Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Read online

  The watchman in his head had been on duty in the best of times, when the boat had floated over an apparently infinite resource of life, when being woken in the middle of the night usually signaled promise rather than threat. The watchman hadn’t flagged even in recent bad times, when nights were filled mostly with vain hopes.

  Darling knew that the watchman would be on duty now, when, for the first time in his life, his most fervent hope was that the sea beneath him would remain a barren, lifeless plain.

  His breathing slowed; his brain succumbed to fatigue. The watchman stood guard, a lonely sentry.

  46

  THE GIANT SQUID expanded its mantle, drew water within and expelled it from the funnel in its belly. It propelled its great mass through the night sea with a force that pushed pressure waves before it and left eddies behind.

  Driven by the most basic of all impulses, it rushed in one direction, then stopped, then rushed in another, extending its many senses to gather in more and more of the scattered signals that were exciting it into a frenzy. Its body chemistry was confused, and the chromatophores it triggered changed the creature’s flesh color from pale gray to pink to maroon to red, reflecting emotions from anxiety to passion.

  The signals it was receiving were partly alien and partly familiar, but its brain registered only that they were irresistible.

  And so it rushed on, soaring up and down and side to side, like an aircraft out of control or a gigantic raptor gone berserk.

  Suddenly it encountered a stream of the signals; it was a trail, strong and true.

  The creature homed in on it, excluding everything else.

  47

  DARLING AWOKE, WITHOUT knowing what had woken him. He lay quietly for a moment, listening and feeling.

  He heard the familiar sounds: the hum of the refrigerator, the scratch of the stylus across the fathometer paper, Talley’s breathing. He saw the familiar sights: darkness, relieved only by the faint red glimmer from the binnacle in the wheelhouse. But he felt a difference in the motion of the boat. There was a reluctance, as if the boat were no longer going with the flow of the sea, but rather fighting it.

  He rolled off the bunk, walked to the door and stepped outside. The instant his eye caught the movement of the water, he knew what had woken him: The boat was going in the wrong direction.

  Something was pulling it backward.

  Then he looked at the stern, and saw little waves slapping against it, casting spray. The ropes still angled straight downward, but they were trembling, and even from a distance he could hear the high-pitched squeak of straining fibers.

  So, he thought. Here we go.

  He ducked back inside and shouted, “Marcus!”

  Talley sat up on the bench seat and said, “What?”

  “Turn your TV monitor on, Doc,” Darling said, then called again, “Marcus! Let’s go.”

  “Why?” Talley was still groggy. “What … ?”

  “Because we’ve hooked the sonofabitch, that’s why. And he’s dragging us backward.” Darling reached across Talley and pressed the switch. The monitor flickered, then glowed.

  The image was without definition, a swirl of bubbles and shadows, light flashing against darkness—a scene of chaos and violence.

  “The lure!” Talley said. “Where’s the lure?”

  “He’s got it,” said Darling. “And he’s trying to run with it.”

  Just then, Sharp came up from below, and Darling beckoned to him and went outside.

  Manning was standing in the stern, soaked with spray, staring at the thrumming ropes. “Is it … ?” he asked.

  “Either it’s the beast, or we’ve hooked the devil himself.” Darling directed Sharp to the starboard winch while he took the one on the port side, and together they began to wind in the ropes.

  For a minute or two, they made no headway; the weight on the winches was too great for them to get traction, so the winch drums skidded under the ropes. The boat continued to move backward, splashing spray as the stern dug into the waves.

  Then the ropes suddenly eased, and the boat stopped.

  “The strain’s gone,” Sharp said. “Did it get off?”

  “Could be. Or else he’s just turning, I can’t tell. Keep cranking.”

  They wound in tandem, retrieving a foot of rope every second, ten fathoms a minute. The muscles in Darling’s arms ached, then began to burn, and he switched hands every few turns.

