Beast by Peter Benchley
29
THE CREATURE’S EYES gathered more and more light; its other senses recorded the increased vibrations in the water. Something was there, not far away, and it was moving.
Its olfactories detected no signs of life, no confirmation of prey. If it had been less hungry, the creature might have been more cautious, might have hung back in the darkness and waited. But its body’s needs were impelling the brain to be reckless, so it continued to move toward the source of the light.
Soon it saw the lights, little pinpoints of brightness piercing the black, and throughout its body it felt the thrumming vibrations emanating from the thing.
Motion meant life; vibrations meant life. And so, although it had yet to perceive the scent of life, it determined that the thing was alive.
It attacked.
3O
THE THING’S NOT down here,” Eddie said. “We’re going up.” He pulled back on the control stick.
Sharp looked at the digital depth readout on the console in front of Eddie. It was calibrated in meters, and as Sharp watched, the numbers changed—ever so slowly, he thought, and he tried to will the numbers to flash faster—from 970 meters to 969. He sighed and massaged his toes, and wondered if they were frostbitten.
Suddenly the capsule jolted and yawed to one side. Sharp was knocked off his knees, and he grabbed for a handhold. The capsule righted itself and continued upward.
“What the hell was that?” Sharp said.
Eddie didn’t answer. He was hunched forward, his shoulders tensed.
Stephanie’s back was pressed against the bulkhead, her hands braced on the deck. “What was it, Eddie?” she said.
“I didn’t see,” Eddie said. “It felt like we hit an air pocket, or like a ship passed overhead.”
“You mean a current?”
Over the speaker Darling’s voice said, “Not a chance. There are no currents down there.” He paused. “Something’s out there.”
As Darling’s words registered with Sharp, he suddenly felt a weight like a sack of rocks in his stomach. Oh God, he thought. Here we go.
He saw that his camera had tumbled across the deck, and now, as he retrieved it and checked its settings and adjusted the focus, he found that his fingers weren’t working very well. They were trembling, and each one seemed to be independent and to defy the messages from his brain. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose onto the lens, and he wiped it away with the tail of his shirt.
He looked over at Stephanie. She had her back to him, and her camera lens was against the porthole. She pressed the release button, and the motor drive fired a dozen frames in a couple of seconds. “Take some pictures, Marcus,” she said over her shoulder.
“Of what?” Sharp said. “I didn’t see anything.”
“The lens is wider than your eye. Maybe it’ll see something.”
Before Sharp could reply, the capsule was jolted again, hard, and it careened to the left. A shadow passed before the lights, dimming them, then disappeared.
“God dammit!” Eddie shouted, and he fought the stick, righting the capsule.
Sharp put his camera to the porthole and pressed the shutter release, advanced the film and shot again.
The capsule was rising again. Sharp looked at the readout: 960 meters, 959, 958 …
31
THE GIANT SQUID rushed through the darkness, seized by paroxysms of frustrated rage. Its whips lashed out, hooks erect, then recoiled and lashed out again, as if trying to flay the sea itself. Its colors flashed from gray to brown to maroon to red to pink, then back to an ashy white.
It had passed once over the lighted thing, appraising it; then it had tried to kill it, although the signs of life the thing emitted were vague and uncertain.
The thing had been hard, an impenetrable carapace, and it had fought back with vigorous movement and alien sounds.
Because its attack had created no encouraging spoor of blood or torn flesh, the squid had not pressed the attack. It had moved on in search of other nourishment.
But its cells were not accustomed to being denied; its digestive juices had begun to flow in anticipation. Now they were causing the creature pain, confusion and rage.
Seeking food, any food, it rushed through the water, moving slowly upward, far behind the retreating lighted thing, not pursuing it but following it nevertheless.
32
“THAT WAS SOMETHING,” Stephanie said as she pulled herself up through the open hatch and sat on its rim. She grinned down at Darling and Hector, who stood below on the ship’s deck.
Sharp squeezed through the hatch and sat beside her. He took a deep breath, savoring the fresh air. Savoring safety.
“Did you see it?” Hector asked.
“We saw about a million of the weirdest things in the world,” said Stephanie. “Things I never even imagined, let alone photographed, before.”
“No, I mean the thing that knocked you around down there? What rocked the boat?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t really see it.” She looked at Sharp. “Did you?”
“No,” Sharp said, looking at Darling. “Did you get anything on the video, Whip?”
“Just a shadow,” Darling said, and he began to walk around the submersible, examining it, touching the paint here and there.
Eddie, who had exited the capsule first and was helping the two crewmen secure it to its cradle, said, “Whatever it was, it didn’t want to tackle the sub. It had a look at us and kept on truckin’.”
“Maybe,” said Darling. He had stopped in his circuit of the capsule, and he was touching something.
Sharp leaned over the side and looked where Whip’s fingers were rubbing the paint. He saw five ragged scratch marks, two or three feet long; something had slashed through the paint and exposed bare metal beneath. “It’s the squid, isn’t it,” he said.
