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.I want to see what you are made of, what you are behindall your faces.""Why?""Because," she said softly, "you came into my drawing for a reason, and you haven't told me whatit is.All you've given me is what I've read about, what I've drawn."He was silent again; nothing of the smile lingered."It costs," he warned her."More than you canimagine.It may cost you your heart."She held his eyes."I'll pay it," she said recklessly, not sure any longer what her heart was worth inthe sea.He shook off her net and rose."Come."Jonah stood in a snowfall of plankton.He assumed it was plankton, vaguely recalling pictures in Megan's books.Microscopic plants andanimals with intricate, transparent structures: They looked like lilies, or space stations, or roulettewheels radiating strands of light.Alive they floated on the waves; dead they drifted down until� theywere eaten, or until they reached the sea bottom.These were drifting, but either he had shrunk orthey were huge as cars.Some had legs, some had chambered shells, some carried a Catherine wheelof filaments.They bounced down around Jonah, stirring up storms of sand and mud.Caught in anopen ring between the tower and the ships and piles of debris, he dodged them wildly.Thereseemed no end to the fall.He crawled finally beneath what looked like an egg, heaving one bulky,liquid side up, as if he were trying to lift a water bed.Whatever had been growing in it was dead,chewed apart by something dark and cloying inside. After a long time the drift came to an end.He crawled out.The crabs were beginning to moveamong the plankton; their great claws mowed a ragged path through it.Jonah, finding it easier tododge them, shifted to let them pass, then followed after them.Others cam�e up behind him,surprising him, but they seemed uninterested.Withdrawing their eyestalks, clicking claws at him,they scuttled away sideways.He moved among them, barely noticing their cleanup operation, onlythat they were clearing his way to the tower, which always, he noticed, was farther than it looked, asif perspective changed constantly in that fluid world.He was working his way toward it patientlywhen the water became very dark.All around him the scavengers began to scatter, crawling over one another in their haste.Jonah,staring upward, found the night falling into the sea.He clambered over the scavengers, sliding ontheir slick shells, riding them until they bumped him off.Finally the darkness hit.A solid wave ofsan#d roiled over him, blinding him, throwing him down, nearly burying him.Sounds too loud tohear reverberated through him.The sand kept coming, churned up, throwing him when he tried tostand.Something else sagged over him.Trying to flee the sandstorm, he tangled in it and fell.Struggling, he only drew it more tightly around him.A net, he realized finally, as cord pulled across his face.He was caught in a net along with somewrithing, bellowing sea animal who was flailing on top of layers of crushed crab and monstrousplankton.He could see little in the gritty water, but he guessed from the sound and the fury that hewas caught in a net with one of the great whales.He clung to the net to keep it from cutting into hisface, and rode out the storm until the wild thrashing eased a little." Trying to grope his way out, hehit something sharp, hard, at his back.He felt along it, recognized it finally as a shard of squashedcrab shell.He loosened it, and, bringing his arm up as far as he could in the tight embrace of the net,he began to saw himself free.By the time he finished, the whale only shook itself from time to time, thrashed a fluke, stirred upsand; he escaped while the sand was settling.He had to stumble, half-blind, through cloudy water,tripping against busy crabs and decaying plankton, before he saw the tower again.He could make out details by then.The tower walls spiraled with grooves like a narwhal's horn; asingle window glowed, darkly translucent, over an open doorway.Tears stung his eyes at the sight ofthe open door.He caught them, put them in his pocket, as Dory had done.He sat down to rest amoment, gazing at it, hearing the mournful cries of the whale mingling with the mermaid's song.Nothing moved between him and the tower except a strand or three of sea grass.The waste wasempty, littered with broken shell.He rose, pulled onward, tide-drawn, driven, like a turtle to itsisland, a whale to its mating ground, a salmon to the river of its birth.By the time he reached the tower door, he barely knew what he was: a man swallowed by the sea,who had swallowed the sea.The light, sweet voice drew him up winding stairs inlaid with starfish;walking on them, he hardly knew if they were alive or dead.He had no idea, by this time, which hewas, nor did he care, as long as he saw the dark glittering at the top of the stairs, and the long darkhair, and the pale, slender hands reaching out to take him to the peaceful place on the other side ofmystery.He heard a muffled thud; water spiraling up the stairs pushed against him, jostled him up thelast few steps.The door below had shut, he thought, and then reached out to cling to the doorposts atthe end of the stairs as the water began to swirl.Or was it the tower revolving, as if it were caught insome vast whirlpool? It shook him loose, flung him across the little chamber at the top of the tower.He hung against the wall, his back to it, his eyes closed, unable to move in the force of the spin.Hefelt something dragged out of him by the roots, and a hollow where his heart had been.The song had stopped."Jonah."He looked into the center of the maelstrom, int o the mermaid's eyes.On the cliff, the merman disappeared.Then the cliff beneath Megan disappeared.The city below peeled away like wrapping paper; all the human language mer-lion and goatfish left the sea.Megan, losing track of her own shape asthe vater jerked her fourteen ways, pulled hair away from her eyes, looked frantically for Adam.Hewas beside her, in a streak of light.And then he was gone.And then there again, his eyes of waterand light, his skin foam, sand, light.Around her the sea lilies curled into balls, and the giant kelpbowed to the wild currents."What is it?" she cried."What's happening?"He didn't answer.She felt an arm drawing her upward; the rest of him was barely a reflection inthe water.A: school of anchovy darted by, turned molten silver, flashed away the other direction.Akelp tore loose from its mooring, a swirl of leaves and yellow bladders that clung to Megan, laidrubbery leaves against her face.She pushed at it, found a cloud of bubbles where Adam's faceshould have been."Adam?"They broke the surface.He turned to foam then; spindrift shaped him in the wind, then fell backinto the waves.She heard a sound as if the world was being sucked down a drain.She saw it then: the end of the world
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