  “Whip, he’s got to have busted away,” Sharp said when the two-hundred-fathom marks on the ropes rolled over the winch drums and tumbled into the coils at their feet. “Must have.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Darling. He had a hand on the rope and was feeling it, trying to read it. There was weight to the rope but no strain, pull but no action. “It feels like he’s there but not pulling. Maybe taking a breather.”

  “Or maybe dead,” Sharp said, sounding hopeful.

  “Keep cranking, Marcus,” Darling said.

  Talley came out of the cabin. “I can’t see anything on the video,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

  “Leave it run anyway,” said Darling.

  “I am.” Talley took a position behind them, pressed against the cabin bulkhead. He had taken another video camera from one of his cases, and he hurried to load a tape and attach a battery.

  Suddenly, Sharp said, “Whip! Look …” and he pointed. The ropes no longer hung vertically; they had started to move slowly out, away from the boat. Still there was no stutter on the winches; the rope kept coming aboard.

  “He’s coming up!” Darling shouted, and he thought: He’s just like a billfish on a run to breaching; he pulls, stops, gathers strength, and now he’s gonna make his move. He looked at Manning and said, “Cock your gun. This is what you’ve been waiting for.” Then he said to Talley, “If you want any pictures, Doc, you better get ‘em fast. The beast isn’t gonna stay long.”

  For the next few minutes, no one spoke. To Darling, the silence was like the false calm in the eye of a hurricane.

  Darling and Sharp cranked the winch handles, and the rope flowed aboard, then ended, and the big shackles rattled over the bulwarks, followed by the first lengths of cable. “Fifty fathoms, Marcus,” Darling said. “Another minute or two.”

  The cables angled out behind them, not quite horizontal, taut and quivering but still coming aboard. The creature must be nearing the surface now, but they couldn’t tell for sure, or how far away it might be, or how far out in the darkness.

  They stared at the water off the stern, trying to follow the silver threads of cable, to see beyond the edge of the pool of light cast by the halogen lamps.

  “Show yourself, you bastard!” Darling called, and he realized suddenly that his fear had changed. What he was feeling now was not dread or foreboding or horror, but the galvanic fear of meeting an opponent more formidable than any he had ever imagined. It was almost like an electric charge, a healthy fear, he thought, and it blended with the fever of the hunt.

  Just then the winches jolted, skidded, and the cable that had just come aboard leaped from its coils on the deck and began to snake overboard.

  “What’s he doing?” Sharp shouted.

  “He’s running again!” Darling cried, and he grabbed the winch handle and leaned on it, but the winch refused, the spool spun, the cable kept backing off into the water.

  “No!” Manning screamed. “Stop him!”

  “I can’t!” Darling said. “Nothing can.”

  “You mean you won’t. You’re afraid. I’ll show you how.” Manning dropped his rifle, reached down into the coil of cable at his feet and grabbed a length of slack.

  “Don’t!” Darling yelled, and he took a step toward Manning, but before he could stop him, Manning had flung the cable at the iron post that ran down into the keel, looped it around the post and tied it off.

  “There,” Manning said. The cable continued to run off the stern, buzzing as it passed over the steel bulwark. Manning turned to face the stern, raised h
is rifle and waited for the creature to rise into his sights. But as he was turning, he slipped, and just then the creature must have accelerated, for suddenly the coils of cables jumped off the deck and flew. As Manning staggered to regain his balance, one of his feet stepped through a snarl of cable, and the cable snapped tight around his thigh, and he was lifted off the deck like a puppet. For a fraction of a second he hung suspended in the lights. He made no sound, and the rifle fell away from his hands.

  Then a great force slammed the cables taut, and Manning seemed to fly backward, pulled by his leg, his arms out as if he were doing a swan dive.

  Light flashed on Manning’s face for an instant, and Darling saw no horror, no agony, no protest—only surprise, as if Manning’s last sensation were amazement that fate had had the temerity to thwart him.

