Beast by Peter Benchley
The reporter stared at the flashing light on his telephone as he hurried to pull a notepad from his desk drawer, and blessed his luck. He had been trying to find this woman for an hour, ever since he had heard the first reports on the newsroom’s police-band radio, but Harbour Radio had refused to give him her name.
This story could be his ticket out of the trenches, his passport to the big time. He had spent the past three years writing on numbing topics like the fish-trap controversy and the rise in import duties, and he had begun to despair that he’d never get off this godforsaken rock. The problem with Bermuda was that nothing ever happened here, at least nothing of interest to the wire services or the news magazines or the television networks.
But this was different. Deaths at sea, especially deaths under mysterious circumstances, were dynamite. If he could play up the mystery, maybe impose a Bermuda Triangle slant on it, he might catch the eye of the AP or the Cleveland Plain Dealer or, dream of dreams, The New York Times.
He had about given up on the woman and was on his way out the door to go to Somerset, to wait for Whip Darling, when the switchboard operator had relayed the call.
He pushed the flashing button and said, “Brendan Eve, Mrs. Outerbridge. Thank you for calling.”
He listened for a few minutes, then said, “You’re sure it didn’t explode?”
Again she talked, and again he listened. Lord, but the woman could talk! By the time she had finished, he saw that he had scribbled four pages of notes. He could write a treatise on the history of humpback whales.
But there had been nuggets of value in the woman’s monologue. He noticed that there was one phrase he had written down several times, and he underlined it: “sea monster.”
PART TWO
15
DOCTOR HERBERT TALLEY hunched his shoulders and shielded his face against the wind, a roaring northeaster that drove salt water off the ocean and blended it with rain, creating a brackish spray that burned leaves brown. He stepped in a puddle and felt icy water slop over his shoe tops and seep between his toes.
It might as well be winter. The only difference between summer and winter in Nova Scotia was that by winter all the leaves had been blown away.
He crossed the quadrangle, stopped at Commons to pick up his mail and climbed the stairs to his tiny office. He was winded by the exertion, which annoyed, but didn’t surprise, him. He wasn’t getting enough exercise. He wasn’t getting any exercise. The weather had been so vile for so long that he hadn’t been able to swim or jog. He had taken pride in being a young fifty, but he was beginning to feel like an old fifty-one.
He vowed to start exercising tomorrow, even in a whole gale. He had to. To go to flab would be to admit defeat, to accept the loss of his dreams, to resign himself to whiling away his days as a teacher. Some might say that academia was the graveyard of science, but Herbert Talley wasn’t ready to be buried just yet.
Days like today didn’t help. A grand total of six students had showed up for his lecture on cephalopods: six stuporous summer-school students, misfits who had been denied their diplomas until they passed their science requirement. He had done his best to infuse them with his enthusiasm. He was among the world’s leading experts on cephalopods, and he found it incredible that they couldn’t share his appreciation of the wondrous head-foots. Perhaps the fault lay in him. He was an impatient teacher, who preferred showing to instructing, doing to telling. On field trips and expeditions he was a wizard. But there weren’t any more expeditions, not with the economy of the Western world about to implode.
Talley’s office had room for a desk and a desk chair, a lounge chair and reading lamp, a bookcase and a table for his radio. One wall was taken up with a National Geographic map of the world, which Talley had dotted with pushpins representing events in malacology: expeditions of which he was keeping track, sightings of rare species, depredations by pollution and cyclical calamities like red tides and toxic algae blooms, which could be natural or man-made. The other walls contained his framed degrees, awards, citations and photographs of the celebrities of his field: octopus and squid and oysters and clams and conchs and cowries and chambered nautiluses.
Talley hung his hat and raincoat on the back of the door, turned on the radio, plugged in the electric kettle for water for tea and sat with his airmail copy of The Boston Globe, the only newspaper he had access to that recognized the existence of issues other than fishing and petty crime.
There was no news, really, at least nothing to excite an aging malacologist stuck in the wilds of Nova Scotia. Everything was more of the same.
Lulled by Bruno Walter’s soothing rendition of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and by the patter of rain and the whisper of wind, warmed by his tea, Talley struggled to stay awake.
Suddenly his eyes snapped open. A phrase—one phrase out of all the thousands of words on the enormous page in his lap—had infiltrated his doziness and imprinted itself on his mind. It had awoken him like an alarm.
Sea monster.
What about it? What sea monster?
He scanned the page, couldn’t find it, ran down each column top to bottom, and then … there it was, a tiny item on the bottom of the page, a filler, what was called boilerplate.
THREE DIE AT SEA
Bermuda (AP)—Three persons died yesterday when their boat sank from unknown causes off the shore of this island colony in the Atlantic Ocean. The victims included the two children of media magnate Osborn Manning.
There was no evidence of explosion or fire, and some local residents speculated that the boat had been struck by lightning, though no electrical storms had been reported in the area.
