Beast Page 19

  “Morning, Marcus,” Darling said when Sharp appeared on the bridge. “Are you sure you still want to go down there and freeze your buns off?”

  “Yes,” Sharp said. “I’m sure.”

  Darling turned to Hector and said, “I’ll have my mate hang off a ways till you launch, then he’ll track the sub on my gear.”

  Sharp said, “What are you gonna do, Whip?”

  “Keep an eye on you, Marcus,” Darling said, and he smiled. “You’re too valuable to lose.” He left the bridge and walked aft to talk to Mike on the Privateer.

  Sharp carried his coffee down to the stern. At the top of a ladder he met Stephanie on her way up, and she gestured for him to follow her through a watertight door above the main cabin and aft of the bridge.

  It was the control room for the submersible, and it was dark, lit only by a red bulb in the overhead and by four television monitors that were showing color bars.

  One of the crewmen, whom Sharp remembered as Andy, sat before a panel dotted with colored lights and keyboard buttons, wearing a headset and a microphone.

  “Andy keeps tabs on all our systems,” Stephanie said. “Your friend Whip will be in here with him—we can talk to him anytime.”

  Sharp pointed at the TV monitors. “The submersible is hard-wired to the surface?”

  “Everything’s videotaped, for the foundation. One fiber-optic cable does it all. I’ve got video cameras inside and outside the sub, plus my still cameras. Can I give you a camera? We’ll be at different portholes, we may see different things.”

  “Sure,” Sharp said, “if you’ve got a real idiot-proof camera. What do you want pictures of? Gorgonian corals? Algae growth?”

  “No way.” Stephanie grinned. “Monsters. Nothing but monsters. Great big ones.”

  At close range, the submersible looked to Sharp like a giant antihistamine capsule, a Dristan with arms. Each arm had steel pincers on the end, and mounted between them was a video camera in a globular housing.

  The sun was higher now, and there wasn’t a breath of breeze. Perspiration poured from Sharp as he lowered himself through the round hatch in the top of the submersible. The crewman manning the crane gave him a thumbs-up sign, and he smiled wanly in reply.

  Stephanie was already inside, as was Eddie, wearing a down vest and crouching forward to check his switches and gauges.

  The interior of the capsule was a tube, twelve feet long, six feet wide and five feet high. There were three small portholes, one in the bow for Eddie, one on either side for Stephanie and Sharp. A square cushion sat on the steel deck before Sharp’s porthole, and he dropped to his knees and crawled to the cushion. He found that he could sit with his legs curled beneath him, or kneel with his face pressed to the porthole, or lie with his feet raised. But there was no way he could straighten out.

  What would happen if he got a cramp? How would he shake it out? Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just do it.

  “How long does it take to get to the bottom?” he asked.

  “Half an hour,” said Stephanie. “We drop at a hundred feet a minute.”

  Not too bad. He could survive for an hour, anyway. “And how long do we spend down there?”

  “Up to four hours.”

  “Four hours!” Never, Sharp thought. Not a chance.

  He heard the hatch slam above him, and a metallic hiss as it was dogged down.

  Stephanie passed him a small 35-mm camera with a wide-angle lens, and said, “All loaded and ready to go. Just push the button.”

  Sharp tried to take the camera, but it slipped from his sweaty palms, and Stephanie caught it an inch above the steel deck. “You look like death,” she said.

  “No kidding.” Sharp wiped his hands on his trousers and took the camera from her.

  “What are you worried about? This is a state-of-the-art deep boat, and Eddie is a state-of-the-art pilot.” She smiled. “Right, Eddie?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Eddie said. He mumbled something into the microphone suspended from his headset, and suddenly the capsule jerked and began to rise as the crane lifted it off its cradle and swung it out over the side of the ship. For a moment it yawed back and forth like an amusement-park ride, and Sharp had to brace himself to keep from being tossed across the deck. Then it dropped slowly until it thudded into the water, and its motion changed to a gentle rocking.

