Benchley, Peter - Novel 08

  Beast

  Peter Benchley

  Copyright Š 1991 by Peter Benchley

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-10579

  ISBN 0-449-22089-3

  e-book ver. 1.0

  For the Squid Squads

  1979

  Billy Mac, Garbage Bob,

  The Duke, Columbus Mould,

  Captain Fathom

  1990

  George Bell, Clayton Benchley.

  Nat Benchlev, Adrian Hooper, Kyle Jachney, Stan Waterman, Michele Wernick, Donald Wesson, John Wilcox

  And, of course, for the Tuckers: Teddy, Edna and Wendy

  “She [Scylla] has twelve splay feet and six lank scrawny necks. Each neck bears an obscene head, toothy with three rows of thick-set crowded fangs blackly charged with death… . Particularly she battens on humankind, never failing to snatch up a man with each of her heads from every dark-prowed ship that comes.”

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  1O

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART TWO

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  2O

  21

  PART THREE

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  3O

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  4O

  41

  42

  PART FOUR

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  PART ONE

  1

  IT HOVERED IN the ink-dark water, waiting.

  It was not a fish, had no air bladder to give it buoyancy, but because of the special chemistry of its flesh, it did not sink into the abyss.

  It was not a mammal, did not breathe air, so it felt no impulse to move to the surface.

  It hovered.

  It was not asleep, for it did not know sleep, sleep was not among its natural rhythms. It rested, nourishing itself with oxygen absorbed from the water it pumped through the caverns of its bullet-shaped body.

  Its eight sinuous arms floated on the current; its two long tentacles were coiled tightly against its body. When it was threatened or in the frenzy of a kill, the tentacles would spring forward, like tooth-studded whips.

  It had but one enemy: All the other creatures in its world were prey.

  It had no sense of itself, of its great size or of the fact that its capacity for violence was unknown in other creatures of the deep.

  It hung more than half a mile below the surface, far beyond the reach of any sunlight, yet its enormous eyes registered faint glimmers, generated, in terror or excitement, by other, smaller hunters.

  Had it been observable to the human eye, the animal would have been seen as purplish maroon, but that was now, at rest. When aroused, it would change color again and again.

  The only element of the sea that the animal’s sensory system monitored constantly was temperature. It was most comfortable in a range between 40 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and as it drifted with the currents and encountered thermoclines and upwellings that warmed or cooled the water, it moved up or down.

  It sensed a change now. Its drift had brought it to the scarp of an extinct volcano, which rose like a needle from the ocean canyons. The sea swept around the mountain, and cold water was driven upward.

  And so, propelled by its tail fins, the beast rose slowly in the darkness.

  Unlike many fish, it did not need community; it roamed the sea alone. And so it was unaware that many more of its kind existed than had ever existed before. The balance of nature had been disrupted.

  It existed to survive. And to kill.

  For, peculiarly—if not uniquely—in the world of living things, it often killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.

  2

  FROM AFAR, THE boat might have been a grain of rice on a vast field of blue satin. For days, the wind had blown steadily from the southwest. Now, in the past few hours, it had faded— withered, retreated—and the stillness was uncertain, as if the wind were catching its breath and shuffling like a weary fighter before deciding where to launch its next assault.

  Howard Griffin sat in the cockpit, one bare foot resting on a spoke of the wheel. The boat, deprived of the driving force of the wind, rocked gently in the long swells.

  Griffin glanced up at the flapping sails, then checked his watch and cursed himself for a fool. He hadn’t counted on this, hadn’t anticipated a calm. He had plotted their course, their schedule, on the presumption of southerly winds.

  Naive. Stupid. He should have known better than to try to outguess the weather.

  They were already hours behind schedule, thanks to having spent the entire morning in the Royal Navy Dockyard waiting for a customs officer to finish showing an apprentice how properly to search a fifty-two-foot Hatteras for contraband.

  They should have been well at sea by now. Instead, as Griffin turned and looked back off the fantail, he could see the tall channel marker at the end of Eastern Blue Cut, a white speck glistening in the oblique light of the lowering sun.

  He heard the kettle whistling below, and after a moment his wife came up through the hatch and handed him a cup of tea. He smiled his thanks and, as the thought suddenly came into his mind, he said, “You look terrific.”

  Startled, Elizabeth smiled back. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “I’m serious. Six months on a boat, I don’t know how you do it.”

  “A delusion.” She bent down and kissed the top of his head. “Your standards have gone to hell.”

  “Smell good, too.” Soap and air and skin. He looked at her legs, the color of oiled oak, not a stretch mark or a varicose vein to betray age or two children born more than fifteen years ago, just a single white scar where she had barked her shin against a concrete post one night down in the Exumas. He looked at her feet, brown and knobby and callused. He loved her feet.

  “How am I ever gonna wear shoes again?” she said. “Maybe I’ll get a job at the Barefoot Bank and Trust Company.”

  “If we ever get there.” He gestured at the luffing mainsail.

