Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Read online

  Elizabeth was silent for a moment, then said, “You believe all that?”

  “Sure I believe all that.”

  “And you’re not scared.”

  He hugged her and said, “Sure I am.”

  “Good.”

  “But if you don’t do something with fear—talk it away, change it—it eats you up.”

  She put her head down into his chest and breathed through her nose. She smelled salt and sweat … and comfort. She smelled twenty years of her life.

  “So …” she said. “You want to fool around?”

  “Right!” he laughed. “Capsize in a fit of passion.”

  They stayed like that, huddled together, as the raft drifted slowly south on the breeze. Overhead, stars seemed to dance in crazy unison, twisting and dipping with the motion of the raft but always moving inexorably westward.

  After a while, Griffin thought Elizabeth had fallen asleep. Then he felt tears on his chest.

  “Hey,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Caroline,” she replied. “She’s so young… .”

  “Don’t, hon. Please …”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You should try to sleep.”

  “Sleep!?”

  “Okay, then. Let’s play Botticelli.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I’m thinking of… a famous M.”

  “M. Let’s see. Is he a … famous French—”

  Elizabeth suddenly started. She sat up and turned toward the bow. “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “That scraping noise.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Like fingernails.”

  “Where?”

  She crawled forward and touched the rubber on the forward-most cell of the raft. “Right here. Like fingernails scraping on the rubber.”

  “Something from the boat, maybe. Forget it. A piece of wood. All sorts of floating crap out here. Could’ve been a flying fish. Sometimes they’ll come right in the boat.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “What smell?” Griffin took a deep breath, and now he did smell it. “Ammonia?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Something from the boat.”

  “Such as?”

  “How do I know? We had a bottle under the sink… . Unless something’s spilled in here.” He turned and faced the stern of the raft and unzipped the lid of the rubberized box. It was too dark to see, so he bent over to smell inside the box.

  He heard a noise like a grunt, and the raft bounced and lurched to one side. He was knocked off his knees, and the tins in the box rattled together, and the deck plates beneath him creaked and squealed against the rubber, and he heard some vague splashing sounds— probably of the raft slapping against confused wavelets.

  “Hey!” He steadied himself with one hand on each side of the raft. “Careful there.”

  There was no alien odor in the box. He zipped it closed. “Nothing.” But the smell of ammonia was stronger now. He turned back to face the bow. “I don’t know what—”

  Elizabeth was gone.

  Gone. Just … gone.

  He had a split second’s sensation that he had gone mad, that he was hallucinating, that none of this was happening, that none of it had ever happened, that he would soon awake in a hospital after a month-long coma induced by an automobile accident or a lightning strike or a slab of cornice fallen from an office building.

  He called out, “Elizabeth!” The word was swallowed by the breeze. He called again.

  He sat back and took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He felt dizzy and nauseated, and his pulse thundered in his ears.

  After a moment, he opened his eyes again, expecting to see her sitting in the bow and eyeing him quizzically, as if wondering if he’d had a fit.

  He was still alone.

  He got to his knees and hobbled around the entire raft, hoping—imagining—that she had fallen overboard and was clinging to a dangling loop of lifeline.

  No.

  He sat back again.

  Okay, he thought. Okay. Let’s look at this rationally. What are the possibilities? She jumped overboard. She suddenly went out of her mind and decided to swim to shore. Or to kill herself. Or … or what? She was kidnapped by terrorists from the Andromeda Galaxy?

  He screamed her name again, and again.

  He heard a scraping noise, felt something touch the rubber beneath his buttocks.

  She was there! Under the raft! She must have fallen over and gotten tangled in something, maybe some debris from the sailboat, and now she was under the raft fighting for air.

  He leaned over the side and stretched his arms under the raft, feeling for her hair, her foot, her slicker … anything.

  He heard the scraping noise again, behind him.

  He withdrew his arm and shoved himself back inside the raft and looked forward.

  In the yellow-gray light from the sliver of moon he saw something move on the front of the rubber raft. It seemed to be clawing its way up the rubber, scrambling to come aboard.

  A hand. It had to be a hand. She had freed herself from the tangle and now, exhausted, half-drowned, was struggling to climb aboard.

  He flung himself forward and reached out, and when his fingers were an inch or two away from it—so close that he could feel its radiant coolness—he realized that it wasn’t a hand, that it wasn’t human.

  It was slimy and undulant, an alien thing that moved toward him, reaching for him.

  He recoiled and scrambled toward the stern of the raft. He skidded, fell. The shift of his weight caused the bow to rise up, and he knew a second of relief as the thing disappeared.

  But then he watched, horrified, as it reappeared and inched upward until finally it was entirely atop the rubber cell. It straightened up, fanned out, looking now, he thought, like a giant cobra. Its surface was crowded with circles, each quivering with a life of its own and dripping water like ghastly spittle.

  Griffin screamed. No word, no oath, no curse or plea, just a visceral shriek of terror, outrage, disbelief.

  But the thing kept moving forward, always forward, compressing itself into a conical mass and slithering toward him, walking, it seemed, on its writhing circles; and as each circle touched the rubber it made a rasping sound, as if it contained claws.