  Sharp looked through the porthole and saw the sea lapping at the glass. From overhead came the metallic sound of the shackle being released from the submersible’s lifting ring.

  The capsule began to sink. Water now covered the portholes. Sharp pushed his cheek to the glass and rolled his eyes upward, straining for one last glance at sunlight. Refracted through the moving water, the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds and the gold of the sun danced together hypnotically.

  Then the colors faded, replaced by a monochromatic blue mist. All noise ceased, except for the soft whirring of the electric motor aboard the submersible.

  The world had been swallowed by the sea.

  Sweat was quickly evaporating from Sharp’s forehead and from under his arms and down his back, and he felt chilly. In less than a minute, the temperature had dropped something like thirty degrees. And yet he was still sweating, not from heat but from fear, and the creeping onset of claustrophobia.

  He looked through the porthole and saw that the blue outside was fast deepening to violet. He dared his eyes to wander downward. Rays of sunlight seemed to struggle to light the water, but they were dispersed and consumed. Below, blue yielded to black, and all was night.

  They fell slowly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. Then Sharp realized he was taking comfort in the nothingness, for he began to recall the tales Darling had told him about what lived down here in this night, this dark. And he shivered.

  25

  SHARP WAS FREEZING. His wool socks were soaked with the condensation on the inside of the steel capsule. Up on the surface, the wetness had felt cool and comfortable, but now, although the condensation had evaporated, his socks had not dried. His toes were numb, the soles of his feet itched. He put his hands beneath his sweater and tucked them under his arms, and leaned away from the porthole to look over Eddie’s shoulder at his gauges. The outside temperature was 4 degrees centigrade, about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside it wasn’t much warmer, just above 50. They were at two thousand feet, and falling.

  Into his microphone Eddie said, “Activating illumination,” and he flicked a switch. Two 1,000-watt lamps on top of the submersible flashed on, casting a flood of yellow that penetrated fifteen or twenty feet before being swallowed by the blackness.

  And then a universe of life exploded before Sharp’s eyes. Tiny planktonic animals swirled in and out of the light, a living snowstorm of sea life. An infinitesimal shrimp adhered to his porthole and began to march purposefully across the glass. Something resembling a gray-and-red ribbon with yellow eyes and a pompadour of tiny spikes wriggled up to the porthole, fluttered before it for a moment, then darted away.

  “Look,” Eddie said, pointing out his porthole. Sharp craned to see, but whatever it was, was gone. He returned to his own porthole, and a moment later he could see it—it appeared, serenely circling the capsule, a creation of some disturbed imagination.

  It was an anglerfish: round, bulbous and brownish yellow, trailing short, mucous fins. Its eyes protruded like blue-green sores, it had fangs like needles of diamond, its flesh was crisscrossed with black veins. It looked like a cyst with teeth. Where its nose should have been was a white stalk, and atop the stalk, glowing like a beacon, was a light.

  Sharp had seen pictures of anglerfish. They used their stalks as lures, dangling the lights before their gaping mouths to attract curious and unwary prey.

  Because there was nothing in the background to compare it to, Sharp had no idea how far away the fish was, or how big.

  “What do you think?” he asked Eddie, and he held his hands a couple of feet apart.

  Eddie
grinned, and held up his hand and spread his thumb and index finger: The fish was four inches long, at most.

  Sharp heard the motor drive on Stephanie’s camera firing frame after frame. She was holding the lens against her porthole, and rotating the f-stop ring, hoping by random shooting to get a good exposure.

  “I thought you only wanted monsters,” Sharp said.

  “What do you think these are?” Stephanie pointed out her porthole. “Good God, look at that!”

  Sharp saw a flicker of yellow pass Stephanie’s porthole. He turned back and waited for the animal to make its way around the capsule.

