White Shark
by
P e
t e r B e n c h l e y
Part One
1945
1
The water in the estuary had been still
for hours, as still as a sheet of black glass, for there was no wind to stir
it.
Then suddenly, as if violated by a great
beast rising from the depths, the water bulged, heaved up, threatening to
explode.
At first, the man watching from the
hillside dismissed the sight as yet another illusion caused by his fatigue and
the flickering light from the cloud-shrouded moon.
But as he stared, the bulge grew and grew
and finally burst, pierced by a monstrous head, barely visible, black on black,
distinguishable from the water around it only by the gleaming droplets shed
from its sleek skin.
More of the leviathan broke through — a
pointed snout, a smooth cylindrical body — and then silently it settled back
and floated motionless on the silky surface, waiting, waiting for the man.
From the darkness a light flashed three
times: short, long, long; dot, dash,
dash — the international Morse signal for W. The man replied by lighting three matches in
the same sequence. Then he picked up his
satchel and started down the hill.
He stank, he itched, he
chafed. The clothing he had taken days
ago from a roadside corpse — burying his own tailored uniform and handmade
boots in a muddy shell crater — was filthy, ill fitting and vermin-infested.
At least he was no longer hungry: earlier in the evening he had ambushed a
refugee couple, crushed their skulls with a brick and gorged himself on tins of
the vile processed meat they had begged from the invading Americans.
He had found it interesting, killing the
two people. He had ordered many deaths,
and caused countless more, but he had never done the actual killing. It had been surprisingly easy.
* * * * *
He had been traveling — fleeing — for
days. Five? Seven? He had no idea, for stolen moments of sleep
in sodden haystacks had blended seamlessly with hours of slogging along
shattered roads, in company with the wretched refuse of weak-willed nations.
Exhaustion had become his companion and
his plague. Dozens of times he had
collapsed in ditches or flopped in patches of tall grass and lain, panting,
till he felt himself revive. There was
no mystery to his fatigue: he was fifty
years old, and fat, and the only exercise he had in the past ten years was
bending his elbow to sip from a glass.
Still, it was infuriating, a
betrayal. He shouldn't have to be in good shape; he wasn't supposed to be running. He wasn't an athlete or a warrior,
he was a genius who had accomplished something unprecedented in the history of
mankind. His destiny had always been to
lead, to teach, to inspire, not to run like a frightened rat.
Once or twice he had nearly been seduced
by exhaustion into succumbing, surrendering, but he had resisted, for he was
determined to fulfill his destiny. He
had a mission, assigned to him on direct orders from the Fuehrer the day before
he had shot himself, and he would complete that mission, whatever it cost,
however long it took.
For though he was not a
man of politics or world vision, though he was a scientist, he knew that his
mission had significance far beyond science.
* * * * *
Now exhaustion, fear and hunger had all
vanished, and as he made his way carefully down the steep hillside, Ernst
Kruger smiled to himself. His years of
work would bear fruit; his faith had been rewarded.
He had never really doubted that they
would come, not once in the endless days of flight nor
in the endless hours of waiting. He had
known they would not fail him. They
might not be clever like the Jews, but Germans were dependable. They did what they were told.
2
A small rubber boat was waiting when
Kruger reached the pebble beach. One man
sat at the oars, another stood on shore.
Both were dressed entirely in black — shoes, trousers, sweaters, woolen
caps — and their hands and faces had been blackened with charcoal. Neither spoke.
The man on shore extended a hand, offering
to relieve Kruger of his satchel. Kruger
refused. Securing the satchel to his
chest, he stepped aboard the boat and, steadying himself with a hand on the
oarsman's shoulder, made his way forward to the bow.
There was a sound of rubber scraping
against pebbles, then only the soft lap of oars pulling against calm water.
Two more men stood on the deck of the
U-boat, and when the rubber boat glided up to its side, they helped Kruger
aboard, took him to the forward hatch and held it open for him as he climbed
down a ladder into the belly of the boat.
* * * * *
Kruger stood behind a ladder in the
control room and listened to a blizzard of curt orders and immediate
responses. The air inside the submarine
was a fog. Every lightbulb had a halo of
mist around it, every metal surface was wet to the
touch. And the air was not only humid, it
stank. He parsed the stench, and
recognized salt, sweat, diesel oil, potatoes and something sickly sweet, like
cologne.
Kruger felt as if her were a prisoner in
an infernal swamp.
He heard a muted sound of electric motors,
and there was a faint sensation of movement, forward and down.
An officer wearing a white-covered cap
stepped away from the periscope, gestured to Kruger and disappeared into a
passageway. Kruger bent his head to pass
through an open hatch, and followed.
They squeezed into a tiny cubicle — a
bunk, a chair and a folding desk — and the commander introduced himself. Kapitänleutnant Hoffmann was young, no more
than thirty, bearded, with the gaunt pallor of U-boat veterans. Around his neck he wore a Knight's Cross, and
when it snagged in the collar of his shirt, he flicked it aside.
Kruger liked the insouciance of the
gesture. It meant that Hoffmann had had
his Ritterkreuz for some time, was
probably entitled to wear oak leaves with it but didn't bother. He was good at his job, but that was already
obvious from the simple fact that he had survived. Nearly 90 percent of all the U-boats launched
during the war had been lost; of thirty-nine thousand men who had sailed in
them, thirty-three thousand had been killed or captured. Kruger remembered hearing of the Fuehrer's
rage as he had read those figures.
Kruger gave Hoffmann the news: of chaos in the country, of the retreat to
the bunker, of the Fuehrer's death.
"Who is the new leader of the Reich?" Hoffmann asked.
"Donitz," said Kruger. "But in fact, Bormann." He paused, debating whether to tell Hoffmann
the truth: there was no more Reich, not in
"Fifty men, including you and me, all
volunteers, all party members, all single."
"How much do they know?"
"Nothing," Hoffmann said,
"except that they're not likely to see home again."
"And the trip will take how
long?"
"Normally, thirty to forty days, but
these days aren't normal. We can't get out
the shortest way. The
Kruger felt sweat bead on his forehead and
under his arms. Fifty days! He'd been in this iron tomb for less than an
hour, and already he felt as if a mailed fist were crushing his lungs.
"You'll get used to it," Hoffman
said. "And when we get south,
you'll be able to spend time on deck. If we get south, that is. We're at a disadvantage. If we have to fight, we'll be like a
one-armed man. We have no forward
torpedoes."
"Why not?"
"We took them out, to make room for
your... cargo. It was too big to go down
the hatch, so we removed the deck plates.
Then we found it wouldn't fit between the torpedoes, so they had to
go."
Kruger stood up. "I want to see it," he said.
They moved forward, past space after tiny
space — the radio room, officers' quarters, the galley. When they reached the bow of the ship, Hoffmann
swung open the hatch leading to the forward torpedo room, and Kruger stepped
through.
It was there, secured in an enormous
bronze box, and for a moment Kruger simply stood and looked, remembering the
years of work, the countless failures, the derision, the first tiny successes
and, at last, his triumph: a weapon
unlike anything ever created.
He saw that the bronze had begun to
tarnish, and he stepped forward and checked swiftly for any signs of
damage. He saw none.
He put a hand on the side of the box. What he felt was beyond pride. Here was the most revolutionary weapon not
only of the Third Reich but of science itself.
Very few men in history could claim what he could: Ernst Kruger had changed the world.
He thought of Mengele, Josef Mengele, his
personal friend and professional rival.
Had Mengele, too, escaped? Was he
still alive? Would they meet in
Kruger dearly hoped Mengele was still
alive; he couldn't wait to show Mengele his achievement, the ultimate
weapon: Der Weisse Hai.
He turned away and left the torpedo room.
3
As the U-boat rounded the tip of
On May 8, Hoffmann told Kruger that a
bulletin had come over the radio: German
had surrendered. The war was over.
"Not for us," Kruger
replied. "Not for us. For us, the war will never be over."
* * * * *
The days fell, like autumn leaves from a
linden tree, one after another, indistinguishable. Hoffmann had avoided the shipping lanes, and
so encountered no Allied vessels. Three
times the lookout had seen trails of smoke on the horizon; half a dozen times
Hoffman had ordered the boat to submerge, shallow practice dives rather than
emergencies.
For Kruger, time became a monotonous cycle
of meals, sleep and work in the forward torpedo room. His work was crucial; it was the sole
motivation for his own life now, and for enduring this interminable voyage.
In the torpedo room, Kruger pushed a
release button hidden beneath a tiny swastika etched in the bronze. The cover of the huge box opened; with a
magnifying glass he examined the thick rubber O-ring seals that kept the box
air- and watertight. He applied grease
to any spots that appeared to be pitting or drying out.
Kruger's superiors had immediately grasped
the military applications of his experiments.
What he saw as a scientific breakthrough, they saw as a magnificent
weapon. And so money was lavished upon
it, and Kruger had been pushed to complete it.
But then, with success so close, time had run out; the empire of the
Reich had shrunk to a bunker in
* * * * *
Four weeks into the voyage, Kruger was
summoned to the control room. Hoffmann's
arms hung over the wings of the periscope, his face was pressed to the eyepiece
and he was turning in a slow circle. He
didn't look up, but as soon as Kruger was in the room, Hoffmann said,
"This is the moment we've been waiting for, Herr Doktor. It's calm, it's
twilight and it's pouring rain. We can
go topside and have a shower."
Hoffman looked away from the eyepiece and smiled. "And in deference to your station, you
shall be on the first shift."
It had been more than a month since Kruger
had bathed, shaved, brushed his teeth.
The boat could store only a few gallons of fresh water, and that which
its desalinizers made every day was reserved exclusively for cooking and for
servicing the batteries. He longed for
the feel of fresh water on his stinking skin.
"Is it safe?" he asked.
"I think so. There's not much traffic this far south —
we're about two thousand kilometers east of the
"No bottom here, Herr Kaleu," a
sailor at a control panel replied.
"No bottom?" Kruger
said. "How can there be no
bottom?"
Hoffmann said, "It’s too deep for our
Fathometer to get a return. We must be
over one of the midocean trenches...
three kilometers, five kilometers...
who knows? Plenty
of water. We're not likely to hit
anything."
The rush of fresh air, as a crewman opened
the conning-tower hatch, smelled to Kruger as sweet as violets. He stood at the base of the ladder, holding a
bar of soap, and savored the drops of rainwater that fell on his face.
The crewman scanned the
horizon with binoculars, call out, "All clear!" and slid
backward down the ladder.
Kruger climbed up, stepped over the lip of
the bridge and descended the exterior ladder to the deck. Four crewmen followed him, scaling the
ladders as nimbly as spiders. They
gathered on the afterdeck, naked, and passed a bar of soap among them.
The rain was steady but soft, not wind
driven, and the sea was sickly calm. The
long, gentle ocean swell lifted the submarine so slowly that Kruger had no
trouble keeping his footing. He walked
forward to a flat stretch of deck, took off his clothes and spread them on the
deck, hoping the rain would rinse the stench from them. He lathered himself and spread his arms.
"Herr Doktor!"
Kruger dropped his arms and looked aft;
the four naked crewmen were rushing up the ladder to the bridge.
"A plane! Hurry!" The last
crewman on the ladder pointed at the sky, then kept
climbing.
"A what?" Then, over the
sound of his own voice, Kruger heard the drone of an engine. He looked in the direction the crewman had
pointed; for a moment, he saw nothing.
Then, against the lighter gray of the western clouds, there was a black
speck skimming the wave tops and heading directly at him.
He scooped up his clothes and ran for the
ladder. His foot hit something, some
obstruction on the deck, and he sprawled forward onto his knees, scattering his
clothes.
The drone of the plane's engine sounded
closer; it had risen to a yowl.
Stunned by a sharp, hot pain that shot
from his big toe up through his calf, Kruger abandoned his clothes and
struggled to his feet. He glanced
backward to see what he had hit; one of the deck plates just aft of the forward
hatch looked warped, as if a weld had popped and sprung one of the plate's
edges.
He began to climb the ladder.
The engine noise was deafening now, and
Kruger ducked reflexively as the plane screamed overhead. He looked up as it began a long loop into the
sky.
One of the crewmen leaned down from the
bridge, reaching his hand out to Kruger, urging his on.
From somewhere inside the hull Kruger
heard the klaxon for emergency dive, and as he fell over the lip of the bridge
and sought footing on the interior ladder, he felt the thrum of engines and a
sensation of motion forward and down.
The hatch clanged shut above him, the
crewman shimmied past him down the side of the ladder, and Kruger found himself
standing on the bottom rung, naked, drenched, a film of soap running down his
legs.
Hoffman was bent over the periscope. "Pull the plug, Chief," he said,
"we're taking her down."
Kruger said, "On the deck, one of
the—"
"Periscope depth," the chief
called. "E motors half speed."
Hoffmann spun the periscope ninety
degrees. "Son of a bitch," he said. "The bastard's coming back."
"He didn't fire on us," Kruger
said. "I think you—"
"He will this time; he was just
making sure. He's not about to let a
U-boat get across the
Hoffmann slammed the wings of the
periscope up and pushed the retractor button, and the gleaming steel tube slid
downward. He glanced at Kruger, noted
the stricken look on his face and said, "Don't worry,
we're a needle in a haystack. Night's
coming on, and the chances of his finding us—"
"Fifty meters!" called the
chief.
"On the deck," Kruger said. "I saw a... one of the pieces of
metal... have you taken this boat to a hundred meters before?"
"Of course. Dozens of times."
"Seventy meters, Herr Kaleu!"
* * * * *
At seventy meters below the surface, there
was nearly a hundred pounds of water pressure on every square inch of the
submarine's hull. The boat had been designed
to operate safely at more than twice that depth, and had done so many
times. But when the forward deck plates
had been removed to take on Kruger's cargo, one of the welders assigned to
replace them had worked too hastily. A
few superficial, inconsequential welds had failed during the shallow dives, but
all the critical ones had held. Now,
however, with thousands of tons of water squeezing the hull like a living fist,
one gave way.
* * * * *
There was a noise forward, a resonant
boom, and the boat lurched downward. Men
were thrown from their seats; Kruger slammed into the ladder, bounced off and
then grabbed it to keep from pitching down the passageway.
Hoffmann's feet skidded out from under
him, and he clutched the periscope.
"Emergency surface!" he
shouted. "Bring her up! All back full! Blow fore and aft!" He shot a glance at Kruger. Did you dog the forward hatch?"
"I can't remem—"
There was another boom then as the forward
hatch blew open, and a solid jet of water five feet high and three feet across
blasted from the torpedo room through the petty officers' quarters. It rushed into the galley and the officers'
wardroom.
"Ninety meters, Herr Kaleu!" a
voice shrieked.
The boat continued down. Kruger suddenly felt weightless, as if he
were in an elevator.
There were loud creaking noises; somewhere
a pipe burst; there was a hiss of steam.
The control room filled with the sour smell of sweat, then of urine,
and, at last, of oil and feces.
Another boom, at two
hundred meters.
Darkness. Screams. Wailing.
In the millisecond before he died, Ernst
Kruger reached a hand forward, toward the torpedo room, toward the future.
4
The submarine sank swiftly. It plummeted, bow
first, to a thousand feet. There, well
beyond its test depth, the pressure hull finally gave way, in a dozen places at
once. Air rushed from ruptures of torn
metal, the boat shuddered and torqued.
Its hydrodynamics destroyed, it began to tumble.
Down, down it went, passing through two
thousand feet, then five thousand. And with
every thirty-three feet another fifteen pounds of water pressure forced the
hull, rushed into tiny pockets of residual air and crushed them like
grapes. At ten thousand feet, more than
two tons of water pressed against every square millimeter of steel, and the
last scintilla of air popped from the shattered hulk and drifted upward in the
darkness.
The submarine descended as if it were a
discarded soda can, until finally it struck a mountainside, bounced and rolled
in slow motion, throwing clouds of unseen silt and dislodging boulders that
accompanied it into a stygian canyon.
There, at last, it came to a halt, a heap of twisted steel.
* * * * *
In the rubble of the bow, the huge box,
cast of bronze, sealed with rubber, denied penetration to the seeking sea.
The silt settled, time
passed. Legions of infinitesimal organisms that
patrolled the abyss consumed what was edible.
Calm returned to the ocean bottom, and the
relentless cycle of life and death went on.
Part Two
1996
Latitude 26
Degrees North
Longitude 45
Degrees West
5
Absolute darkness is rare on earth. Even on a moonless night, with clouds hiding
the stars, the loom of civilization glows against the sky.
In the deep oceans, absolute darkness is
commonplace. Rays of the sun, thought
for millennia to be the sole source of life on earth, can penetrate less than
half a mile of seawater. Nearly three
quarters of the planet — vast plains, great canyons, mountain ranges that rival
the
* * * * *
Two submersibles hovered side by side like
alien crabs — white-bodied, brilliant-eyed.
The two five-thousand-watt lights mounted on their concave snouts cast a
path of gold some two hundred feet in front of them.
"Four thousand meters," one of
the pilots said into his radio.
"The pass should be dead ahead.
I'm going in."
"Roger that," the other pilot
replied. "I'm right behind
you."
Propellers turned simultaneously as
electric motors were engaged, and the first submersible moved slowly ahead.
Inside the steel capsule — only ten feet
long and six feet across — David Webber half lay, half crouched beside the
pilot and pressed his face to a six-inch porthole as the lamps picked up steep
gray escarpments of dirt and rock that seemed to go on forever, as if
descending from nowhere above to nowhere below.
Four thousand meters, Webber thought. Thirteen thousand feet of
water, more or less. Two and a half miles.
All that water above him, all that pressure around him. How much pressure? Incalculable. But certainly enough to
turn him into a Pudding Pop.
Don't think about it, he told
himself. If you think about it, you'll
go apeshit. And this is not a good time or
place to go apeshit. You need the work,
you need the money. Just get the job
done and get the hell out of here.
A few drops of condensation dripped from
overhead, landed on his neck, and he jumped.
The pilot glanced at him and laughed. "Wish I'd have seen it coming," he
said. "I'd have screamed along with
you, made you think we were buying the farm." He grinned.
"I like to do that to first-timers, watch ‘em go
goggle-eyed."
"Nice," Webber said. "I'd have sent you my cleaning
bill." He shivered and crossed his
arms to rub his shoulders. It had been
85 degrees on the surface, and he had been sweating in his wool pullover, wool
socks and corduroy trousers. But in the
three hours it had taken them to descend, the temperature had dropped more than
fifty degrees. He was freezing. He was still sweating, but now it was from
fear.
"What's the water temperature out
there?" he asked, not from genuine curiosity but because there was comfort
in conversation.
"Thirty, thirty-two," the pilot
said. "Cold enough to pucker your
dickie, that's for sure."
Webber turned back to his porthole and
rested a hand on the controls of one of the four cameras he had installed in
movable housings bolted to the skin of the submersible. The boat was skimming the side of a canyon
wasteland, an endless terrain of monochromatic rubble that looked less inviting
than the surface of the moon. He kept
reminding himself that his and the pilot's were the first human eyes ever to
see this landscape, and his lenses would be the first to record it on film.
"Hard to believe things actually live
down here," he said.
"Oh, yeah, there's
things, but nothing like you've ever seen. There's albino critters and things with no
eyes — I mean, talk about tits on a bull, what good's eyes gonna do ‘em
here? There's
transparent things — shit, there's life of some kind damn near
everywhere. ‘Course, I can't speak for
the bottom bottom, like thirty-five
thousand feet. I never
been down there. But, sure,
there's life all around here. What's got
everybody in an uproar is the idea that some kinds of life actually begin here."
"Yeah," Webber said. "So I hear. They're calling it chemosynthesis."
Chemosynthesis, that was the point, the reason he was here. Here, freezing his ass off two miles down in
the sea, in an utter, impenetrable blackness.
Chemosynthesis: the generation of life without light; the
concept that living things could be created by chemicals alone. Fascinating. Revolutionary. Undocumented.
To discover evidence that chemosynthesis
was possible, to record that evidence, to prove its existence beyond all
reasonable doubt — this was his assignment, a photographer's dream. A freelancer on contract to National Geographic, Webber was to take
the first pictures ever of deep-ocean vents in the recently discovered Kristof
Trench, a the bottom of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge just
west of the
He had been chosen for the assignment over
several of his peers because he was celebrated for possessing great ingenuity
with his cameras, his lenses and his housings; and also because of his youth
and his courage. He had accepted the
assignment partly for the money, partly for the credit in the magazine, but
mostly for the thrill of being the first to prove that this oddity of science
really could occur in the sea, in nature.
He hadn't thought of fear; he considered
himself inured to fear. Over the past
fifteen years, he had lived through three plane crashes, an attack by a wounded
lioness, bites from sharks and moray eels, scorpion stings and infestation by a
succession of exotic parasites and amoebas that had caused, among other
inconveniences, the temporary loss of all body hair and the sloughing of the
skin from his tongue and penis.
He was accustomed. in
short, to surprises, to the bizarre tricks nature could throw at him.
What he hadn't suspected, had not even imagined
and was amazed to discover in just the past few hours, was that he had become a
claustrophobe.
When did this happen? And why? Blundering around blindly in an underwater
mountain range deeper than the Rockies were high, with his survival dependent on
the skills of some laid-back sub jockey at the helm of a miniscule capsule that
had probably been welded together by the lowest bidder, Webber felt
unwell: suffocated, compressed,
imprisoned, ill.
Why hadn't he listened to his girlfriend
and taken the other assignment instead?
He'd be much happier in the
But, no, he had to have the glory of being
the first.
Asshole.
"How much farther?" he asked,
eager for his voice to distract him from the sounds of his own heart.
"To the smoker? No too
long." The pilot tapped a gauge on
the panel before him. "Water temp's
creeping up. We gotta be close."
As the submersible rounded a sharp point
of rock in the cliff face, its lights were suddenly dimmed by a cloud of thick
black smoke.
"Here we are," the pilot said,
and he stopped the boat's forward motion and reversed. They descended until the lights cleared.
Webber hunched forward and gripped his
camera controls. "Tell Charlie to
see if he can move around to the other side," he said. "I want to get him in the frame."
"Will do." The pilot
spoke into his microphone, and Webber saw the white shape of the other submersible
drift through the black cloud and hover spectrally.
From this distance, the vent didn't look
like much: a roiling plume of black
smoke against a background of black water, with occasional slashes of
red-orange flame as the belly of the earth belched molten rock up through its
skin. But the Geographic wanted comprehensive coverage of everything he saw, no
matter how mundane, so Webber began to shoot.
Each camera was loaded with one hundred
frames of 35-mm film, and the strobes recycled instantaneously, so he was able
to fire shot after shot as the pilot guided the submersible slowly toward the
mouth of the vent.
Webber was relieved to be working now,
concentrating on angles and exposures, trying to avoid the glare from the other
submersible's lights, his fear forgotten.
His shivering had stopped, he wasn't cold
anymore. In fact, he felt hot, as hot as
he had on the surface.
"What's the temperature out there
now?" he asked.
"Almost two hundred Fahrenheit,"
said the pilot. "The vent's like a
stove, heats everything around it."
Suddenly something bumped into Webber's
porthole and ricocheted away into the cloud of smoke. Startled, he jerked backward and said,
"What the hell?" It had been
too fast and too close for him to distinguish its features; all he had seen was
a fluttering blur of white.
"Just wait," said the
pilot. "Don't use up all your
film. We got lots of critters out there
now, might even find something brand-new nobody's ever seen before."
They were approaching the mouth of the
vent now. Here, supposedly, animals fed
on the vent's chemicals. There was a
deep staccato rumbling sound, and flashes of red and orange, as molten rock
erupted from fissures in the cliff.
Another animal sped by, then another. And then, as the submersible settled above a
small mesa of newly hardened lava, a blizzard of them: shrimps.
They were huge, ash white, eyeless; thousands, hundreds of thousands of
shrimps, perhaps millions. So many that
they filled the field of vision, swarming, pulsating like a living mountain.
"Sweet Jesus..."
Webber said, both riveted and appalled.
"What are they doing?"
"Feeding," he pilot said,
"on whatever's in that smoke."
"Shrimps can live in
two-hundred-degree water?"
"Born in it, live
in it and die in it. Once in a while, one'll tumble into the mouth
of the vent — that's about seven hundred degrees in there — and he'll burn
up... pop, just like a tick in a
match flame."
After Webber had fired a dozen shots, the
pilot nudged the submersible forward, parting the shrimps as if they were a
thick bead curtain.
Surrounding the mouth of the vent, rooted
to the lava and growing like a nightmare garden, were long bony stalks, six or
eight feet tall, from the ends of which protruded red and yellow feathery
fingers that moved sinuously in and out of the billows of smoke.
"What the hell are they?" Webber
said.
"Tube worms. They build
those houses for themselves out of something they excrete, then
send their fans out to feed. Watch." The
pilot reached for a control lever and extended one of the submersible's
articulate arms toward the nearest stalk.
As the steel claws of the arm drew near, the fans seemed to freeze, and
a split second before they would have been touched, they vanished, withdrew as
if by magic into the shelter of their calcareous tubes. "Did you get a picture of that?"
the pilot asked.
"Too fast," said Webber. "Let's try again. I'll set the shutter speed for a
two-thousandth."
