The Tribes of Atlantis
I cannot adequately describe the range of peculiarities one experiences when working with the Inspectre. Despite being the ghost of a long-dead human being, he is an undisputed genius in the fields of paranormal science and mechanical engineering. His laboratory is quite possibly the most advanced of its kind in any nation, his arsenal of ghost-hunting weapons is ever-expanding, and, as I have already observed, he has constructed an incredible car to speed us to any ghost-related incident in record time.
But I’ve discovered that his genius does not stop there. As I was inspecting his underground lair one afternoon with our new ghost companion Slosh, I stumbled upon a large hangar containing a steam-powered aeroplane and helicopter, and in the next chamber, a coal-powered tugboat with a subterranean outlet to the Thames. It would seem he is quite prepared to handle any supernatural threat, be it on land, sea, or air.
During one particularly strange week in August, the east coast of England had been shaken by a series of tremors. No damage had been done, but Scotland Yard had experienced a flood of calls from citizens who feared that the worst was yet to come. Back at the manor house, the Inspectre, Slosh, and I had been taking a bit of a holiday from paranormal studies due to recent events, and were passing the time doing other things. I had found a book of geology in the Inspectre’s library and was poring over it with the hope of finding some answers to the string of recent earthquakes. Slosh was dozing on the floor, his blue, tadpole-shaped and legless body curled up like a sleeping Labrador, while the Inspectre sat in his armchair reading the afternoon paper. I finally looked up from my book and broke the silence.
“Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Earthquakes in the British Isles? I can’t seem to find anything in this book that could offer an explanation.”
“There is none that I can think of either,” the Inspectre replied. “The closest area of repetitive seismic activity that I can think of is in Iceland. However, there is something curious in this afternoon’s paper that offers a possible, but seemingly outlandish, answer to this riddle.”
He handed me the paper to look at while Slosh, freshly awakened from his nap by our conversing, floated up behind me to look over my shoulder. “In the gossip column, top of the page,” the Inspectre said to us.
I flipped to the gossip column and read the headline: Madame Trevala, renowned psychic, predicts that lost island of Atlantis will rise from the depths on August 17 of this year. “But this is merely a gossip column!” I exclaimed. “We can’t take seriously the words of a superstitious gypsy. Why, she may be mad, or perhaps she made the whole story up for profit!”
“Perhaps so. But you and I have already commented on the peculiarity of getting tremors in such a place as this. And may I remind you that it is our business to take seriously the claims of such people until they can be proven or disproven? In any case, it is a strange but plausible theory as to why earthquakes are occurring in London.”
“But isn’t Atlantis just a fairy tale?” Slosh argued, yawning.
“Perhaps there is more to that tale than we believe. After all, the philosopher Plato described it in such vivid detail that it seemed as though he had been there himself. What do you know of Atlantis, Baker?”
“Only stories from my childhood,” I replied. “Tales we used to read in school. Atlantis was said to be a thriving island kingdom some four thousand years ago, the most magnificent and prosperous civilization of that age.”
“But not perfect,” said the Inspectre. “As I recall, the inhabitants of Atlantis began to lust for wealth and power, and corruption filled the land. After many years the citizens had become so violent and sinful that they stirred the wrath of Poseidon, the sea god, who cursed Atlantis and caused the sea to swallow the island whole. To this day, no one has been able to find any trace of that lost culture, and thus there is no real evidence of its existence.”
“Exactly the point, Inspectre,” I replied. “We can’t bother chasing a rumor, can we?”
“I have been chasing rumors since before you were born, Baker, and let me tell you, I have not been disappointed thus far. In any case, I cannot resist an opportunity to see the kingdom of Atlantis firsthand, even if our efforts do leave us empty-handed. I say our first order of business would be to pinpoint the exact location where Atlantis will rise. Since there is no mention of it in the paper, I would think our best bet would be to locate the epicenter of these recent quakes. I have had instruments in my lab monitoring the tremors since they began. We must start there. To the laboratory, gentlemen!”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the Inspectre’s underground facility, poring over the earthquake data he had gathered and pinpointing the quakes’ locations on a large map of the British Isles. Needless to say, we were not disappointed by our results. The Inspectre would look at the date each anomaly occurred, I would read off its location and magnitude, and Slosh would draw a circle on the map where we indicated. We had been working at this for two hours when the Inspectre leapt up from his chair, startling Slosh and me.