  This creature seemed to have no fins; it might have been a yellow arrow, save that its entire digestive system, gut and stomach, hung down from a pouch and trailed along, pulsing. Its lower jaw was studded with pinprick teeth, and its black, milk-white eyes stuck out of its head like round buttons.

  Soon, other animals swarmed around the capsule, drawn by the light, inquisitive and unafraid. There were snakelike creatures that seemed to trail hairs along their backs; large-eyed eels with lumps on their heads that looked like tumors; translucent globes that seemed to be all mouth.

  Sharp started as Darling’s voice suddenly boomed over the speaker inside the capsule. “You’ve got yourself a bloody zoo down there, Marcus,” he said. “If the aquarium ever comes to its senses, I know where to drop my traps next time.”

  “Wait’ll they see these pictures, Whip,” Sharp said. “They’ll come back to you on their hands and knees.”

  Forgetting his fear, ignoring the cold, Sharp picked up the camera Stephanie had given him, and adjusted its focus. He knelt on the cushion, and waited for the next miniature mystery to swim by.

  26

  MIKE SLAPPED HIMSELF in the face, and the sting roused him for a moment. But as soon as his eyes returned to the screen of the fish-finder, he felt his lids begin to droop. He stood up, stretched, yawned and looked out the window. The ship was about a quarter of a mile away, and behind it he saw the gray lump of Bermuda. Otherwise, from horizon to horizon the sea was empty.

  Whip had told him to keep his eyes glued to the fish-finder—he called it the poor man’s side-scan sonar—and for more than an hour Mike had. But the image hadn’t changed at all: There was the line that delineated the bottom, and just above it the little dot of the meandering submersible. Nothing else. Not a broken smear that would signal a school of fish, certainly not the solid mark of something big and dense, like a passing whale.

  Normally, Mike wouldn’t have liked being left alone on the boat, but this was different: There was a ship nearby, and Whip was on it, and all the action was half a mile away and didn’t involve him. He had nothing to do but watch, and report in if he saw something. Best of all, he had no decisions to make.

  He didn’t just feel calm, he felt hypnotized, not only by the static screen but also because the sea rocked the Privateer with such subtle gentleness that before he knew what was happening, he had twice found himself lulled to sleep. He might not have woken up at all if his head hadn’t banged against the bulkhead.

  The radio crackled to life, and Mike heard Whip’s voice: “Privateer … Privateer … Privateer … come back.”

  Mike picked up the microphone, pushed the “talk” button and said, “Go ahead, Whip.”

  “How you doing, Michael?”

  ” ‘Bout to fall dead asleep. This is worse than watching paint dry.”

  “Nothing’s going on—take a breather.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mike said. “Make some coffee, go out in the fresh air and fiddle with that whoreson pump.”

  “Leave the volume up and the door open, so you’ll hear me if I call.”

  “Roger that, Whip. Standing by.”

  Mike replaced the microphone on its hook. He looked at the fish-finder one more time, saw that the image hadn’t changed and went below.

  In the wheelhouse, the fish-finder continued to glow. For several moments, the image stayed as steady as if it were a still picture. Then, on the right side of the screen, about a third of the way up from the bottom, a new mark appeared. It was solid, a single mass, and slowly it began to move across the screen, toward the submersible.

  27

  THERE HAD BEEN a change in the creature. Until now, as it had grown and matured, it had lived adventitiously, drifting with the currents, eating whatever food came its way. But food was no longer plentiful; passivity could not guarantee survival.

  Its instincts had not changed—they were genetically programmed, immutable—but its impulse for survival had altered. It had started to become more active in its responses to its environment.

  It could no longer live as a scavenger; it had been forced to become a hunter.

  Hovering now at the confluence of two currents that swept around the volcano, the creature grew agitated; something was intruding, disturbing the normal rhythms of the sea.

  It sensed a change in its surroundings, as if energy had suddenly surged into its world. There was a faint but persistent pulsing in the water; small animals darted back and forth, flashing bioluminescence; larger ones traveled nearby, subtly altering the water pressure.