* * * * *
An hour later, Webber had shot more than
three hundred frames of film. He had
photographed the shrimps and the tube worms in close-up, wide-angle and with
the other submersible in the background.
He hoped he had at least twenty Geographic-quality
images. He had no idea whether or to his
pictures would verify the existence of chemosynthetic species, or would simply
prove that blind albino shrimps lived in 200-degree water two and a half miles
below the surface of the sea. Either
way, he knew he had some spectacular shots.
For insurance, he had had the pilot use
the submersible's mechanical arm to gather half a dozen shrimps and two tube
worms; they were secured now in a collecting basket on the outside of the
boat. He would take some macro shots of
them in the lab on board the mother ship.
"That'll do it," he said to the
pilot. "Let's go."
"You're sure?" I don't guess your boss'll want to spend
another fifty grand to send us back down here."
Webber hesitated briefly, then said, "I'm sure." He was confident that he had the money
shots. He knew his cameras, sometimes he
felt as if his brain were an extension of them, and he could picture now the
images in his mind. They were excellent,
he was certain.
"Okay." Into his radio, the pilot said, "We're
outta here." He put the boat into
reverse and backed away from the vent.
A moment later, Webber was making reminder
notes on a pad when he heard the pilot say, "Son of a bitch..."
"What?"
"Look over there." The pilot was pointing at something on the
bottom, outside his porthole.
Webber leaned to his own porthole and held
his breath so he wouldn't fog the glass.
"I don't see anything," he said.
"Down there. Shrimp shells. Zillions of them. They're all over the sand."
"So?
Don't you figure those creatures eat each other?"
"Well, I dunno. I never saw it like this. I s’pose they do eat each other, but would
they shell each other too? Maybe it's one of them deep sharks, a
six-gill or a sleeper. But would they stop to shell a shrimp before they
eat it? It don't
make a lick of sense."
"Could it eat them whole and spit out
the shells? Regurgitate them?"
"A shark's got digestion like battery
acid. Three wouldn't
be nothin' left."
"I don't get it," Webber said.
"Me neither, but something's been eating those shrimp, by the goddamn thousands, and
shelling ‘em too. I think we better have
a look-see."
The shells appeared to taper off into a
trail, and the pilot turned the boat around and followed the trail, directing
the lights downward as he cruised along a few feet off the bottom.
The submersible moved slowly, no more than
a couple of hundred feet a minute, and after two or three minutes the monotony
of the whirring motor and the sameness of the barren landscape became
hypnotic. Webber felt his eyes
glazing. He shook his head. "What are we looking for?" he
asked.
"I dunno, but my guess is it's the
same as usual — a clue that'll lead us to something nature didn't make. A straight line or
something, maybe... a perfect circle... anything symmetrical. There's damn little in nature that's
symmetrical."
They had been moving for only a few
seconds more when Webber thought he glimpsed an anomaly at the edge of the ring
of light. "Over there," he
said. "That isn't exactly
symmetrical, but it doesn't look natural, either."
The pilot turned the boat, and as the
lights moved across the bottom, a mass of gnarled black metal appeared on the
carpet of powdery silt. It had no
recognizable shape, and parts seemed to have been crushed, other parts torn and
twisted.
"It looks like junk," Webber
said.
"Yeah, but what
kind of junk? What was
it?" The pilot radioed his position
to the other submersible, then dropped down until the
bottom of his boat rested on the silt.
The mass of metal was spread over too
large an area for the lights to illuminate all of it, so the pilot aimed all
ten thousand watts at one end and manipulated the lights foot by foot, studying
every shape and, as if constructing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit them
together into a coherent whole.
Webber didn't offer to help, for he knew
he couldn't contribute anything useful.
He was a photographer, not an engineer.
For all he knew, the heap of steel out there might have been a
locomotive, a paddle-wheel steamer or an airplane.
As he waited, he felt fear returning. They had been down in this thing for almost
five hours; it would take them at least three more hours to return to the
surface. He was cold; he was hungry; he
needed to take a leak; most of all, he needed to move, to do something. And to get the hell out of here.
"C’mon," he said. "Let's forget it and take off."
The pilot waited a long moment before he
replied. When at last he did, he turned
to Webber and said, "I hope you still got a pile of film left."
"Why?"
"‘Cause we
just found ourselves one hell of a bonus."
6
The pilot summoned the other submersible
and positioned it fifty yards away, across the field of wreckage. With the four lamps throwing a
twenty-thousand-watt pool of light, they could see nearly the entire site.
The pilot grinned at Webber and said
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Well, what is it?"
"How the hell do I know?" Webber snapped.
"Look, I'm freezing, I'm tired, I have to
hit the head. Do me a favor and
stop—"
"It's a submarine."
"It is?" Webber said, and pressed his
face to the porthole. "How do you
know?"
"Look there." The pilot pointed. "That's a diving plane. And there. That's gotta be a snorkel tube."
"You mean a nuke?"
"No, I don't think so; I'm pretty
sure not. It looks to be steel. See how it's oxidizing — real slow, because
there's almost no oxygen down here. But
it is oxidizing — and it's small and
the wiring's shitty, old-fashioned. I'd
say we're talking World War Two."
"World War Two?"
"Yeah, but let's try to get
closer." The pilot spoke into his
microphone, and, on cue, the two submersibles began to crawl toward each other
at a speed barely above idle, skimming the bottom just high enough to avoid
roiling the silt.
Webber's film counters told him he had
eighty-six frames left, so he shot sparingly.
He tried to imagine the wreck whole, but the destruction was so complete
that he couldn't see how anyone could identify individual sections of the ship.
"Where are we on the thing?" he
asked.
"Looks to me like the stern,"
the pilot said. "She's lying on her
starboard side. Those pipes there should
be the after torpedo tubes."
They passed one of the submarine's deck
guns, and because it actually looked like something, Webber shot a couple of
frames of it.
They came to a gaping wound in the side of
the ship and saw on the silt a few feet away a pair of shoes looking as if they
were waiting for feet to step into them.
"Where's the guy who wore them?" Webber asked as he shot the shoes from different
angles. "Where's the body?"
"
"Bones and all? Worms eat
bones?"
"No, but the sea does. Deep, cold salt water dissolves bones... it's
a chemical thing. The sea seeks out
calcium. I used to want to be buried at
sea, but not now, not anymore. I don't
like the thought of being lunch for creepy crawlies."
They saw a few more recognizable items as
they crept toward the bow: pots from the
galley, the frame of a bunk, a radio.
Webber shot them all. He was
readjusting one of his cameras when, at the edge of his field of vision, he saw
what looked like a letter of the alphabet painted on a steel plate. "What's that?" he said, pointing.
The pilot turned the submersible around
and moved it slowly forward. Looking
through his porthole, he said suddenly, "Bingo! We just identified the boat."
"We did?"
"The kind, anyway. That's a U painted on one of the conning-tower
plates. It's a U-boat."
"A U-boat? You mean she's
German?"
"She was. But what she was doing this far south in the
middle of nowhere, the Lord only knows."
Webber shot pictures of the U from several angles as the pilot
nudged the submersible on toward the bow of the submarine.
When they reached the forward deck area,
the pilot disengaged the motor and let the submersible hover. "There's what sank her," he said,
focusing the lights on an enormous hole in the deck. "She imploded."
The deck plates were bent inward, their
edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.
As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat
running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the
men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die. He could imagine the roar of rushing water,
the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the
agony. "Christ..." he said.
The pilot put the motor in gear, and the
submersible inched forward. Its lights
reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a...
"Hey!" Webber
shouted.
"What?"
"There's something in there. Something big. It looks... I don't
know..."
The pilot maneuvered the submersible above
the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the artificial
arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes. He angled the lights into a single
five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole. "I'll be damned..."
"It looks like a box," Webber
said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a
perfect rectangle. "A
chest."
"Yeah, or a
coffin." The pilot paused, reconsidering. "No.
Too big for a coffin."
For a long moment, neither of them
spoke. They just stared at the box —
wondering, imagining.
At last, Webber said, "We ought to
bring it up."
"Yeah." The bastard's
gotta be eight feet long. I bet it
weighs a ton. I can't lift it with this
boat."
"How about both
boats together?"
"No, we can't lift a thousand pounds
apiece, and I'm just guessing. It could
be a lot more than that. We
couldn't..." He stopped. "Just a sec. I think they've got five miles of cable in
the hold of that ship up there. If they
can weight an end of it and send it down, and if we can get a sling around the
box, maybe... there's a chance..."
He pushed a button and spoke into his microphone.
* * * * *
It took the two submersibles nearly an
hour to retrieve the weighted cable sent down from the mother ship and to
secure the box in a wire sling. By the
time they gave the ship the order to begin lifting, they were pushing the
limits of their air supply. And so, as
soon as they made sure that the box was free of the submarine's hull and was
rising steadily, they shed ballast and began their own ascent.
Webber felt exhausted and elated and
challenged, impatient to get to the surface, open the box and see what was
inside.
"You know something weird?" he
said as he watched the depth gauge record their meter-by-meter progress up
toward daylight.
"This whole thing's weird," the
pilot said. "You
thinking of something in particular?"
"That wreckage. All of it was
covered by silt. Everything had a gray
film on it... except the box. It was
clean. That's probably why I saw
it. It stood out."
The pilot shrugged. "Does silt stick to bronze? Beats me."
7
"I don't believe this!" Webber said. "Metallurgists,
archaeologists, chemists... who gives a shit? All that counts is what's inside! What are they thinking of?"
"Yeah, well, you know
bureaucrats," the pilot said, trying to be sympathetic. "They sit around with their thumb up
their ass all day, and now, suddenly, they got something to do, they gotta justify their existence."
They were standing on the stern of the
ship as it steamed westward toward
And then, not half an hour before he was
to begin shooting, the ship's captain had handed him a fax marked
"Urgent" from the Geographic: he was to leave the box untouched and
unopened until the ship reached port, so that a cadre of scientists and
historians could meet the ship and examine the box and open it in the presence
of a writer, an editor and a camera team from the National Geographic Explorer television series.
Webber was devastated. He knew what would happen: his lighting setup would be destroyed: he'd be shunted aside, given a backseat to
the TV team, ordered around by the experts.
He'd have no chance to shot enough film to have ample "outs" —
pictures the Geographic wouldn't want and which he could sell to other
magazines. The quality of his work would
suffer, and so would his pocketbook.
Yet there was nothing he could do about
it, and worse, it was his own fault. He
should have stifled his excitement and waited to inform the magazine about the
discovery of the box.
Now he shouted, "Shit!" into the
evening air.
"C'mon," the pilot said,
"forget it. Let's go down to the
wardroom; I got a friend there named Jack Daniel's who's dyin' to meet
you."
* * * * *
Webber and the pilot sat in the wardroom and
finished the Jack Daniel's. The more the
pilot groused about bureaucrats, the more convinced Webber became that he was
being shafted. He had discovered the
box, he had photographed it inside the submarine, he should be the one to take
the first, the best — the only — pictures of what was inside.
At eight-forty-five, the pilot pronounced
himself stewed to the gills, and he staggered off to his bunk.
At eight-fifty, Webber decided on a
plan. He went to bed and set his alarm
clock for midnight.
* * * * *
"That's Montauk Point," the
captain said, indicating the outer circle on the radar screen, "and
there's
"Right," Webber said, nauseated
by the pool of acid coffee that sloshed in his stomach as the ship nosed into a
trough and then rose askew onto the crest of a combing wave. Pushed by a following sea, the ship was
corkscrewing through the night.
"Guess I'll go back and try to get some sleep."
"Put a wastebasket by your
bunk," the captain suggested. "Nothing worse than trying to sleep in a bed of puke."
Webber had gone to the bridge to see how
many lookouts were on duty and had found only two, the captain and a mate, both
in the wheelhouse, both facing forward.
The stern was empty and unobserved.
Back in his cabin, he put a finger down
his throat and forced himself to vomit into the toilet. He waited five minutes, tried to vomit again,
but brought up nothing but bile. He
brushed his teeth, and, feeling clearheaded and more
stable, he slung a Nikon with an attached flash over his shoulder, picked up
and tested a flashlight and walked aft, out onto the stern.
The wind was blowing twenty-five or thirty
knots, but there was no rain, and the ship was moving with the wind at fifteen
knots, which cut its bluster: walking across
the flat, wide stern was no worse than trudging into a fresh breeze.
Two five-hundred-watt lamps flooded the
afterdeck with light. The submersibles
squatted on their cradles like mutant beetles assigned to guard the gleaming
greenish-yellow box that lay between them.
Webber stayed in the shadows as he crossed
the hundred feet of afterdeck. He
crouched behind the portside submersible, checked to be sure no one was
watching from the wings of the bridge, then shone his
flashlight on the side of the box.
He had no idea how heavy the lid of the
box was — hundreds of pounds, certainly more than he could hope to lift
alone. If he had to, he could use the lifting
rig from one of the submersibles, a big steel hook shackled to a
block-and-tackle arrangement and powered by an electric winch. But perhaps the lid was spring-loaded;
perhaps there was a release latch or button.
He emerged from the shelter of the submersible
cradle, crossed the deck and knelt beside the box. Facing aft to shade the flashlight beam with
his back, he followed the lip of the lid form one end to the other. On the far side, only a few feet from the
edge of the fantail, with the ship's wake boiling as it rose and fell beneath
him, he saw a design etched in the bronze:
a tiny swastika. Beneath it was a
button.
He pressed the button, heard a click, then
a hiss, and the lid of the box began to rise.
He knelt, stunned, for a moment as he watched
the lid move up tantalizingly slowly, rising at no
more than an inch a second.
When it was about half open, he got to his
feet, turned on his camera, raised it to his eye, focused it, and waited for
the beep signaling that the flash was ready to fire.
The light was dim; the lid shadowed the
interior of the box, the view through the lens was shimmery and amorphous. The box was full of liquid.
He thought... was that a face? No, not... but it was something, and facelike.
There was a sudden thrashing in the
liquid, and flashes of what looked like steel.
For a fraction of a second, Webber felt
pain, then a rush of warmth, then a feeling of being dragged underwater. And then, as he died, the bizarre sensation
that he was being eaten.
8
It needed to feed, and it fed until it
could feed no more. It drank, sucking
ravenously, inefficiently, until its viscera refused to accept any more of the
warm, salty fluid.
Once nourished, it was still disoriented
and confused. There was motion and
instability and, when it rose from its box, an alarming lack. Its gills fluttered, gasping for sustenance,
but found none until it submerged again.
Nerve impulses fired randomly in its
brain, crossing barren synapses, unable to sort responses. It was programmed with answers, but, in its
frenzy, it was unable to find them.
It sensed that sustenance was nearby, and
so, in desperation, it emerged again from the safety of its box and sensed its
surroundings.
There, just there. The dark and welcoming
world to which it must return.
It was bereft of knowledge but keen in
instinct. It recognized few imperatives
but was compelled to obey the ones it knew.
Its survival depended on fuel and protection.
It had no powers of innovation, but it did
have enormous strength, and that strength was what it called upon now.
Trailing streaks of mucous slime, it moved
to the far end of the box and began to push.
Though increasingly starved for oxygen, its brain was able to generate
electrical impulses that charged its muscle fibers.
* * * * *
The bow of the ship buried itself in a
trough, then the stern rose. The box
slid forward, pushing the creature with it.
But then the bow recovered and climbed toward the sky, and as the stern
fell rapidly, there was a tiny interstice when the box was weightless.
The box moved aft, teetered on the edge of
the fantail and tumbled into the sea.
As soon as it felt the cold, comforting
confinement of salt water, its systems responded with instantaneous
regeneration. The creature soared
downward through the night sea, infused with the primitive perception that it
was once again where it should be.
The ship pitched and slewed its way toward
the lee of an island as a blood-spattered Nikon camera rolled back and forth
across the afterdeck.
Part Three
1996
Waterboro
9
Simon Chase leaned close to the television
monitor in the boat's cabin and shaded it with his hand. The summer sun was still low in the sky, and
its brilliance flooded through the windows and washed out definition on the
green screen. The slowly moving white
dot was barely visible.
With his finger Chase traced a line on the
screen, checked it against a compass and said, "Here she comes. Swing around to one-eighty."
"What's she doing?" asked the
mate, Tall Man Palmer, as he spun the wheel to the right and headed south. "Been out to Block for breakfast, coming
back to Waterboro for lunch?"
"I doubt she's hungry," Chase
said. "Probably so full of whale
meat she won't eat for a week."
"Or longer," said Chase's
son. Max sat on the bench seat facing
the monitor and meticulously copied its data onto graph paper. "Some of the carcharhinids can go more
than a month without eating." He
made the remark with studied casualness, as if such esoterica about marine
biology was on the tip of every twelve-year-old's tongue.
"Well, excuse me, Jacques
Cousteau," Tall Man said, chuckling.
"Don't mind Tall Man, he's just
jealous," said Chase, touching Max's shoulder. "You're right." He was proud, and moved, for he knew that Max
was reaching out, trying to do his part in building a bridge that, under other
circumstances, would have been built years ago.
Tall Man nodded toward shore and said,
"Let's go tell the folks on the beach that the lady ain't hungry. They'd be tickled to hear it."
Chase looked through the window at the
rocky beach of
He smiled at the thought of the scramble,
the panic, that would ensue if the people had any idea why this
innocent-looking white boat was cruising back and forth out here, less than
five hundred yards from the beach.
People loved to read about sharks, loved to see movies about sharks,
loved to believe they understood sharks and wanted to protect them. But tell them there was a shark in the water
anywhere within ten miles — especially a great white shark — and their love
changed instantly to fear and loathing.
If they knew that he and Max and Tall Man
were tracking a sixteen foot white shark that likely weighed a ton or more,
their affection would turn to blood lust.
They'd holler for it to be killed.
Then, of course, as soon as someone did kill it, they'd go right back to
mouthing off about how they loved sharks and how all God's
creatures ought to be protected.
"The shark's coming up," Max
said, reading digital numbers on the screen.
Chase bent to the screen again, shading
it. "Yeah, she's been cooling off
at two hundred feet, but she's already at less than a hundred."
"Where'd she find two hundred feet
between here and Block?" asked Tall Man.
"Must be a ditch
out there. I tell you, Tall,
she knows her territory. Anyway, she's
coming up the slope." From a hook
on the bulkhead Chase took a still camera with an 85-mm—200-mm zoom lens and
hung it around his neck. He said to Max,
"Let's go see if she'll pose for us."
Then, to Tall Man, "Check the monitor now and then just to make
sure she doesn’t buzz off somewhere."
He went to the doorway and looked at the
shore again. "I hope she doesn't
come up between us and the beach. Mass
hysteria, we do not need."
"You mean like Matawan Creek,"
Max said, "In 1916."
"Yeah, but they had reason to be
hysterical. That shark killed three
people."
"Four," Max said.
"Four. Sorry."
Chase smiled and looked down — he could still look down, but barely; the
boy was already five-ten — at the gangly replica of himself, but skinnier and
better-looking, for he had his mother's sharp nose and narrow mouth.
Chase took a pair of binoculars from a
shelf and handed them to Max.
"Here, go see if you can find her."
Tall Man called to Chase. "Never argue with a kid about
sharks. Kids know sharks. Sharks and dinosaurs."
It was true, Chase thought: kids were dinosaur freaks, and most kids were
shark freaks. But he had never met a
child who knew half as much about sharks as Max did, which pleased him and also
saddened and pained him, for sharks had always been the main, if not the sole,
bond between father and son. They hadn't
lived together for the past eight years, had seen each other only occasionally,
and (phone-company TV commercials to the contrary) weekly long-distance calls
were no way to reach out and touch someone.
Chase and Max's mother had married too
young and too hastily. She was an
heiress to a timber fortune, he an impecunious Greenpeacer. Their naïve premise was that her money and
his idealism would interact synergistically, benefitting the planet and
allowing them to live in
They tried to compromise: Simon learned to play tennis and to give
speeches; she learned to scuba dive and to differentiate between the Odontoceti
and the Mysticeti. But after four years
of drifting apart, they agreed to disagree... permanently.
The only synergy that
come from the relationship was Max — handsomer than either of them,
smarter, more sensitive.
Corinne got custody of Max: she had money, a large and caring family, a
home (several, in fact) and, by the time the divorce was final, a stable
relationship with a neurosurgeon who had been the number one singles tennis
player in
Simon was the only son of deceased
parents, and he had no steady income, no fixed residence and fleeting
relationships with several women whose prime assets were their looks and their
sexual fervor.
Through her lawyer, Corinne had offered
Chase a generous financial settlement — she was neither cruel nor vengeful, and
she wanted her son's father to be able to afford a decent home for Max to visit
— but in a fit of self-righteous nobility, Chase had refused.
Several times since, Chase had regretted
what he now regarded as a misplaced sexist lunacy. He could have put the money to good use. Especially now that the Institute — his institute — was teetering on the
brink of insolvency. He had been tempted
to reconsider, to call Corinne and offer to accept that last beneficence. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.
What mystified him, what he could not
fathom, was the fact that somehow, over the years and the thousands of miles,
his son had been able to see through the sheltering veil of private schools and
country clubs and trust funds, and to maintain an image of his father as a
figure of adventure... someone not only to long for, but to emulate.
* * * * *
As Chase followed Max outside onto the
open stern of the forty-eight foot boat, he slid his sunglasses down from the
top of his head. The day was bound to be
a scorcher, 95-plus degrees even out here on the ocean, one of those days that
used to be rare but in the past few years had become more and more common. Ten summers ago, there had been only eight
days when the temperature had reached 90 degrees in Waterboro; three years ago,
thirty-nine days; this year, meteorologists were predicting fifty days over 90
and as many as ten over 100.
He used the zoom lens as a telescope and
scanned the surface of the glassy sea.
"See anything?" he asked Max.
"Not yet." Max rested his elbows on the bulwark, to
steady the binoculars. "What would
she look like?"
"If she came up to bask on a day like
this, her dorsal fin would stand out like a sail."
Chase saw a tire floating, and a plastic
milk jug, and one of the lethal plastic six-pack holders that strangled turtles
and birds, and globules of oil that when they reached the beach and stuck to
the soles of children's feet would be cursed as tar. At least he didn't see any body parts today,
or any syringes. Last summer, a woman at
the town beach had had to be sedated after her four-year-old son presented her
with a treasure he had found in a wavewash:
a human finger. And a man had
taken from his dog what appeared to be a rubber ball but turned out to be a
perfect orb of sewage sludge.
He looked over the stern at the
rubber-coated wire that held the tracking sensor, and checked the knot on the
piece of twine that held the sensor at the prescribed depth. The coil of wire on the deck behind him was three
hundred feet long, but because the bottom was shoaly and erratic, they had set
the sensor at only fifty feet. The twine
was fraying. He'd have to replace it
tonight.
"You still see the shark?" he
called forward to Tall Man.
There was a pause while Tall Man looked at
the screen. "She's up to about
fifty," he said. "Just
hangin’ out, looks to me.
Signal's nice and strong, though."
Chase spoke to the shark in his mind,
begging her to come up, to show herself, not only for him but for Max. Mostly for Max.
They had been tracking her for two days,
recording data on her speed, direction, depth, body temperature — eager for any
information about this rarest of the great ocean predators — without seeing
anything of her but a white blip on a green screen. He wanted them to see her again so that Max
could enjoy the perfection of her, the beauty of her, but also to make sure the
shark was all right, had not developed an infection or an ulcer from the
tagging dart that contained the electronic signaling device. It had been perfectly placed in the tough
skin behind the dorsal fin, but these animals had become so scarce that he
worried about even the remote possibility of causing her harm.
They had found her almost by accident, and
just in time to save her from becoming a trophy on a barroom wall.
Chase maintained good relations with the
local commercial fishermen, carefully staying out of the increasingly bitter
controversy over limiting catches because of depleted stocks. Since he couldn't be everywhere at once, he
needed the fishermen to be his eyes and ears on the ocean, to alert him to
anomalies natural and man-made, like massive fish kills, sudden algae blooms
and oil spills.
His assiduous neutrality had paid off on
Thursday night, when a bluefisherman had phoned the Institute (he'd had sense
enough not to use his radio, which could be monitored by every boat in three
states). On his way home, he told Chase,
he had seen a dead whale floating between
But they would, those few that still
patrolled the bight between Montauk and Point Judith. And soon.
The word would reach the charter-fishing
boats, whose captains would call their favored customers and promise them, for
fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a day, a shot at one of the most
sought-after trophies in the sea — the apex predator, the biggest carnivorous
fish in the world, the man-eater: the great
white shark. They would find the whale
quickly, for its corpse would show up on radar, and they would circle it while
their customers camcorded the awesome spectacle of the
rolling eyeballs and the motile jaws tearing away fifty-pound chunks of whale. And then, drunk with the dream of selling the
jaw for five thousand or ten thousand dollars and blinded to the fact that they
could make more money if they left the shark alone and charged customers for
the privilege of filming it, they would harpoon the animal to death... because,
they would say to themselves, if we don't do it, someone else will.
The would call it sport.
To Chase, it was no more sport than shooting a dog at its dinner.