Others, recalling the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, blamed the incident on a sea monster. The only clues noted by police were strange marks on wooden planks and an odor of ammonia in some of the debris.
Talley held his breath. He read the item again, and again. He rose from his chair and went to the wall map. His pushpins were color-coded, and he searched for red ones. There were only two, both off Newfoundland, both marked with reference dates from the early 1960s. Off Bermuda there was nothing.
Until now.
Obviously, the reporter hadn’t known what he was writing about. He had gathered facts and lumped them together, not realizing that he was inadvertently including the key to the puzzle.
Ammonia. Ammonia was the key. Talley felt a thrill of discovery, as if he had suddenly stumbled upon a new species.
This species wasn’t new, however; it was Talley’s old nemesis, his quarry, a creature he had spent a large part of his professional life seeking, a creature he had written books about.
He tore the item from the paper and read it again. “Can it be?” he said aloud. “Merciful God, please let it be. After all these years. And, it’s time.”
It was true, it had to be. There was nothing else it could be. And it was only a thousand miles away, a couple of hours away by air, waiting for him.
But as quickly as he had become elated, he was overcome by gloom. He had to get to Bermuda, but how? He must mount a search, a proper scientific search, but how would he pay for it? The university was funding nothing these days; grant money had vanished. He had no cash of his own, and no family to borrow from.
He had a vision of himself as a mountain climber, with the summit of his aspirations suddenly appearing through a break in the clouds. He would have to struggle to reach it, but struggle he would.
He had to. If he missed this chance, he would be acknowledging that he was the most contemptible of academic frauds, a reciter of other people’s data, an amalgamator of other people’s theories.
The solution was simple enough: money, the world was full of money. How could he get some of it?
From the radio came the strains of music he knew but couldn’t name, a lilting melody, a song, haunting and sad but somehow hopeful too. What was it? The blank in his memory annoyed him, so he pushed from his mind all thoughts of money and concentrated on identifying the
The song ended, there was a brief pause, and then another song began—equally haunting, equally hopeful—and Talley knew what it was: Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the song cycle about the death of children. A nice irony, Talley thought, that from the most ghastly of tragedies could come a wondrous masterpiece. It would take a spiritual giant to create beauty out of the death of children.
Children …
He stopped breathing.
There it was. His answer.
He took the newspaper clipping from his pocket and smoothed it on the desk before him. Manning, he read … “media magnate Osborn Manning.”
He picked up the telephone and asked the operator for Directory Assistance for New York City.
Osborn Manning sat in his office and tried to focus on a report from one of his vice presidents. The news was good. With the economy heading for the dumper, people weren’t willing to pay seven dollars for a movie or fifty for the theater, weren’t taking Sunday drives or visiting amusement parks. They were opting for cheap entertainment, his entertainment, cable television. Subscriptions were up across the country, and his people had been able to buy half a dozen new franchises at distress prices, from operators who couldn’t keep up with their bank debt. Manning had no bank debt. He had seen the troubles coming, and had concluded that in the nineties, cash would be king. He had sold off most of his marginal companies in late ‘88, at the top of the market, and now he had more cash than many emerging nations.
So what? Would cash bring back his kids? Would cash make his wife whole? He hadn’t known how much his family mattered to him, until he lost it. Could cash restore a family?
Cash couldn’t even buy him revenge, and revenge was one thing he craved, as if it could help expiate his sin of being a distant, almost an absentee, father. In his private, unspoken yearnings, he wished his children had been murdered by some hophead. Then he could have killed the hophead himself, or hired someone to do it.
But he didn’t even have the luxury of imagining revenge, for he had no idea what had killed his children. No one knew. Freak accident. Terribly sorry. Pain gnawed at his stomach, a spasm flashed from just below his rib cage down into his bowels. Maybe he was getting an ulcer. Good, he thought. He deserved it.
He tossed the report aside, leaned back in his chair and looked out the window at the sprawl of Central Park. The late-day sun was glittering gold off the windows on Fifth Avenue. It was a view he loved, or, used to love. He didn’t care anymore.
The intercom buzzed on his desk. He spun around and punched a button and said, “Dammit, Helen, I told you I—”
“Mr. Manning … it’s about the children.”
“What about them?” And then, to see what the words felt like in his mouth, he added, “They’re dead.”
There was a pause, and in his mind’s eye Manning saw his secretary swallow.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “But there’s this Canadian scientist on the phone.”
“Who?”
“A man who says he knows what killed the children.”
Manning suddenly felt cold. He couldn’t speak. “Mr. Manning … ?”
He reached for the phone, and he saw that his hand was shaking.
16
THEY HAD RESTED, mother and calf, on the surface of the sea with the others in the small pod, since the sun had lowered into the western sky and the moon had appeared as a pale wafer in the east.
It was a daily gathering, fulfilling a need for socialization. No matter where they were, no matter how dispersed during the day, as night began to fall the pod came together, not to feed, not to breed, but to experience the comfort of community.
