Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Read online

  A swell caught her, and from its crest she saw a searchlight swinging toward her. She prayed she wouldn’t drop away until it had found her, but she was dropping, dropping. She waved her arms. It was going to miss her!

  At the last instant, the light caught her upraised hands—she saw the beam illuminate her grasping fingers—and stopped swinging, and she heard the voice on the loud-hailer cry, “Got you!”

  Then she heard the engine start again.

  The pulse had begun again … closer, more distinct, moving toward the small living thing.

  Excited now, it rose, and its color changed. It was excited not by hunger, not by a sense of an impending battle or an imminent threat, but by a desire to kill.

  It began to feel the swells, for it was near the surface.

  When Katherine reached the top of a swell, the light hit her face and blinded her. But the boat was there, she could feel the beat of the engine, she could smell the exhaust.

  Something splashed beside her, something big, and she felt an arm around her waist and heard a voice say, “I’ve got you … it’s okay … it’s okay.”

  Timmy. She wrapped her arms around him, and then she felt herself being pulled, and her hand touched the hard side of the boat.

  *

  It was there, the living thing, directly above, thrashing.

  A wounded animal.

  Prey.

  More than prey.

  Food.

  The creature drew a mass of water into the caverns of its body and expelled it through the funnel in its belly, and it shot upward.

  Hands grabbed Katherine and pulled so hard she thought her arms might come out of their sockets, but then she was in her father’s embrace, and he was crushing her against him and saying, “Oh, sweetheart … oh baby … oh Muffin …”

  Other hands pulled Timmy aboard, and he fell onto the deck, coughing.

  Then someone said, “What’s that smell?”

  She heard the clunk of the engine’s gears engaging, and she felt the boat begin to move.

  Then, as her father carried her to the after hatch, voices:

  “Hey, look!”

  “What?”

  “Back there.”

  “Where?”

  “Something in the water.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “There! Right there!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “Probably just our wake.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s nothing. We’ve got her back. Forget it.”

  *

  The pulse was fading again, the living thing was gone.

  The creature wallowed in the swells and scanned the water with one of its mammoth yellow-white eyes. It raised its whips and swept them across the surface, searching. But it found nothing, and so it sank back into the deep.

  Wrapped in blankets, Katherine lay in her bunk, and let her father feed her soup. He was laughing and crying at the same time, and his hand shook so that finally she took the soup from him and fed herself.

  Evan had taken her clothes off for her—not so stuck-up anymore, in fact rather nice—and washed her off with hot water and given her one of her own sweat suits.

  Timmy stopped by on his way to the shower and didn’t say anything, just bent down and kissed her forehead.

  David and Peter and Uncle Lou, everybody, came in one at a time and said something, and there wasn’t a condescending remark among them.

  She felt like a celebrity, and she liked it. For once, she had a story she could tell, when everybody else was boasting. For once, the excitement had included her.

  Her eyes drooped. She thought she’d like to sleep all the way to Bermuda.

  21

  AS WHIP DARLING took a breath, he realized that the air was coming slowly, reluctantly, as if he were sucking on an empty soda bottle. His tank was almost out. He might get one more breath, two at most, before he’d have to surface.

  Never mind, he was only five feet down. If he drew a vacuum, he’d spit out the mouthpiece and exhale and go up.

  But he didn’t want to have to go up now and change tanks and come back down, just to finish this stupid, cussed job that should have taken twenty minutes and was already into its second hour. Replacing the government buoys was easy; anyone who could master a pair of pliers could do it; he’d done it a hundred times. All you had to do was unshackle the buoy from the chain, put a temporary float on the chain, haul the buoy aboard, drop the replacement buoy overboard, shackle it on the chain and retrieve your float. Piece of cake.

  Not this time. First, Mike had given him the wrong size shackle for the chain, then the wrong size pin for the shackle. Then Darling had dropped the correct pin and had had to go up to find another one, because Mike was so rattled about Darling being down there alone that he couldn’t find his ass with both hands. Then, while Darling was aboard looking for the pin, Mike had dropped the boat hook with which he was holding the buoy, so the buoy had drifted away on the tide and they’d had to haul the anchor and chase it, because no one man was going to dive in and drag a three-hundred-pound steel buoy that wanted to travel.

  It should have been Mike down here anyway, and Darling passing him the proper equipment piece by piece—and it would have been Mike if Darling hadn’t decided that Mike was so obviously panicked about being chewed on by some great villain that he might forget to breathe and have an embolism and die. And so Darling had decided to do the job himself.

  He held his breath and set the pin to the shackle and whacked it with the hammer. In the water, the hammer moved in slow motion, and most of its force was spent before it struck, so he had to hit the pin again. His vision was distorted by the water and the mask and the bouncing around of the buoy, so he hit the pin awry, and it skipped off the shackle and tumbled away, down into the blue.

  Darling shouted “Shit!” into his mouthpiece as he watched it fall. He took his final breath from the tank, sucking in every last atom of air, and pulled the spare pin from the waistband of his bathing suit. He struck it with the hammer, and it slid in like a sharp knife into fresh fish. He spun it tight with pliers, then looked around below, to make sure nothing was cruising in the gloom that might make a run at him as he surfaced. He spat out his mouthpiece and exhaled and kicked upward into the sun.