He and scientists from
Everyone agreed that white sharks were
marvels of evolution that had survived almost unchanged for scores of millions
of years; that they were biologically wonderful and medically fascinating; that
they performed a critical function in maintaining the balance in the marine
food chain. But in an age of tight
budgets and conflicting priorities, there was little public pressure to protect
an animal perceived as nothing more than a fish that ate people.
Before long, Chase was sure, perhaps
before the turn of the millennium, they would all be gone. Children would see white-shark heads mounted
on walls, and filmed records of them on the Discovery Channel, but within a
generation they wouldn't even be a memory; they would be no more real than the
dinosaurs.
His first impulse after talking to the
bluefisherman was to collect some explosives, find the whale and blow it to
pieces. It was the best solution, the
quickest and most efficient: the whale
would disappear from the charter fishermen's radar, the sharks would
disperse. But it was also the most
dangerous, for destroying a whale carcass was a federal crime.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act was a
masterwork of contradictions. No one —
scientists, laymen, filmmakers or fishermen — was
allowed to get near a whale, dead or alive.
No matter that the entire save-the-whales movement (including the act
itself) had been born of the excellent films made by dedicated
professionals. No matter that a whale
carcass could become an environmental catastrophe. If you messed with a whale, you were a criminal.
Chase's days as an environmental firebrand
were over. Five years ago, he had made a
decision to work within the system rather than from outside it. He had swallowed his anger and kissed some
ass and wangled scholarships to graduate school, and had returned to Waterboro,
with no specific idea about what he wanted to do. He could teach, or continue to study, but he
was impatient to be free of the classroom and the laboratory; he longed to
learn by doing. He could apply for a job at Woods Hole or Scripps
or any of the other marine institutes around the country, but he was still a
dissertation shy of his doctorate, and he had no confidence that anyone would
hire him to be anything more than a drone.
The one certainty in Chase's life was that
he would spend his life in, on, around and under the sea.
He had loved it from first memory, when
his father had taken him aboard the Miss
Edna on balmy days and let him savor the feel and the sounds and the smells
of the sea. He had learned affection and
respect, not only for the sea itself but for the creatures that lived in it and
the men who harvested them.
He had become particularly (perversely,
his father thought) fascinated by sharks.
Sharks seemed to be everywhere in those days — basking on the surface in
the sun, assaulting the nets balled full of thrashing fish, following the
boat's bloody wake as fish were cleaned and their guts tossed overboard. At first, Simon had been enthralled mostly by
their appearance of relentless menace, but then, as he read more and more about
them, he came to see them as a wonderful representation of natural
continuity: unchanged for millions of
years, efficient, immune to almost all diseases that affected other animals. It was as if nature had created them and
thought, Well done.
He still loved sharks, and though he no
longer feared them, now he feared for
them. Around the world, they were being
slaughtered recklessly, wastefully and ignorantly — some for their fins, which
were sold for soup; some for their meat; some simply because they were
perceived as a nuisance.
By coincidence, Chase had returned to
Waterboro at precisely the time a small island between Block Island and
Fisher's
Chase, however, saw tiny
He had no trouble finding projects worthy
of study: dwindling fish stocks,
vanishing marine species, pollution — all demanded attention. Other groups and institutes were doing
similar work, of course, and Chase tried to complement their work with his,
while always reserving time and what money he could muster for his
specialty: sharks.
So now, much as he hated to admit it, at
thirty-four and as director of the Institute, he was a card-carrying member of
the Establishment. He was attaining a
respectable reputation in the scientific community for his research on sharks;
his papers on their immune systems had been accepted by leading journals and
were received as interesting, if somewhat eccentric. And he himself was regarded as a scientist
worth watching: a comer.
If he were to be caught blowing up a
whale, however, he knew he would be instantly discredited, as well as fined and
probably jailed.
And so he had opted for compromise. He had faxed the Environmental Protection
Agency in
He hadn't waited for a reply from either
agency. He and Tall Man had loaded
grappling hooks and a barrel of rope into the Institute's boat and gone looking
for the whale. They had found it right
away, and, at around midnight, in the glow of the moon, they had sunk the hooks
into the rotting meat and begun to tow the carcass out into the Atlantic beyond
The whale was a young humpback, and at
first light they saw what had killed it.
Fishing nets floated like shrouds around its mouth and head. It had blundered into huge commercial nets,
had ensnared itself further by thrashing in its struggle to escape and had
strangled to death.
The white shark had arrived just after
dawn. She was a big mature female,
probably fifteen or twenty years old, of prime breeding age. And she was pregnant, which Chase had discovered
when the shark rolled on her back as she plunged her massive head deep into the
pink meat of the whale's flanks, exposing her swollen belly and genital slit.
No one knew for sure how long great whites
lived or when they first began to breed, but current theory favored a maximum
age of eighty to a hundred years and a breeding cycle that began at about age
ten and produced one or two pups every second year.
So, to kill her, to hang her head on the
wall and sell her teeth for jewelry, would not be to kill a single great white
shark. It would be to wipe out perhaps
as many as twenty generations of sharks.
They had inserted the transmitter dart
quickly and easily. The shark had never
felt the barb, had not interrupted her feeding.
The had watched her for a few minutes, and
Chase had taken pictures. Then, as they
prepared to leave, Tall Man had turned on the radio and heard charter fishermen
talking back and forth about the whale.
Clearly, the bluefisherman had gone to a bar and, feeling that he had
done his duty by phoning the Institute first, had been unable to resist making
points with his mates by talking about the whale.
Where had it gone? the
fishermen would have wondered. Who took
it? The goddamn
government? Those
bleeding hearts from the Institute? East. They had to have taken it East of Block.
The fishermen were coming, coming to
slaughter the pregnant shark.
Chase and Tall Man had had no
discussion. They had fetched some
explosives from below — a brick of plastique left over from the building of the
Institute's docks — and had carefully inserted charges into parts of the whale
farthest from where the shark was feeding.
They had detonated the charges one by one, blasting the whale carcass
into pieces that immediately began to disperse and sink. The fishermen's radar target was gone; now
they could never find the remains of the whale — or the shark.
The shark submerged, following pieces of
blubber down into the safety of the deep.
If the EPA or the DEP wanted to try to
make a case against them, Chase thought, let them. There had been no witnesses, the evidence
would be flimsy and if any of the charter fishermen were smart enough to figure
out what he'd done and why, and fool enough to lodge a complaint, they'd be
hanging themselves by admitting they'd been intending to get closer to the dead
whale than the law allowed.
Most important, the shark would still be
alive.
They had lowered their tracking sensor and
followed the white for a few more hours as she moved eastward into deeper water
and then turned to the north.
Under normal circumstances, Chase would
have pursued the shark without interruption, for to break away meant risking
losing her; she could wander out of range, and they might not find her again
before the transmitter's batteries gave out — two days, three at most.
But Max had been scheduled to arrive at
the Groton/New London airport that evening, flying in from Sun Valley via
So he and Tall Man abandoned the shark,
prying that she wouldn’t roam up to
Max had said he didn't need to unpack, and
they hustled out of the airport, into the truck, onto the ferry, out to the
island and onto the boat. Red-eyed,
exhausted, the boy had also been deliriously excited at the thought of seeing a
live white shark. When he called his
mother from the cellular phone on the boat, the only adjective he could summon
up was ‘awesome.’
Corinne had been less than thrilled, had
asked to speak to Simon, had lectured him to be
careful. Max had settled the
matter. He had taken the phone back from
Chase and had said, "Chill out, Mom, it's okay. Great whites don't want to hurt people."
"What do you mean?"
Max had laughed and said, "They just
want to eat them." But when he
heard his mother gasp, he had added, "Just kidding, Mom... a little shark
humor."
"Do you have your windbreaker?" Corinne had asked.
"We're fine, Mom, really... love
ya." Then Max had hung up.
Within an hour, they had relocated the
shark, which Chase regarded as a fortuitous confirmation of one of his pet
theories.
He was particularly interested in — and in
fact was considering writing his dissertation about — the question of
territoriality in great white sharks.
Researchers in
Here on the East Coast of the
But what intrigued Chase most was that the
records of years of tagging were beginning to show that some whites returned to
the same area year after year after year and reestablished the same general
territory during their stay in that area.
If he could prove that there were patterns of repetition, he might be
able to open up a new field of research into the navigational capacities and
memory-engram imprinting in great white sharks.
That is, as long as there were any great
white sharks left to study.
* * * * *
"She's goin' down again," Tall
Man called from the cabin.
"I guess she's one fickle lady,"
Chase said, disappointed. He looked
toward shore. Napatree Point was abeam,
the town of
"She's off to Montauk, looks
like. But not with any
great purpose. She's
strolling."
Chase walked forward into the cabin, hung
up the camera and wiped sweat from his eyebrows. "Want a sandwich?" he called to
Max.
"Not one of those gross
sardine-and-onion things."
"No.
I saved you a peanut-butter-and-jelly."
"Crack me a beer," Tall Man
said, looking at his watch. "This
watch may say it's nine-fifteen, but it doesn't know
diddly about what time it really is."
They had been sleeping in erratic four-hour shifts for the past forty
hours. "My guts tell me it's
straight up on beer o'clock."
Chase took a step toward the ladder that
led to the galley below, when suddenly the boat lurched, lurched again and lost
forward motion. The bow seemed to heave
up, the stern to drop.
"What the hell's that?" Chase said.
"You hit something?"
"In a hundred feet of water?" Tall Man frowned at the Fathometer. "Not hardly." The engine seemed to be laboring.
They heard a sound, as of rubber stretching
— a complaining screech — and then the television monitor and the signal
receiver began to inch backward on their mounts. The connecting wire was stretched taut
through the doorway.
"Reverse!" Chase
shouted as he ran to the door.
Tall Man shifted into reverse; the
connecting wire went slack and drooped to the deck.
Outside in the cockpit, Chase saw that the
coil of rubber-coated wire was gone; three hundred feet had spooled
overboard. "The twine must've
broken," he said. "The
sensor's hitched in something on the bottom."
Chase took the wire in his hand and began
to pull, and Max coiled it on the deck behind him. When the wire tautened again, Chase jigged
it, pulling it left and right, giving it slack and then hauling it tight. There was no give; the sensor was caught
fast.
"I can't figure out what it's hitched
in," he said. "Nothing down
there but sand."
"Maybe," Tall Man said. He put the engine in neutral, letting the
boat drift, and joined Chase and Max in the stern. He took the wire from Chase and held it in
his fingertips, as if trying to decipher a message from its vibrations. "That nor’easter last week... forty knots of breeze for a day and a half
will kick up hell with the bottom.
Sand'll shift. It could be
anything: a rock, a car somebody
deep-sixed."
"It could be a shipwreck," Max
said.
Chase shook his head. "Not around here. We've charted every wreck in the
area." To Tall Man he said "We
got any tanks aboard?"
"Nope. I didn't plan
on diving."
Chase went forward, into the cabin, and adjusted
the scale on the Fathometer to its most sensitive reading. When he returned, he was holding a face mask
and snorkel.
"Thirty meters," he said. "Ninety-five
feet, give or take."
"You gonna dive for that sensor?" Tall Man asked, his voice rising. "Free-dive? Are you
nuts?"
"It's worth a try. I've dived ninety feet before."
"Not without a tank, you
haven't. Not since you were
eighteen. Hell, Simon, you'll black out
if you try forty feet."
"You want to try?"
"Not a chance. This country's already got enough dead
redskins."
"Then we got a problem, ‘cause I'm
damned if I'm gonna lose three thousand bucks worth of wire and three thousand
more of transmitter."
"Buoy it," Tall Man said. "We'll get some tanks and come back for
it later."
"By then we'll have lost the shark
for good."
"Maybe... but we won't have lost
you."
Chase hesitated, still tempted to try to
free-dive for the sensor, or at least go down far enough down to be able to see
what had snagged it. He was curious to
know if he could still dive that deep.
As youngsters, he and Tall had free-dived to bottoms invisible from the
surface, had swum around the hulks of old fishing boats, had stolen lobsters
from traps nestled in crevices in deep reefs.
But Tall was right; he was no longer a teenager,
an athlete who could party all night and swim all day. He might make it to the bottom, but he'd
never make it back. Starved for oxygen,
his brain would shut down and he would pass out — near the surface if he was
lucky, far below if he was not.
"Talk to the man, son," Tall Man
said to Max. "Tell him you didn't
come all this way just to take your daddy home in a box."
Max started at Tall Man's bluntness, then
put a hand on his father's arm and said, "C'mon, Dad..."
Chase smiled. "Okay, we'll buoy it," he said.
"Can we get some tanks and come back
and dive on it?" Max asked. "That'd be cool."
"You know how to dive?" Chase felt a pang, almost of pain, as if the
fact that Max had learned to dive without him, somewhere else, was a reprimand
for his failures as a parent.
"Where'd you learn?"
"At home, in the
pool. Gramps got me some lessons."
"Oh," Chase said, feeling
better. At least the boy hadn't really
been diving; he'd been preparing for his visit.
"We'll put you in the water, sure, but I think we'll start a little
shallower."
Tall Man went to the cabin to disconnect
the wire and waterproof the plug with O-ring grease and rubber tape. Chase lifted a hatch in the stern and found a
yellow rubber buoy, eighteen inches in diameter, on which the initials ‘O.I.’ were emblazoned in red Day-Glo tape.
Walking aft, Tall Man coiled the wire
around his shoulder and elbow. He had
removed his sweat-soaked shirt, and the muscles in his enormous torso glistened
as they moved beneath his cinnabar skin as if he had been oiled. He stood six feet six, weighed about
two-twenty, and if he carried any fat, as his mother used to say as she pressed
more food on him, it had to be between his ears.
"Whoa!" Max
said as he looked at Tall Man.
"Rambo meets the Terminator!
You work out every day?"
"Work
out?" Chase said, laughing. "His two exercises are eating and
drinking; his diet's a hundred percent salt-fried
grease. He's a cosmic injustice."
"I'm the Great Spirit's
revenge," Tall Man said to Max.
"He's gotta do something to make up for five hundred years of the
white man's oppression."
"Believe that," Chase said to
Max, "and you might as well believe in the tooth fairy. His Great Spirit is Ronald MacDonald."
"So?" Tall
Man guffawed. "A man's gotta pray
to somebody."
Max beamed, loving it. It was men's talk, grown-up's talk, and they
were including him, letting him be a part of it, letting him be grown-up.
He had heard of Tall Man all his life — his dad's best
friend since childhood — and the huge Pequot Indian had become a mythic figure
for the boy. He had almost been afraid
to meet him, lest reality spoil the image.
But the human being had turned out to be as grand as the myth.
Chase and Tall Man had separated several times: while Chase had gone to college, Tall Man had
served in the Marines; while Chase had gone to graduate school, Tall Man had
tried his hand as a high-steel worker in
But their lives had intersected again, when Chase had
begun the Institute. He had known he
would need an assistant proficient in the technical skills he himself lacked,
and he found Tall Man working as a diesel mechanic at a truck dealership. Tall Man didn't mind the work, he told Chase,
and twenty dollars an hour wasn't a bad wage, but he hated somebody telling him
when to come to work and when to leave, and he didn't like being cooped up
indoors. Though Chase could offer him no
fixed salary and no guarantees, Tall Man had quit on the spot and joined the
Institute.
His job description listed no specific duties, so he
did whatever Chase wanted done and whatever else he saw that needed doing, from
maintaining the boats to hydro-testing the scuba gear. He loved working with animals, and seemed to
have an almost mystical gift for communicating with them, calming them, getting
them to trust him. Seabirds with
fishhooks in their beaks would allow him to handle them; a dolphin whose tail
had been snared and slashed by monofilament netting had approached Tall Man in
the shallows, and had lain quietly while he removed the strands of plastic and
injected the animal with antibiotics.
He had freedom and responsibility, and he responded
well to both. He arrived early, left
late, worked at his own pace and took great, if unspoken, pride in being a
partner in keeping the Institute running.
* * * * *
When the coil of wire was secured to the
buoy, they tossed both overboard and watched for a few moments to make sure
that the wire didn't foul and that the buoy would support its weight. The wire was heavy, but in water it was
nearly neutral — one pound negative for every ten feet — and the buoy was
designed to support a dead weight of no more than two hundred pounds.
"No sweat," Tall Man said.
"If nobody steals it..."
"Right. Why would
anybody want three hundred feet of wire?"
"You know as well as I do. People are ripping carriage lamps off houses
to get the brass; they're torching light poles down for the aluminum; they're
stealing toilet fixtures for the copper.
In this economy, specially thanks to the crowd
your blood brothers have brought in with their casino up in Ledyard, a smart
man walks with his mouth closed so no one can steal his fillings."
"There he goes again," Tall Man
said to Max, grinning, "the racist blaming the poor Indians for
everything."
Chase laughed and walked forward to put
the boat in gear.
10
"Birds," Tall Man called down
from the flying bridge, pointing to the south.
Chase and Max were on the foredeck — Max
out at the end of the six-foot wooden pulpit that extended beyond the bow, from
which he had been looking down into the water in hopes of seeing a
dolphin. Chase had told him that
dolphins sometimes frolicked in the bow wave of the boat.
Chase shaded his eyes and looked to the
south. A swarm of birds — gulls and terns — was wheeling over half an acre of water that seemed
to be aboil with living things. The
birds dove and splashed in a flurry of wings and rose
again, their heads bobbing as they hurried to swallow a prize so they could
dive for another. The southwest breeze
carried the sound of frenzied screeching.
"What are they doing?" Max asked.
"Feeding," Chase said. "On fry... tiny fish. Something's attacking the fry from
underneath, driving them to the surface."
He looked up at Tall Man.
"Let's go have a look."
Tall Man swung the boat to the south,
leaving the distant gray hump of Block Island to the north and the closer, but
smaller and lower, profile of
As the boat drew near the turmoil in the
water, Tall Man said, "Bluefish."
"You're sure?" said Chase. He hoped Tall Man was right: a big school of bluefish would be a good
sign, a sign that the blues were making a recovery. Recently, their numbers had been dwindling —
they were victims of overfishing and pollution from PCBs, pesticides and
phosphates from agricultural runoff — and many of the survivors were
manifesting tumors, ulcers and even bizarre genetic mutations. Some were being born with stomachs that
ceased functioning after about a year, so the fish starved to death. The Institute and various environmental groups
had helped clean up the rivers that fed the bays that led to the ocean, and the
amount of pollutants had been reduced significantly though by no means
completely.
If the bluefish were breeding successfully
again... well, it was a tiny step, but it was
a step forward, at least, and not back.
"Gotta be blues," Tall Man
said. "What else kicks up a shower
of blood like that?"
A bird veered away from the flock and
soared over the boat, and Chase saw the telltale signs of bluefish
carnage: the white feathers of the
bird's belly were stained red from fish blood.
The blues were running amok in a vast school of panicked bait, chopping
and slashing with blind fury, dyeing the water crimson.
Tall Man throttled back, letting the boat
drift in relative silence so as not to drive the school away. "Big bastards, too," he said. "Five,
six-pounders."
The bluefish rolled and leaped and lunged,
their gunmetal bodies flashing in the sunlight, and the birds dove recklessly
among them, plucking fry from the bloody water.
"Gross!" Max
said, mesmerized. "Can we go have a
look?"
"You're having a look."
"No, I mean, can we put on masks and
go down there?"
"Are you crazy?" said
Chase. "No way. Those fish would cut you to ribbons. You didn't want to bring me home in a box...
how'd you like me to send you home to your mother in a doggie bag?"
"Bluefish attack people?"
"In a frenzy
like this, they attack anything. A few years ago, a lifeguard in
Tall Man interrupted, "—they're one
mean-tempered son of a bitch."
"Cool," Max said.
As if on cue, a large gull swooped down, reached for a baitfish, missed, braked with its wings and landed on the water. It snatched up the fish and began its takeoff run, when suddenly a blue body rolled beside it. The gull stopped, jerked backward and shrieked —a bluefish had it by its legs. The bird flapped its wings futilely and arched its neck forward, trying to peck at the tormentor.
Another bluefish must have grabbed it then, for the bird lurched to the side, submerged and popped back to the surface. It shrieked again, and beat with its wings, but now other fish sensed savory new prey, and they flung themselves out of the water, onto the bloodsoaked feathers.
The bird's body was pulled below the surface tailfirst. A final tug snapped its head back, and the last they saw of it was the yellow beak pointing at the sky.
Chase looked at Max. The boy's eyes still stared at the spot on the water where the bird had been, and his color had faded to a greenish gray.
* * * * *
They continued toward the island, Max and
Chase on the foredeck, Tall Man driving from the flying bridge. Now and then, Chase would signal Tall Man to
slow down, and he would take a net and dip it into the water and bring up
something to show Max: a clump of
seaweed in which tiny crustacean — shrimps and crabs — took shelter until they
were mature enough to fend for themselves on the bottom; a fist-sized jellyfish
with a translucent purple membrane on its topside that looked like a sail, and
long dangling tentacles that, Chase explained, stung its prey to death — a
Portuguese man-o’-war. Fascinated, Max
touched one of the tentacles and recoiled with a yelp as it stung his
fingertip.
"It's early for them to be
around," Tall Man remarked.
"The water must be warming up fast."
When they were half a mile from the
island, Chase pointed to a small Institute buoy bobbing off the starboard
bow. Tall Man took the boat out of gear,
letting it coast up to the buoy, as Chase picked up the boat hook and held it
over the side. Chase snagged the buoy
and brought it aboard. It was attached
to a length of rope.
"Pull," he said to Max.
Max grabbed the rope and began to haul it
aboard. "What is it?" he
asked.
"An experiment," Chase said, dropping the boat hook and helping Max pull on the
rope. "A big problem around here is
lost lobster pots. Boat propellers cut
the buoys off, or storms carry them away or the ropes just rot and fall
apart. Anyway, there are pots lost all
over the bottom."
"So?"
"They're killers. All sorts of creatures, not just lobsters —
fish, crabs, octopuses — go inside after the baits and can't get out. They die and become bait themselves, so more
and more of the creatures come in and die.
The pots keep killing for years and years.
The pot bumped against the side of the
boat, and Chase leaned overboard and heaved it up onto the gunwale. It was a rectangular wire cage, reinforced
with wooden slats. On one end was a wire
funnel — the way in; on the other, a square door made of a flimsy mesh material
and secured with twine.
"What Tall and I've been trying to
do," Chase said, "is design a biodegradable door. Pots should be pulled at least once a week,
preferably twice, so we've been looking for a cheap material for the door
that'll degrade after about ten days.
The lobsterman can change the door every week, but if the pot's lost, the critters can get free before they die."
Max bent close to the pot and peered
inside. "It's empty," he said.
"We didn't put any bait in it,"
Chase explained. "We're not trying
to catch things, we're trying to save ‘em. He tugged gently at the mesh in the door, and
several strands broke. "This cotton
blend may be the thing," he called up to Tall Man. "It's breaking down real well."
When Tall Man didn't reply, Chase looked
up at the flying bridge and saw him bend down, his hand cupped over one ear,
listening.
Suddenly Tall Man straightened up. "We got trouble, Simon," he
said. "A couple of yahoos are
yammering over channel sixteen that they've just hooked Jaws."
"Damn!" Chase
said. "Can you tell where they
are?"
"About three miles to the northeast,
sounds like, just this side of Block."
"Let's go," Chase said. He shoved the lobster pot overboard and
tossed the rope and buoy after it.
Tall Man put the boat in gear, pushed the
throttle forward and, as the boat leaped ahead, turned it in a tight arc and
headed toward
Max held on to the railing and bent his
knees as the bow of the boat thumped into the waves. "Do you think it's our shark?" he
shouted to his father.
"I'd bet on it," Chase
said. "She's the only one we've
seen."
The boat rose up onto a plane and skimmed
over the surface. The hump of
"What are you gonna do?" Max asked.
"What can you do?"
"I'm not sure, Max," Chase said,
staring grimly ahead. "But
something."
* * * * *
"They're two kids," Tall Man
said, looking through a pair of binoculars.
"Sixteen, eighteen, maybe... fishin’ from a
twenty-foot outboard. Stupid bastards. They
better hope they don't land the
shark; it'll turn that boat into splinters."
Tall Man throttled back as he approached
the outboard, then took the boat out of gear and let it idle thirty or forty
yards off the outboard's port side.
One boy sat in a fighting chair in the
stern, the butt of his rod snugged into a socket between his legs. The rod was bent nearly to the breaking
point, and the line led straight out behind the boat: the shark was near the surface, but still
fifty yards or more away. The other boy
stood forward, at the console, turning the wheel and using the gears to keep
the stern of the outboard facing the shark.
"Can he really catch a shark that
big?" Max asked.
"On a fishing rod?"
"If he knows what he's doing,"
Chase said. "He's using a tuna rig,
probably sixty- or eighty-pound test line with a steel leader."
"But you said the shark weighed a
ton."
"He can still wear her out. Great whites aren't great fighters,
they're not true game fish. They just
pull and pull and finally give up."
As they watched, the boy with the rod
tried to reel in some line, but the weight was too great, and the drum of the
reel skidded beneath the spool of line.
So the boy at the console put the outboard in reverse, backing down
toward the shark, giving the angler slack to reel in.