Darling nodded and said, “Looks like it to me.”
“Well, if it was,” Eddie said, “he gave us a once-over and took off.”
“We’ll be ready for him next time,” said Stephanie. “I’m going to readjust the video cameras.” She pulled her legs out of the hatch, slid down off the capsule and said to Eddie, “What’s your turnaround time?”
“Four hours,” Eddie replied, looking at his watch. “We should be ready to go down again at about three-thirty, four o’clock.”
Not me, Sharp thought, I’ve had enough excitement for one day. “I’ll stay topside,” he said. “I can see plenty on the TV screens to keep the navy happy.”
“You couldn’t go even if you wanted to, navy man,” said Hector. “You’ve already been bumped.”
“By whom?”
When Hector didn’t answer, Sharp looked at Darling and saw a look of disgust on his face. Then Darling turned away and spit over the side of the ship.
33
HERBERT TALLEY WATCHED the ramshackle pickup truck head off down the driveway, then he turned and went into the house. He crossed the living room, walked down a hallway and opened the door to Manning’s bedroom. “Wake up, Osborn,” he said. The room smelled of night breath and stale brandy, and Talley went to the far wall, opened the curtains and raised the window.
Manning groaned and said, “What time is it?”
“Nearly noon. Meet me on the terrace.” While Manning brushed his teeth and poured himself a cup of coffee, Talley stood on the terrace and gazed across Castle Harbour. At the airport a mile away a 747 lumbered in for a landing, and when the pilot reversed his engines, the shriek was so loud that the spoon trembled on Talley’s saucer. What was it about Tucker’s Town, Talley wondered, that enticed the rich and famous to buy and refurbish huge houses practically on top of one another for the privilege of enduring deafening noise twenty times a day? Exclusivity, he decided; the gate at the end of the lane and the sign that said PRIVATE.
Manning came out from the kitchen, carrying his coffee and wearing a bathrobe. “What’s up?” he said. “That fisherman, Frith. He was just here. He overheard some i
“And?” Manning was edgy and impatient, and his hangover didn’t help. When he saw Talley pause and smile, he barked, “Dammit, Herbert, stop playing games. What’s going on?”
“The ship is called the Ellis Explorer. It’s got a submersible on board. It’s here looking for Architeuthis. I think they found it, even though they don’t know for sure.”
“Ellis,” Manning said. “Barnaby Ellis?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. But the point is, Osborn, I think the squid is still here and still hungry. And there’s a ship out there with the equipment and capability to take people down to it. On that sub we could see it, study it, film it, learn about it. And you could kill it, if…” Talley paused.
“If what?” Manning said.
“If we can get on board. You have power, Osborn. Now’s the time to use it.”
Manning hesitated, thought for a moment, then got up and went indoors. Talley heard him punching numbers into a telephone.
Talley walked to the edge of the terrace and looked down at the big oval swimming pool. A scuba tank lay beside the pool, rigged with backpack and regulator. Talley could see that it had been there for days, if not weeks, for it was covered with pine needles, and a salamander had made a home among its straps. He wondered if the tank had been used by one of Manning’s children, and if Manning had left it there as a kind of bleak memorial.
Talley had begun to feel restless. Manning was spending his evenings with a brandy bottle, and Talley sensed that his passionate anger was being transformed by inaction and frustration into despair.
He heard Manning talking into the phone, and he thought, Good; maybe this will get things going again.
When Manning came back, he said, “It’s all set. I talked to Barnaby himself. The ship is here for one of his magazines. He agreed to bump his people and give us a crack at it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Talley said. “Why not today? Frith said they’ve got a dive scheduled for this afternoon.”
“The sub is filled. The Bermuda government’s got someone on it this afternoon. It seems they’ve got a plan to kill the squid.”
“How?” Talley suddenly felt sick. “How do they think they’re going to kill that beast?”
“I have no idea,” Manning said, “but I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“How can you be so nonchalant? You’ve spent—”
“I’d say their chances are about one in a million.”
“Why?”
“Because the chief squid hunter they’re sending is your friend Liam St. John.”
34
SHARP AND DARLING stood on the observation deck and watched St. John unload his gear from the aquarium boat. There were four aluminum cases, two boxes of fresh fish and a modified fish trap, about three feet square, made of chicken wire and steel reinforcing rod.
St. John consulted with Eddie and Stephanie. Then Eddie called the two crewmen over, and they hauled the cases to the submersible and began to fasten the wire cage to the top of the submersible, forward of the hatch.
Stephanie climbed the ladder to the observation deck. “This should be interesting,” she said. “He’s even got Hector jazzed, and that takes some doing.” She pointed to the afterdeck, and they saw Hector following St. John around, asking questions.
Darling looked at Stephanie, and after a moment he said, “Sometimes there’s a reason certain things haven’t ever been done, and that’s because they can’t be done.”