  The rifle struck the deck and discharged a bullet, which ricocheted off the bulwark and whined away overhead.

  Darling thought he saw Manning’s leg pull away from his body, for something seemed to fall from the cable. But he heard no splash, for all sounds were overwhelmed by the sproing! of the cable setting against the iron post.

  Instantly the cable rose to the horizontal, and the boat was dragged backward. Waves splashed against the transom, soaking them.

  Then Darling saw the cable rise above the horizontal, and he yelled, “He’s up!”

  “Where?” Talley cried. “Where?”

  They heard a splash then, and a sound like a bellows, and they smelled a stinging stench. The spray that fell on them suddenly became a rain of black ink.

  Darling got to his knees and started to stand, but then he saw, ten or fifteen feet behind the stern, a little flicker of silver, and instinctively he knew what it was: The threads of the cable were snapping and rolling back on themselves.

  He shouted, “Duck!”

  “What?” said Talley.

  Darling dove at him and tackled him to the deck, and as they fell, there was a booming sound from behind the boat, like a magnum pistol being fired in a tunnel, followed instantly by a high-pitched whistle.

  A length of cable screamed overhead and shattered the windows in the back of the cabin. The second length followed immediately, and they heard the crash of Talley’s camera housing disintegrating against a steel bulkhead.

  The boat pitched and yawed for a moment, then settled back into the sea.

  “Jesus God …” Talley said.

  Darling rolled away from him and stood up. He looked aft, out into the darkness. There was no sign that anything had ever been there, no roil of water, no sound. Only the soft whisper of breeze over the silent sea.

  48

  TALLEY’S FACE WAS the color of cardboard, and as he got up off the deck, he trembled so badly that he could barely stand. “I never thought …” he began, but his voice trailed off.

  “Forget it,” Darling said. He and Sharp were pulling in the skeins of rope that littered the surface beside the boat.

  “You were right,” Talley said. “All along you were right. There was no way we—”

  “Listen, Doc …” Darling looked at Talley and thought: The man’s in despair; in about a minute, he’s gonna collapse. “When we get to shore, there’ll be time enough to piss and moan. We’ll say nice words for Mr. Manning and do all the proper things. But right now, what I want to do is get us the hell out of here. Go inside and lie down.”

  “Yes,” Talley said. “Right.” And he went into the cabin.

  When they had hauled the last of the rope aboard, Sharp leaned over the stern and said, “I hope none of that rope’s wrapped around the prop.”

  “You want to go overboard and have a look?” Darling said, starting forward. “I don’t.” Then he added, “Talley was right about one thing—the bastard sure was drawn to the lure. But now, who knows? All I know is, I want to be somewhere else when he figures out he’s been had.”

  In the cabin, Talley was sitting at the table. He had rewound the videotape, and he looked at the monitor as he started to play it back.

  “What are you looking for?” Darling asked.

  “Anything,” Talley said. “Any images at all.”

  Darling took a step up toward the wheelhouse, and said over his shoulder to Sharp, “Check the oil pressure for me, Marcus.”

  Sharp opened the engine-room hatch and started below.

  Suddenly Talley jolted in his seat and shouted, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” His eyes were wide as he stared at the monitor, and he groped blindly for the controls for the recorder.

  Sharp and Darling crowded behind Talley as he found the tape controls and pressed the “pause” button.

  On the monitor was an image of froth and bubbles. Talley pressed the “frame-advance” button, and the picture jumped. “There’s the lure,” he said, pointing to a flicker of something dense and shiny. On the black-and-white screen it looked dark gray. In the next frame it had disappeared, then it reappeared at the top of the screen. Talley pointed to the bottom of the screen, and he said, “Now watch.”

  A grayish hump rose from the bottom of the screen, and, in the staccato pulse of the frame-advance, it seemed to march upward until it covered the entire screen. The frames kept changing, and the gray shade kept climbing. And then the bottom of the screen was invaded by something off-white, curved on top. It moved upward, as if to cover the screen.