As Chase had feared, the boys knew what they
were doing.
"Get closer," he said to Tall
Man. "I want to have a talk with
them."
Tall Man maneuvered them so that the stern
of the boat was within ten yards of the side of the outboard. Chase walked aft and stood at the transom.
"What've you got there?" he
asked.
"Jaws, man," the boy at the
console said. "Biggest
damn white shark you ever seen."
"What're you gonna do with it?"
"Catch it... sell the jaws."
"How're you gonna get it aboard that
little boat?"
"Don't have to... gonna kill it, then
tow it in."
"Kill it how? That's one big angry shark."
"With this." The boy
reached under the console and brought out a shotgun. "All we have to do is get close enough
to him for one clean shot."
Chase paused, considering, then said, "Did you know he's a she?"
"Huh?"
"That shark is a female, and she's
pregnant. We've tagged her, we've been
studying her. If you kill her, you're
not just killing her, you're killing her and her
children and her children's children."
"It's a fish," the boy
said. "Why should I give a
shit?"
"Because white
sharks are very rare... endangered, even. I'll make you a deal. You cut that shark away—"
"Fuck you!" shouted the boy with
the rod. "I been busting my
hump—"
"—and I'll get your names in the
paper for helping the Institute. You'll
get a lot more mileage than if you just kill her."
"Not a chance." The boy with the rod yelled over his
shoulder. "Come back some more,
Jimmy. He's takin' line again."
The boy at the console put the outboard in
reverse, and Chase saw the angle of the line increase as the boat neared the
shark.
"Dad," Max said, "we've
gotta do something."
"Yeah," Chase said, leaning on
the bulwark as he felt rage rise within him.
The problem was, there was nothing he could do, not legally anyway, for the
boys were breaking no law. And yet he
knew that if he let this happen, he would never forgive himself. He turned away and went below.
When he returned, he was carrying a mask
and a pair of flippers, and a pair of wire cutters was stuck in the belt of his
shorts.
"Jesus, Simon..."
Tall Man said from the flying bridge.
"Where is she, Tall?"
Tall Man pointed. "About twenty yards thataway, but you
don't—"
"She's so worn out and confused, she
won't pay any attention to me. Last thing
she wants to do is eat anybody."
"You know that, do you?"
"Sure," Chase said, forcing a
smile and pulling on his flippers.
"At least, I hope
that."
"Dad!" Max
said, as Chase's intent suddenly dawned on him.
"You can't—"
"Trust me, Max." Chase pulled the mask over his face and
rolled backward off the bulwark.
The driver of the outboard saw the splash
as Chase fell into the water, and he shouted, "Hey! What the hell's he up to?"
"What you shoulda done way back
when," Tall Man said.
The boy picked up his shotgun and cocked
it. "You get him back, or—"
"Put that away, you little
prick," said Tall Man, in a voice as flat and hard as slate, "or I'll
come over there and make you eat it."
The boy looked up at the huge dark man
towering over him on the fly bridge of the much larger boat, and he lowered the
shotgun.
* * * * *
Chase located the line feeding down from
the outboard and followed it with his eyes until he saw the shark. He took three or four deep breaths on the
surface, held the final one and thrust himself downward with his flippers.
The shark had stopped fighting, for in its
initial thrashing it had rolled up into the steel leader and then into the line
itself, and now it was circled with monofilament strands that pressed into its
flesh. It lolled on its side, perhaps
resting for a final, futile attempt to escape, perhaps already resigned to
death.
Chase swam to it, staying away from the
snarls of line until he was within arm's reach of the tail of the shark.
He had never before swum in the open with
a great white shark. He had seen them
from the safety of a cage, had touched their tails as they swept by the bars in
pursuit of hanging baits, had marveled at their power, but he had never been
alone in the sea with this ultimate predator.
He permitted himself a moment to run his
hand down the steel-smooth skin of the back, then backward against the grain of
the dermal denticles, which felt like rubbing sandpaper. He found his tagging dart and its tiny
transmitter, still securely set in the skin behind the dorsal fin. Then he leaned over the shark; its eye gazed
at him with neither fear nor hostility, but with a blank
and fathomless neutrality.
There were six loops around the shark —
one of steel, five of monofilament — starting just forward of the tail, ending
just forward of the pectoral fins. Chase
hovered above the shark, nearly lying upon its back, took the wire cutters from
his belt and cut the loops one by one.
As each muscle group in the torpedo-like body sensed freedom, it began
to shudder and ripple. When the last
loop was gone, the shark swung downward, suspended only by the wire in it mouth
that led to the hook deep within its belly.
Chase reached his hand into the mouth of the shark and snipped the wire.
The shark was free. It began to fall, upside down, and for a
moment Chase feared that it had died, that the lack of forward motion had
deprived it of oxygen and it had asphyxiated.
But then the tail swept once from side to side, the shark rolled over
and its mouth opened as water rushed over its gills. It turned in a circle,
its eye fixed on Chase, and rose toward him.
It came slowly, relentlessly, unexcited,
unafraid, its mouth half open, its tail thrusting it forward.
Chase did not turn or flee or
backpedal. He faced the shark and
watched its eyes, knowing that the only warning he would have of an imminent
attack would be the rotating of its eyeballs, an instinctive protection against
the teeth or claws of its victim.
He heard his temples pounding and felt
arrows of adrenaline shooting through his limbs.
The shark came on, face-to-face, until it
was four feet from Chase, then suddenly rolled on its side, presenting its
snow-white belly distended with young, and angled downward, like a banking fighter
plane, disappearing into the blue-green depths.
Chase watched until the shark was
gone. Then he surfaced, snatched a few
gasping breaths and made his way back to the boat. He pulled himself out of the water, and as he
sat on the swimstep to remove his flippers, he noticed that the pulpit of the
Institute boat was hovering over the hull of the outboard. He hard Tall Man
say, "So, we got a deal, right? The
story is, you hooked the shark, saw that it was tagged and reported it to
us. We tell the papers what fine
citizens you are."
The sullen boys stood in the stern of the
outboard, and one of them said, "Yeah, okay..."
Tall Man looked down, saw that Chase was
aboard, then put the boat in reverse.
"Thanks," he called to the boys.
Chase passed Max his flippers and climbed
up through the door in the transom.
Max looked angry. "That was really dumb, Dad," he
said. "You could've—"
"It was a calculated risk, Max,"
Chase said. "That's what dealing
with wild animals is. I was pretty sure
she wouldn't bite me; I made a judgment that the risk was worth taking, to save
the life of that mama shark."
"But suppose you'd been wrong. Is a shark's life worth as much as
yours?"
"That's not the point; the point is, I knew what I had to do.
The Bible may say man has dominion over animals, but that doesn't mean
we've got the right to wipe them off the face of the earth."
* * * * *
Max was standing at the end of the pulpit,
Chase behind him on the foredeck, as they passed through a stretch of deep
water between the islands.
Suddenly Max shouted, "Dad!" and
pointed down into the water.
A dolphin had appeared from nowhere and
was riding the bow wave of the boat, coasting effortlessly on the bulb of water
created by the boat's forward motion.
They could see its shiny gray back, its pointed snout, the puckered
blowhole in the top if its head. They
could hear sounds — faint clicks and trills — coming from somewhere within the
animal.
"He's talking!"
Max said excitedly. "That's how
they talk! I wonder what he's saying?"
"Probably just
jabbering... maybe calling his buddies over, maybe saying something like
"Whee!"
For several moments, the dolphin's body
barely moved; it let the momentum of the boat carry it along. Then, for some reason, it accelerated,
thrusting its horizontal tail up and down, and pulled ahead of the boat. It slowed, waited for the boat to catch up
and resumed its ride.
"Look at that tail," Chase said.
Max leaned over the pulpit. "What about it?"
"The left fluke. Look at the
scars."
Max looked, and saw five deep white
slashes, an inch or two apart, in the flesh of the tail fluke. "What did that?" he asked.
"This dolphin was attacked by
something," Chase said. "I'd
say he was lucky to get away."
"A shark?"
"No, not a shark, no shark did
that. A shark bite would be
semicircular."
"A killer
whale?"
"No, you'd see punctures or drag
marks from the conical teeth, not sharp slashes like those." Chase frowned. "They look like claw marks, like a
tiger's or a bear's."
"What lives in the ocean and has five
claws?"
"Nothing," Chase said. "Nothing I've ever heard of."
11
The dock had been built in a cove on the
northwest corner of the island, and as the boat puttered up to it, Chase nudged
Max and pointed overhead and smiled: a pair of ospreys were flying high over the water, searching
for food for their young, which were sheltered safely on nesting poles that
Chase had built.
"Once ospreys were almost wiped
out," he told Max. "For some
reason, their eggs had become so weak they were cracking before the chicks
could hatch. A scientist got to wondering
what was doing it, and he found out:
DDT. The pesticide was leaching
into the water and poisoning the food chain, and the fish the ospreys were
eating were destroying their eggs. That
discovery was the beginning of the Environmental Defense Fund. Once they got DDT banned, the ospreys started
coming back. They're in pretty good
shape now."
A one-winged blue heron stood sentinel
over his tidal pool by the dock.
"Hey, Chief," Tall Man called to
the bird, then he looked at Chase and said, "The
Chief is pissed. His lunch is
late."
"That's Chief Joseph," Chase
explained to Max. "Some kids found
him over at the borough beach. He had a
broken wing; the vet they took him to said the wing was too badly smashed to
fix, he wanted to put him to sleep, but I said no, just amputate the wing and
let us have him. He's become a real
prima donna. Twice a day he walks around
in the shallows, the rest of the time he stands there and complains that we
don't feed him enough."
"Why'd you name him Chief Joseph?" Max asked.
"Tall named him that, after the Nez
Percé chief... you know,
the battle of
"Is the Chief friendly?"
"If you've got food he is. If you don't, he's a perfect pain in the
ass."
Max grinned. "Maybe I'll find some special animal, something I can take care of and
name."
"Sure," Chase said. "Maybe you will."
Tall Man guided the boat into its slip between
two smaller craft — a Whaler and a Mako — and Chase hopped onto the dock and
retrieved the lines. He hopped onto the
dock and retrieved the lines. He tossed
the stern and spring lines to Tall Man and returned aboard to show Max how to
cleat the bow line.
Then, while Tall Man went to find food for
the heron, Chase and Max went on up the hill.
* * * * *
Technically, because it consisted of
thirty-five acres of waterfront property, the island was worth a fortune, and
the state and township had taxed it accordingly. Over the past two decades, taxes had doubled,
and doubled again, until finally the cost of running the enclave had approached
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
One by one, family members had discovered that for their allotted two
weeks on the island every summer, they were paying more than the cost of
renting a decent house on Nantucket or
They had tried to sell the island, and
discovered that, in fact, it wasn't worth very much at all because nobody —
including the family members themselves — wanted to pay its assessed value.
And so, in a calculated act of revenge against the local ‘taxocrats’, the family corporation, an entity that existed solely to run the island, had taken out as large a mortgage as the local bank would permit —half the assessed value — had split the proceeds among the twelve families within the family... and had then dissolved itself and abandoned the island, leaving its liens, its taxes and its upkeep in the hands of the bank.
Simon Chase had been welcomed by the bank and the town as the new owner. He had deep roots in the local community, and though as a nonprofit entity the Institute might not pay local taxes, some of Chase's projects might generate substantial revenue for the townspeople. For example, he might find a way to bring the shellfishing industry back. For years, the beds of clams, scallops, mussels around Waterboro had been so badly polluted that no one was permitted to dig, eat or sell any of the mollusks. Perhaps Chase could find a way to clean up the beds.
Local merchants knew, furthermore, that the Institute wouldn't be competition for any of them. And finally, Chase's grand plans for the island promised to bless the area with what it needed most: jobs.
Defense cutbacks had slashed jobs from the largest employer in
southeastern
For a year, it had seemed that the dream might come true. Chase had taken a course in preparing grant
applications, and he had received a hundred-thousand-dollar grant to buy boats
and basic scientific equipment. He had
also received preliminary approval for grants for projects involving endangered
species, commercial fishing and medical research from the federal government,
the state of
And then, in late 1995, the bottom had fallen out of the economy. The national debt had grown to six trillion
dollars; the President and the Congress, obsessed with reelection, had refused
to make the hard decisions necessary to deal with the budget deficit. The Germans and the Japanese and the Arabs,
who had supported the vaunted American way of life for more than a dozen years,
looked across the water and, disgusted at long last, proclaimed the
Inflation had begun to soar; interest rates were reaching double digits; the stock market had dropped a thousand points and so far showed no signs that it had bottomed out; unemployment nationwide was 11 percent; one family in four now lived below the poverty line.
In the space of a single week, every one of Chase's grants had been refused. New construction was the last thing he had money for. He could barely pay his staff of three, could barely feed himself. Had he not been successful in obtaining tax-exempt status for the Institute, he would have had to follow his predecessors and abandon the island.
And he might yet have to pick up and go, if his last roll of the dice came up craps.
Months ago he had received a call from a Dr. Amanda Macy in
Now she wanted to try the same technique with another species of whale, the Atlantic humpback. She had heard about the new institute and had read some of Chase's papers on sharks. She knew he had boats, guts and experience with large deep-water animals. She knew the humpbacks passed just to the east of the island every summer on their way north. Would he be willing, she wondered, to have her and her team of sea lions come to the island for three months, to take them to sea and help her research... for a fee of, say, ten thousand dollars a month?
Chase had agreed instantly, while trying to temper the excitement in his voice. This could be salvation, not only financially but intellectually as well — a terrific project, well funded, with a respected colleague.
The only problem was, Dr. Macy was due to arrive in a few days, Chase had spent a lot of money, money he didn't have, building facilities for her and her sea lions, and Dr. Macy's first check hadn't come yet. If she had changed her plans, if she had decided to cancel without having the courtesy to call him, if... well, he wouldn't think about it.
* * * * *
The Institute's nerve center was a twenty-two-room clapboard Victorian
pile that had formerly been the main house for the island's clan. Though its structure hadn't changed, its
function had: it was used for the
Institute's housing, dining, administration and communications. It was ramshackle and inefficient, and
Chase's original, grandiose plans had called for it to be razed and replaced at
a cost of more than a million dollars.
By now, though, he was delighted that the house had remained untouched,
for he had come to love it. His office
was large, high-ceilinged and airy, with a working fireplace and French doors
that gave him a view of Fishers Island and, on a clear day,
When Chase and Max came into the office, Mrs. Bixler was polishing pewter and watching The Weather Channel.
"Morning, Mrs. B.," Chase said.
"Morning's long gone," Mrs. Bixler replied, "and you look like you've been on a three-day toot." She looked at Max. "Did you really take this boy sharking?"
"I did, and he did just fine... thanks to the sandwiches you sent along."
"You were lucky," Mrs. Bixler said, frowning and returning to her polishing. "You were lucky, pure and simple. Don't push your luck, I say."
Nominally, Mrs. Bixler was Chase's secretary; in fact, she was the Institute's majordomo and his self-appointed caretaker. A sixty-year-old widow whose children lived somewhere out West, she was a member of the island's founding family and had lived there year-round since the Korean War, shuttling back and forth to the mainland in her own boat, a 1951 wooden speedboat that she kept in her own cove.
Initially, when the family had left the island, she had moved to a small house on the water near Mystic, but as soon as Chase had taken over — and had found himself calling her daily for advice and counsel about the island, its buildings, its septic systems, its generators, its wells — he had asked her to come back to the island and work for the Institute. She had, on her terms, which included the restoration of her four-room apartment off the kitchen of the main house.
The pewter collection, a museum-quality array of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mugs, flagons, plates, candlesticks and flatware, was Mrs. Bixler's own and was probably worth several hundred thousand dollars. She could have sold it, stashed it in a vault somewhere or kept it in her rooms, but it had traditionally resided in the room that was now Chase's office, and that, she told Chase, was where it would continue to reside.
"Why are you watching that, ma'am?" Max asked, pointing at the television set mounted in a bookcase.
"Can't be too careful," Mrs. Bixler said. "That's one thing you can never be, too careful."
Mrs. Bixler was tuned to disaster.
She had been three years old in 1938, when the colossal hurricane had
devastated
"What's going on?" Chase said.
"Nothing much, not enough to wet a frog's socks. But there's a nasty-looking low-pressure
convection cooking down east of
"I meant about business. Anything from the EPA or the DEP? Did we get an okay to move the whale?"
"Not a peep. I called ‘em both, and I got a robot that told me to have a nice day."
Chase ruffled through a pile of letters on his desk. "Did we get the check from Dr. Macy?"
"Not yet. If I was you, I'd tell that woman you're gonna make two parkas and a pair of gloves out of her seals if she doesn't pay up." Mrs. Bixler paused. "One thing, though. I was over to town collecting the mail; Andy Santos told me Finnegan's fixing to make a run at your tax status."
"Damn!" Chase said. "He won't give up, will he?"
"Not till he's got you turn-tail and running... or till you roll over and sell out to him."
"I'll blow the island off its pins first."
Mrs. Bixler smiled. "That's what I told Andy."
Brendan Finnegan was a land speculator whose acumen was very sharp... and usually about a year too late. He had made a fortune in the seventies, lost it in the early eighties, made it back in the late eighties and been hammered by the most recent turnaround. Currently, his empire was teetering not he lip of bankruptcy, and he was in desperate need of a big score.
A month after Chase had closed his deal for
Finnegan saw the prince as his big score, if only he could find an island to sell him. He didn't just want a broker's commission; he wanted the seller's profit too. Thus, he'd have to own the island.
Chase's financial problems were no secret. The price he had paid for the island was public record, and his difficulties meeting the day-to-day expenses were common knowledge.
Finnegan had first offered Chase the same amount Chase had paid for the island. Ignoring Chase's insistence that he didn't want to sell, Finnegan had upped his ante in increments of 10 percent. His latest offer had been for 180 percent of Chase's purchase price, or nearly two thirds of the assessed value of the island.
Chase knew the game Finnegan was playing, and he wasn't trying to hold the man up. As he told Finnegan while they were still on relatively amicable terms, he had finally found something he loved, something he wanted to preserve and pursue, and he intended to keep it.
Finnegan had stopped being friendly. He had begun to file nuisance complaints — with the zoning board, the planning board, the Coast Guard and the EPA. None of the complaints had been sustained, but each had had to be answered, if not by Chase himself then by his two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer.
"What grounds has he thought up this time," Chase asked Mrs. Bixler.
"Says you're not doing any real science out here, says your experiments haven't produced anything concrete yet, so why should the taxpayers support you."
"The arguments' got a certain appeal." Chase paused. "Dr. Macy's arriving just in time... the cavalry to the rescue."
"Long as she pays the bills."
Max had appeared to be ignoring the conversation, watching the hypnotic drone of the weather reports. But now he said suddenly, "Can't you afford all this? Are you gonna lose the island?"
"No," Chase said, forcing a smile. "Now let's go get us some scuba tanks and have a lesson before we go back and dive up that sensor."
"Not likely," said Mrs. Bixler. "Compressor's down."
"For God's sake... what now?" Chase said, seeing Max's shoulders slump in disappointment.
"Gene said it's probably the solenoid. But then, Gene thinks all the world's problems can be traced to solenoids. If I were you, I'd have Tall look at it."
"Okay," Chase said. He felt panicky; now there were problems with the compressor. What would break down next? What he wanted to do more than anything was take a nap.
But Max was here, and Chase was determined that Max was going to have the time of his life. He smiled and said, "We'll go talk to Tall, help him feed Chief Joseph. Then we'll go check the tank racks. Maybe there're still a couple of full tanks."
* * * * *
Tall Man was already in the equipment
shed, working on the diesel compressor, whose problem was not the solenoid but
clogged injectors. He'd have it running
by late this afternoon, he said; there would be full tanks by tomorrow morning.
Chase didn't know how Max would react —
with sullenness, perhaps, or resignation — but the one attitude he would have
bet against was enthusiasm. So he was
surprised and pleased when Max said, "That's the great thing about being
here for a month; there's always tomorrow." He gestured.
"C'mon, Dad, gimme a tour of the rest of the
place."
There were three other buildings on the
island. All had been homes, all had been
scheduled for demolition and all had instead been jury-rigged as laboratories,
storage facilities and, in one case, a makeshift infirmary.
The living room of the smallest house had
been stripped of furniture and carpeting, its floor had been tiled, its
Sheetrock walls plastered over. In the
center of the room, bolted to the floor, lit by large ceiling-mounted
fluorescent tubes, was a cylinder twelve feet long and six feet high, with a
round hatch on one end and a small porthole in the middle. Plastic tubing and coated wires ran from the
cylinder to a control panel on one wall.
"That's our decompression
chamber," Chase said. "We call
it Dr. Frankenstein."
"What's it for?"
"Well, let's see how much you learned
from your diving lessons. What are the
three main dangers in diving? Aside from
stupidity and panic, which are the two most important and the ones they don't
tell you about?"
"That's easy. Embolism first — that's from holding you
breath on the way up. The
bends. And... I
forget the other one."
"Some people call it the
rapture," Chase said. "The rapture of the deep." He led Max to a small refrigerator, from
which he took two cans of Coke. He
passed one to Max and said, "You ever been drunk?"
Max flushed. "Me?"
"Never mind, that wasn't a question
you have to answer. What I'm getting at
is, the thing they call the rapture is like getting
drunk under water. Its real name is
nitrogen narcosis. When you breathe
compressed air in deep water, there's a high ratio of nitrogen in what you take
into your body, and nitrogen can become poison, pretty much like alcohol. It affects people at different depths, in
different ways. Some people never get
it, some people get it once and never again, some people get it so often
they're almost used to it. And some
people die from it."
"Why?"
"Because getting
drunk under water is... well... a real bummer. The worst
thing is, a lot of times you don't know what's happening. It's a mellow, dreamy kind of drunk. You forget where you are; you don't care;
that deep reef down there at two hundred feet is so pretty you think you'll go
have a look for a while, and if you think to check your depth gauge or your air
gauge, you find you can't read them, the numbers are all blurry, but you don't
give a damn so you go anyway.
"They've done tests on divers and
found that, as a rule, at a hundred and fifty feet a twenty-five-year-old male
in peak physical condition can't perform simple tasks he wasn't prepared to
do."
"Like what?"
"One of those puzzles you did when
you were little, where you put the round thing in the round hole
and the square thing in the square hole.
He can't do that, he can't figure it out. He's lost all power of innovation. He can't change his dive plan. If he has an emergency, if he runs out of air
or his mouthpiece pulls away from his regulator, he survives by instinct and
reflexes conditioned by experience and training. Or he doesn't survive."
"Emergencies kill them?"
"Not always. Sometimes they kill themselves. You'd think it was suicide if you didn't know
better."
"How?"
Chase took a breath and looked off into
the middle distance, remembering.
"Ten years ago, I was a safety diver for a guy who wanted to film
black coral on the
"People breathe other things?" Max asked.
"Yeah, if you have to work deeper
than that, you use mixed gases.
Helium-and-oxygen is one. Anyway,
we took all sorts of precautions: put a
weighted line down to two-fifty, posted a diver every fifty feet with a spare
tank so the cameraman would have someone watching over him all the time and
plenty of air for decompression on the way up.
I was the guy at a hundred, and there was a guy below me at
one-fifty. The cameraman was wearing twin
eighties pumped to thirty-five hundred psi — big tanks, so no way he'd run out
of air. He said he'd never been narced
before, so nobody gave it a thought.
"We got positioned, and the cameraman
jumped in and started down. He went by
me and gave me a wave, same for the next guy, then he
grabbed the line at two hundred and stopped to adjust his camera and turn on
his lights. The water was clear as gin,
so I could see everything. He looked
fine, in control, his bubbles coming up nice and regularly, which meant his
respiration was good, no anxiety, no panic, nothing.
"A big grouper came out of his hole
in the wall and hung there looking at the cameraman, who cranked off some film
of him. Then the grouper got bored and
began to mosey down the wall.
"Well, all of a sudden the cameraman looks up at the guy below me, waves, takes off his mask —his mask, for God's sake! — tosses it away and starts chasing the grouper down the wall.
"I started after him, so did the guy below me, and we were humming, but there was no way. We quit at two-fifty, and all we could see were the camera lights going down and down into that blackness, till they looked like little pinpoints."
"He deep was it there?"
"Two miles. I imagine he's still down there."
"Two miles!" Max said. "Did you feel it... the rapture?"
"Mostly I was in shock. But there was one second when I felt a weird envy of what the man must be seeing way down there in the abyss. As soon as I felt it I knew what it was, and it frightened me, so I grabbed the other diver and dragged both of us up to where we felt normal again."
"What about the bends? Have you ever had that?"
"No, thank God, and I hope I never
do." Chase gestured around the
room. "Sitting right here," he
said, "we have fourteen and a half pounds of air
pressure on every inch of our bodies.
Okay? Fourteen-point-five
psi. Every thirty-three feet you
go down diving, you pick up another atmosphere, as they call it; the air in
your tank is compressed another fourteen-point-five psi. So at thirty-three feet, you've got
twenty-nine psi; at sixty-six feet, forty-three and a half; and so on. You with me?"
"Sure," Max said.
"Now, remember what I said about the
deeper you go the more nitrogen you breathe?
