-haired man with a drooping mustache sipped his tea and held forth on his situation. Hatch, in dry clothes the older man had given him, was willing to listen, almost certain Munro knew the way back to dry land.
    â€œI’m in Drowned Town, but not of it. Do you understand?” he said.
    Hatch nodded, and noticed what a relief it was to have the pressure of the sea off him.
    Isaac Munro lowered his gaze and said, as if making a confession, “My wife, Rotzy, went under some years ago. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. She came down here, and on the day she left me, I determined I would find the means to follow her and rescue her from Drowned Town. My imagination, fired by the desire to simply hold her again, gave birth to all these many inventions that allow me to keep from getting my feet wet, so to speak.” He chuckled and then made