Beneath the World, a Sea

From the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of the Eden Trilogy

Chris Beckett

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786491572
• eBook ISBN: 9781786491565
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'A disturbing descent into a surreal world, written with a deft hand.' Adrian Tchaikovsky, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016 South America, 1990. Ben Ronson, a British police officer, arrives in a mysterious forest to investigate a spate of killings of Duendes. These silent, vaguely humanoid creatures - with long limbs and black button eyes - have a strange psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears. Ben becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but the closer he gets, the more he begins to unravel, with terrifying results... Beneath the World, A Sea is a tour de force of modern fiction - a deeply searching and unsettling novel about the human subconscious, and all that lies beneath.
'Beckett is superb at undercutting reader assumptions with a casual line of dialogue or acute psychological observation: the book reads like Conrad's Heart of Darkness reimagined by JG Ballard.' Guardian

III. THE POLICEMAN

(5)

It was his first night for a month in a decent bed and Ben had promised himself a long sleep, but he actually woke very early and decided to go outside for a walk. Mrs Martin – he hadn’t yet brought himself to call her Nicky – was already up and eager to know what he’d have for breakfast, but he told her on this occasion he’d take coffee in the town.

‘Well, if you’re sure.’ She looked dismayed. ‘We have fresh croissants and coffee all ready.’

‘Much appreciated, but I need the air this morning, I think, before the day gets too warm.’

One of these days, he found himself thinking as he emerged into the warm moist air outside, if he wasn’t very careful, when he was tired and discouraged, or had been made to feel that he didn’t know what he was doing, he would take from Mrs Martin what she was so obviously offering him. He would let her kiss him, and tell him how wonderful he was. And she’d offer him more and more, dote on him, mother him, tend to him, and at the same time, if that’s what he seemed to want, submit to him as if she was a helpless child. And it would feel great for about half an hour and then he’d feel sick.

He walked down to the waterfront, through streets that were still very quiet: a little grocery shop here, a small café there with a single customer sitting at the bar. In the harbour, the boat that had brought him was still docked, along with the submarine and a couple of other vessels. To the east, beyond the harbour wall, the smooth water of the Lethe, here almost half a mile wide, flowed on round the northern end of the rocky island on which Amizad was built. Looking in that direction, the forest was in the distance, the far shore, another place entirely. But just to the south of the town, Ben knew from the little town map that was provided in his room, it came right up to the rock itself, and you could simply walk straight out into it.

On a bench in the middle of the quay, he spotted Hyacinth, sketching in charcoal in a large pad.

‘Good morning. Drawing already?’

‘Hello there, Mr Policeman. Yes, it’s a nice way to start the day.’

He sat on the bench beside her. ‘I’m not really a policeman, you know.’

He wondered immediately why he’d said it, for he’d always despised people in authority who tried to wriggle out of the role they themselves had chosen to play. And Hyacinth seemed to feel the same because she frowned and said nothing at all, still scratching away at a detail of the water at the southern edge of the harbour.

‘Well, I am a policeman, of course I am,’ he corrected himself, ‘and very happy to be one. What I meant was that it wasn’t my life’s ambition. I have other interests. I considered other careers. Like many people, I studied for a degree and then looked around for something I could do, and this just happened to come up.’

She laughed. ‘Well, you seem like a policeman to me. I saw you that way even before you told me what you did.’ She glanced down at the drawing she’d been working on. ‘I’ll tell you what. If you’ve got ten minutes, I’ll draw you.’

Well, why not? Ben thought. He settled into a more sustainable pose, and she flipped over a page and began to draw again. ‘So what have you got on today, Ben?’

‘Nothing until eleven, when I’ve got a meeting with the police chief here and the Head Administrator.’

‘Da Ponte and Tiler. Ha.’ She scratched away with her charcoal, making a series of long curves. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘You know them?’

‘I’ve met them a few times. This is their world. They’ve been here a long time. Everyone has to develop their own way of coping with the Delta if they’re here for more than a few months, and they’ve both learnt to manage by keeping very very still.’ She paused, held the pad further away from herself to see the effect.

‘I’ve got to admit,’ he said, ‘that my understanding of this place is so limited that I do wonder what a meeting’s going to achieve.’