Well, here it is again — nitrogen's a bad actor. If you stay down too long and come up without
giving it a chance to vent out of your system — it's what's called
decompression, you just hang in the water and breathe it off — a bubble of
nitrogen can lodge in an elbow or a knee or your spinal cord or your brain. That's the bends. It can cripple you or kill you or give you
what you think is bursitis for the rest of your life." Chase pointed at the steel cylinder. "That's why we have the decompression
chamber, in case somebody gets the bends.
The chances of it happening around here are pretty slim, considering how
little deep diving we do, but when the Navy offered us this surplus chamber, I
snapped it up."
"What does it do?"
"If a person gets bent, you put him
inside and pump the chamber full of air and pressurize it to the equivalent of
the depth the dive tables say he should be at to begin safe decompression — a
hundred feet, two hundred, whatever. We
can pressurize the chamber to the equivalent of a thousand feet. Pressure puts the nitrogen back into solution
in the person's bloodstream, so the bubbles disappear and he feels normal
again. Usually. But it depends on how long ago he was bent
and how much damage was already done.
"Then comes the
tricky part. You reduce the pressure in the chamber very gradually,
which is like bringing the person up from depth very slowly, almost inch by
inch, so the nitrogen has a chance to flush itself from his tissue. Sometimes it takes as long as a whole
day."
"What happens if he comes up too
fast?"
"You mean really too fast? He'll
die."
They tossed their soda cans into a trash
basket, and went outside.
On the southeast corner of the island, an
enormous circle of concrete, fifty feet in diameter,
had been poured into forms set in craters blasted into the ledge rock. The circle had been filled with water, and the
natural boulders had been left within it to make platforms and caverns.
"It looks like the sea lion house at
the zoo," Max said.
"Good for you... that's what it
is. I had it custom-built for Dr. Macy's
sea lions."
"Do you think I'll be able to play
with them?"
"I don't see why not." Chase looked at his watch. "But right now I've got to go make a
couple of calls. Want to come?"
"Can I go ask Tall Man for a fish,
maybe try to feed Chief Joseph?"
"Sure." Chase started away, then
stopped. "But, hey, Max,
remember... this is an island... water, water everywhere."
Max grimaced. "Dad..."
"I know, I know, I'm sorry,"
Chase said. Then he smiled. "But you've got to remember, I'm pretty
new at this fathering business."
* * * * *
Chase sat at his desk and stared at the
fax copy of the bank-transfer slip. Dr.
Macy's money would be good funds in the Institute's account at the borough bank
tomorrow morning. He could pay Mrs.
Bixler, he could pay Tall Man and the caretaker, Gene, he
could clear his tabs with the fuel dock and the grocery store. He could even pay his insurance premium on
time, avoiding a late charge for the first time in months.
He should probably frame the fax and hang
it on the wall, the way some people framed the first dollar bill their business
took in, because this ten thousand was a real lifesaver, the first step on the
Institute's road to solvency. If he
could keep Dr. Macy and her sea lions here for the full three months — and why
shouldn’t he? The weather would be good,
and the whales should be passing back and forth till the end of September —
he'd take in thirty thousand dollars, enough to keep him afloat until the end
of the year. Maybe by then grant money
would have loosened up for the bite-dynamics project; maybe he'd be able to
wangle some charters from cable TV companies doing shows on sharks or whales;
maybe... maybe what?... maybe he'd win
the lottery.
Yes, he'd copy the fax and frame the
copy. He'd enjoy looking back at it
later on, when times were better.
He wondered if Dr. Macy had any idea how
critical her ten thousand was to him.
And what did ten grand mean to her?
Nothing, probably. The state university system in
He wondered what Macy herself would be
like. All natural, he'd bet,
fiber-loaded, fully organic, no preservatives, one of those women who smelled
of lamb fat because their sweaters were knit from raw New Zealand wool, who
wore little round eyeglasses and had dirt between their toes from walking
around in orthopedic sandals and refused to eat anything that had ever lived.
He knew them well, from his days in
Greenpeace, and found most of them to be either insufferably
smug and self-righteous or ditsily, dangerously naïve.
Anyway, he didn't care if Dr. Macy was the
spawn of Tiny Tim and Leona Helmsley.
Her money was good, as so was her project. The Institute's public
relations — an element of his job that Chase loathed and wasn't adept at
exploiting — could benefit from an association with her. Good video images of humpback whales,
especially if they were breakthrough images of the kind Dr. Macy had supposedly
gotten of the
12
Max's foot slipped on the slick boulder,
and before he could catch himself he skidded down its face and found himself
standing in water up to his ankles. He
called himself a few names, then sloshed through the
shallow water till he came to a place where the rocks were smaller. He climbed them and continued his circuit of
the island, stepping carefully from rock to rock, aware now of the truth of
what Tall Man had told him: low tide
makes for slippery rocks.
Tall Man had given him two fish to feed to
the heron. He had approached the bird
gingerly, for it was big, its beak was long and sharp and its dark eyes
followed him as if he were prey.
Max had dropped the first fish, fearing
for his fingers, and the heron had snatched it from the water, craned its neck
and swallowed it whole. The heron had
seen the second fish, and had taken a step toward Max. Max had forced himself to stand his ground,
dangling the fish from his fingertips, and the heron had plucked it from him
with surgical precision, its beak missing Max by millimeters. Then Max had tried to touch the heron, but it
had turned away and marched back to the center of its tidal pool.
Max had nothing special to do, his father
and Tall Man were both busy, so he had decided to go exploring. At low tide, Tall Man had said, you could
walk all the way around the island on the rocks, and he had already made it
nearly halfway around, had reached the far southern end of the island, before
skidding off the slimy boulder and soaking his sneakers.
He came to a small pool — a big puddle,
really — where the tide had receded from a basin in a boulder, and he knelt
down and bent close to the water. He saw
tiny crabs scuttling among the stones, and periwinkles clinging motionless to
the bottom, as if patiently awaiting the next high tide. He watched the crabs for a moment, wondering
what they were doing that made them look so busy — feeding? Fighting?
Fleeing? — then stood
up and continued on.
The larger rocks were spattered with guano
and littered with clam shells dropped from the air by gulls, which would then
swoop down and peck the succulent meat from the shattered shells. The smaller rocks closer to the water were
coated with algae and weeds, and in niches between them Max saw matchbooks,
plastic six-pack holders and aluminum pop-tops from soda cans. He picked up those he could reach and stuffed
them into his pockets.
He came to a spot where the rocks looked
too slimy and their faces too slippery for him to climb over them safely, and
so he walked up the hillside and crossed twenty or thirty yards of high grass
toward the biggest boulder he had ever seen:
at least twelve or fifteen feet high, probably twenty feet long, a
remnant of the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. He circled the boulder, looking up at it with
awe, then began to search for a way down the hill to
the rocks.
He walked between two bushes, tested his
footing and started down.
Something caught his eye, something in the
water, not far out, no more than ten yards away. He looked, but saw nothing, and tried to
articulate for himself what it was he had seen; movement, a change in the shape
of the water, as if something big was swimming just beneath the surface. He kept looking, hoping to see the dorsal fin
of a dolphin or the shimmering shower caused by a school of feeding fish.
Nothing. He kept going,
walking slowly, stepping carefully among the wet rocks.
He heard a sound behind him: a splash, but a strange kind of splash, a
plopping splash, as if an animal had risen out of the water and submerged
again. He turned and looked, and this
time he did see something — a ring of ripples spreading from a spot just
offshore. There was a vague hump in the
surface of the water, but as he watched, he saw it disappear.
He wondered if there were sea turtles
around here. Or seals. Whatever it was out there, he wanted to see
it.
But again, there was nothing. He walked another few yards and looked up to
gauge the terrain ahead. The rocks on
this side of the island seemed to be smaller, more cluttered with debris. There were pot buoys and big chunks of plastic
and...
What was that? Ten or fifteen yards away, something was
caught in the rocks, half in the water, half out. An animal of some kind. A dead animal.
He walked closer and saw that it was a
deer, or the remains of a deer, for the corpse had been savaged, its flesh torn
and stripped. There was no sickly smell
of rot, no gathering of flies, which told Max that the deer had not been dead
for long; this was a fresh kill. He
couldn’t imagine what had done this to so large an animal. Hunters? He looked for bullet wounds in the body, but
saw none.
He was about to turn away, when he saw
something in the head of the deer, something strange. He stepped forward, bent down, reached
out. His foot slipped; he flung out his
arms and tried to straighten up to regain his balance, but overcorrected and
fell backward into the water.
The water wasn't deep, only three or four
feet, and Max quickly found footing on the loose gravel. He stood up.
Suddenly he sensed something behind him —
movement, a change in pressure, as if a mass of water was being shoved at
him. He turned and saw the same vague
hump in the surface. This time it was
moving toward him.
He splashed water to try to frighten it
away, but it kept coming.
A surge of panic washed over Max; he
turned back toward shore, leaned into the hip-deep water and paddled with his
hands. He gained a yard, two yards, and
now he was scrambling up a slope on his hands and knees, scattering rocks and
gravel behind him. He pushed with his
feet and reached for a handhold. His
hand found the head of the deer, and he pulled.
Something sharp dug into his palm, cutting it, but he held on and kept
pulling.
He reached the dry rocks, lurched to his
feet and ran. He didn't stop until he
got to the top of the hill. Gasping
ragged breaths that were more like sobs, he looked down at the water. The hump had vanished, and rings of ripples
were fading from the glassy surface.
Trembling from cold and fear, Max ran
toward the house. He had covered half
the distance before he felt a stinging in his palm. He looked at his hand and saw, protruding
from the fleshy bulb beneath his thumb, the thing that had cut him.
* * * * *
Chase looked up from his desk and saw Max
standing in the doorway, soaked from the shoulders down; a puddle was forming
on the floor around his sodden sneakers.
He was shivering. His face was
gray, his lips nearly blue. He looked
terrified.
"Max!" Chase jumped up from his desk, knocking his
chair back against the wall, and crossed the room. "Are you okay?"
Max nodded.
Chase knelt down and began to unlace Max's
sneakers. "What happened? You fall off the rocks?"
"A deer," Max said.
"A deer? What
deer?"
Max tried to speak, but stammered as a
spasm wracked his chest and shoulders and made his teeth clatter.
"Hey," Chase said, "it's okay." He
removed Max's sneakers, socks, jeans and underwear, balled them up and threw
them out the front door onto the lawn.
He took two bath towels from a linen closet in the hall, dried Max off
with one and wrapped him in the other.
Then he led him to the sofa in his office and sat him down.
"Deer swim over here," he
said. "Usually from Block Island
but sometimes all the way from town. I don't
know why they bother, there's nothing here for them they can't find somewhere
else. They're a nuisance: they eat everything Mrs. Bixler plants, and they're loaded with ticks, Lyme ticks. They—"
Chase stopped, for he saw that Max was
shaking his head. "What?"
"It was dead," Max said.
"What? In the water? It drowned.
Yeah, they—"
"Something killed it... tried to eat
it... did eat it, a lot of
it." Max spoke haltingly, for he
was still shivering. "I was on the
rocks by the point... near that giant boulder Mrs. Bixler said her family
always called Papa Rock... saw something
in the water, caught in the rocks... saw its head and part of the rest of
it... I got closer... saw there was nothing left behind about
here..." Max touched his rib
cage. "I thought maybe bluefish had
got it... like they did to that
bird."
"It's possible, if it was
bleeding. One of them might take a bite
out of it, and then the others see how easy it is and get in a frenzy
and—"
"No." Again Max shook his head. "I thought maybe a shark, but when I got
real close I saw... the deer had no eyes.
Everything around the eyes was all torn.
A shark wouldn't do that... couldn't."
"No.
So you were right the first time... bluefish, probably."
Max ignored him. "I saw something sticking out of its
cheek... something shiny... I tried to reach for it but couldn’t, so I
took a step and slipped... fell
in."
"What was it?"
Max opened his right hand. The wound in his palm was small and shallow,
and already the bleeding had stopped. He
passed the shiny thing to his father.
"Looks like a shark tooth,"
Chase said as he took the thing and turned out of the shadow cast by his own
torso.
"That's what I thought, too."
But then, as Chase moved to the light on
his desk and examined the thing in his hand, he started, and felt his pulse
leap.
It did look like a shark tooth, a great
white shark's tooth, perhaps fossilized, for it was a dingy gray color. It was a triangle, about half an inch on a
side, and two of its three sides had finely serrated edges that, when Chase ran
his thumb along them, shredded his skin as swiftly as a scalpel. The third side was slightly thicker and had a
flat base, and on each end of the base was a tiny barbed hook. The two hooks faced each other. One had been broken off just above the barb.
Chase took a ruler from his desk and
measured the triangle. It was not half
an inch on a side but five eighths — exactly five eighths. The thing was a magnificently machined,
perfectly precise equilateral triangle.
Chase rubbed it between his thumb and
index finger. The gray patina felt like
slime, and as he rubbed it, it transferred to his skin.
Now the tooth, or whatever it was, shone
like polished silver.
Chase looked at Max. "Is this a joke?" he said. "Tell me you're jerking my chain."
"A joke?" Max shivered
and gestured at the goose bumps on his arms and legs, and at the wound in his
hand. "Some joke."
"Well, then,.. what kind of an
animal is there that's got stainless steel teeth?"
13
It was two-fifteen when Buck and Brian
Bellamy pushed off from the dock, nearly two hours later than Buck had wanted
to leave, and Buck was furious. He had
told Brian to fill the two scuba tanks, but his brother had been so wrapped up
in helping his girlfriend put together her costume for Waterboro's parade for
the Blessing of the Fleet that he hadn't gotten around to it. He had told Brian to be sure the boat was
full of gas, but Brian had forgotten, so they'd had to wait for forty minutes
in line at the fuel dock while some richbitch put two thousand buck' worth of
diesel into a Hatteras so big that it blocked off all the pump on the dock.
But Buck held his tongue. It wouldn't do any good to give Brian a
chewing-out; Brian was immune to reprimands.
After his time in the Army, those two years down in
Buck, though, wasn't mellow; he was damn well excited, this could be the biggest day of his life. So instead of saying anything snappy to Brian he just asked him nicely to please sit on the padded box amidships so it wouldn't bounce around, and then he rammed his throttle forward. There were sailboats thick as flies everywhere in the harbor, and dinghies threading their way among them — people who'd come all the way from down-east Maine and the Jersey shore to watch all the half-assed Blessing folderol — but Buck didn't give a damn. If there was a marine cop around, let him try to catch them. There wasn't much afloat that could catch the Zippo. Buck had taken a stock Mako hull and modified the bejesus out of it, then added a turbocharged power plant that could generate four hundred and fifty horses and make the hull get up and go.
He cleared Waterboro Point going about thirty, pulled back so as not to jar his precious box while he crossed the wakes of the big boats going in and out of the Watch Hill channel, then hammered the throttle again and kicked in the turbo, heading for Napatree with his speedometer quivering around sixty.
If everything went well with the tests today and the meeting tomorrow, by midweek he could be adding a whole bunch of zeroes to his prospects, and he'd be able to tell the folks at Waterboro Lumber to find some other sap to peddle plywood and paint to yuppies. If Brian wanted to come along on the gravy train, he'd let him — all corporations had dim-witted brothers on the payroll — though if he had to put money on it, he'd bet Brian would choose to stay out there making change at the gas station on the turnpike.
There was no swell rolling in, so Buck kept speed up as he swung around
Napatree and headed southeast, aiming for the space between the two humps that
were
"Where we goin’?" Brian shouted over the shriek of the engine.
"To the Helen J."
"Long ways."
"Got a better idea?"
"Nope," Brian said, leaning toward the cooler. "Think I'll have me a foamie."
"Later, Brian. We got head work to do."
"Well, hell, Bucky..." Brian sat back.
Brian was right, the wreck of the old schooner Helen J was a long way away, but it was the only wreck around decent
enough for videotaping. It was shallow,
so the light would be good, and it was relatively intact, so it looked
good. Buck needed a nice set for the
demo movie he was going to make to show the honchos from
"Look here," Brian said, pointing off to starboard.
Buck looked, and saw a big yellow buoy with lettering on it. "So? A buoy."
"Never seen a buoy like that. Wonder what's under it."
"Got no time to look, Brian. We lost a lot of time."
"Could be a boat," Brian said thoughtfully. "Storm last week, maybe somebody lost a boat, buoyed it for the barge to find... could make pretty pictures."
'Fat chance," Buck said, but as he passed the buoy, he thought: Why not have a look? Give it five minutes, and if it is a boat, a newly sunk boat, those five minutes could save me two hours. He throttled back and swung the boat in a tight circle. "Good idea," he said. "You're thinking, Brian."
Brian beamed. "I can, Bucky, when I put my mind to it." He leaned over the bow and grabbed the buoy and brought it aboard, straining at the weight of the coil of wire.
"Power wire," said Buck.
"What's the ‘O.I.’ mean?"
"Who cares? There's something down there. Put a tank on and have a look while I set up the gear."
"Right, I'll have a look."
"But just a look, Brian. Down and up, that's it. I don't want you sucking up a bottle of air dicking around on some lobster trap."
Brian nodded. "A bounce dive. I like bounce dives."
"And you're good at ‘em, too," Buck said. Maybe compliments would accomplish what reprimands couldn't.
"Damn right." Brian put the tank harness on over his T-shirt and buckled the belt to which he always kept ten pounds of lead weights attached. He picked up a sheath knife and began to strap it to his calf.
"Think some monster's gonna eat you?" Buck said, smiling.
"You never know, Bucky, and that's a fact." Brian slipped a pair of flippers on, spat in his face mask and rinsed it overboard. Then he sat on the side of the boat, fit the mask over his face, put his mouthpiece in and flung himself into the water.
Buck watched until Brian had cleared his mask and, with a burst of bubbles, begun to recede downward into the gray-green gloom. Then he opened the padded box nestled before the console.
There were two full-face masks in Styrofoam beds inside the box. Each resembled half of the helmet of a space suit, and contained an air regulator apparatus, a microphone and an earphone. On the back of each mask, secured by straps, was a small rubber-covered box about the size of a cigarette pack. It was this box that represented Buck's future.
What Buck had invented was an inexpensive, compact, self-contained underwater communications system. His was not the first device to allow divers to talk to one another underwater — he had no illusions about that — but all the existing systems had two major drawbacks: conversations had to be relayed through a receiver-transmitter on a boat or platform on the surface, and they cost several thousand dollars, which limited their use to commercial or scientific professionals. With Buck's system, two or three (or five or ten) divers could talk directly to one another, just like on a telephone conference call, and the devices could be manufactured for less than two hundred dollars apiece. The average sport diver spent well over a thousand dollars on equipment, so a couple of hundred more — especially for something exotic, glamorous and potentially lifesaving — amounted to nickels.
Buck had run the numbers so many times that by now they were burned into
his memory: there were said to be about
four million divers in the
And all thanks to a chance discovery... no, that wasn't true, he didn't believe in chance, not after ten years of tinkering with video and sound systems in his father's garage. Anyway, it was all thanks to discovering a new combination of wires and transistors and relays.
Now all he had to do was make a decent three-minute video for the guys who were flying in from Oregon, with high-fidelity sound of him and Brian talking crystal-clear across fifty or a hundred feet of open water. And if the guys still weren't convinced, why, he'd bring them out here and let them try it themselves. That was another beautiful thing: the system was so simple it could be used by anybody. Even his brother.
"Bucky!" Brian burst from the water and grabbed the low bulwark on the stern of the boat. "There's a coffin down there!"
It took a moment for Brian's words to sink in. Then Buck said, "Bullshit, Brian... come on..."
"I swear! Either that or a treasure chest. You gotta come see it."
"Brian... we been diving out here a thousand times. There's fishing boats, car wrecks, a two barge, a bunch of barrels and the Helen J. There's no fuckin’ coffin! There's no treasure chest. Besides, you wouldn't know a treasure chest if it up and—"
"There is now, Bucky. A big one, too... looks like it could be made of bronze."
Brian was slow, but he didn't have much of
an imagination, he didn't make up things.
If there was a big chest down there, with something in
it...
"I wonder..." Buck
said, "... that storm..."
"That's what I was thinkin’. Probably churned it
up."
Buck reached over and helped Brian
aboard. "Let's go for it," he
said.
He rigged the masks and connected Brian's
wires for him and reminded him of the procedures for clearing the
faceplate. Then he mounted the video
camera in its housing, attached a bracket that held two 250-watt lamps — for
insurance if the water was dark, for fill light if it wasn't — and plugged the
connector from the housing into his own mask.
He ran a few seconds of tape of himself and Brian in the boat, then watched the playback through the viewfinder to make
sure everything was working. The picture
was sharp, the sound perfect.
They sat on either side of the boat and,
on cue, flopped overboard.
Buck went down first, kicking as hard as
he could and guiding himself with his free hand not the wire. The water was murky, and there was a moment
when he found himself suspended in a green haze, unable to see either the
surface or the bottom. He gripped the
wire and stopped.
"Did you check the depth?" Bucks words reverberated hollowly in his
mask.
"I didn't go all the way down,"
Brian said from a few feet up the wire.
"I just went till I got a good look."
Buck heard each of Brian's words as
clearly as if he were standing beside his brother on the surface. "Isn't the sound in this thing
fabulous?" he said.
"You're at fifty now," said
Brian. "Drop down another ten,
twenty feet."
Buck exhaled and thrust downward with his
legs, pushing the video camera in front of him.
What he saw first looked like a
yellow-green blur in a pea-green murk; then, as he drew nearer, it took
shape: a perfect rectangle, at least
eight feet long, maybe ten, and about four feet wide and four feet thick. When he was ten feet above it, Buck framed it
in his viewfinder, turned on his lights and swam in a slow circle around it,
taping as he went.
He heard Brian say, "Must be
soemthin’ good if they bothered to buoy it."
"They didn't buoy it, they snagged
it. Look there: that's some kinda sensor head caught
underneath, between the thing and that rock." Buck swam closer. "I don't even think they know what they
got."
"Then it could be really good."
"It could... or it could be
fuck-all... just some bronze somebody chucked overboard."
"Why'd anybody do that? You can sell bronze for good money."
"‘Cause
people are assholes," Buck said.
"Anyway, we won't know till we open it."
"You're gonna open it?"
"Think of the tape, Brian. Even if the guys from
"But suppose there's a body in
it. That wouldn't be—"
"There's no body, unless it's King
Kong himself. Look at the size of the
damn thing. It must've fallen off a
ship, probably something valuable, too, if they took the trouble to case it in
bronze." Buck turned off the camera
and let himself drift down to the sand bottom.
He steadied himself, adjusted the lamps, the focus f the lens. "Okay, Brian, swim
down to it and sit on it so I can take your picture, show how big it is."
"I don't know..." Brian hesitated, kicking slowly to maintain a
position six or eight feet above the box.
"C'mon, Brian... don't you want to be
famous?"
14
In the sealed box the ambient pressure was
constant, but in the electromagnetic field nearby, there was a change. It sensed this. There was life nearby, life of size and
substance.
And then a sound —
though it did not recognize sound as sound but only as a miniscule compression
of the tympanic membranes on either side of its head.
Then the sound stopped.
It was ravenous with hunger. When all the nourishment it had derived from
the meal it had had in the alien and threatening surroundings above had been
used up, it had left its box and hunted.
It had found that there was no food
here. It had emerged and sought to feed
on some of the countless tiny animals to which it had become accustomed, but
had found nothing. Confused, it had swum
up and down the water column, seeking life — any life — that would give it
sustenance.
It had seen living things, but they had
been too swift, too wary, too elusive. It had struck one or two, but been unable to
catch them.
Increasingly desperate, driven by signals
that it knew only as need, it had swum further afield.
It had found food —some, not much, barely enough to maintain life.
There had been a small thing that had suddenly appeared above, thrashing in panic, and it had grabbed the thing and taken it down and consumed it, collecting indigestibles — fur and gristle — in the side of its mouth, like a cud, and then spitting them out.
There had been a larger thing, almost as large as itself, also above, not at home here, and it had seized it form below and dragged it down and tried to consume it. But it had been too big to consume at once, and the uneaten part had drifted away. It had followed the body until a wave had carried it out of the water, out of range.
Then another living thing, slow and clumsy, had fallen into the water, almost within its grasp, but had escaped.
Its programming told it that it must hunt soon, and successfully, or surely it would cease to exist.
It knew there was a living thing nearby now.
It would eat it.
15
"Straddle the box," Buck said,
"like a horse."
"I can't, it's too wide."
"Then sit sidesaddle. Pose for me.
Pretend you're in Playgirl."
Tentatively, awkwardly, Brian swung his
legs over the side of the box. To steady
himself against the current, with one hand he gripped
the heavy black wire that led up to the surface.
He's spooked, Buck thought as he watched
Brian through the viewfinder. In another
minute, he's gonna bolt for the boat. To distract him, Buck asked, "How's your
air?"
Brian reached for his gauge, raised it to
his mask. "Fifteen
hundred. How long we been
down?"
"We got another ten, fifteen minutes
anyway."
Brian leaned over the edge of the box and ran
his hand along the lip of the lid.
"How you gonna open the thing?" he said. "Don't look to be a latch
anywheres."