  Mike was waiting on the dive step. “Done?” he asked as he took Darling’s tank and weight belt and hauled them up onto the deck.

  Darling nodded and pulled himself up onto the dive step and lay facedown, catching his breath.

  “What are we doing out here, Michael?” he said when finally he could speak. “We should be sitting in a condo in Vero Beach, drinking Pink Ladies and watching the sunset, instead of casting ourselves into the sea and damn near drowning, all for a measly five-dollar bill.”

  “It pays the fuel.”

  “Barely,” Darling said, and thought to add something nice to make Mike feel better about not doing the diving himself. “Only thanks to you.”

  Mike had determined that with some minor fiddling with the engine, he could make it run fine on a mixture of diesel oil and kerosene, which brought the cost of fuel down by more than a third. And that meant that they could actually make a couple of dollars from crappy jobs like this.

  Darling hadn’t had to work on the government’s buoys in years, had hoped he’d never have to again. But when he had heard that the government wanted to change one of the major channel buoys and was letting the job out for bids, he had gotten into the bidding and, to his amazement—embarrassment, almost—found himself the low bidder.

  Now they were doing the job, for $500, and because they were running on cheaper fuel they might actually clear $250 on the day—not exactly ransom money, but better than sitting around the yard counting the hairs on the neighbor’s cat.

  There was no other work, at least not work Darling would do. The aquarium retainer was gone, and the race layover had passed
without a single dive charter for anybody, because as soon as the racers had hit shore and seen that article in Newsweek, with the picture of the giant squid from the Museum of Natural History in New York, they had concluded that diving was out … even on the shallow reefs, where the worst thing likely to happen was a coral cut on the knee. It had been nearly two weeks since anybody had seen a sign of the squid, and still not a single diver had gone into the water.

  It made no sense, but then, Darling thought, lots of things didn’t. Soon enough, there’d be reports of people refusing to take showers for fear that a giant squid would come out of the shower head or up the drain and eat them.

  Other people were getting work, though. One of the glass-bottom boats had painted a new name on its transom, SQUID HUNTER, and was taking tourists out to the edge of the reefs and letting them peer into a hundred feet of water, while the captain, dressed up like Indiana Jones, scared the bejesus out of them with bullshit broadcasts over his P.A. system in his best Vincent Price voice.

  It was nonsense, but Darling didn’t fault the man; he’d had to do something. Some of the boats that took out snorkelers might as well have been in dry dock. Visitors were afraid to get near the water, and they weren’t about to pay thirty dollars to ride around and be told what they should be seeing.

  An enterprising gift-shop owner was already selling a line of squid-theme jewelry, junk made from seashells and silver wire. And there was talk that one of the fishermen was making a fortune catching little school squid and freezing them and casting them into blocks of Lucite and selling them as Genuine Miniature Bermuda Triangle Monsters.

  Representatives of the far-out environmental groups had arrived, and were going door to door raising money for their Save the Squid campaign. Darling had been asked to be a local spokesman for the campaign, but he had refused, on the grounds that Architeuthis was doing a fine job of saving itself without any help from him or anyone else.

  The Save-the-Squidders hadn’t been in Bermuda for forty-eight hours before they got into a fight with the opposition, some big-time sport fishermen who were sending their Rybovitches and Hatterases and Merritts down from all points westward to go monster fishing. A couple of them had gotten impatient waiting for their boats and had tried to charter Darling, but he’d turned them down, same as he’d turned down Manning and Dr. what’s-his-name … Talley.

  Sometimes he regretted turning down Talley, especially days like today, when his mouth ached from biting on a regulator mouthpiece, when he was frozen like a Popsicle and whipped to the point of coma … all for a couple of hundred bucks that he’d have to split with Mike.

  But, as the saying went, Talley and Manning were folks to feed with a long spoon. Charlotte had pointed out that each in his own way was the most dangerous kind of person to get mixed up with: A person who has nothing to lose. Darling had never stopped to think exactly what was worth risking his life for, outside of Charlotte and Dana, but he knew for sure it wasn’t some creature that ate people for breakfast and boats for lunch.

  Besides, he wasn’t totally out of hope. A restaurant down in town needed its dock repaired, and if he landed the job it could be a week’s work at a thousand a day. He’d heard that the telephone company might be wanting a cable laid … scut work, pumping mud to dig a trench to lay the cable in, but honest work that paid some bills without destroying anything.

  That was all he wanted … work. He didn’t know how Charlotte was keeping food on the table and the lights turned on and the insurance paid up, but she was, somehow.

  Darling washed the salt off in the shower, and put on a pair of shorts, while Mike stowed the dive gear and fried a mackerel from the cold box. They’d been meaning to use the mackerel as bait, but since there wasn’t anything around to catch, they figured they might as well eat it.

  After lunch, they cruised southwest along the outer edge of the reefs, meandering toward home. Darling intended to stop at the town dock on the way and submit his bill to Marine & Ports. He had a friend there who had promised to pay him in cash.