  It continued to come. It did not hesitate or pause or explore. It came as if it knew that what it was searching for was there.

  Griffin’s eyes fell on the oar in the raft, tucked under the cells on the starboard side. He grabbed it and held it like a baseball bat, and he raised it above his head and waited to see if the thing would come closer.

  He braced himself on his knees, and when he judged that the moment had come he shouted, “Son of a bitch!” and slammed the oar down upon the advancing thing.

  He was never to know whether the oar struck the thing or whether, somehow, the thing had anticipated it. All he would know was that the oar was torn from his hands and held aloft and crushed and rejected, cast away into the sea.

  Now the thing, sensing exactly where Griffin was, moved more rapidly along the rubber.

  Griffin stumbled backward, fell into the stern. He pushed himself back, and back, and back, desperate to squeeze into the tiny space between the cells and the deck plates. He reached—insanely, ridiculously—for his Swiss Army knife, fumbling with the snap on the leather case and mewling a litany of “Oh God … oh Jesus … oh God … oh Jesus.”

  The thing hovered over him, twitching and spraying him with drops of water. Each of its circles twisted and contorted itself as if in hungry competition with its neighbors, and in the center of each was a curved hook which, as it reflected rays of moonlight, resembled a golden scimitar.

  That was the last Griffin knew, save for pain.

  5

  WHIP DARLING TOOK his cup of coffee out on the veranda, to have a look at the day.

  The sun was about to come up; already there was a pink glow in t
he eastern sky, and the last of the stars had faded. Soon, a slice of orange would appear on the horizon, and the sky would pale and the wind would make up its mind what it was going to do.

  Then he’d make up his mind, too. He should put to sea, try to raise something worth a few dollars. On the other hand, if he stayed ashore, there was always work to do on the boat.

  The wind had gone around during the night. When he had come up from the dock at twilight, the boats anchored in the bay had been facing south. Now their bows were a phalanx arrayed to the northwest. But there were no teeth to the wind; it was little more than a gentle breeze. Any less, and the boats would have lain scatterways and swung with the tide.

  He saw a splash in the bay, then another, and heard a fluttering sound: baitfish, a school of fry running for their lives and skittering over the glassy surface.

  Mackerel? Jacks? Little puppy sharks finishing their dawn patrol before returning to the reefs?

  Mackerel, he decided, from the vigor of the swirls and the relentlessness of the chase.

  He loved this time of day, before the din of traffic began across in Somerset, and the growl of sightseeing boats in the bay and all the other noises of humanity. It was a time of peace and promise, when he could gaze at the water and let his memory dwell on what had been, and his imagination on what might yet be.

  The screen door swung open behind him, and his wife, Charlotte—barefoot and wearing the summer cotton nightgown that showed the shadow of her body— came out with her cup of tea and, as she did every morning, stood beside him so close that he could smell the spice of sleep in her hair. He put an arm around her shoulder.

  “Mackerel in the bay,” he said.

  “Good. First time in … what?”

  “Six weeks or more.”

  “You going out?”

  “I expect so. Chasing rainbows is more entertaining than chipping paint.”

  “You never can tell.”

  “No.” He smiled. “And there’s always hope. Anyway, I want to retrieve the aquarium’s lines.”

  He finished his coffee, poured the dregs onto the grass, and as he turned to go inside, the first rays of the sun flashed over the water and bounced off the white-washed house. He looked at the dark blue shutters, paint flaking, slats cracked and sagging.

  “Lord, this house is a mess.”

  “They want two hundred apiece to do the shutters,” said Charlotte, “three thousand for the lot.”

  “Thieves,” he said, and he held the door for her.

  “I suppose we could ask Dana. …” She paused.

  “Not a chance, Charlie. No more. She’s done enough.”

  “She wants to help. It’s not like—”

  “We’re not there yet,” he said. “Things aren’t that bad.”

  “Maybe not yet, William.” She went into the house. “But almost.”

  ” ‘William’ now, is it?” he said. “It’s pretty early in the day for your heavy artillery.”

  William Somers Darling was named after the Somers who settled Bermuda by shipwreck in 1609. Sir George Somers had been on his way to Virginia when his Sea Venture struck Bermuda, which Darling regarded as a triumph of seamanship, since to hit Bermuda in the middle of a billion square miles of Atlantic Ocean was akin, he felt, to breaking one’s leg by tripping over a paper clip on a football field. Still, Somers wasn’t the first or the last: It was a safe guess that the twenty-two square miles of Bermuda were ringed by more than three hundred shipwrecks.

  Most Bermudians, black and white, were named after one or another of the early settlers—Somers, Darling, Trimingham, Outerbridge, Tucker and a dozen more. The names harkened to history, rang with tradition. And yet, as if in rebellion against mother-country pretension, most Bermudians, black and white, soon cast off one or two of their names and assumed a nickname that had to do with something they looked like or something they’d done or some affliction.

  Darling’s nickname was “Buggywhip,” in commemoration of the weapon with which his father had regularly thrashed him.

  His friends called him Whip, and so did Charlotte, except when they argued or discussed something she considered too serious for levity. Then she called him William.