“By Jove! Look at the pattern we’ve created!”
We looked at the map. The Inspectre had been reading the dates backwards to me, starting with the most recent and moving forward towards the first recorded incident. Each time Slosh had drawn a circle on the map, the earthquake’s location had moved farther off the coast, like a shockwave. Which, when the first recorded event had occurred, put the epicenter…
“Right here,” the Inspectre exclaimed, pointing to the center circle on the map. “In the North Sea, one hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Scarborough!”
“But wasn’t Atlantis supposed to be in the Mediterranean?” I asked.
“That’s just one theory. Some legends have placed it in the Atlantic Ocean, which bears the lost island’s name, others in the Mediterranean. But as of today, no evidence has been discovered as to its true location, which means it could have been anywhere. Besides, it’s not entirely impossible that an interdimensional cross-rip occurred when Atlantis sank, and that it has been existing in another universe all this time.”
“I never understand you when you talk that way,” Slosh muttered.
“Well, that’s just an unlikely theory of mine,” the Inspectre replied. “It’s far more likely to have been under the North Sea all along. In any case, now that we are convinced of its location, let us go and investigate the floor of the North Sea, shall we?”
“And how are we to do that?” I asked.
“Surely the two of you know from your recent snooping about in my lab that I have a coal-powered tugboat named Spectre Gamma ready and waiting for just such occasions as this. Like Spectre Alpha, it too is equipped with lights and sirens, as well as numerous other pieces of spook-hunting equipment. I think it will do nicely for this case. Call the chief at Scotland Yard and tell him that we are taking a leave of absence from London to investigate a supernatural disturbance near Scarborough and will be back shortly.”
“Will we be back shortly?” Slosh asked nervously.
“That depends on what we find out there. When you’ve finished informing the chief of our whereabouts, grab your weapons from the armory and meet me in the tugboat dock downstairs. Oh, and Slosh? I want you to use the big ectopistol from now on. I have a feeling you’ll need it.”
The call to the station chief went fairly well, though I had a hard time explaining the reason for our absence. I simply concluded the call by saying that the Inspectre was usually right about these things and hung up the phone. I then trudged down the dimly lit staircase into the Inspectre’s self-made underworld, where I met up with him and Slosh at the subterranean boat dock. When the three of us were aboard, the Inspectre took his place at the helm while Slosh turned over the engine. With a blast of coal smoke from the stack, we surged down the underground outlet and into the Thames, setting a course for the North Sea beyond.
We made good time, speeding out of the Thames into open waters in the course of that afternoon. The Spectre Gammawas as remarkably fast as the Inspectre’s car, and we maintained at least forty knots as we headed towards the coordinates where we believed Atlantis would rise. We stopped once in Skegness so I could buy food, the two ghosts requiring no nourishment at all. The three of us spent the night in the tugboat’s hold, sleeping on blankets on the floor, and the next morning, after restocking our coal supply, we were off again.
It was late afternoon as we approached our destination, and a thick, dark fog had rolled in over the North Sea. Behind the wheel of the ship, the Inspectre checked and rechecked his instruments for any spike in ectomagnetic energy, while Slosh and I stood on the bow with our binoculars trained on the sea in front of us, ever vigilant for signs of peculiarity. The Inspectre slowed the tug to a relative crawl and we waited one hour, then two.
“Inspectre, are you sure we’re at the right coordinates?” Slosh finally asked a little impatiently.
“Without a doubt.”
“Then are you sure we haven’t arrived too early?”
“If we have, Atlantis will show up sooner or later. All the data gathered by my instruments indicate we are right on top of the lost island’s exact position. We must simply be patient, that’s all.”