  The thing must have moved away from the camera, for gradually the image widened out, and the thing showed itself as a perfect off-white circle, and in its center was another perfect circle, blacker than ebony.

  “My God,” Sharp said. “Is that an eye?”

  Talley nodded.

  “What kind of size?” asked Darling.

  “I can’t tell,” Talley said. “There’s nothing to measure it against. But if the focal length of the camera was about six feet, and the eye fills the whole frame, it has to be … like so.” He held his hands two feet apart. For a moment he gazed at his hands, as if unable to believe the size of the span he had created. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “The thing must be ninety feet, perhaps more.” He looked up at Darling. “This could be a hundred-foot animal.”

  “When we get home,” Darling said, “we’re all gonna get down on our knees and give thanks that we never got any closer to that fucker.” Then he turned away and climbed the two steps up into the wheelhouse.

  Dawn was breaking. The sky in the east had lightened to a grayish blue, and the advancing sun cast a line of pink on the horizon.

  Darling pushed the starter button, and waited to hear the warning bell from the engine room and the rumbling cough as the engine came to life.

  But all he heard was a click, then nothing.

  He pushed it again. This time, nothing at all. He swore to himself several times, and then whacked the wheel with the heel of his hand, for as soon as he knew that the engine wouldn’t start, he knew why it wouldn’t start. There was no generator noise: The silence told him that sometime during the night, the generator had run out of fuel. The batteries had taken over automatically, but eventually, after being drained for hours by the lights and the refrigerator and the fathometer and the fish-finder, they had run down. They were still putting out some power, but they couldn’t muster the juice to fire up the big diesel engine.

  After he had calmed down, he considered which of the two fully charged compressor batteries would be easiest to shift over to the main engine, selected one, and reviewed in his mind the procedure for removing it from its mounts and sliding it through the tangle of machinery in the engine room and mounting it beside the engine.

  It was nasty work, but not the end of the world.

  As he crossed the wheelhouse on his way down to the engine room, it occurred to him that he should turn off the instruments, to save power. All the kick in the new battery should be directed to igniting the engine. He turned the knob on the fathometer, and the stylus stopped moving. The switch on the fish-finder was farther away. As he reached for it, his eyes glanced
at the screen.

  It wasn’t blank anymore. For a moment, he thought: Good, life is coming back. Then he looked closer, and he realized that he had never seen an image like this on the screen. There weren’t the little dots that signaled scattered fish, or the smears that showed schools of larger animals. The image on the screen was a single, solid mass, a mass of something alive. Something rising toward the surface, and rising fast.

  49

  THE BEAST SHOT upward through the sea like a torpedo. An observer might have thought that it was in retreat, for it moved backward, but it was not retreating. Nature had designed it to move backward with great speed and efficiency. It was attacking, and its triangular tail was like an arrow point, guiding it to its target.

  It was over a hundred feet long from the clubs on its whips to the tip of its tail, and it weighed a dozen tons. But it had no concept of its size, or of the fact that it was supreme in the sea.

  Its whips were retracted now, its tentacles clustered together like a trailing tail, for it was streamlined for speed.

  Its chemistry was agitated, and its colors had changed many times, as its senses struggled to decipher conflicting messages. First there had been the irresistible impulse to breed; then perplexity when it had tried to mate and been unable to; then confusion when the alien thing had continued to emit breeding spoor; then anxiety as it had tried to shed the thing and found it could not, for the thing had attached itself like a parasite; then rage as it had perceived a threat from the thing and proceeded, with its tentacles and its beak, to destroy the threatener.

  Now, what remained was rage, and it was rage of a new dimension. The beast’s color was a deep, viscous red.

  Before, the giant squid had always responded to impulses of rage with instantaneous explosive spasms of destruction, which had consumed the rage. But this time the rage did not abate; it evolved. And now it had a purpose, a goal.