  He was a fisherman, or, rather, he had been; now he was an ex-fisherman, for being a fisherman in Bermuda had become about as practical a profession as trying to be a ski instructor in the Congo. It was hard to make a living catching something that wasn’t there.

  They could live comfortably if not lavishly on twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars a year. They owned the house—it had been in his family, free and clear, since before the American Revolution. Upkeep, including cooking gas and insurance and electricity, cost five or six thousand dollars a year. Boat maintenance, which he and his mate, Mike Newstead, did themselves, cost another six or seven thousand dollars. Food and clothing and all the other magical incidentals that appeared from nowhere and ate money, consumed the rest.

  But twenty thousand dollars might as well have been a million, because he wasn’t making it. This year was half gone, and so far he’d made less than seven thousand dollars.

  His daughter, Dana, was working downtown in an accounting firm, making good money instead of going to college, and she tried to help. Darling had refused, more brusquely than he meant to but unable to articulate the confusion of love and shame that his child’s offer had triggered in him.

  For a while, Dana had succeeded in stealing some of their bills from their mailbox and paying them herself. When, inevitably, she had been discovered and confronted, she had advanced the matter-of-fact defense that since the house was going to be hers one day, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t contribute to its maintenance, especially since the alternative was for them to go to the bank for mortgage money, which would only burden her with payments later on.

  The argument had slipped away from reason into dark regions of trust and mistrust and had ended in hurt and anger.

  Maybe Charlotte was right. Maybe things were that bad. Darling had seen a folder from the bank in a pile of mail on the kitchen table, but before he could ask about it, it had vanished, and he had put it out of his mind. But now he forced himself to wonder: Was she already talking about mortgages or loans? Would they have to let the bank get its hooks into them?

  No. He wouldn’t let it happen. There had to be ways. The Newport-Bermuda race was coming up in ten days, and a friend in the dive business was overbooked for charters during the layover and had asked Darling to pick up a few for him. They’d be good for a thousand dollars apiece, maybe five thousand in all.

  Then there was the aquarium retainer, which paid his fuel costs in exchange for his bringing them exotic animals he fished up from the deep. At four dollars a gallon he burned up thirty-two dollars’ worth of fuel every hour he was away from the dock. The aquarium also paid a bonus if he caught something spectacular. He never knew what he’d catch. There were common things down there, like little toothless sharks with catlike eyes, and rare things, like anglerfish, which lured their prey with bioluminescent dorsal stalks and ate it with needle teeth that seemed to be made of crystal. He knew that in the abyss there were unknown critters, too, animals no one had ever seen. Those were the challenge.

  Finally, there was always the chance—about as long as winning the Irish Sweepstakes, but never mind, a chance—that he’d find a shipwreck with some goodies on it.

  In the kitchen, he ate a banana while he warmed up some of last night’s barracuda. There were two barometers on the wall, and he consulted both. One was a standard aneroid instrument with two pointers, one of which you set by hand, the other responding to atmospheric pressure. He tapped the glass. No change.

  The other barometer was a tube of shark-liver oil. In good weather the oil was clear, a light amber color. In times of change or dropping pressure, the oil clouded. His faith was in the shark-oil barometer, for it wasn’t a machine, and he distrusted machines. Machines were made by man, and man was a chronic screwup.
Nature rarely made mistakes.

  The oil was clear.

  He decided to go to sea. Maybe there was a robust grouper out there waiting to be caught, a wanderer from times gone by. A hundred-pound fish could net him four or five hundred dollars. Maybe he’d run into a school of tuna.

  Maybe …

  Darling’s mate, Mike Newstead, showed up a little after seven. Darling liked to joke that a geneticist would have prized Mike as the ultimate Bermudian, for he contained every ethnic strain ever represented in the colony. He had the short, curly hair of a black, the dark red skin of an Indian—a memento of eighteenth-century Tories bringing Mohawk Indians to the island as slaves—the bright blue eyes of an Englishman (but almond-shaped like an Asian’s), and the taciturn resignation of a Portuguese. He was thirty-six, five years younger than Darling, but he looked ageless. His face had always been sharp-featured and deeply furrowed, as if hacked from some mountain stone. A stranger might have guessed his age at anything from thirty to fifty.

  Some people still referred to him, behind his back, as Tutti-Frutti, but nobody called him that to his face anymore, for he stood six foot four and weighed well over 220 pounds, not a gram of which was fat. Though Mike was slow to anger, he was said to possess an explosive temper that was kept in check by his diminutive Portuguese wife, and by Darling, whom he loved.

  Darling considered him the perfect mate. Mike didn’t like to make decisions, but rather preferred to be told what to do. He responded instantly and unquestioningly to commands—as long as he respected his commander. He didn’t talk much—he barely spoke, in fact—and if he had any opinions, he kept them to himself. He communicated most intimately and joyfully with Darling’s most hated enemies: machines. Utterly unschooled, he seemed to intuit the workings of engines and motors, be they powered by diesel oil, gasoline, kerosene, air or electricity. He talked to them, soothed them, cajoled them and seduced them into doing what he wanted.