“Perhaps we made a mistake, Inspectre,” I said with some degree of resignation. “Perhaps the earthquakes were the result of something more natural and Atlantis really is just a legend.”
“If Atlantis is a legend, than I’m no ghost at all,” the Inspectre replied, hardening his gaze on the sea.
Slosh gave him a bewildered look, then returned to his binoculars. “Well, Baker and I have been peering at nothing but water for damn near three hours. We’re tired and cranky, and I just don’t see any trace of…”
Slosh’s voice trailed off into silence. Puzzled, the Inspectre and I turned to look at him. His mouth was open in a gape and his eyes were glued to his binoculars. Then we all heard it: a slow, distant rumbling coming from the direction Slosh was facing, just off the bow. Before we could even turn around to see what he was looking at, a shadow fell over the Spectre Gamma. Whirling around, we caught a glimpse of something huge and dark rising out of the water, fog swirling around it. It was like a mountain, but as the fog cleared we could clearly see buildings of a Greco-Roman design clustered around it.
The Inspectre turned to us and smiled smugly, as if to say, “What did I tell you?” Needless to say, we apologized on the spot. “No need for that,” the Inspectre told us, still smiling, “The only thing we need do now is explore the lost island. Sit tight while I bring us in to the shore.”
He gunned the engine and a cloud of smoke billowed from the stack as we drew nearer to the ghostly landmass. We had been farther away from it than any of us had realized, for the closer we came, the more and more colossal this island appeared to be. More buildings had emerged from the sea by now, and torrents of saltwater cascaded off cliffs and outcroppings like waterfalls in a rainforest. The Inspectre found a small bay near the western side of the island, and Slosh and I heaved the anchor over the side. Already, we could hear the catcalls of Atlantean ghosts echoing over the hills and bluffs.
“I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you that I’ve made some modifications to your weapons,” the Inspectre said to us. “They’re now equipped with vortex capture beams just like mine. Each of you is now capable of catching ghosts on your own.”
“Good to see you’re trusting us more and more,” I laughed.
The Inspectre smiled. “All the same, let’s try not to get separated while we’re here. We don’t know for sure what we’re dealing with yet. But as a precaution I want each of you to wear one of these.” He passed us a pair of small devices shaped like phonograph horns with leather straps around them. “These are ghost communicators. They emit a radio signal that will allow us to remotely communicate with each other should we get lost. They can also emit a tracking signal so we can find each other.”
Strapping the devices to our belts as instructed, we left the Spectre Gamma near the bay and climbed ashore. I still remember how I felt being the first mortal to set foot on Atlantis in so many thousands of years; it was a mixture of exhilaration and fear if I recall correctly. “What do we do now that we’re here?” I heard Slosh ask.
“I want to have a look at that building in particular,” the Inspectre replied, pointing at a very large building on a distant mountaintop. “That building is without a doubt the Temple of Poseidon. Look, you can see his gilded statue over the entrance. I have a strong premonition that that is where we will discover the secret of this lost island; more specifically, why it has suddenly risen from its watery grave after an absence of four thousand years. However, I also suspect that we will need to fight our way there. If there is something significant inside that temple, you can be sure that the Atlantean spirits will do everything in their power to prevent us from reaching it.”
He glanced through his binoculars at the temple for a minute or two. “I see there is a broad road leading through the heart of the city directly to the temple of Poseidon! That must be the island’s main road. That’s the one we shall take.”
I looked up and down the main road through my own set of binoculars. “There seem to be plenty of places for malevolent ghosts to hide along the roadside as well. Any one of those buildings lining the main street could be a staging area for an ambush.”
“True,” sighed the Inspectre, “but it’s still the fastest way there, and it’s broad enough to give us plenty of room to put up a fight if the natives do decide to get nasty.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Slosh answered as he charged up his ectogun. “The faster we get to that temple, the faster we can leave this godforsaken rock.”
The main road started at the edge of the beach next to a small cluster of stone dwellings, and we took it up there. The Inspectre checked his psychometer and the needle immediately shot up to the yellow level. “This island is full of EM energy, even this far from the heart of the city. Heat up your weapons,” he instructed. One by one, our ectoguns hummed to life, poised and ready for any supernatural attack.
