Read The League of Sharks for Free Online Page A

into shadow. But all around him were portals of green light, just like the one he had come through. Thousands of them. Thousands of doors. A room of doors.
    The doorways weren’t set into walls. They werefree-standing. They were arranged in ordered rows and columns. Junk pulled off his one and a half swim fins and stood up. He walked around the door he had passed through. He was able to view it from three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and it looked the same from all angles. The green hue was deeper in here. It pulsed at regular intervals like a heartbeat.
    Only now did Junk notice that all the doors were pulsing softly, in unison, and if he trained his ear on the sound he could feel a sonorous thrum reverberate through him every ten seconds or so. It entered the soles of his feet and moved upwards. The room felt like it was inside a living organism, a vast whale maybe. The sensation had soporific qualities and Junk found his eyelids growing heavy. He sucked in a sharp bubble of air. It was cold, like air in a meat locker, and it made Junk feel alert.
    He remembered what he was doing here. The creature. Where had he gone? He looked around but there was no sign of him. He listened but couldn’t hear anything other than the low drone of the doors. Now what? Then he noticed footprints. A trail of wet tracks leading away from him. He followed them.
    The tracks moved away to the right for about a hundred metres and then stopped at one of the many doorways. Evidently the creature had gone through. Without hesitation, Junk followed. As the light from the doorway touched his skin, he could feel a tugging sensation as if some invisible force was pulling him in. For a moment he started to pull back, but the force wasgrowing stronger and he was unable to stop himself being drawn in.
    For a second or two Junk felt as if he was moving so quickly that the molecules of his body were being sucked apart, but before he had time to panic they were all slammed back together and he was spat out.
    He found himself on a narrow ledge still in the Room of Doors but much higher up. He was a good fifty metres or more off the ground. He could judge this by the fact that there were twenty or so levels of doors beneath him now, whereas before they had been only above him. He looked down and spotted his air tank, mask and swim fins a long way down. A surge of vertigo-induced dizziness fluttered through him. He groped for a wall but there was nothing to hold on to. The only solid thing was the tiny ledge beneath his feet. It was made of the same cold, hard, metallic green-black substance as the ground level and was about a metre wide. After a moment Junk got his balance. He looked around and saw that the trail of wet footprints carried on to his left. Gingerly he started to follow them, walking sideways to maintain the most secure balance.
    After he had gone thirty metres or so, the footprints started to evaporate and Junk felt a flicker of panic at the prospect of losing his only clue as to the creature’s path. Then he reached two doorways that stood side by side, with only about half a metre’s gap between them. Here the footprints, or the little that was left of them, stopped. The only problem was that it wasn’t clear which of thetwo doors the creature had gone through. The two portals were so close that the shallow film of seawater was in front of both. Junk could see nothing to do but choose one and hope for the best.
    He looked back the way he had come and counted the number of doorways he had passed on the ledge: eighteen. Then he turned and looked down, searching for the first doorway, the one he had initially come through. His empty air tank, mask and discarded swim fins were sitting on its threshold. He counted the doorways he had passed on the ground level: thirty-nine. Now that he felt confident that he knew the way back, he turned to the two doors in front of him and pointed at the one on the left and recited a rhyme from the