"If we have to, we'll go up and get a
pry bar."
"S'pose it's alive in there... a
specimen, like."
Buck laughed. "That box coulda been here years. What the hell could be alive?" He finished shooting, turned off the camera
and let it hang from the thong around his wrist. "Now, let's see if we can crack that
sucker open."
Brian slid down off the box, and as he
landed, his flippers disturbed the fine sand, kicking up a cloud of milky
silt. He saw something fly upward in the
cloud, then settle again a few feet away.
"What's that?" he said.
"What'd you see?" asked Buck,
and he kicked slowly over toward Brian.
Brian dropped to his knees and ran his
fingers along the surface of the sand until they touched something solid. He picked it up and looked at it. "A bone," he said.
"What kinda bone?"
Brian held it up. It was about five inches long, and
curved. "Looks like a rib
bone. I dunno what from."
"Size of it, I'd say a dog."
"What's a dog bone doing down
here?"
"Beats me," said Buck. "See if there's any more."
He dropped down beside Brian and together
they began to dig.
* * * * *
It sensed faint sounds from the sand
nearby.
Prey.
It felt for the release button. It pressed the button. Slowly the lid began to rise.
* * * * *
"Look here," Buck was
saying. "A
jawbone. It's a dog for sure, and
something ate it." He held up the
jaw and pointed to the slashes in the bone.
"Tooth marks."
Buck saw something dark in the ashy silt,
and he reached for it. It was round and
blackish and hard, roughly the size of a plum.
He ran his fingers over its surface, first one way then the other. "I'll be damned, Brian, it's a fur
ball... like what a cat pukes up."
Buck rose to his feet and took a step
backward. He raised the camera and
switched it on. "Two shots, Brian, then we're gone," he said. "Hold up a couple bones and the fur
ball. You can go back up to the boat if
you want, while I open the box."
* * * * *
It swam out of the box and landed on the
sand. Because its body contained no air
spaces, it was not weightless in water, it was negatively buoyant: it would sink. But because, like all of its kind, its
chemical composition was more than ninety percent water, it was only a few
pounds negative. It could hover with
almost no effort, and — thanks to the webbing on its
extremities — it could swim very fast, it could actually fly through the water.
Now it propelled itself off the bottom and
veered toward one end of the box.
* * * * *
Buck had composed a perfect shot. Brian filled the frame, on his knees, holding
two bones in one hand and the fur ball in the other, all nicely contrasted
against the white sand. Buck pushed the
“record” button.
"Good job, Brian," he said. "Now smile, like you're selling
something in a commercial." He saw
Brian try to smile, then look up at the camera.
Suddenly Brian's eyes opened wide, and he
dropped everything and shouted something.
"Brian!" Buck
said. "Goddamnit!"
* * * * *
There were two things, not one. They were big and slow and very close.
It pushed off the bottom and lunged
forward, thrusting porpoise-like with its posterior webs. It covered the short span of open water in
less than a second.
From somewhere in its numbed brain came a
recollection of these beings, a familiarity, and with the recollection came a
sense of purpose: its mission was to
kill these things.
As hungry as it was, as satisfied as it
would have been with eating only one of them, it was programmed to kill both.
It seized the first, and buried its claws
in soft flesh.
* * * * *
Brian reeled backward on the sand and watched, paralyzed, as a cloud of blood — dark green at this depth — exploded from Buck's carotid artery. Buck's legs jerked, throwing up a cloud of silt, and his hands flew upward.
Brian couldn’t see what had Buck, but it was big, and whitish, and it had come from somewhere near the bronze box.
Through the murk he saw silver flashes tearing again and again at Buck's throat, until his head was connected by nothing but bones and sinew.
Brian scuttled backward, and then he realized that safety lay not horizontally but vertically; he pushed off the bottom and kicked upward, reaching frantically for the rubber-coated black wire that led up to the buoy on the surface. He found it and began to pull himself upward.
But the wire had bowed in the running tide, and Brian's weight merely consumed the slack in the bow: instead of pulling himself up, he was pulling the wire down. Relieved of tension from above, the sensor that had snagged beneath the box slid free and bounced along the sand. Now the boat above was drifting free, carrying the sensor, and Brian, with it.
Brian looked down and saw Buck's body sag to the sand, still spilling blood.
Then the thing turned toward him.
It had eyes, chalky white, hueless eyes.
It pushed off the sand like a rocket. It seemed to be flying up at him.
Still kicking, still pulling with one hand, Brian reached for the knife strapped to his calf. His fingers scrabbled at the rubber safety ring that held the knife in its sheath. It stretched, snapped back, stretched again and flopped away. Brian yanked the knife from its sheath.
The thing continued to soar upward, kicking like a dolphin, making no sound, blowing no bubbles. Its claws reached for Brian — ten of them, each curved like a little scythe.
Brian glanced up; the surface wasn't far, he could see the sun. Rays of brilliance slashed downward through the green water.
Then he looked down, and the thing was upon him. Its mouth opened, and a flash of sunlight struck row upon row of triangular teeth and made them glitter like silver stars.
Into his mask Brian screamed, "No!" But there was no one to hear him.
Claws dug into his ankle, puncturing the flesh and dragging him down.
He raised the knife and swung it blindly. Something grabbed his wrist, and steel slivers cut through the veins and tendons. The knife fell away.
He released the wire and flailed with his other hand, but it, too, was grabbed, and his arms were forced wide and his head thrust backward.
He tried to scream, but as he opened his mouth, something thudded against his mask, stunning him.
And then he felt the teeth at his throat.
His last sight was of a cloud of his own blood billowing up against the rays of yellow sun, a mist of orange.
* * * * *
It sensed the thing was dead. It held on with claws and teeth, and spiraled
downward with its prey in a slow ballet of death.
Once on the bottom, it carried the prey
over to where the other one lay on the sand, rolling back and forth in the
current. And then it began to feed.
* * * * *
On the surface, the small boat was caught
in the flooding tide. It moved quickly,
spinning erratically in lazy circles because of the drag caused by the heavy
rubber-coated wire dangling off the bow.
It grounded briefly on a shallow reef, but
the surge from a distant ship lifted it gently up and over the reef and sent it
on toward shore.
16
Chase aimed the bow of the Whaler toward
an empty slip in one of the floating docks in front of the tiny yacht club on
the western edge of the borough. He
wasn't a member of the club — he didn't play tennis, race sailboats or wear
pastel slacks emblazoned with ducks — but he had known most of the members for decades,
liked many of them, and they never begrudged him the loan of one of their
coveted slips.
The water was glass calm in this hour
after dawn, as if the day's breeze hadn't decided which direction to blow. Seabirds hadn't yet begun to feed, so beds of
fry made barely a ripple as they scurried aimlessly between anchored yachts.
Chase pulled the gearshift lever back into
neutral, then turned the key that killed the engine,
letting the boat nose silently into the slip.
He saw Max standing in the bow, ready to fend off the dock, and told himself: keep your
mouth shut, don't warn him again to watch his balance so he doesn't fall
overboard.
Max bent his knees and braced himself and
fended off perfectly, hopped up onto the dock with the painter in one hand and
cleated it off like an expert.
Chase didn't say anything as his son
cleated the stern line, didn't congratulate Max or even nod in acknowledgment
of a job well done. But he did
congratulate himself as he noticed Max's little smile of pride, for he realized
that he was learning something nearly as difficult as how to be a parent — when
and how to stop being a parent.
He passed Max his knapsack and climbed up
onto the dock, and they walked together toward the parking lot.
A single gull cawed in the distance, and
somewhere in the borough a dog barked.
Otherwise, the loudest sound they heard was the soft hiss of their feet
on the dewy grass.
Then, carried across the treetops, came
the muted bong of a church bell ringing six times.
"Six o'clock," Max said, and he
looked around as if in discovery.
"I've never been up at six before.
Ever. I
mean, since before I can remember."
"At this time of day, everything's
new and clean," said Chase.
"It's the time for belief in second chances."
"I should've come with you
before." Max started to say
something more, hesitated, then took a breath and said, "You're worried
about money, aren't you... about maybe
losing the island?"
"Not at six o'clock in the morning,
I'm not." Chase smiled. "It's impossible to worry about money at
six o'clock in the morning."
They reached the parking lot, and Chase
leaned against the wall of the clubhouse and stretched his calves and thighs
while Max unzipped his knapsack and spread his gear on the pavement.
For the first days Max had been with him,
Chase had gone running alone, waking, automatically as always, at five or
five-thirty and circling the island six times, a course of two miles, more or
less. He had showered, shaved, dressed
and eaten, and was at his desk or in one of the labs by the time Max got up at
eight or nine, grumpy and uncommunicative until infused by Mrs. Bixler with
glucose and protein.
Last night, for no apparent reason, Max
had asked if he could go with his father in the morning.
"Sure," Chase had said. "Why?"
"I don't want to miss anything."
"What's to miss? You huff and you puff."
"And you feel great, right?"
"On good days,
yeah. You pump the beta0endorphins, and you feel
great."
"So," Max had said, "I want
to go with you."
Chase hadn't pressed the boy because suddenly, blessedly, he had understood what Max was really saying — that he had a month to be with his father and, though he probably didn't know he was looking for them, to uncover things, find answers, solve riddles about himself. Thirty days to make up for eight years. Like an archaeologist digging for clues to a lost people, Max was determined to scrape away the overgrowth of years and find out who he was and where he had come from.
The only problem was, Max didn't actually want
to run, he wanted to Rollerblade, because his hockey coach had said it was the
best way for him to improve his skating so he'd have a chance to make the
varsity hockey team this coming winter.
That meant going into town, for there was no paved surface on
Chase had debated pressing Max to run with him on the island, arguing that to waste gasoline in search of pavement rather than to run on nature's own grass and rocks was a kind of corruption. But as he had formed the words in his mind, he realized that he was sounding like a pious pain in the ass.
So they had taken the Whaler and left the island at sunrise and gone into Waterboro.
As they had planed across the flat water, Chase had felt a niggling sensation that something was awry... missing, out of place or just... wrong. He didn't know what it was, but it was there, somewhere in his mind.
His buoy.
That was it. The one he and Tall
Man had dropped the other day to mark the sensor head. They had meant to come back and dive the
sensor up, but the compressor needed a part from
But where was the buoy? He should have seen it as they approached Napatree Point, but he hadn't, and now they were past Napatree, and as he looked eastward he was blinded by the rays of the rising sun.
He dismissed it; the buoy was surely there, they'd find it on the way back.
* * * * *
Chase finished stretching and pretended to be busy, double-knotting his running shoes and doing knee bends, as he glanced at Max putting on his elaborate outfit: knee pads, elbow pads, helmet and, finally, a pair of black high-top lace-up shoes soled with yellow rubber wheels. The boy looked like a B-movie robot.
All Chase said was "That's safe, is it?"
"Sure."
"So how come all the pads?"
"Well... it can be kinda hard to stop."
"So you're like a runaway train." Chase grinned. "Okay, killer, let's go for it."
"Where to?"
"You haven't seen the borough yet." Chase pointed. "We'll make a circuit: down
"Okay." Max stood up on the grass, as shaky as a newborn calf, and hobbled onto the pavement. The first foot to hit the hard ground skidded forward, and he staggered, windmilled with his arms, tottered, splayed and recovered. He smiled sheepishly and said, "Little rusty."
"That's a sport?" Chase shouted in mock alarm. "Jeez, maybe after breakfast we can have a friendly game of Russian Roulette."
"Just watch," Max said, and he leaned forward, pushed off with one foot, took a couple of long, striding steps, spread his arms and, as Chase watched in surprise, described a graceful circle around the parking lot. Then he pumped a fist in triumph and skated off toward the road that led into town.
Chase wanted to shout out warnings about traffic, pedestrians — about all the perils of growing up too fast — but he didn't. He took a few deep breaths and started to run.
As he crested the gentle hill that led into the borough, he smelled the
aroma of cinnamon buns and frying bacon from the two restaurants on
There was no traffic this early, so he ran down the middle of Beach Street, waving to Sally, who was stacking vegetables in front of the Borough Market, to Lester, who was unloading cases of beer from his truck at the back of the liquor store, and to Earl, who had been purveying newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, gun and paperbacks from the same storefront since long before Chase was born.
Everybody waved back, everybody had a word for him and Chase suddenly regretted that he didn't come into town more often. This was home, home was people and he wondered if his passion for his island was becoming unhealthy, turning him into a recluse.
He ran past
Chase met Max at the end of the point, where they spent a moment
appreciating the sunrise. Then they
turned back and, with Max zigzagging like a minesweeper in front of his father,
threaded their way through the little side streets until they emerged onto
Oak Street was wide, straight, open and empty. "I'm gonna pump," Max said. "See you back at the club."
"Go for it. Just be—"
But Max was gone, churning with his legs, sweeping with his arms, head down, back bent, his rubber wheels humming on the macadam.
Chase sprinted after him, more for the exercise than from any real hope of being able to keep up with him, but after two blocks he was winded, and he slowed to his normal rhythmic lope.
Max pulled away, a block ahead, then two, then became only a dark blur speeding down the shaded street.
Chase saw the girl first, saw her step out of the door of the house and turn back to pull the door closed and cross the sidewalk — looking not at the street but down into her tote bag — and step into the street.
He shouted, but his words were whipped away in the wind.
Max probably never saw her, for his head was down; he certainly never heard her, for the padding in his helmet pressed tightly against his ears.
Chase saw the girl's head suddenly snap up, the tote bag fall from her arms, and her hands rise toward her face.
Max must have sensed her then, somehow felt her presence, for he jerked upright and tried to veer to the right. One foot must have hit the other, or crossed over it, for his feet came to a sudden stop and his upper body catapulted forward. One of his wheeling arms struck the girl and spun her into a parked car. She bounced off the car and fell to the street in a billow of blue cotton skirt.
Chase saw Max fly for a moment in gangly slow motion and fall like a shotgunned bird, striking the ground first with his knees, then with his elbows, then with his head. He somersaulted once, and lay still.
Chase accelerated to a sprint, his mind cursing and praying while his body gasped for oxygen.
He saw the girl grasp the bumper of a car and pull herself to her feet. She walked over to Max and knelt down and touched his face. Max sat up, they looked at each other and Max said something; the girl shook her head.
Chase saw the girl turn her head his way, see him and suddenly jump to her feet, grab her tote bag and, with a last look at Max, disappear down an alley between two houses.
By the time Chase reached Max, the girl was gone.
Max was on his hands and knees. He reached a hand up, and Chase took it and pulled him to his feet, keeping an arm around his waist to steady him. "Are you okay?"
"Sure." Max smiled wanly. "That's why the pads." He gestured at his knees, and Chase saw that the fabric covering the pads was tattered.
"What about the girl?"
"She's fine... just shaken up."
"She said that?"
"Not... not exactly." Max frowned, as if unsure what the girl had said.
"So how do you know she's fine?"
"I don't know... I just know."
"Max..." Chase felt himself growing angry, and he fought to keep his mouth from surrendering to his temper. "Look, you creamed that kid. Maybe she's hurt and doesn't know it. Maybe she's looking for a doctor right now."
"She's not," Max said flatly.
"Why'd she run off?"
"I don't know."
"What did she say?"
"Nothing."
"What d'you mean, nothing? She has to have said something... like, ‘It's okay’ or ‘How are you?’ or "Why don't you look where you're going?’"
"No," Max said, "she never said a word. She came over, and I said, ‘I'm really sorry, are you okay>’ and all she did was touch my face and smile. But it was like she was talking, like inside my head I could hear the words."
"What words?"
"I'm not sure, maybe they weren't even real words but more a kind of feeling... sort of a ‘Don't worry’ and ‘I'm glad you're not hurt’ kind of thing." Max paused. "Then she saw you and took off."
"Christ, we don't even know who she is. I didn't notice what house she came out of." Chase glanced down the alley as if expecting to see the girl, but the alley was empty. Then he turned back to Max. "Well," he said, pointing at Max's blades, "you want to take those things off and we'll walk back to the club?"
"No, I'm fine, let's keep going. It's this helmet, that's the problem. I never heard her."
"Stick close to me, then, I'll be your eyes and ears."
"Right," Max said. "I'll circle you like you're a defenseman."
Chase smiled. "Great, maybe we can share a room in the intensive-care unit." He started off at a jog.
When they reached the end of the street, Chase had to make a choice: they could proceed ahead and return to the club and get in the boat and go back to the island, or they could take more time, get more exercise, by winding through the small back streets on the east side of the borough.
Jogging in place, he looked at Max, who
was happily skating backward and pretending to cradle a puck with an imaginary
hockey stick, and decided that the boy was indeed unhurt and could use the
workout. So he turned right off
The street dead-ended in a chest-high
stone wall beside the building. Normally, Chase would have turned several
yards before the end of the cul-de-sac, but in the bay beyond he saw a flock of
terns feeding, and the sunlight on their white bodies and on the water that
splashed as they dove looked like a spray of diamonds. He kept going toward the wall, pointing out
the terns to Max, who sped by him and circled to a stop.
They watched the terns for a moment, turned
to go, and as Chase's eyes left the water, he saw something in the rocks at the
water's edge. He paused.
"What?" Max
said.
"I'm not sure." Chase looked again, scanning the narrow
expanse of pebbles and boulders. Max
leaned on the wall beside him. "Where
are you looking?"
"By that mess of weed," Chase
said, pointing.
A wave lifted the clump of weed and moved
it a couple of feet closer to shore.
"Dad!" Max
shouted. "It's a hand!"
17
Its fingers were locked in a claw, as if
whoever it was had been trying to climb something or grab something or fight
off something at the moment he or she had died.
"Stay here," Chase said, and he
hauled himself up onto the wall, swung his legs over and dropped down onto the
pebbly strand.
"But Dad..." Max was already unlacing his Rollerblades.
"Stay here!" Walking toward the clump of
weed, Chase tried to recall if he'd heard of anyone reported missing. Then he wondered how long it took a drowned
body to rise to the surface again. It
happened, he knew that: after a while
the gases in a body built up, and as they expanded, the corpse would float.
The clump of weed was huge, extending far
out into the water. Chase didn't want to
touch the hand — what if that was all there was to it, or what if there was
more but it was so rotten that it fell apart? — so he used his running shoe to nudge aside the rubbery
strands of weed.
He saw a head then, and what was left of a
face, and bile rushed up the back of his throat and poured into his mouth. He dropped to his knees, coughing and
spitting.
The skin was whitish gray; the eyes were
gone, and the earlobes and the lips.
There was more of the body snarled in the weed — no blood left in it,
just shredded white flesh interlaced with strands of neoprene wet suit.
"Call the police," he said to
Max. "Go down to
"Who... who is it?"
"I don't know."
"What happened?"
"Just go!" Chase said, and almost
immediately he heard the rattle of Max's wheels on the pavement.
When he thought he could look again
without retching, Chase crawled closer.
The face was unrecognizable, but there was something familiar about the
hand.
The watch. The watch on
the wrist of the hand with the rigored claws was one of those diver's watches
that did everything but rinse your socks — told the time in every zone on the
planet, had windows for bottom time, lap time and phases of the moon. It was the watch of a gimmick freak, and he'd
seen it before. But
where?
It came to him: Waterboro Lumber, holding out a can of
WD-40. He had remarked on the watch, and
the owner had insisted on explaining every function and had told him how to
order one.
Buck Bellamy, that's who it was. Could this be
what was left of Buck Bellamy? But why? Buck was an expert
boatman, a certified scuba diver, and in high school he'd been a competitive
swimmer.
He had been diving,
the wet suit was evidence of that. What
could have killed him? Maybe he'd gotten
bad air — people sometimes were careless about where they filled their tanks,
and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Maybe he'd had a heart attack or a
stroke, or been chopped up by a boat propeller, or... Christ
knew what.
Chase peeled more of the weed away, and he
saw the other arm. All the flesh between
the elbow and shoulder was gone, and there were deep gashes in the bone of the
upper arm, as if a big fish or a small shark had grabbed the arm and shaken it
back and forth and gnawed on it like a dog with a bone too big to crush.
Around the wrist was a thong, and attached
to the thong was a steel housing containing a video camera.
* * * * *
"You tell me, Simon," said
Police Chief Roland Gibson. "You're
the shark expert. What kind of shark'd
do a job like that?"
"None," Chase said. "None I know of. Not around here."
They were sitting in Gibson's office in
the station house on Route 1. Polaroid
pictures of Buck Bellamy's remains were spread out on Gibson's desk, and Buck's
video camera was plugged into a television set in a bookcase.
A police car had arrived within five
minutes, an ambulance a few minutes later, and by the time the body had been
photographed and bagged and taken away to the medical examiner in
At Gibson's request, Chase and Max had
been brought to the station house, and their statements had been taken. Now Max sat in the lobby while Chase and
Gibson talked.
"Nice, Simon," Gibson said. "First you tell me it looks like a shark
attack, then you tell me there are no sharks around
here that attack people."
"I didn't say a shark attacked him, Rollie, I said it looks
like a shark might've bitten him... after Buck was already dead."
"What makes you think so?"
"Shark attacks are rare anywhere, and
unheard-of around here. A man's got a
better chance of being killed by a feral cat or a farmer's pig than by a
shark. For one thing, there are damn few
dangerous sharks in these waters. Sand
sharks are bottom feeders; they'd never go after a swimmer, let alone a diver,
but they might nibble on a dead body on the bottom. Makos are scarce, they're loners, and they
live in deep water and follow schools of pelagics — tuna and jacks. The odds are a million to one against a mako
wandering into shallow water, especially murky shallow water like around
here. A blue shark's a possibility; a
blue might make a run at a person if he was bleeding, and if a bunch of them
went after someone, they'd rip him to pieces.
But we'd see the evidence — the bite marks are obvious."
"What about white sharks? They're around, you've told me so
yourself."
"Sometimes," Chase said,
unwilling to tell Gibson about the big white he and Tall Man had tagged only
last week. The last thing he wanted was
a mass vendetta against white sharks by an armada of blood-thirsty macho
loons. "But rarely... almost
never. And, hell, if a great white shark
had wanted to eat Buck, it would've eaten him.
Period.
If it had made a run at him by mistake, maybe thinking he was a seal —
divers in wet suits on the surface look like seals to a shark — Buck would've
probably been sheared in half. We might
find the other half, we might not, but if we did, the bite marks would be
definitive: big, nasty half-moons. We sure wouldn't find him with his throat
torn out and meat bitten off him here and there like he'd been served up at a
banquet."
Gibson paused. "I guess we have to wait for what the
M.E. says. Maybe like you say, Buck just
died. People do."
There was a rap on the door, and a
patrolman stepped into the room.
"They found Buck's brother, Chief," he said. He hesitated, then added, "Over on
Seagull Point."
"What's the matter? You look awful."
"He's dead, too. Half et. Just like the other one. Like Buck.
Only difference, this one, Brian, had a knife scabbard strapped to his
leg."
"Just the scabbard?"
Gibson said. "No
knife?"
"Nope, the knife was gone. The scabbard had one of them rubber safety
rings, too, so the knife didn't just fall out."
"Which means Brian had it out, in his hand." Gibson looked at Chase. "So much for natural causes, wouldn't you
say?" He nodded to the
patrolman. "Okay, Tommy."
"There's Nate Green out here wants to
see you."
"Shit, I knew the fucking press would
get onto this." Gibson sighed. "You might's
well send him in, else he'll have it all over
Nate Green, a reporter for the Waterboro Chronicle, was a thirty-year veteran who
had once wanted to work for a big-city daily but had finally reconciled his
modest talent with a comfortable life by the seashore.
Green came into the room and closed the
door behind him. He was in his
mid-fifties: soft and overweight,
drinker's veins crisscrossing his nose and cheeks like a road map.
"I hear we got some excitement,"
he said as he smiled at Gibson and shook hands with Chase and sat down in the
empty chair facing the desk.
"Maybe," said Gibson. "Do me a favor, Nate. Let's not go jumping to any
conclusions."
"I hear Buck had a video camera on
him."
Gibson hesitated, then
said, "Yeah, but it flooded, the tape got wet. Maybe one of my geniuses did it when they
unloaded it, I don't know. Anyway,
there's not much on it."
"Mind if I look?"
"Only ‘cause
I trust you." Gibson gestured to
Chase, who got up and pressed the ‘play’ button on the video camera. "But keep all this to yourself. We don't know exactly what happened here."
"You know me, Rollie."
A blurred image of Brian Bellamy came on
the screen, the tape flickering and jumping as if the signal wouldn't lock
in. He seemed to be holding something up
to the camera. They heard Buck's voice
telling Brian to smile. Then Brian's
face changed. His eyes popped wide and
his mouth opened and he dropped whatever he was holding and shouted something
incoherent.
"Looks like he's seen
something," said Green.
"Yeah," Chase said, "but
what?
They heard Buck say, "Brian! Goddamnit!"
"Listen to that," said
Gibson. "Buck's cussing him, like
maybe Brian started screwing around... or went apeshit."
Suddenly the camera zoomed in on the sand
bottom, and the screen went dark. There
were sounds of shouts and screams, and the camera jolted up again, whirling
around in a cloud of fuzz. The water
seemed to take on a greenish tone.