We entered the city limits within a few short minutes. I noticed the psychometer’s needle rise even higher into the orange level, but I don’t think even the Inspectre was paying attention. He and Slosh had their faces pointed towards the buildings as if they were sensing something I wasn’t. But in the next moment I heard it too: sinister whisperings coming from all around, only a few at first.
“You shouldn’t be here,” whispered one of the disembodied voices.
“You should have run away,” said another.
When Slosh nudged me and pointed towards one of the buildings, I looked up and saw it too. A face with a pinkish aura and red eyes was peeking around a corner at us. “There are two more on this side too,” said the Inspectre, as if reading our minds. “They think they’re sneaky, don’t they? I’ve an idea, but it’s risky.”
“Any idea will suffice at this point,” I admitted rather timidly.
“Very well then. We’ll spread out and take them one by one. You two,” he said pointing to Slosh and me, “go over there and see if you can split up that pair of ghosts behind that building. I’ll take that lone one on the other side of the street. This will be the first time either of you have captured a rogue ghost, so here’s how to do it: First blast them with your ectorays for at least thirty seconds. That will weaken them sufficiently. Then hit them with the vortex grabber and reel them in using that red button above the trigger. If they struggle, hit them against something solid to weaken them further. Got that?”
Slosh and I nodded. I hated leaving the more knowledgeable Inspectre, but as usual, he was in charge and certainly an excellent judge of character. If he thought Slosh and I were ready for a solo mission, we would just have to take his word for it. Slosh and I quietly crept after the two ghosts who had vanished around the side of the building, while the Inspectre loped off after the one on the other side of the street.
As I had suspected, our spectral antagonists were not there to greet us when we rounded the corner. “Stay alert, Slosh. We’ll take them together,” I whispered to my companion.
“With any luck we’ve frightened them away. Speaking as a ghost, I promise you that if they do come back it will not be to welcome us to their island. Since you’re a human being they’ll probably save their darkest deeds for you, like ripping your head off or, worse, possessing you,” Slosh growled back.
“Will you shut up about that?” I hissed. “We need to keep alert here!”
From across the street there came the unmistakable sound of an ectobeam discharge, followed closely by a ghostly scream, which was suddenly cut short. “Either the Inspectre got his ghost or his ghost got him,” Slosh whispered. “Let’s see if we can do better.”
It got eerily quiet for a few moments after that. Slosh and I crept quietly about, peering around corner after corner, hoping not to find what we were looking for. Then, without warning, a cold wind shot through my hair. Not the kind of cold wind one would expect in late summer, even in the middle of the North Sea. Slosh must have felt it too, for his hand shot to the trigger of his gun. “Baker,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “I think they’re very, very close.” For one fleeting moment, I thought I heard a deep growl resonate from a wall nearby.
I didn’t immediately see what happened next, but Slosh did. I heard a scream that wasn’t his and the sound of his ectogun discharging and whirled around to see him frantically waving a beam of energy about like an American cowboy’s lasso. On the other side of the energy beam was a horrible purple hag-like ghost with the wildest hair I’ve ever seen on a woman (at least I think it was a woman; it’s not always easy to determine the gender of the undead). I didn’t realize I was gaping until Slosh angrily yelled at me to help him, at which I clumsily aimed and fired my weapon. I missed, however, and managed to atomize the head of a large stone lion just behind the ghost.
“Cut her off, Baker! We can’t let her escape!” Slosh cried. “Aim to the left of her and we’ll box her in!” Regaining control of my heavy weapon, I fired again, this time hitting her square in the back. She reeled forward from the impact, globs of her ectoplasm spewing everywhere. “I think we’ve almost got her,” I yelled back at Slosh. “Hit her with one more shot, then switch over to your vortex grabber and reel her in.” Slosh discharged his weapon again, hitting the ghoul right between her red eyes. “Got her!” he cried excitedly. “Switching to vortex grabber!”