‘Well, cancel it, then,’ she said, resuming her scratching. ‘They won’t mind. In fact, I’m sure they’d rather you cancelled it altogether. There’s a call box just over there, look. Dial one for Administration. Leave a message. Then I suggest you go out into the forest. Meet some Mundinos. And hopefully a duende or two. I promise you, until that’s happened, you’ll have no idea at all what you’re talking about.’

‘Because of this disturbing effect they’re supposed to have?’

She was taking another pause, holding out her picture and looking back and forth with sharp critical eyes between the picture and his face. ‘“Supposed to have”,’ she repeated. ‘Ha! There really are things you need to experience before you do anything else.’ She made a mark, considered it, rubbed at it with her finger. ‘Oh and by the way,’ she said, ‘everyone here knows that you’re here about the duende killings, so you can probably afford to relax that whole “need to know” thing.’ She glanced at him, scratched away at the paper, glanced at him again. ‘Tough assignment. How to stop people you know nothing about from killing a creature you’ve never encountered.’

‘That’s about it, I’m afraid,’ he said, thinking he’d take her advice and put the meeting off for a day.

They sat in silence for a while, him looking southwards along the quay, her glancing back and forth between his face and her page, sketching, pausing, sketching again. It was an odd thing to have his face examined quite so closely, simply as a physical object.

‘Oh look,’ he said presently. ‘There’s Jael and Rico.’ The two of them had arrived and sat down four benches away. They had cakes of some kind in a paper bag. Rico had his guitar. He stretched out his arms and his long thin legs, graceful and fluent as a cat, and as he did so he glanced across at Ben and winked. Ben looked away uneasily.

‘Yeah?’ Hyacinth adjusted some detail in her drawing and didn’t look round. ‘Keep your head still, please. You’ve moved.’

‘They’re a strange pair.’

‘Sure are.’

‘Just a couple of drug-addled hippies, I suppose.’

‘Bit more than that.’ Hyacinth opened a box and selected a finer piece of charcoal. ‘Jael’s work was once going to be the next big thing in science. Jael Tarn. Have you not heard of her?’

‘Do you know what, I think I have. I think I read something a few years ago. It’s just that …’

‘I know. You don’t expect to see a famous scientist acting like she does. She used to work on the interface between biology, subatomic physics and psychology. It was very original stuff. But she came down here and chucked it all in. Decided it was beside the point.’

‘And Rico?’

She shrugged. ‘He is just a drug-addled hippy, as far as I can tell. Can’t say I get what she sees in him, but it seems he’s useful to her.’ She paused, held the picture at arm’s length again, nodded. ‘Anyway, here you are, Ben. I’m done. What do you think?’

She held up the pad and there he was, a little sterner in the face than he would prefer to see himself, a little more single-minded in the eyes, but she’d absolutely got those taut muscles in his cheeks and jaw, whose tension he could feel from inside, like steel cables. He was, unmistakably, a policeman.

The phone box was a British one, except that it was painted in pale United Nations blue and had been adapted for the American coins that were used in the Delta Protectorate. Ben put a dime in the slot, phoned in a message postponing the meeting, then headed off southwards through the town, thinking to walk out into the forest. There were a few more people on the streets now, about half of them local Mundinos as far as he could tell, and half international visitors like himself. He passed another café with four or five customers inside, and a butcher’s shop, and a small, dark ‘International Book Store’. In a shop called Fantini’s, which was also a diner of sorts, he bought himself a French loaf, a bottle of lemonade and some cooked chicken.

‘Obrigada, senhora,’ he said to Mrs Fantini, trying out the Portuguese he’d been mugging up on since he took his post.

‘De nada,’ she told him, with a smile that struck him as sly, though not unfriendly. On the wall behind her a miniature Iya hung from a nail, watching Ben blankly with her little stone eyes.

Almost at the end of the town (it was only a dozen streets wide), there was a little place with a prettily painted shopfront that sold ceramic ornaments. Ben was surprised by this – was there really a market for such things in Amizad? – and, out of curiosity, stepped inside. There was a shelf of quaint Mundino characters in traditional dress, and a row of ceramic clock towers – the little town’s Eiffel Tower – but what caught his eye were the figurines of duendes in various sizes. At this point, he’d still only seen duendes in photographs – and very blurry ones at that, for the creatures didn’t photograph well for reasons not yet understood – but nevertheless he was startled by the way that they were presented here, with vulnerable, almost beseeching eyes, and hands stretched out as if offering friendship. He was turning one over in his hand when the owner of the shop came out of a back room where she’d been working, drying her hands on a piece of rag.