“I know,” Stephanie said, “but this doesn’t look to me like an impossibility. Just a long shot.”
Sharp said, “So you think he’s got a chance?”
“A chance, yes. And he’s sure got enough bait. A hundred pounds of fresh tuna should attract anything that lives down there, and keep it busy long enough for us to do what we have to do.”
“How does he think he’s gonna kill it?” Darling asked.
“With two weapons,” Stephanie said, gesturing at the mechanical arms of the submersible. “Both are attached to the sub’s arms, and he can work them from inside the capsule. One’s a spear gun loaded with a syringe of strychnine, enough to kill a dozen elephants. The other’s like a diver’s bang-stick—it fires a twelve-gauge shotgun shell, loaded with globs of mercury that disperse like poisonous shrapnel. I don’t know that much about giant squid, but it seems to me he’s got enough firepower to kill it two or three times over. Eddie thinks so, too.”
“I can see how you think it all makes sense,” Darling said, “but what you haven’t calculated is that this beast doesn’t know sense. It doesn’t play by our rules. It makes the rules.”
“He’s taken that into account.”
“How?”
“If the weapons don’t kill it, he thinks the squid might wrap itself around the capsule, and then it can be brought to the surface on the cables, and killed up here.”
“My God, girl,” Darling said. “That’s like trying to catch a tiger by sticking your arm in his mouth and shouting, ‘I’ve got him!’ Don’t you know what kind of beast this is?”
“He can’t crush the submersible,” Stephanie said. “I think it sounds like a pretty good idea.”
“Well, I think it sounds like damn foolishness,” said Darling, and he left the deck.
“Don’t go down,” Sharp said to Stephanie when Darling had gone. “Let St. John try it alone. You can go the next time.”
“You’re nice to care, Marcus,” she said, and she touched his cheek. “But I want to go. That’s what I’m here to do.”
Darling entered the bridge, asked Hector’s permission to use the radio and called over to the Privateer, which by now had drifted a mile to the north.
It took Mike several moments to respond. Darling assumed he had been out on the stern, napping or working on his pump.
“Just checking in, Michael,” he said. “You staying awake?”
“Barely. Okay with you if I put a line down, try to catch me some snappers?”
“Sure, but drive the boat over here first. Get within a couple hundred yards, then kill the engine and let her drift. That way you’ll be in position to track the sub.”
“Okay. When are they putting it down?”
“In about an hour. And, Michael, once it’s down there, try not to nod off. I want you wide awake and firing on all cylinders, in case you’re needed.”
“Roger that, Whip,” Mike said. “Privateer standing by.”
35
MIKE TOOK THE boat out of gear and let it settle. He looked across the still water and tried to gauge his distance from the ship. A hundred and fifty yards, he guessed, maybe two hundred. Just about right. He turned off the engine.
He took the binoculars off the shelf in front of the wheel and focused them on the submersible. The hatch was open, and people were still fooling with the sub’s mechanical arms. He had plenty of time.
He went aft and cut up the mackerel he’d put out in the sun to thaw. He rigged two hooks on a line, put half the mackerel on each, then tied a two-pound weight to the end of the line and tossed the rig overboard. He let the line run through his fingers until he judged that the hooks were about a hundred feet down. Then he stopped it and stood with his hip against the bulwark, holding the line in his fingertips and jigging it every few seconds, to create the illusion of a wounded fish.
He saw at his feet the bucket that the mackerel had been in. It was half-full of bloody water, scales and bits of flesh. He picked up the bucket, tossed its contents overboard and watched a little slick of blood and oil begin to spread behind the boat.
When after five minutes he hadn’t had a nibble, it occurred to him that if there were any fish around, they might be far above or far below his bait. The fish-finder was still on; he might as well take advantage of it, see if it could give him any clues. He cleated the line off and went forward, into the wheelhouse.
The
Maybe something had gotten caught in the through-hull fitting that held the machine’s transponder. When they got to shore, he’d put on a scuba tank and go under the boat and have a look. Or maybe the machine itself had broken down. These days, with everything made of chips and circuit boards and invisible magic things that could only be understood by Japanese people with microscopes, there was no way a normal man could look at a piece of electronics and make a decent diagnosis.
He decided that when he’d finished fishing, when the sub was down, he’d pull the machine apart and see if the problem was something simple, like a loose wire.
He went back to the stern and uncleated his line, and right away could tell that something was wrong with it; it was too light. The weight was gone, and probably the hooks and bait as well.
He cursed and began to reel in the line.
36
THE CREATURE BLEW a volume of water from its funnel and propelled itself through the blue water, searching for the faint trail of food scent that it had. found, then lost, then found, then lost again.
It was not comfortable this close to the surface, was not accustomed to warm water and would not have been up here if hunger had not driven it. It had found two bits of food and had consumed them, and then it had rested in the cool shadow of something above. But it had felt itself tapped by a barrage of annoying impulses from that thing above, and so after a moment it had moved again.