As Slosh locked onto our prey with the whirling vortex grabber, his expression suddenly changed to one of horror. “Behind you!” he cried. I turned around just in time to see the second ghost reaching for me, having snuck up on us while we were preoccupied with its companion. “You take that one. I’ll stay on this one,” Slosh ordered.
I swung the barrel of my rifle around and pulled the trigger. This other ghost was considerably larger than the one Slosh was grappling with, and I hit it fairly easily. It roared angrily and swung its bulk from left to right in an effort to escape. But to my credit, I stayed with it and kept the trigger down while counting to thirty, the amount of time the Inspectre had predicted it would take to wear the ghost down. When I reached thirtieth second I engaged the vortex grabber and latched on. The freakish ghoul shrieked and tugged against the force of the grabber so hard I almost lost my foothold. At last I located the red button on the barrel of my rifle and with a flash of light and a loud bang, the ghost was pulled rapidly towards me and disappeared into the neutrino capsule of my gun.
I looked rather nervously down at the brass capsule on the barrel. Much to my relief, the analogue counter on the node registered the presence of one paranormal entity! “Mine put up a bit of a fight too,” Slosh said from behind me. I turned to see him hovering over my shoulder, a look of relief on his face. A quick look at his capsule confirmed that he too had caught his first rogue ghost.
“Doesn’t surprise me for a minute. I knew you two had it in you.” The Inspectre stood a short distance away, leaning against a marble wall and smoking his spectral pipe. “How long have you been standing there?” I demanded of him. “Long enough to enjoy the show,” he replied. “That was quite a bit of ghost-wrangling you two did there. Not bad for your first entrapment.”
“If you were watching us, did you ever think that we might need your help?”
“Certainly not!” the Inspectre scoffed. “You did beautifully. Besides, how else are you going to learn the ins and outs of this business? As the ancient proverb says, ‘Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.’ And now that we’ve all made our catch of the day, let’s get back to the main road and head for the temple, on the double this time.”
The Inspectre, myself, and a much wearier Slosh found ourselves back on the same central road we had been traveling, only this time, the ghosts seemed to be giving us a much wider berth, crouching in the shadows, whispering and never straying very far from their hiding places. “It seems we’ve made quite an impression. Now that they know what we’re capable of, they’ll probably be too frightened to do anything aggressive,” I said aloud.
“Don’t be too sure of it,” the Inspectre replied. “We may indeed have frightened them, but they still outnumber us thousands to one. If we’re not careful, we’ll have the whole island after us. We must exercise extreme caution from now on.”
“Some of us were doing that already,” Slosh muttered.
We kept walking for at least another half hour, and the sun had nearly set by the time we reached the outer perimeter of the temple. We could see the ghosts more clearly in the twilight, their glowing bodies hovering in doorways and back alleys, their luminescent eyes regarding us from rooftops and windows. I could again hear their faint whispers in the chilly wind. “They’re getting closer,” hissed one voice. “They’ve seen too much,” whispered another. “They must not be allowed to enter it.”
I turned to address the Inspectre, who appeared to be deep in thought. “What do they mean, ‘They must not be allowed to enter it?’” I asked him. “Oh, you know people. Always putting restrictions on something around London,” he replied, his mind clearly on something else at the moment.
“I was referring to what the ghosts are saying.”
“Oh, that. They just don’t want us going inside that temple. It probably hides some dark secret of theirs that they don’t want us to find.”
“Well, what if they attack us?”
“Then we must get inside the temple before they do and uncover their secret. But please don’t interrupt me right now, I’m busy working on a theory.”
“What theory?”
“I’m starting to think that I was wrong about Atlantis being under the North Sea for so many thousands of years. Look at this architecture, these statues; they’re all Grecian in design. The empire of Greece may have been powerful once, but their influence never extended this far in their day.”
“So what is your theory?”