In times past, long ago but still within the memory of the eldest of the pod, there had been many more of them. There was no questioning, for these whales with the largest brains on earth did not question, they accepted. They accepted their smaller numbers, would accept the inevitable further shrinkage, would accept even when the pod was perhaps reduced to two or three.
But these sophisticated brains, unique among animals, did recognize loss, did know sadness, did, in their way, feel. And accept though they might, they also lamented.
Now, as darkness fell, the pod disbanded. In ones and twos and threes they moved slowly apart and drew breaths through the tops of their heads, a chorus of hollow sighs; they filled their enormous lungs and dove into the darkness. Instinct drove them north, and north they would go, until months from now the planet’s rhythms shifted and sent them south again.
Mother and calf dove as one; only a few months ago, this would have been impossible. When the calf was younger, its lungs were still developing, and they had lacked the capacity to sustain an hour-long dive into the deep. But now the calf was two years old, had grown to twenty-five feet long and more than twenty tons of weight. The teeth in its lower jaw had erupted into pointed cones efficient for gripping and scooping. The calf had ceased to nurse and now it fed on live prey.
As they dove in the black water, propelling themselves with powerful sweeps of their horizontal tails, from their blunt foreheads they emitted the pings and clicks of sonar impulses that, on return, would identify prey.
The creature hung in the dark, doing nothing, anticipating nothing, fearing nothing, letting itself be carried by the current. Its arms and whips floated loose, undulating like snakes; its fins barely moved, yet kept it stable.
Suddenly it was struck a blow, and another, and what passed for hearing in the creature registered a sharp and penetrating ping. Its arms withdrew, its whips coiled and cocked.
Its enemy was coming.
The sonar return was unmistakable: prey. The mother thrust downward with her tail, accelerating, pulling away from her calf as she drove herself ever deeper.
The calf strove to keep up, and with its striving—though as yet it had no sense of this, felt no urgency—it was consuming oxygen too fast.
Though the prey was already located and had made no effort to escape, the mother’s brain fired sonar missiles again and again, for it had determined that this was to be the calf’s first mature kill. The prey was large and must be stunned by sonar hammers before the calf could set upon it.
Besieged, the creature recoiled. Chemical triggers fired, nourishing the flesh, galvanizing it and streaking it with luminescence. As if in contradiction of the color display, other reflexes voided a sac within the body cavity, flushing a cloud of black ink into the black water.
Blows struck it again and again, pounding the flesh, confusing the small brain.
Defense impulse changed to attack impulse. It turned to fight.
As the mother closed in on the prey, she slowed, permitting the calf to draw even, then to pass her. She unleashed a final burst of sonar blows, then swerved and began to circle the prey.
The calf plunged downward, excited by the prospect of the kill, impelled by a million years of imprinting.
It opened its mouth.
The creature felt the pressure wave, was driven backward by it. The enemy was upon it.
It lashed out with its whips. They flailed blindly, then found flesh, hard and slick. Automatically they surrounded it and their circles fastened to it and their hooks dug in.
The muscles in the whips tightened, drawing the enemy to the creature and the creature to the enemy, like two boxers in a clinch.
The calf closed its mouth on … nothing. It was perplexed. Something was wrong. It felt pressure behind its head, confining it, slowing its movement.
It struggled, pumping with its tail, corkscrewing, frantic to rid itself of whatever was holding it down.
Now its lungs began to send out signals of need.
The mother circled, alarmed, sensing danger to her calf but incapable of helping it. She knew aggression, she knew defense, but in the programming of her brain there was no code for response to a threat to another, even to her own offspring. She made noises—high-pitched, desperate and futile.
The creature held on, anchored to its enemy. The
Though here in the absence of light there were no colors, the chemicals in the body of the beast changed their composition from defense to attack.
The more its enemy struggled to rise, the more the creature drew water into its body and expelled it through the funnel beneath its belly, forcing itself and its enemy down into the abyss.
The calf was drowning. Deprived of oxygen, the musculature in its tissue shut down bit by bit. An unknown agony coursed through its lungs. Its brain began to die.
It stopped struggling.
The creature felt its enemy stop struggling and begin to sink. Though it still clutched the flesh, gradually the creature released the tension and let itself fall with its kill, slowly spiraling.
The whips tore away a chunk of blubber and fed it to the arms, which passed it back to the snapping protuberant beak.
The mother, circling, followed her calf with sonar pings. She sent clicks andwhistles of distress, a bleat of helpless despair.
At last her lungs, too, were exhausted, and, with a final sonic burst, she thrust up toward the life-giving air above.
17
MARCUS SHARP SAT on the beach and wished he were somewhere else. He couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to a beach, probably not since the times with Karen. He didn’t like beaches much; he didn’t like sitting on sand and watching water while his skin fried in the tropical sun. A misguided impulse, born of desperate frustration, had led him to jump on his motorbike and drive the fifteen miles from the base to Horseshoe Bay.