  The small and relatively weak human eye could not have perceived any light at all, but the creature’s enormous eyes were suffused with rod cells that gathered and registered even the smallest scintilla of light.

  Now it perceived more than a scintilla. Somewhere in the distance below there was a great light, moving, emitting the pulsing sound, galvanizing other animals.

  The creature had not eaten in days, and though it did not respond to time, it was driven by cycles of need.

  It drew water in through its body cavity and expelled it through its funnel, aiming for the source of light.

  It began to hunt.

  28

  YOU LOOK COLD, Marcus,” Stephanie said.

  Sharp nodded. “You got that right,” he said. His arms were crossed over his chest, his hands tucked into his armpits, but still he couldn’t stop shivering. “How come you’re not?”

  “I’ve got a layer of wool over a layer of silk over a layer of cotton.” She turned to Eddie. “Where’s the coffee?”

  Eddie pointed and said, “In the box there.”

  Stephanie reached over, opened a plastic box and took out a thermos bottle. She poured the top full of coffee and passed it to Sharp.

  The coffee was strong, sour-bitter, unsweetened and harsh, but as it pooled in his stomach, Sharp welcomed the warmth. “Thanks,” he said.

  He looked at his watch. They had been down for nearly three hours, drifting at twenty-five hundred feet, about five hundred feet over the bottom, and they had seen nothing but the small, strange creatures that gathered curiously around the capsule and then vanished into the darkness.

  “What say I put her down on the bottom?” Eddie said into his microphone.

  Darling’s voice came over the speaker. “Might’s well,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see a shark.”

  Eddie pushed the control stick forward, and the capsule began to drop.

  The bottom was like pictures Sharp had seen of the surface of the moon: barren, dusty, undulating. The submersible pushed a slight pressure wave before it, and mud rose up and billowed away as the machine moved along.

  Suddenly Eddie straightened up and said, “Christ!”

  “What?” Sharp said. “What is it?”

  Eddie pointed at Sharp’s porthole, and so Sharp shaded his eyes and pressed his face to the glass.

  Snakes, Sharp thought at first. A million snakes. All swarming on a dead body.

  And then, as he watched, he thought: No, they can’t be snakes, they’re eels. But no, not eels either—they had fins. They were fish, some kind of weird fish, writhing and twisting and tearing at flesh. Bits of flesh broke loose and floated away, and were instantly mobbed and ingested and reduced to molecules by other, smaller scavengers.

  One of the eely, snakelike things detached itself from its food and backed aw
ay and, confused or enraged by the lights, attacked the submersible. It thrust its face at

  Sharp’s porthole and thrashed, as if to suck the entire machine into its belly. The face became nothing but a mouth, and around its edges were rasping teeth and a probing tongue. The body twisted like a corkscrew, frantic to force the face to drill a hole in the prey.

  A hagfish, Sharp realized, one of the nightmare demons that bored holes in larger animals and gnawed the life out of them.

  Eddie swung the submersible over the gnarled ball of hagfish, pressed its bow among them, driving them away, and then Sharp could see what they had been feeding on.

  “A sperm whale!” he said. “It’s the lower jaw of a sperm whale. Do you see that, Whip?”

  “Yes,” Darling’s voice said, sounding flat and distant.

  “What the hell kills a sperm whale?”

  Darling didn’t answer, but in the silence, Sharp suddenly thought: I know. And he began to sweat. He strained his eyes to see beyond the perimeter of light. Fish darted back and forth, not fading from view but suddenly appearing and disappearing, phantoms that crossed the rim of light. He was comforted by them and by what they signaled: Whip had once said that as long as fish were around, you didn’t have to worry about sharks, because, long before a man could, the fish read the electromagnetic impulses that warned of a shark’s intention to attack. It was when the fish vanished that you worried.

  On the other hand, Sharp reminded himself, Architeuthis isn’t a shark. He raised his camera to the porthole.