“Do you remember what I said sometime earlier about the possibility that Atlantis was caught in an interdimensional cross-rip when it sank? Well, I dismissed that theory at first because it was much easier to believe that Atlantis had been off the British coast all along. But now I believe that the more implausible scenario is exactly what occurred. Mediterranean islands don’t simply pop up a thousand miles north of their original position. If Atlantis did indeed fall into an interdimensional portal when it sank, then in theory it could reassert itself anywhere in this dimension, and that seems to be exactly the case.”
“Well, I certainly couldn’t have come up with a better theory,” Slosh replied. “But we seem to have reached the temple walls, Inspectre. Look.”
The Inspectre and I looked up from our discussion to see that we had indeed reached the massive walls of the Poseidon temple. They were covered in precious gems and engraved with depictions of dolphins and sea monsters. The Inspectre ran his hand over a section of the wall.
“Ordinary limestone bricks held together with mortar. There’s no physical way this can still be standing after four thousand years. Whatever dimension Atlantis has existed in all these years is obviously one where conventional laws of time don’t apply.” He took out his psychometer and scanned the wall’s gateway. “There’s enough concentrated ectomagnetic energy radiating from that temple to sustain a ghost population that could fill Europe! Whatever’s inside there must be overwhelmingly powerful!” he exclaimed.
By this time, Slosh and I noticed that the ghosts that had been trailing us in the shadows during our trek were starting to emerge from their dark hiding places and were moving slowly towards us. Their eyes displayed not malice, but fear, a terror directed not at us, but at whatever lay beyond the temple gates. The Inspectre was still carefully examining the wall in front of us with silent awe.
“Inspectre, I think we should go,” Slosh said in a voice not unlike a whimper.
The Inspectre looked at us, then at the mob of spirits closing in. “Yes, I agree,” he replied. “Here is what we shall do: we shall run as far as the temple doors, then turn and fire our weapons at the ghosts for a few seconds. It should frighten them away and buy us some time, but not much. They will be less frightened this time and come back in even greater numbers. When they flee, we enter the temple and find out what it is they’re so afraid of. Understand?”
Slosh and I nodded, and the three of us backed slowly towards the gate. “On my mark,” the Inspectre whispered, then shouted, “RUN!”
The three of us bolted through the gates and ran like madmen towards the large doors of the temple. The grounds in front of the temple itself were much larger than I had anticipated, requiring us to sprint for nearly a full minute before reaching our destination. Several times I felt the deathly cold of the angry swarm start to wash over me, and I could hear the same voices, louder this time, screeching in the air like steam from a kettle. “Stop them!” they cried. “Seize them! We will split them open and see what color they are on the inside!”
The second we reached the large wooden doors, the Inspectre yelled, “Now!” The three of us whirled around and discharged our weapons, slicing through the crowd of angry spirits as if they were warm butter. Just as the Inspectre had predicted, they screamed in terror and fled blindly in every direction. Some, in their panic, shot straight towards us, only to be hit square in the face with a bolt of energy before managing to get away. Within seconds, the spectral mob had retreated into the city like a wave into the sea, leaving us alone in front of the temple. “Hurry, we must get inside before they regain their composure,” the Inspectre said, pushing open one of the huge doors.
The inside of the temple was a sight to behold. Statues of dolphins and horses, all of them solid gold, adorned the entrance. Similar statues lined either side of a marble walkway leading towards an enormous altar in the center of the temple. The closer we moved towards the altar, the more it became apparent that there was something large and reflective on top of it. Closer still, and I could see that it was a large glass globe, not sitting upon, but hovering just over the altar. And inside the globe I could see…
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “It’s a man!”
“No, Baker,” said the Inspectre. “It’s Poseidon.”
“What, the god of the sea?”
“I’d recognize him anywhere.”
“Your friend is quite right about my identity,” Poseidon’s voiced boomed from the globe, “but I am ignorant of your identities. Two of you are ghosts and one of you is a man. Tell me, have you come to mock me as well?”
“Mock you?” the Inspectre asked.
“Yes,” Poseidon replied. “Ever since the ghosts of this island made a pact with the Titan, Styx, and imprisoned me here, they’ve desecrated my temple, laughing and cursing my name, asking, ‘What has happened to the mighty Poseidon and his magic? Has he lived so long that he has become senile and no longer understands what it means to be a god?’ And alas, they may be right, for as long as I am imprisoned here my magic is useless, as is the curse I placed upon Atlantis.”