  “The wind’ll go round again.”

  “Maybe. But we don’t have time.” He leaned forward, toward the ignition key, to turn on the engine.

  “Don’t.”

  “You think I like it? The man’s gonna be at the dock Monday morning, and we better be there too.”

  “One second.” She held up a hand, staying him. “Just let me check.”

  Griffin shrugged and sat back, and Elizabeth went below. He heard a burst of static as she adjusted the radio, then Elizabeth’s voice as she spoke into the microphone. “Bermuda Harbour Radio, Bermuda Harbour Radio, Bermuda Harbour Radio … this is the yacht Severance.”

  “Yacht Severance, Bermuda Harbour Radio …” came back a voice from fifteen miles to the south. “Go to six-eight, please, and stand by.”

  “Severance going to six-eight,” Elizabeth said, and there was silence.

  Griffin he
ard a little splash off the stern of the boat. He looked overboard and saw half a dozen gray chubs swarming on a patch of yellow sargasso weed, competing for the tiny shrimps and other creatures that took shelter among the floating stalks and bladders. He liked sargasso weed, as he liked shearwaters, which spoke to him of freedom, and sharks, which spoke to him of order, and dolphins, which spoke to him of God. Sargasso weed spoke to him of life. It traveled on the water, pushed by the wind, bearing food for small animals, which became food for larger animals, and so on up the food chain.

  “Yacht Severance, Bermuda Harbour Radio … go ahead.”

  “Yes, Bermuda. We’re sailing north for Connecticut. We’d like to get a weather forecast. Over.”

  “Right, Severance. Barometer three-oh-point-four-seven and steady. Wind southwest ten to fifteen, veering northwest. Seas three to six feet tonight and tomorrow, with winds northwest fifteen to twenty. Scattered showers possible over open water. Over.”

  “Many thanks, Bermuda. Severance standing by on sixteen.”

  Elizabeth reappeared through the hatch and said, “Sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end.”

  “No.”

  What was supposed to happen, how they had envisioned their return, was that they would ride a south wind all the way up the coast, and when they cleared Montauk Point, with Fishers Island ahead and Stonington Harbor just beyond, they’d run up all the burgees and pennants and flags from all the countries and yacht clubs and marinas they’d visited in the last half-year. When they reached the Stonington breakwater, the wind would back a little bit around to the east so they could march triumphant down the harbor with everything flying proud and beautiful. Their kids would be waiting on the dock with Elizabeth’s mother and Griffin’s sister and her kids, and they’d have a bottle of champagne and then strip the boat of all their personal things and turn it over to the broker for sale.

  One chapter of their life would end, and the next would begin. With all flags flying.

  “There’s still hope,” Griffin said. “This time of year, a northwest wind doesn’t last.” He paused. “It better not, or we’ll run out of fuel and tack back and forth till we die of old age.”

  He turned the key and pushed the button that started the engine. The four-cylinder diesel wasn’t particularly noisy, but it sounded to him like a locomotive. It wasn’t particularly dirty, but it smelled to him like midtown Manhattan.

  Elizabeth said, “God, I hate that thing!”

  “It’s a machine. How can you hate a machine? I don’t like it, but I can’t hate it. You can’t hate a machine.”

  “I can so. I’m a terrific-looking person. You said so yourself. It’s in the Constitution: Terrific-looking people can hate whatever they want.” She grinned and went forward to haul in the jib.

  “Think positively,” he called after her. “We’ve had a lot of sailing. Now we’ll do a little motoring.”

  “I don’t want to think positively. I want to be angry and disappointed and spoiled. And I’d appreciate it if you’d be angry too.”

  “What do I have to be angry about?” When he saw that the jib was down, Griffin put the boat in gear and pointed the bow into the breeze, which had begun to freshen. The oily calm had been wiped off the swells and replaced by the dappling of little waves. “I’m shacked up with the most beautiful crazy woman in the Atlantic, I’ve got a boat worth enough money to let me spend a year looking for a decent job, and I’m getting horny. What more could a guy ask?”

  Elizabeth came aft and started on the mainsail. “So that’s the bottom line, is it? You want to fool around.”

  “That I do,” Griffin said. He stood and helped her with the big sail, steering with his foot to keep the bow pointed to windward. “But there’s one tiny little problem.”

  “What’s that?” She stood on one foot and let the toes of the other trace a circle on Griffin’s calf.

  “Someone to drive the boat.”

  “Turn on the automatic pilot.”

  “Great idea … if we had one.”

  “Yeah. I thought maybe saying the words would make one happen.”

  “You are disturbed,” he said. “Gorgeous but nuts.” He leaned between folds of the sail and kissed her. Then he reached for a length of bungee cord to secure the sail. His foot slipped off the wheel, and the boat yawed off the wind. A wave struck the starboard quarter and splashed cold spray down Elizabeth’s legs. She yelped.

  “Nice work,” she said. “You sure know how to drown romance.”