‘That’s ten dollars if you’d like it,’ she said, and then, ‘You must be the new policeman. How do you do? My name is Justine.’

He shook her hand. She was a Frenchwoman, a few years older than himself, quite tall and thin, with large eyes and delicate features, and somehow fragile, like her own creations. She wore green school sandals and had her hair in a single long plait that hung most of the way down her back.

‘From what I’ve read about duendes,’ he said, ‘I never thought I’d see a cute one in a gift shop.’ He realized at once that he’d said the wrong thing. She wasn’t a confident enough person to be angry, but instead she visibly shrivelled. And Ben understood that, in her mind, this was not a gift shop, and that what he had assumed to be a sentimental and formulaic souvenir was to her a work of art, an expression of what she wanted to think of as her deepest or truest self. ‘Beautifully made,’ he added hastily. ‘And how amazing that each one is different.’

She rallied a little. ‘I try to bring out the life in them. I try to show that these creatures too are children of the same universe as ourselves.’ Her eyes moistened slightly. ‘The Mundinos butcher them in their thousands, you know. I do hope you’re going to be able to help them. The poor things can’t speak for themselves, so I make these little figures to do it for them.’

‘That’s … that’s very commendable. I’ll certainly buy one. But I’m going for a walk now, so perhaps you could keep it for me until my return.’

‘With pleasure. Where will you walk?’

‘I thought I’d go into the forest.’

She looked startled. ‘On your own, on foot?’

‘That’s right.’ He jiggled the model duende in his hand. ‘Who knows, I might find one of these chaps for real.’

Soon after Justine’s shop, the road, which had hitherto followed the waterfront, curved inland to avoid a small rocky outcrop that marked the end of the town and of the stretch of the River Lethe that came right up to Amizad. Having avoided this lump of rock – it was the core of a volcanic side vent – the road continued along the edge of the much larger Rock which was the island on which Amizad stood. But here there was no town and no Lethe. To Ben’s right, in place of houses and roads, a waste of stone and earth, apparently completely bare of vegetation, rose up to the extinct volcanos that formed the crest of the island. Several research stations were visible near the top, along with the aerials and parabolic dishes that were busy measuring the perturbations in space and time that set the Delta apart from the rest of the planet. And to his left, where the river had been, there was now the forest, abutting directly on to the rock. He was right next to it at last. There were spiral magenta leaves above his head, white helices dangling down within his reach, opening their lovely pink bells.

A hundred yards further along the road he came to a track that headed straight out into the trees. He hesitated, feeling suddenly very nervous. But he knew there were no real dangers in the forest – no carnivorous animals, no venomous insects or snakes – and besides, the physical sensation of fear seemed very close indeed to the feeling of desire: so close, in fact, that it was hard to distinguish the one from the other. As he took his first step off the Rock and on to the forest track, he felt like a young boy on the way to his first sexual encounter.

The track was made of living wood. Feet and wheels going back and forth had worn through the thin layer of compost and down to the matrix of entangled roots beneath, polishing the roots themselves until they were shining and smooth. He stood there for a few seconds, just inside the threshold, and then began to walk, under those big magenta trees with their countless spirals, until the Rock was out of sight. In the warm, moist air, the aroma was almost overpowering – caramel and lilies, sweet and bitter, along with that other scent that had no name – and the whole place was extraordinarily quiet. No birdsong, no hum of insects, only sometimes the faint groaning and creaking from the wood itself that he’d listened to in his nights on the boat. Away through the trees, patches of sunlight revealed ponds, pools and channels, each one silent and alone, or so they appeared, though in reality all of them were simply openings into one continuous sea.

The track crossed a channel on a rough wooden bridge. Pinkish underwater weeds undulated gently in the slow northward flow towards the main channel of the Lethe, each a kind of necklace of bead-like, spiral-bearing nodules with only a superficial resemblance to plants in the world outside. According to the briefing notes that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• The Corpse Servants
• I. The Policeman
• II. The Anthropologist
• III. The Policeman
• IV. The Potter
• V. The Policeman
• VI. The Anthropologist
• VII. The Policeman
• VIII. The Oilman
• IX. The Policeman
• X. The Anthropologist
• XI. The Policeman
• XII. The Anthropologist
• XIII. The Policeman
• XIV. The Anthropologist
• XV. The Policeman
• XVI. The Potter
• XVII. The Policeman
• XVIII. The Potter
• Acknowledgements