I was on the Survey Ledge. From here rocks went vertically downwards for over a hundred and fifty feet, and there, in the echoing abyss, the Devil’s Eye was swirling and roaring. Quite near me, in just a few steps, stood Garcia, showing into the abyss with an inviting gesture. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Neither were his friends.
“Do you still like looking at the sea, Renaldo? Don’t you want to look at it from inside?”
No one managed to escape from the Eye’s funnel. Yet grandfather Ignacio used to say when in his cups that if you got right into the centre, into the pupil of the Eye, Satan would blink – and then amazing things would happen... And also...
Garcia’s fellows seized me by my hands and pulled me to the edge of the cliff. Garcia himself was standing a bit away, curling his fat lips in a strained grimace.
“Hands off! I’ll do it myself!”
Out of unexpectedness they let me go, and I made a step towards the edge of the cliff. The brown foamy whirlpool roared below, convolving to the black collapse of the “pupil”, and I pushed myself away from the edge, bending my aching, beaten, punctured, but still obedient body...
...lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me...
...Convulsions were turning me inside out, I was melting, falling to pieces... Maybe this is how you die? But death wasn’t unpleasant, it was remaking me, altering me, merging me with water, with air; it seemed to me that I saw myself from aside, my transparent glaring body, and it was flowing, changing...
I felt the elasticity of the water floating along my new body – a smooth, springy body! I breathed in the air noisily, breathed out. The Devil’s Eye was roaring more than a mile from me, there was open sea around, and in it a glittering black dolphin was swimming, and it was me!
My flippers obeyed my orders perfectly, on my tongue I felt the tastes of iodine, seaweed and various sea dwellers, invisible vibrations reflected in my brain as a distinct picture of the shore relief... The shore! Annabel and Garcia’s scum!..
I rushed back, avoiding the electric strings and the giant kraken’s embrace without any effort. Then again, they didn’t try hard to catch me. A wild thought crept into my head – what if they were also...
The funnel was quite near when at last I saw high above Annabel’s orange dress. “Saw” was not a suitable word, but I hadn’t others as yet. Garcia’s friends were crowding around her, and he himself was standing there, grinning, saying something – and finally he embraced the motionless girl.
The next moment he waved his hands clumsily, falling back, losing his balance, separating from the rock, trying in vain to tear Annabel’s tenacious fingers off himself – and the orange dress together with the black coat hang over the precipice! And I knew, knew with all my new dolphin knowledge that damned Garcia would get into the “pupil”, while Annabel...
Annabel!..
I rushed into the Devil’s eye, bursting through the sucking strength of the funnel like a furious torpedo, praising Heaven, God, Satan for not being human anymore – I made my way through, I got in time – and threw my new obedient body into the air, meeting Annabel, aiming the orange dress where there was black silent emptiness...
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
...After a couple of minutes two dolphins dived out five miles away from the island and after some lingering swam away, making for the open sea. To the left of them there was a dark and foggy continent of mad cities, wild objects and nascent legends. To the right there lied the quiet island of San-Sebastian with its Survey Ledge, embrasures of the parapet and the Devil’s Eye from which there emerged slowly the slippery ink-black carcass of a colossal octopus...
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea...