"What's that?"
Green asked.
"Could be blood," Chase said,
"depending on how deep they were.
Below thirty-three feet, blood looks green."
The camera fell to the bottom again, more
lazily, as if it had been dropped, and all that filled the screen was water.
There was one last word, a voice yelling
"No!"
Green said, "Who was that?"
Chase said "We don't know."
"Run it again for me, Simon,"
Gibson said.
Chase rewound the tape and played the
scene again. When it was over, Gibson
said, "Looks to me like maybe Brian killed Buck."
"The what
killed Brian?" asked Chase.
"Could be they killed each
other."
Green shook his head... "Doesn't make any
sense. They were as close as brothers
can be. Brian worshipped Buck. Why would he kill him?"
"Drugs," Gibson said. "Brian had a history. Could be he had a relapse and wigged
out."
"No, Brian was scared to death of
drugs. He went to every N.A. meeting he
could find, and if there wasn't one, he'd go to A.A. or Al-Anon... even church if he had to. I remember one day I was getting gas, he told
me he'd already killed so many brain cells, he was taking care of the ones he
had left. A beer now and then was all he
ever allowed himself. The Bellamy boys
kill each other? No, Rollie, it makes no
sense at all."
"You got any better idea?" Gibson leaned back in his chair and stared at
the ceiling.
"Just a mystery, I guess," Green
said. "Mysterious death always
makes good copy."
"Scares the shit outta people
too," Gibson said.
After a long moment, Gibson made a show of
looking at his watch, and stood up.
"Speaking of killing brain cells... it's only nine-thirty in the
morning, and already it's been one long sumbitch of a day." He took a key from his pocket and opened the
bottom drawer of a file cabinet, pulled out a bottle of scotch and a stack of
paper cups and returned to his desk. He
poured two inches of whiskey into a cup, passed it to Green, poured another and
offered it to Chase, who shook his head.
Then he took a sip himself and again leaned back in his chair. "You got people coming in for the
Blessing of the Fleet, Nate?"
"My sister and her
kids. They'll probably find some excuse to hang
around for a week." Green sipped
his drink. "Jesus."
Chase didn't know why Gibson had suddenly
started talking about the Blessing, but he didn't want to hear about it. He wanted to find Max and return to the
island and get to work. He leaned
forward as if to rise, started to say something, but Gibson cut him off.
"They say this'll be the biggest
Blessing ever, folks coming in from everywhere, specially now the casino gives
‘em something to do if it rains and at night."
"So they say," said Green.
"Could give us a real shot in the
arm."
"Uh-huh."
Now Chase realized what Gibson was doing,
and he knew he'd have to sit there and listen.
"Now, Nate," Gibson said,
"I know you have to fill all those column inches, so whyn't you let Simon
and me give you a hand with the logic?"
"Okay."
"First off, there's no way this was a
shark attack. Simon as
much as gave me a deposition about that.
Right, Simon?"
"More or less," said Chase. "I said—"
"And the tape," Gibson said to
Green. "Remember, you're the only
one's seen it, that's an exclusive, and you'd have to agree it sure looks like
Brian just suddenly went ape."
"Or saw something that made him go
ape."
"Saw what? The Ghost of Christmas
Past?" Gibson barked out a
laugh.
"Well, that's the question."
"Here's my point: nothin’ down there to see. The only conclusion
a reasonable man can reach is that Brian had an acid flashback or something and
went after Buck and got himself killed, too, in the process."
"Where's all the blood come
from?"
"Brian's
knife."
"Brian had a knife?"
"Sure," Gibson said. "Didn't I tell you that? Strapped to his leg. But when they found him, the knife was
gone. There's another exclusive for
you."
Green set his cup on the desk and turned
to look at Chase. "What do you
think, Simon?"
"I don't know what to think,"
said Chase. "But it all seems a
little—"
"You got a better explanation?" Gibson snapped at him.
"No," Chase said, for he
didn't. All he would swear to, if it
ever came to that, was that neither man had been killed by a shark... at least
not by any shark he had ever heard of.
"There you have it then, Nate,"
said Gibson. "You're too good a
reporter to go off half-cocked with a lot of dingbat speculation."
Green paused, then
said, "You'll let me know what the M.E. says?"
"Soon as he
certifies the cause of death." Gibson splashed more whiskey into Green's
cup. "But I'll bet a dollar to a
dime it'll be death caused by a sharp instrument. Seems to me one lesson to pass along to your
readers is, drug addicts and maniacs shouldn't go diving."
The patrolman rapped on the door again,
opened it and said to Chase, "There was a call for you."
"I'll take it outside," Chase
said, standing up.
"No, she's gone," said the
patrolman. "It was Mrs.
Bixler. She said to tell you the Little
Mermaid's arrived."
"Good. Thanks, Tommy." Chase said to Gibson, "Three months'
reprieve from debtor's prison... I hope." He turned to go.
"Simon..." Gibson
said, stopping him. "We're all
agreed here, right? I mean, in case one
of those half-ass TV reporters calls you and wants to make a big deal out of
this."
"Sure,
Rollie."
"Good." Gibson smiled. "Your institute's getting a real good
reputation. You wouldn't want to muddy
it up by poking around in police business."
Chase left the room with an uneasy
feeling; by the time he reached the lobby, he was sure he had just been
threatened.
The patrolman was waiting in the lobby
with Max, ready to drive them back to their boat.
"There was one of your buoys about a
hundred yards from where they found Brian," the patrolman said. "Length of rubber
wire, some electronic thing on the end.
I told ‘em leave it there, you could pick it up on your way home."
"Thanks," Chase said. "It must have sprung loose from whatever
it got snagged in."
When they were in the car, Max leaned
forward from the backseat and said to Chase, "I found her."
"Who?"
"The girl, the one I almost
hit."
"What d'you mean, you found
her."
"In the newspaper back there, while I
was waiting. There was a picture, some
prize she won. And I knew there had to
be a reason why she didn't hear me coming.
She's deaf."
"Who is she?"
"Her name's
18
Chase slowed the Whaler as he approached
the tip of the low spit of land called Seagull Point, and turned toward shore
so he could cruise close to the beach.
Brian's body had been found about halfway down the peninsula; Chase's
wire should be just this side of the spot, or just beyond.
Max stood in the bow, steadying himself
with a rope attached to a cleat.
"What'll it look like," he asked.
"Against that white sand," Chase
said, "it should stand out like three hundred feet of black snake."
Seagull Point had once been private
property, then a state beach; now it was a bird sanctuary. Gulls bred there, and terns, and though
people sometimes beached their boats to swim or picnic, anyone who ventured
inland beyond the dunes risked scalp lacerations form being dive-bombed by
birds protecting their nests.
Chase could hear the birds screeching at
one another, and saw them circling over their nests, but he noticed that there
were none diving or floating on the water.
He wondered why. Usually, on a
day this calm, dozens of birds would be sitting on the surface, waiting for a
signal from sentinels overhead that schools of baitfish were on the move.
"Look!" Max
said, pointing off the starboard bow.
Chase turned, following Max's gesture,
took the boat out of gear and let it coast.
He saw something white on the surface; it slipped along the side of the
Whaler unit Chase reached over the side and stopped it.
It was a dead seagull, floating
belly-up. At first Chase thought it was
whole, but then he picked it up by one leg and saw that the bird's head was
gone.
"Jeez!" Max
said, startled.
Chase examined the stump of the bird's
neck. He looked for tooth marks, slash
marks, anything that might tell him what had decapitated the gull, but there
was nothing. As far as he could see, the
bird's head had simply been torn from its body.
"There's another one!" Max said.
Chase dropped the dead gull into the
bottom of the boat and put the motor in gear.
The second gull was floating upright, its
head lolling forward. It almost looked
asleep, but it lay too low in the water, and it bobbed unsteadily. Chase picked it up by its neck, turned it
over. Its legs had been ripped off, and
there was a ragged wound in its belly.
"What the hell..."
Chase said.
"Bluefish?" asked Max.
"No, I think bluefish would've
finished the job, eaten the whole bird."
"What, then? What did it?"
Chase shook his head. "I don't get it. I don't get any of this."
Max stood on tiptoe in
the bow, bracing himself with the rope, and looked toward the beach. "There's
our wire," he said. "And more
birds. Lots more. In the waves."
Chase aimed the boat at the shore and
gunned the motor. When he reached
shallow water, he turned off the outboard, raised it and locked it in place so
the propeller wouldn't catch in the sand.
The boat had enough momentum to coast through the
wavewash and nudge its bow onto dry sand.
It was like traveling through a
slaughterhouse. Dead birds were
scattered everywhere in the wavewash — some decapitated, some eviscerated, some
with their throats cut. Chase picked up
one or two, glanced at their wounds and dropped them back into the water.
"It almost looks like something kids
would do," Chase said.
"What do you mean, kids?" said
Max.
"Sickos... you know... vandals. Practically nothing in the ocean kills for
the sake of killing. Animals kill for
two reasons: to eat and to defend
themselves."
Max hopped off the bow; Chase followed and
pulled the Whaler farther up onto the sand.
They walked up the beach to the black wire, which the policeman had
coiled and tied.
They dragged the wire back to the boat,
loaded it aboard and pushed off from shore.
When Chase judged that the water was deep enough, he lowered the motor
and started it. As the propeller roiled
the water, another dead bird surfaced and bumped against the side of the
boat. Chase lifted it from the
water. It was a young tern; its wings
had been torn from its body.
"Whatever did this," Chase said,
setting the bird gently back into the water, "did it just to do it. Almost for the thrill of
it."
He aimed the boat eastward, toward the
island.
* * * * *
When they were halfway home, slicing
through the long, easy swells, they saw a big, slow, broad-beamed boat heading
toward them. The boat had a tiny
deckhouse forward and a huge open stern with a davit on each side. As they passed the port-to-port, the captain
of the big boat tooted his horn, leaned out of the deckhouse door and
waved. Chase waved back.
"Who's that?" asked Max.
"Lou Sims. He hauls freight. I guess he just dropped off Dr. Macy and her
sea lions... must've picked them up at the
In the wake of the freight boat was
another boat, still a quarter of a mile away but coming fast. It was a sleek white sportfisherman, with a
flying bridge and outriggers. As it drew
near, it slowed, and a man on the flying bridge signaled to Chase that he
wanted to talk.
Chase took the motor out of gear and let
the Whaler drift. "Hold on
tight," he said to Max. "That
thing pushes a mountain of water around it."
As the fishing boat stopped, its deep hull
wallowed, and waves surged out from its sides.
Chase braced himself as the waves tossed the Whaler from side to side;
he saw Max stagger, then half fall, half sit onto the forward thwart.
"Been lookin' for you, Simon,"
said the man on the bridge. "We
were trolling off Watch Hill; I seen a dead dolphin, for chrissakes, hitched up
in the rocks."
"A dolphin," Chase said. "You're sure it wasn't a shark? It was a dolphin... a porpoise?"
"You think I don't know a dolphin
from a shark? It was a porpoise. Just like Flipper, only younger, a baby. I couldn’t get too close, but the thing
looked all cut to ribbons, like something had had at it. I thought you might want to have a
look."
"I appreciate it, Tony," said
Chase. "I will, right now. Where was it exactly?"
"Just this side of
the lighthouse. What the hell lives around here that can
catch and kill a porpoise?"
"Beats me." Chase picked
up one of the dead birds. "Maybe
the same thing that's cutting the heads off seagulls." And maybe, Chase thought to himself, the same
thing that killed those two divers.
"Well, anyway... give me a call when
you figure it out."
"I will."
"Is that your boy?"
"Yep," Chase said. "Max... Captain
Madeiras."
Max waved, and
"Thank you," Max said, "But
I don't have much exper—"
"Don't worry,
you couldn't do any worse than that worthless Bobby down three."
A teenaged boy stood in the stern, looking
unwell and unhappy.
19
Bobby Tobin decided that the chances were
excellent that sometime in the next five minutes he would throw up. With every breath the stink of blood and guts
and diesel exhaust got to him, and he had to swallow constantly to keep bile
from oozing into his mouth. Every time
the boat yawed in the following sea he felt his stomach drop into his feet and
then rush up as if it would burst from the top of his head.
Though he knew it would make him feel
better, he didn't want to throw up — wouldn't throw up, refused absolutely to
throw up — for Captain Madeiras would never let him forget it. Every customer that came aboard would be
regaled with the story of Bobby sprawled on the bulwark heaving his breakfast
overboard; lessons would be drawn about landlubbers, teenagers, summer people,
Protestants and kids who had life too easy.
Bobby rose to his knees and, careful not
to touch his shirt or any part of the gleaming white fiberglass with his bloody
hands, leaned over the side and drew several deep breaths of clean air, air
that didn't smell of diesel oil and dead fish.
He could see
"Hey, asshole,"
"Yes, sir," Bobby said, and he
sucked in a last breath and turned to face the carnage on the afterdeck. He had already cleaned ten bluefish — scaled
and gutted them and wrapped each carcass in newspaper — and another twenty
waited in the fish box on the starboard side.
What did two fishermen want with thirty
fish? They wouldn't eat more than one or
two, there was no market for the rest — bluefish were so plentiful this summer
that the fish stores could make money only if they were given the fish for free
— and chances were they wouldn't even be able to dole them out to friends.
Trophies, that's all they were, badges of
manhood.
A dozen gulls hovered over the boat's
wake, cawing impatiently as if hurrying Bobby along.
He picked up the dip bucket by the
six-foot length of rope tied to its handle, walked to the open transom in the
stern, got a firm grip with his free hand, leaned over the transom and tossed
the bucket into the water. It hit,
bounced, tipped, and suddenly filled, and the weight jerked at Bobby, almost
pulling him overboard. He sloshed water
on the deck and scrubbed with a brush at the patches of drying blood and
scales, shoving them overboard through the transom and the scuppers.
The gulls wheeled over the new blood in
the water and squawked when they spied no bits of meat.
Bobby put the bucket aside, dropped to his
knees, took the filleting knife from the scabbard on his belt and reached into
the box for another bluefish. He slashed
its gills to start the blood draining, then slit its
belly from throat to tail, reached inside the body cavity and pulled the guts
out and tossed them overboard through the transom.
The gulls dove frantically, two of them
snatching at the same piece of viscera, and they rose from the water, flapping
their wings and screaming as they tugged at the rubbery guts.
Bobby flipped the fish onto its side and
began to scale it with the blade of his knife, cursing himself and his father
and
God, how he wished he'd gone to summer
school instead of taking this job. His
father had given him the option, go to summer school or get a paying job. In this economy, jobs were as scarce as teeth
in a goose; college graduates were bagging groceries, business school students
were tending bar. He'd bee turned down
everywhere from the Mystic Seaport Museum to the Waterboro marina, and he'd
been about to start calling around to summer schools when all of a sudden his
father had called in an IOU from the Madeirases.
Manuel, the family's gardener, who had no
medical insurance, and whose hip-replacement surgery had been paid for by Mr.
Tobin, let slip one day that his brother Tony's mate had just come down with
hepatitis. Without asking Bobby, Mr.
Tobin had called Tony and gotten him the job.
True enough, Bobby had gone along with
it. The job had sounded great: mate on a sportfishing boat. Five bucks an hour, plus tips, maybe as much
as a hundred bucks a day on good days. Outdoor work. Learn
how a professional fishes. The work was
long — seven days a week, weather permitting — but he had every night off, and
there were bound to be at least ten days of rain and wind that would keep the
boat ashore.
But there were a few things that nobody
had told Bobby. First of all,
motorboats, especially thirty-eight-footers like the Sea Hunter, weren't like sailboats.
They didn't ride the wind and cut the waves and stay relatively stable;
they bounced and pitched and rolled, soaking you and bruising you and making
you sick all day long.
Second, the word mate really meant waiter, busboy, garbageman, slopsman,
fish-gutter, ass-kisser and drudge. If a
customer lost a fish, it was the mate's fault:
he hadn't set the hook properly or hadn't grabbed the leader at the
right time. If a customer puked, the
mate cleaned it up. Worst of all and
most common, if a customer clogged the head, ignoring the prominent sign over
the flushing mechanism and tossing into the bowl a tampon, a cigarette filter
or a condom (it had happened), it was the mate's job to unclog and clean it
out.
Finally, nobody had told Bobby that Tony
Madeiras was a sadistic bully, one of those people who inflate themselves by
belittling others. He was also an
alcoholic, and though he claimed he never drank on the job, ‘the job’ seemed to
be ending earlier and earlier every day.
A month ago, he wouldn't touch a drop till the boat was tied to the
dock; now he was drinking from a flask stowed on the flying bridge as soon as
he started in from the fishing grounds.
Most of the customers didn't know or
didn't care — like today's two, firemen from
Bobby cared, though, because he took the
brunt of
He could quit, of course, but he wouldn't
because he knew what would happen. He
would tell his side of the story to his father, who would pretend to believe
him but really wouldn't. His father
would call
Quitting would be too expensive. Better to stick it out for another six weeks.
Bobby was gutting another fish when the
glass door to the air-conditioned cabin slid open and a voice said, "Hey,
kid, we're outta ice."
"Yes, sir," Bobby said, and he
dipped the bucket overboard again and washed his hands and went inside. His hand still stank of fish, but these two
would never notice.
* * * * *
It swam back and forth in the froth just
below the surface, frenzied by a strong, pervasive scent of prey, and confused
at finding nothing of substance. There
had been a few bits of food, and it had closed on them, only to have them
plucked from its grasp by things from above.
Tantalized, it swam onward, absorbing the
oily, blood-laced water through its fluttering gills.
* * * * *
Fillet the last couple and put ‘em in
baggies for me,"
"Yes, sir," Bobby said.
There were three fish left in the box, the
first three of the day, and the biggest — eight-pounders at least, maybe
ten. He grabbed the biggest by the tail
and slapped it on the deck. It had been
caught hours ago, and its body had already rigored stiff. Its glassy eyes stared in blank menace, and
its mouth was frozen open, revealing rows of perfect tiny triangles.
"I'm glad you don't' grow to a
hundred pounds," Bobby said to the fish as he felt for its backbone and
slipped the knife in beside and drew it backward.
He didn't scale this fish or gut it. Instead, with swift slashes of the knife he
removed all the meat from one side of the fish, cutting along the backbone,
around the tail, up the belly and across the gills. Then he turned the fish over and repeated the
procedure on the other side. He shoved
the carcass overboard — head, tail, bones, guts and all.
He watched the gulls swarm on the carcass
as it bobbed in the wake of the boat.
One gull tried to lift it by the head, but it was too heavy, and the
bird couldn't get airborne. Another
grabbed the tail, and for a moment it seemed that the two birds might cooperate
in carrying the carcass away to a safe feeding place. But then a third bird struck the carcass, and
it fell away and splashed into the water.
The birds swooped down upon it again. Before they could reach it there was a sudden
flurry in the water, a flash of something shiny; when the flurry subsided, the
carcass was gone.
* * * * *
Its long, curved steel claws tore the dead
thing to pieces. It sucked the viscera
from the body cavity, and the eyes from the head. Its teeth crushed the bones of the jaw; it
ate the tongue. It consumed everything,
as it drifted to the bottom.
The large thing from which the food had
come moved away and became a fading pulse on the creature's tympanic membranes.
It wanted more. Not purely from hunger, for it had fed on
many things recently — had fed until it regurgitated and then fed some more —
but from programmed reflex. Prey was irresistible;
killing and eating were its only functions.
Though its body was fully fueled, its gastric juices continued to be
stimulated.
It pushed off the bottom, its webbed feet
thrusting up and down synchronously, its talons
gleaming. It flew through the water
toward the pulsing sound.
* * * * *
Bobby finished filleting the last two
fish, tossed the carcasses overboard and wrapped the fillets. He dipped the bucket and washed his hands,
and was about to swab the deck, when he heard the engine subside and felt the
boat slow, stop and wallow broadside to the little waves.
"Birds up ahead,"
"Yes, sir," Bobby said. He opened the door to the cabin and felt a
rush of icy air. The men had been
playing gin rummy on the couch. One had
fallen asleep, and the other was fumbling with the cards. An empty vodka bottle was upended in the
wastebasket.
Let them say no, Bobby prayed. He didn't want to rig any more lines, clean
any more fish. Besides, now that these
anglers were plastered, they'd be bound to make mistakes, and he'd be bound to
be blamed for them.
"Captain wants to know if you'd like
to cast some," Bobby said.
The man looked at Bobby and frowned as if
he didn't recognize him. "For
what?" he said.
"Bluefish."
The man thought for a moment, then shook
his friend's knee, but his friend didn't waken.
"Fuck it," he said.
"Yes, sir." Bobby shut the
door and called up to
"They'll be sorry," said
Bobby sloshed the bucket of water on the
deck, tossed the bucket behind him and scrubbed the blood and scales into the
scuppers.
A few spots of dried blood remained, and
Bobby picked up the bucket, wrapped the rope around his hand and walked aft.
"Hey, asshole,"
"Yes, sir," Bobby replied
tightly. "That's why I'm getting
more water."
Go ahead, Bobby thought angrily. Maybe you're so wasted you'll trip and fall
overboard and the bluefish'll tear you apart.
The exhaust from the idling engine
billowed over the stern, stinging Bobby's eyes and clouding his vision. The gulls hovered high overhead, away from
the noxious fumes.
There was no wake now, the boat wasn't
moving, so Bobby didn't grip the transom as he flung the bucket. The bucket hit the water on its bottom and
bobbed upright; Bobby jiggled the rope, trying to tip it over so it would fill.
* * * * *
It approached a dozen feet below the
surface. The large thing had stopped
moving.
It hovered; its receptors sought signs of
prey, but found nothing.
It rose a few feet, and through the still
water it could see a refracted image of something moving.
There was a disturbance on the surface, a
little sound and a few ripples; it saw something floating.
Prey.
It thrust itself upward, grasping with its
claws. Its mouth was agape, its lower
jaw rolled forward and a row of triangular teeth sprang erect, into bite
position.
* * * * *
The bucket filled, Bobby pulled on the
rope, but even without the drag of motion, the bucket was heavy — two gallons
of water weighed sixteen pounds. Bobby
pulled the rope hand-over-hand.
Suddenly the rope went taut, as if the
bucket had snagged on something. Then it
jerked away from him, as if a huge fish had grabbed hold of it.
Bobby lost his balance, turned to grab at
the transom, but he was too far away, his fingers found only air and he tumbled
overboard. As he hit the water, he
thought, I hope it wasn't a bluefish that grabbed the bucket.
* * * * *
It spiraled downward, clutching its prey
in its claws, gnawing with its teeth at the soft white flesh. It sucked and drank and chewed and swallowed.
By the time it reached the bottom, it
could eat no more, so it squatted on the sand and, with claws and teeth, tore the prey to pieces. One tooth caught in a mass of gristle and
broke off. Another tooth, from the row
behind it, rolled forward and took its place.
* * * * *
Tony Madeiras hung the binoculars on their
hook, put the boat in gear and pushed the throttle forward. The engine growled, the bow rose and the
stern settled.
"Where the hell's my rod?" he
shouted without looking down. There was
no response.
Part Four
Predators
20
When Chase nosed the Whaler into its slip,
just after noon, he saw Mrs. Bixler walking down the path to the dock. She was carrying an ancient wicker picnic
hamper, and Chase knew what was in it: a
sandwich, a thermos of iced tea, a spool of fishing line and some bacon rind or
beef fat or stale bread. Mrs. Bixler
loved to spend her lunch hour hand-lining off the dock for little fish to feed
to the heron. The heron saw her coming
and took a couple of spindly steps toward the dock.
As soon as he had turned off the motor,
Chase heard barking from the inlet beyond the hill.
"It sounds like Dr. Macy and her sea
lions made it safe and sound," he said to Mrs. Bixler.
"Yep, her and her
whole menagerie."
"Are those the sea lions barking?" Max asked excitedly.
"Can I go see them?"
"Sure," Chase said. "But mind your manners, introduce
yourself. We've never met Dr.
Macy."
Max nodded, hopped out of the Whaler and
ran up the path.
Mrs. Bixler glanced down into the
boat. "Somebody been on a killing
spree?" she said, gesturing at the dead animals: two gulls and a juvenile bottlenose dolphin.
"Or something." Chase picked
up the little dolphin. It was less than
three feet long; its slick skin, which in life had been a lustrous steel gray,
was now dull and flat, like charcoal ash.
There were deep slash marks on its back; its belly had been torn
open. "I brought it back for Dr.
Macy to have a look at. She knows more
about mammals than I do."
"What can she tell you that anyone
can't? Something slaughtered it."
"Yeah, but
what?" Chase returned the dolphin to the bottom of
the boat. "I'll pack it in ice till
we can do a proper autopsy." He stepped
out of the boat, tied it fore and aft and climbed the steps to the dock. "Did you get Macy settled in?" he
asked.
"I showed her around; Tall showed her stuff."
"What's she like?"
Mrs. Bixler shrugged. "Seems to be full of
enthusiasm, dresses like she's going on safari. But at least she doesn't parade her degrees
like most of them do."
Chase started up the hill, and when he
reached the crest, he heard Max's voice — screaming, he thought at first, but
then realized what he was hearing wasn't screams but laughter.