“That would explain why Atlantis has risen again. But why would the Atlanteans conspire with a Titan to imprison you?” asked the Inspectre.
“Atlantis was once the most powerful kingdom in the world, and the envy of all other nations. It was for their pride and arrogance that I sealed the fate of the Atlanteans. But it seems that even death could not end their lust for power, and they long to experience the glory of their empire once more. That is why they have returned, to seize the nations of the world as trophies, forcing the citizens of faraway lands to pay tribute to them, as they did in ages past. As long as I am imprisoned in this place, the curse of Atlantis is invalid and I am powerless to stop their madness, since the source of my power, my trident, has been taken from me. It hangs on the wall over there, just beyond my reach.”
The three of us looked over at the far wall of the temple, and sure enough, the trident hung there on a rack, quietly humming with mysterious energies. “I believe we can help you, Poseidon,” the Inspectre said, addressing the imprisoned sea god. “I have yet to encounter a cursed object that my weapons cannot destroy, and your glass prison is no exception. Once you are free, you may reclaim your power and your dominion over these ghosts who have dared to betray you.”
“And what will you ask in return?” Poseidon queried.
Slosh and I opened our mouths, but the Inspectre spoke first. “All my friends and I ask in return is that we be able to return home safely, and that this attempt at world domination will be averted, preferably for good.” He turned to face Slosh and me. “Get ready to fire at the globe, boys. I believe I hear our old friends outside returning from their cowardly flight, and they sound none too happy.”
Sure enough, I could now hear the angry screeching of the Atlantean ghosts approaching the temple, their tones less fearful this time. We raised our weapons. “Fire!” yelled the Inspectre. Hot blue beams of energy burst from the barrels of our ectoguns and collided with the glass bubble, instantly shattering it into a flurry of tiny fragments like snowfall on Christmas morning. Poseidon’s hand shot out, and the trident ripped away from the wall and into his outstretched hand by some ancient magic. Instantly, he was enveloped in a blinding white light and the island began to shake violently.
“Go now, my friends!” Poseidon boomed over the din. “The curse I placed upon Atlantis has been restored, and the entire island is sinking. I will hold it above the water as long as it takes for you to escape, but you must leave now!”
We needed no prompting. We bolted from the temple as it began to crumble, and dashed madly down the central road toward the shore. The ghosts no longer seemed occupied with us, but were now desperately trying to avoid being sucked into the ground by the reactivated curse. “No! It can’t end this way!” they screamed over and over.
I estimate it must have taken us twenty minutes to run the length of the road, and there was Spectre Gamma waiting for us, intact at the shoreline. All around us the screams of the ghosts dwindled and were replaced by the rumblings of the sinking island. The three of us leapt onto the deck of the tugboat and the Inspectre turned over the engine, cranking the throttle wide open and speeding us away just in time to avoid being sucked under the waves by the retreating landmass. As Spectre Gamma sliced through the open waters of the North Sea, Slosh and I stood at the stern, gaping awestruck as the last traces of the kingdom of Atlantis disappeared forever—again.
Two days later, the three of us were lounging companionably in the Inspectre’s sitting room on the outskirts of London. Even the Inspectre, bold as he was, had not brought up the subject of Atlantis since our narrow escape from its clutches and our return to familiar civilization. In the end, it was Slosh who broke the spell of silence to mention the cursed place once more.
“Am I the only one who has a sneaking suspicion that we haven’t seen the last of Atlantis?” he asked.
“You may be,” replied the Inspectre. “I have confidence that Poseidon will be more alert than ever, now that he knows conspiracy doesn’t always end with the death of a nation. Disaster may arrive from other worlds or dimensions, but for now the sea, I feel, is secure. Poseidon has done his work and we have done ours. All that remains is for us to be vigilant, for in my experience, the threat of the paranormal never vanishes for long.”