  “Look there,” Mike said, pointing down from the flying bridge. Two snappers were floating belly-up, and the boat passed between them.

  A moment later, they saw two more, then a porgy and an angelfish and four or five sergeant majors. All dead, all bloated.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Darling said.

  They heard a noise then, in the distance, a deep, resonant ka-WHUMP, and they felt a thud through the steel at their feet, as if someone were hammering on the hull with a maul.

  Then, half a mile ahead and to the right, in deep water, they could see a boat, and in front of the boat a torrent of spray descending onto what looked like a hump of ocean water. As they watched, the hump withdrew, absorbed by the sea, and the spray became a white smear on the surface.

  Mike picked up the binoculars and focused on the boat. “It’s the aquarium’s boat,” he said.

  “Christamighty,” said Darling. “Liam’s gone and got himself a permit to bomb the beast.”

  Herbert Talley licked the salt spray off his sunglasses and wiped them on his shirttail. He found the little gray fish that had been blown out of the water and had struck him in the back of the head, and he tossed it overboard where the others—the dozens, the scores, that had been killed by the concussion—were bobbing to the surface, their white bellies turned to the sun.

  “That was close,” he said, and he restrained himself from using the other words he wanted to say, words like “fool” and “idiot.”

  “Not really, Doctor,” said St. John, whose curls, water-soaked and blast-blown, hung like jungle weeds down the sides of his head. “I’ve made a study of explosives. We were quite safe.”

  St. John looked over the side, shading his eyes to see down beneath the layer of dead fish. He straightened up, took a step forward and shouted to his men in the bow, “Rig another one! And set this one for a hundred fathoms.”

  The helmsman, a muscle-bound graduate student who looked like the star of a sex-and-surfers movie, stuck his head out of the cabin and said, “How far do we go to find a hundred fathoms?”

  “Use the fathometer, for God’s sake. You know how, don’t you? … Or do I have to do everything?”

  “We just blew it out.”

  “Go that way, then!” St. John said, and he waved his arm in the general direction of darker water.

  When he turned back to Talley, he said, “You agree that when we kill the animal, it will float.”

  “If,” Talley said. “If you kill the animal. Yes.” Agree? Talley had told St. John, who hadn’t known the first thing about the biology of Architeuthis.

  “Even when we blow it to shreds?”

  “Yes.” Talley saw no point in qualifying his assertion, since St. John seemed to have about as much chance of killing Architeuthis as a ten-year-old had of hitting a sparrow with a slingshot.

  “It’ll come to the surface even from a hundred fathoms … six hundred feet?”

  “From anywhere. As I told you, the ammonia content of the flesh makes it lighter than seawater. It will float, just like oil, just like—”

  “I know, I know,” St. John said, and he turned away toward the bow.

  Talley swallowed bile, and tried to think how to escape from this diminutive bully who was treating him like an apprentice. He should never have accepted St. John’s invitation to come along.

  On the phone, however, St. John had been polite, receptive, even eager to have Talley observe his attempt to kill the giant squid. He had welcomed Talley aboard the thirty-five-foot aquarium boat, had introduced him to his crew of four—including the young man in charge of explosives, who looked nauseated, either from nervousness or anticipatory seasickness—and then proceeded to lecture Talley about the subject that Talley had made his life’s work, a lecture laced with pseudo-facts gleaned, Talley imagined, from comic books, horror movies and supermarket tabloids.

  When Talley had contradicted one of St. John’s putative facts�
�not rudely, not didactically, he had simply stated that there was no conclusive evidence to affirm St. John’s assertion that there were only three species of Architeuthis, that many scientists believed there could in fact be as many as nineteen species, all with subtly different characteristics—St. John’s response had been a curt “Ridiculous!” and he had changed the subject, convincing Talley that he had no interest in learning anything, and that he expected Talley only to approve and applaud whatever he did.

  The amazing thing was that St. John was so ignorant of how ignorant he was; he truly believed the nonsense he purveyed. It was as if his brain gathered data from all sources—the reliable, the marginal and the fantastic— and selected that which it liked and discarded all the rest and molded its own gospel truth.

  St. John had stayed away from Talley for most of the voyage, had instructed Talley to stay aft—“where it’s safe”—while he lectured his crew about giant squid and underwater explosives. The only reason he had bothered to say anything else to Talley—and it hadn’t been phrased as a question but as a speculative musing about the flotation of certain kinds of flesh—was that one of his crew had wondered how they would know if they had killed the monster because if it didn’t have a swim bladder it would probably sink to the bottom … wouldn’t it?

  St. John had looked stricken until Talley had volunteered that Architeuthis flesh had positive buoyancy, information that St. John had then passed along as if it had sprung whole from the cornucopia of his mind.

  Talley didn’t mind feeding St. John data. By now, all he wanted to do was to get off this boat, before St. John pulled some boner that blew them all to bits.

  If only he and Manning had been able to charter a boat of their own. They had tried, but there was nothing of suitable size available except an old ferry that needed a complete overhaul. There were a few medium-size government boats, but as they inquired about each, they encountered bureaucratic confusions, all concocted, Talley was becoming convinced, by St. John, who wanted the creature to himself.