  Griffin spun the wheel to starboard and brought the bow back into the wind. The boat’s motion was uncomfortable now, as it plowed into the short, choppy seas. He said, “Maybe we should wait for a fairer breeze.”

  “Well … it’s nice to know your heart’s in the right place.” She smiled at him and wiggled her butt and went below.

  Griffin looked to the west. The sun had reached the horizon and was squashing into an orange ball as it slipped off the edge of the world.

  The bow dipped under a wave, rose up and slapped the next wave hard. Spray flew aft like a chill rain. Griffin shivered, and was about to call out to Elizabeth, to ask for his slicker, when she reappeared, wearing her own slicker and carrying a cup of coffee.

  “Let me take her for a while,” she said. “You get some sleep.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I know, but if the wind doesn’t go round, this is bound to be a long night.” She slipped around the wheel, into the seat beside him.

  “Okay,” he said, and he lifted one of her hands off the wheel and kissed it.

  “What was that for?”

  “Change of command. Old sea custom. Always kiss the hand of your relief.”

  “I like that.”

  He stood up, ducked under the boom and went to the hatch. “Wake me if the wind dies,” he said.

  Below, he consulted with the loran, took its numbers to a chart on the gimballed table in the cabin and pinpointed their position. He used a ruler to draw a pencil line from their position to Montauk Point, then matched the line to the compass rose on the chart.

  He poked his head up through the hatch and said, “Three-three-oh oughta do it.” In the past few minutes the sky had darkened so that the light from the binnacle now cast a reddish glow under Elizabeth’s chin. Her yellow slicker shone orange, and her auburn hair shimmered like charcoal embers.

  “You are beautiful,” Griffin said, and he backed down into the cabin and went into the head. As he peed, he listened to the engine and to the sounds of the water rushing by the wooden hull. His ears were alert to strange noises, but he heard none.

  He walked forward, peeled off his shirt and shorts and tucked himself into one of the two small bunks in the fo’c’sle. In port, they slept together in the after cabin, but at sea it was better for whichever one was sleeping to sleep forward, to keep in touch with the motion of the boat, to sense a change in the weather, a shift in the wind, just in case… .

  The pillow smelled of Elizabeth.

  He slept.

  The engine droned on. Injectors pumped fuel into the cylinders, pistons compressed the fuel to combustion, and a thousand explosions every minute turned the shaft that held the propeller that drove the boat north into the night.

  A pump drew seawater through a fitting in the hull and passed it through the engine, cooling it, and fed it aft to be flushed overboard with the engine’s exhaust.

  The engine was not old, had had less than seven hundred hours on it when they bought the boat, and Griffin had nursed it like a cherished child. But the exhaust pipe was harder to tend. It exited the engine compartment aft and nestled tightly beside the propeller shaft, under the floor of the after cabin. It was of steel, good steel, but for a thousand hours or more of engine use it had carried tons of salt water and acrid gases. And when the engine was not running, when the boat was sailing or tied to a dock, salt residue and molecules of corrosive chemicals ha
d lain in the exhaust pipe and begun gradually to eat away at the steel.

  The minuscule hole in the exhaust pipe could have been there for weeks. They had had fair winds all the way up from the Bahamas and had used the engine only to power in and out of St. George’s Harbour and Dockyard, and routine pumping of the bilges would have removed any excess water. But now, with the engine running steadily and the heat-exchanger pump working full time and the boat punching into the sea rather than sailing gently with it, thus stressing its innards, the hole was growing. Bits of rusted metal flaked away from its edges, and before long it was the diameter of a pencil. Water that had dripped into the bilges now flowed.

  Elizabeth steered with her feet and leaned back against the cushions in the cockpit. To her left, in the west, all that remained of the day was a sliver of violet on the rim of the world. To her right, a crescent moon was rising, casting a streak of gold that tracked her on the surface of the sea.

  No souls, she thought as she looked at the moon. It was an Arab idea—she had read of it in The Discoverers, one of a score of books she had for years been meaning to read and had at last devoured in these past six months—and she decided she liked it: The new moon was an empty celestial vessel setting out on a month’s journey to collect the souls of the departed, and as the days passed it swelled and swelled until, finally, engorged with souls, it disappeared to deposit its cargo in heaven, then reappeared, an empty vessel, and began again.

  One reason she liked the conceit of a ship of souls was that for the first time in her life she was beginning to think she understood what a soul was. She was not a profound person, had always deflected serious conversations before they could plumb too deeply. Besides, she and Griffin had always been too busy living to pause and reflect.

  He had been on the fast track at Shearson Lehman Brothers, she in the private banking division of Chemical Bank. The eighties had been a time when they had gathered toys: a million-dollar apartment, a half-million-dollar house in Stonington, two cars with heated seats and light bulbs in the backseat ashtrays. The money came in, the money went out: twenty thousand dollars for private-school tuition, fifteen thousand a year for eating out a couple of times a week, twenty thousand for vacations, fifty thousand for maintenance and upkeep.