He looked down and saw Max splashing in
the shoulder-deep water in the tank Chase had built for the sea lions. Four dark shapes zoomed around him, streaking
by him underwater, paddling behind him on the surface, deftly
avoiding him as he lunged at them.
A woman stood on the lip of the tank,
gesturing to the sea lions and laughing with Max.
Because neither she nor Max had noticed
him, Chase was able to study her as he walked down the hill.
Tall and sturdily built, Amanda Macy
looked like either a model for the Lands' End catalog or the ambassador from
the court of L.L. Bean. She was wearing
Top-Sider moccasins, knee-length hiking shorts, a khaki shirt with epaulets, a
Croakie to secure the sunglasses that hung around her neck, and a stainless steel
diver's watch. Her legs were tan and
muscular, her hair sun-bleached and short.
She looked younger than he had imagined,
though why he had assumed she would be his age or older he didn't know. He tried to see her face, but her back was to
him. Suddenly an alarm sounded in his
head, an alarm he had not anticipated.
Oh Lord, he thought as he drew near, don't let
her have a pretty face.
Some men were fixated on women's breasts,
some on their buttocks or their hands or legs or feet. Chase had always been a sucker for a pretty
face. All his life he had fallen for
faces, irrationally — and fully knowing it was irrational — ignoring the
neuroses, personality disorders, stupidity, greed and vanity that often lay beneath
the skin of those faces.
He would have to work with this woman for
three months. The last thing he needed
was the added complication of being smitten.
Then Max saw Chase and shouted,
"Dad!" and waved, and Dr. Macy turned around.
Chase blew out a breath of relief. Her face was nice, and well proportioned,
handsome, even, but not a heart-stopper.
He held out his hand and said, "Simon Chase."
"Amanda Macy," she said, taking
his hand with a firm, confident grip, and smiling with lips that wore no
lipstick.
"I see Max wasn't exactly shy."
"Oh, he was very polite," Amanda
said. "It was me that cut off the
small talk. I told him that if he wanted
to get to know the sea lions, the best way was to jump right into the water
with them. He's a natural in the water,
by the way, and seems more gifted with animals than a lot of kids. They took to him right away."
"Dad!" Max
shouted. "Watch!"
Chase looked into the tank. Two of the sea lions were facing Max, their
heads out of the water. Max splashed one
of them, and suddenly both sea lions exploded in a blur of flippers, splashing
Max like playground bullies. He shrieked
with laughter and ducked underwater, and the sea lions dashed after him,
brushing him with their silky bodies, spinning him in circles.
"Amazing," Amanda said. "They usually take a long time to trust
someone. They must sense a benevolence, a kind of innocence, in children... or in this child, anyway."
"They never bite?"
Amanda laughed. "That's a parent asking, right, not a
scientist?"
"Right," Chase said.
"The only reason an intelligent
mammal like this will bite anything or anybody are
food, fear and aggression. These four
are all females, so there's no problem with sexual aggression. They're well fed. And they don't have anything to
fear." She paused. "They're not at all like sharks."
Chase's eyes followed Max as he frolicked
with the sea lions. "So I
see," he said.
"To me, these animals are a lot
closer to people than to sharks. They
need attention and affection, from each other and from me. They like to have their teeth brushed and
their coats stroked. I've raised them
since they were pups."
Max popped to the surface, laughing, and
Chase waved him to the side of the tank.
"Come on out of there," he said. "You're turning blue."
"But Dad..."
Amanda said, "The sea lions need a
rest, Max, same as you. You've given
them quite a workout."
Max hauled himself out of the tank, and
Chase rubbed his shoulders and back.
"You feel like a Popsicle," he said.
Max pointed at the sea lions, which, as
soon as he had left the tank, had scrambled up onto the rocks and were sunning themselves.
"They're called Harpo,
Chase felt Max shivering under his hands,
and he said, "Go take a shower and put on some warm clothes."
Max started away, then turned back and
said to Amanda, "Later can I play with them some more?"
"Sure," Amanda said with a
little laugh, "but only when I'm here with them. You have to learn the signals, just like they
did."
Chase had constructed a shed against the
rocks behind the tank, and Amanda ducked inside and came back with a bucket of
fish. "Lunchtime, ladies!" she
called as she approached the edge of the tank.
The sea lions slid off the rocks and into the water and, barking
impatiently, swam over to her, lined up in a row and waited.
She fed them each a fish, then another and
another, and when they had all had their allotted five,
she rubbed each on the head and behind the ears.
She replaced the bucket in the shed, then said to Chase, "This is a wonderful place. Were you brought up around here?"
"Not on the island... in
Waterboro."
"Where did you go to school?"
"All over the place," Chase
replied, thinking. Here it comes. Briefly, he debated planting a lie, but
because in his experience lies tended to grow until they became unsustainable,
he told the truth. "The last place
was URI —
"They're really good in
oceanography. Is your degree specifically
in sharks, or all the elasmobranches?"
"No." Chase paused, then
said, "It's in process."
She started. "You mean you don't have your
degree? You're director of an institute
and you don't have a doctorate?"
"That's right... Doctor,"
Chase said. "Can you live with
that?" Before the words were out of
his mouth, he felt like an ass.
Amanda blushed. "Of course... I
didn't... I mean... I'm sorry... It's just..."
She threw back her head and laughed.
For a moment, Chase thought she was
laughing at him, and he tried to think of a snappy put-down. Before anything came to him, however,
something in her expression told him she was laughing not at him but at
herself.
"It's great!" she said. "I love it!"
"What?"
"I spend four years in college, two
years getting my master's, five years getting my doctorate. I'm somebody! My Ph.D. is my armor. I could be a jerk, a turkey, a fool, but I've
got a Ph.D. It's the official label of
my exalted status." She laughed
again. "And then I meet someone who
doesn't have his doctorate, can't be anywhere near as exalted as I am, but he's
done more than I've ever done, set up an entire institute of his own. And what's my first reaction? ‘Impossible!’
I love it."
They started up the hill together. "Let me take the topic from the
top," Amanda said. "If you
ever do a dissertation, what'll it be on?"
"Territoriality in white
sharks," Chase said. "Which
reminds me: there's been a white around
here in the last week or two. We were
tracking it for data till we lost our sensor.
A couple of divers were killed, but I don't think the white's connected to it.
Still, it's out there."
"You think you could find the shark
again?"
"I'm going to try, but..." Chase stopped. "You mean you want to find it? A great white shark?
What about your—"
"My sea lions are savvy about white
sharks," Amanda said. "There
are whites all over
"I thought you worked exclusively on
whales."
"So far, yes, but the images the sea
lions are bringing back on videotape are so extraordinary, the behavior they're
recording is so remarkable, that I don't see why we can't expand our
research."
"I don't get it," Chase
said. "What can a sea lion with a
video camera on its back see that a scientist in a boat, or even in a
submersible, can't?"
"Nature," said Amanda. "Nature in action. Whales, sharks, other animals, most everything will stay away from a boat or a submersible
because it's alien to them, and possibly threatening. It's a big, strange, noisy intruder, and if
it does get close to them, the animals' behavior will be anything but
natural. On the other hand, they're
completely accustomed to having sea lions swim around them, so they go on about
their business — feeding, mating, whatever, and we get it all on tape. Besides, a submersible's slow and clumsy, and
it costs a fortune. A sea lion can keep
up with a whale, and they're cheap — they work for a few pounds of
mullet."
"How do they know what you want them
to do?"
"Conditioning, plus
native intelligence. When it comes to smarts, sea lions are in the
league with dolphins and killer whales.
We built a full-size model of a gray whale and fit it over an
electric-powered submersible, to use to train them. From a boat, I give them a series of hand
signals: swim alongside it, swim beneath
it, circle around it. It doesn't take
long to teach them things; they want to learn."
Chase thought for a moment, then said, "Do you think you could teach them to take
pictures of something they're not
accustomed to, something that maybe isn’t natural, behavior they've never
seen?"
"Like what?"
"I wish I knew," Chase
said. "But things aren't right in
the ocean around here. Either something
new is in the area, or something's gone berserk." He told her about the random slaughter of
birds and animals, and about the mystery surrounding the deaths of the
Bellamy's.
"I can try," said Amanda,
"once I get the sea lions used to the water around here, and to the
humpbacks. My first priority, though,
has got to be to find the whales. I've
chartered a spotter plane, starting this afternoon."
"A plane?" Chase
whistled. "That's some kind of
grant you got yourself. For that kind of
dough, I'd strap on wings and fly myself."
"The grant? The grant's a
joke, seventy-five hundred a year for three years. It keeps me in fish, but that's about
it." She hesitated, looking
embarrassed, then continued.
"Basically, I'm my own angel."
"How do you manage that?" Chase asked.
"How do you think? The luck of the gene pool. My great-great-grandfather was one of the
whaling Macys — sometimes I think my career is penance for what he did — and he
saw the collapse coming in whale oil and put all his money in petroleum. We've been loaded ever since." She smiled.
"Can you live with that?"
"Hell," Chase said,
laughing. "I did." He told her about his marriage to
Corinne. "If I'd had any brains,
I'd've taken her up on her offer and let her finance the Institute. But no, I was too proud."
"Never mind. You got
something even better out of the marriage."
"What's that?"
"Max."
"Oh," he said. "Yeah, I'm just now learning more about
that."
They had reached the small house on the
top of the hill, in which Chase had prepared living quarters for Amanda: a bedroom, a kitchen and, because the living
room had been taken up by the decompression chamber, another bedroom furnished
as a sitting room.
"Are you hungry?"
Chase said. "We've got
sandwich fixings in the big house."
"Later," Amanda said. "First, I want to show you the present I
brought you."
"Present? You didn't have to—"
"My parents always told me never to
go for a visit without a house present."
Grinning, she took his arm and led him beyond the house, where the land
sloped down to a cove in which the bottom had been dredged to permit the
approach of deep-draft boats.
"There," she said, pointing at the cove. "I wanted to wrap it, but..."
Chase looked and, when suddenly he
realized what he was seeing, stopped walking.
"My God..." he said.
On a slab of ledge rock at the edge of the
cove sat something Chase had longed for ever since he had begun his graduate
work: an anti-shark cage. It was a rectangular box, roughly seven feet
high, five feet wide and eight feet long, made of aluminum bars and steel mesh. There were entrance hatches on the top and
one end, and foot-square openings — camera ports — on each side. Two flotation tanks had been welded to the
top of the cage, and even from this distance Chase could see gleaming brass
fittings that told him the tanks contained their own air supplies, which meant
that the cage could hover well beneath the surface.
Cages were a prime research tool for shark
scientists, for they permitted safe underwater access to the animals in the
open ocean. Most sharks couldn’t bite
through the aluminum bars, and those that could, like big tiger sharks or great
whites, didn't. They might bite at the bars — testing them, determining
if they were edible — but none had ever bitten through them.
From the moment he had opened the
Institute, Chase had tried to acquire a cage — a discarded cage, a used cage, any cage — so he could perform
experiments in deep water. He had found,
however, that used cages were never available:
there was so much demand for shark films from cable-television companies
that rental houses snapped up every cage they could find and charged usurious
rates for them. Derelict cages were
derelict for a reason: they were
battered and broken beyond repair.
And the price for a new cage, a good cage,
started at around twenty-thousand dollars.
This cage looked brand-new and very good
indeed. "It's beautiful," Chase
said, staring down toward the cove.
"But how did you—"
"It was part of my divorce
settlement," Amanda said. "My
ex-husband had it built three years ago; he was going to be a macho shark
photographer, but he discovered a lot of competition, and switched to sea
otters." She paused, then added with a wry smile.
"He couldn't make a go at that either, so he decided to concentrate
on bimbos. He got the
"I sure can. I've been hoping to—"
"I know, I read your paper on bite
dynamics and arthritis research. From
the cage, you should be able to do some productive work with your
gnathodynamometer."
"You pronounced it!"
Chase said with a laugh. Gnathodynamometer was a ten-dollar word
for a simple concept, a method of testing the bite pressure exerted by a
shark's jaws. "I've never met
anybody else who could pronounce it."
"No sweat," Amanda said. "Just don't ask me to spell it."
When the reached the
cage, Chase ran his hand over the aluminum bars and examined welds and
fittings. "It's perfect," he said,
smiling. "I can't wait."
"Why wait? What's wrong with today?"
"Today?" Reflexively,
Chase looked at his watch.
"There are still seven or eight more
hours of daylight," Amanda said.
"How far offshore do you have to go to raise sharks?"
"Not very, not for
blue sharks. An hour, maybe less."
"The sooner I put the sea lions in
the water," Amanda said, "the better.
They can swim with blue sharks; they like
to. They love to tease them. Have you got bait... and chum to bring the
sharks in?"
"Uh-huh." Then Chase remembered, and he said, "But
what I don't have is air. The compressor's—"
"It's fixed," said Amanda. "I asked Tall Man. He's pumping tanks now. I tell you, he's jazzed at the thought of the
trip."
Chase was impressed. More than impressed. Awed. He looked at her, and saw her smiling at him,
a smile not of triumph or condescension, but of confidence. He shook his head and said, "I guess I
really do have to get my degree."
"What? Why?"
"‘Cause you
were right the first time." He
grinned. "Lady, you are
somebody. You are something!"
21
The Institute boat sat low in the water,
for it had been filled with fuel and fresh water and loaded to the bulwarks
with scientific, photographic and diving gear.
In addition to the two-hundred-pound cage, which Chase and Tall Man had
swung aboard into the stern with a block-and-tackle rig hung from a davit on
the starboard side, there were four camera cases; a videotape recorder; eight
scuba tanks; fifty pounds of mullet for the sea lions; three ten-gallon cans of
chum — minced mackerel and tuna — to create a smelly slick that would ride the
tide and lure sharks from miles around; two twenty-pound boxes of frozen
bait-fish, now thawing in the sun; three dive bags packed with wet suits, masks
and flippers; and, finally, a cooler full of sandwiches and sodas prepared by
Mrs. Bixler.
Amanda had led the sea lions down the path
to the dock, and they had willingly waddled aboard the boat. Now they huddled together in the stern, their
heads bobbing and their whiskers twitching with excitement. Amanda stroked them and cooed to them.
Max knelt beside her. "Are they okay?" he asked.
"Oh, sure," Amanda said. "They know the boat means work, and they
can't wait. They love to work; they get
bored very easily."
Max reached out a hand, and one of the sea
lions bent its head toward him to have its ears scratched. "Which one is this?" he said.
"Harpo."
"I think she likes me."
Amanda smiled. "I know she does."
On the flying bridge, Chase put the boat
in reverse. Tall Man stood on the pulpit
and used the boat hook to fend the bow away from the rocks. When the boat had cleared the cove and Chase
had turned toward deep water, Tall Man came aft and went into the cabin.
He returned a moment later and said to
Amanda, "Your spotter pilot just radioed, said to tell you he'll be up in
the air and looking for whales in an hour or so. I said we'd monitor channel
twenty-seven." Then he looked up at
the flying bridge. "There's a
bulletin on sixteen," he said to Chase.
"We're supposed to keep an eye out for a kid in the water."
"Who?" Chase
asked.
"Bobby Tobin, the mate on Tony
Madeiras's boat. They say he fell
overboard. Tony swears he did a bunch of
three-sixties, looking for him, but never saw a thing."
Amanda said, "Falling overboard seems
to be epidemic around here."
"Why?" said Tall Man. "Who else?"
"Before I left
The boat was still moving slowly, the
engine rumbling softly, so even from ten yards away, up on the flying bridge,
Chase had heard what Amanda said. He called
down to Tall Man, "See if you can find a life preserver for Max."
"Dad..." said Max. "C'mon... I'm
not gonna fall overboard."
"I know," Chase said. "And I bet Bobby Tobin never thought he
would, either."
* * * * *
As they passed to the south of
"Every time I see people swimming
offshore," Chase said, "I think how lucky it is that they can't see
themselves from a couple of hundred feet in the air."
"Why?"
"‘Cause if they saw what swims within
ten or fifteen feet of them every few minutes, they'd never set foot in the
water again."
"Are there that many sharks?"
"No, not anymore, not the way there
used to be. But it doesn't take many to
start a panic. It only takes one."
A hundred yards off the beach, a
lobsterman was pulling his pots. He
cruised up to a buoy, grabbed it with a boat hook and hauled it aboard, fed its
rope through a block and tackle suspended from a steel A-frame, wrapped the
rope around a winch and brought the wood-and-wire lobster pot up onto his
bulwarks.
Chase waved to him, and the lobsterman
looked up, began to wave, then noticed the ‘O.I.’
stenciled on the side of the big white boat.
He aborted his wave, and instead banged one fist into the crook of the
other arm and shot Chase the finger.
"How charming," said Amanda.
Chase laughed. "That's Rusty Puckett," he
said. "He doesn't like me very
much."
"So I see."
"Lobstermen are a strange breed. A lot of them believe the sea is their
private reserve, that they've got some God-given right to put traps wherever
they want, whenever they want, to catch however much they want, and the rest of
the world be damned.
Lord help anyone who messes with their traps;
they'll sink one another, shoot one another."
"And you messed with his traps?"
"Sort of. Before I owned
the island, he used to use it as a camp, a storehouse, a trash dump. He set his pots everywhere, not just in the
shallows but in the channel and by the dock.
I couldn’t get in or out, and kept fouling my propeller in his
lines. I asked him to move them, he told
me to piss off. I went to the Coast
Guard, but they didn’t want to get mixed up in it. So one day, Tall Man and I pulled all his
pots, emptied them and gave the lobsters to the old folks' home, then reset his
pots out here. It took him about two
weeks to find them.
"He knows we did it, but he can't
prove it, and when he accused us, Tall just said it
was a warning from the Great Spirit.
Rusty's stupid, but he's not suicidal, he wasn’t about to go up against
Tall, a giant who feels the same way Rusty does about the law.
"So he left his pots out here, partly
‘cause the fishing's better out here anyway."
"He should be happy, then."
"You'd think. But Rusty harbors grudges. And he doesn’t like it out here. Nothing ever happens, there's no excitement,
nobody to get upset with or take a shot at."
They traveled on in silence for a few
minutes, then Chase turned and looked aft.
"We're where?" Amanda looked around. "I don't see a thing, not a bird, not a
fish, nothing but empty ocean."
"Yeah," Chase said, "but I
can feel ‘em, I can smell ‘em, I can practically taste ‘em." He grinned.
"Can't you?"
"What?"
"Sharks."
22
Rusty Puckett watched the boat speed away
to the east, its white hull seeming to be absorbed by the ocean swells until, at last, all he could see were occasional flashes as
the steel superstructure on the flying bridge caught the sun.
Son of a bitch, he thought, I hope you
sink, I hope you hit something and go down like a stone. Or maybe catch fire first, then
sink. Yeah, fire's good, something nice
and nasty about a fire.
Maybe he should go over to the island some
night and set fire to something. Teach
them a lesson about messing with him.
‘Course, they'd likely know he did it, then that fuckin’ King Kong of an
Indian would be all over him like drool on a baby. He should probably think about it for a
while.
He opened the door in the trap balanced on
the bulwarks and looked inside. Two
lobsters were in the far corner, their antennae waving back and forth. One was a good size, a couple of pounds at
least, and Puckett reached in and grabbed it behind the head, avoiding the
claws, and pulled it out and dropped it into the box on the deck.
The other was much smaller, probably a
‘short,’ a youngster that should be thrown back and allowed to grow for another
year or two.
Puckett considered measuring the carapace
to confirm that the lobster was a short, but then he thought: Hell, if I don't take it, someone else
will. So he pulled the lobster from the
trap and, with a single swift twisting motion, tore its tail off and dropped
the head, legs and claws — still writhing — overboard, and watched them sink
out of sight.
He set the tail on his cutting board. He'd shell it later and sell it for lobster
salad. Nobody'd ever be the wiser.
He rebaited the trap, tied the door
closed, shoved the trap off the bulwarks and let the rope slide through his
hands till it went slack, which told him that the trap was on the bottom. Then he chucked the buoy overboard, put the
boat in gear and motored slowly along the line to the next one.
Ten down, ten to go. He already had eighteen ‘bugs’ in the box,
he'd likely have thirty or more by the time he was through... not bad for a
morning's work.
Puckett reached his next buoy, put the boat
in neutral, leaned over the side, snagged the buoy and brought it aboard. He fed the rope through the block, wrapped it
around the winch and turned the winch on, keeping a hand on the rope to guide
it around the drum.
He heard a scream from the shore, and he
looked and saw a tall blond girl being chased along the hard-packed sand by her
boyfriend. She was wearing one of those
bikini bathing suits that weren't so much a bathing suit as a come-on — what
did they call them? Butt floss — and her
hooters bounced up and down like two melons.
Nice, he thought. He wouldn't mind having some of that.
The girl suddenly stopped running and
turned and kicked sand and water at the boy, and he shouted something and
charged at her, but she veered away from him and dove into the water and
started swimming.
Come on out here, honeybun, Puckett
thought, I'll show you how it's done.
The girl treaded water beyond the wave
line, taunting the boy until he dove in and swam to her. Together they breaststroked down the beach,
moving swiftly with the tide.
The trap bumped against the bottom of the
boat. Puckett shut off the winch and
pushed the rope as far out over the side as he could, guiding the trap out from
under the boat and up to the surface.
Something was wrong: the trap was hanging at a weird angle, as if
one end were much heavier than the other.
He leaned on the bulwark and grabbed the trap with both hands and heaved
it aboard.
One end of the trap was gone. Splinters of wooden slats hung from pieces of
shredded wire.
He looked inside. At first, the trap looked empty — no bait, no lobsters, nothing. Then, as he looked closer, he saw bits of shell and two lobster legs caught in the wire mesh.
What the hell? he thought. A poacher wouldn't do this, he'd do it the easy way: pull the trap, open the door, take the lobsters and toss the trap back. A shark? No, a shark would've beat the trap to pieces, maybe crushed parts of it as he ran away with it.
Puckett unshackled the rope from the shattered trap, pushed the trap overboard and walked aft to fetch a spare. He always carried four spares, because you never knew: traps got stolen, had their ropes cut by propellers, drifted away in storms. He rigged the spare, baited it and shoved it over.
The next trap he hauled was the same, only worse. Two sides were bashed in, and the door was ripped off, gone. Half a dozen lobster antennae were scattered around the bottom of the trap, which meant that there had been at least three lobsters in there. Something had torn them to pieces.
But what?
No octopus would do that to a trap. There were no giant eels around here, no squid big and mean enough.
How about a gigantic lobster? They were cannibals, and a huge enough one might crush a trap.
Gimme a break, he told himself, that lobster'd have to be the size of a goddamn Buick.
Whatever did this was big and strong and either angry or crazy, and it had some kind of tools to work with.
A man. It had to be a man, but what man would want to...
Chase. Simon Chase.
Sure, it made sense. Why else would Chase have waved when he went by? They weren't exactly bosom buddies. He was stickin' it to old Rusty, not content with running him off the island where he'd been lobstering the better part of twenty years, not content with pushing him all the way to hell-and-gone out here, now he wanted to drive Puckett out of business altogether.
Yeah, that wave was the key, the giveaway.
Okay, Mr. Simon fucking Chase from your Osprey fucking Island Institute... you want a war, you got a war.
Conjuring up a suitable revenge, Puckett replaced the trap and gunned the engine, racing down the line to the next buoy. Chances were, Chase had wrecked all the rest of the traps, but he'd have to pull them all to find out.
Anger returned like an incoming tide as Puckett realized that he had only two more spares, which meant that he'd have to go all the way back to town, collect some more and come all the way out here again.
Anger distracted him as he reached for the next buoy. It should have been floating with the tide, its rope angling downward, but it wasn't; it was bobbing, as if something was tugging on it.
Puckett didn't notice. He hooked the buoy and brought it aboard and wrapped the rope and started the winch.
Immediately, the winch whined, the boat heeled over and the rope began to skid against the drum.
Now what? Puckett thought. The damn thing must've got itself hitched in the rocks.
No, that wasn't it, couldn’t be, because now the rope was grabbing, the winch was bringing it in... slowly, as if it had a huge weight on it; but it was coming.
Weed. It probably had a hundred pounds of kelp wrapped around it.
He grabbed a six-foot gaff hook and leaned overboard, prepared to tear the kelp away before bringing the trap aboard.
Suddenly the boat popped upright and the rope came faster.
Maybe the kelp fell off. Maybe...
The trap came into view, a dark shape against the green mist.
There was something beside it, caught in it... no, pushing it... it was whitish, and...
Jesus Christ, Puckett thought, it's a body.
But, no, it wasn't a body, and it was swimming, and fast. Its mouth was open, as were its eyes. It had hands — or claws — and they were reaching up at him.
One of the hands grabbed the gaff hook.
Puckett screamed, and tried to pull the gaff hook away, but it was yanked from his hand, and he stumbled backward, still screaming. His shoulder hit the throttle and knocked it forward, into gear, and he fell on it, and the weight of his body pressed it all the way down.
The engine shrieked and the stern sagged as the propeller cavitated and then bit into the water. The boat leaped ahead. The rope whipped off the winch, its coils fell into the water and the buoy caromed off the A-frame and disappeared.
Puckett didn't move until he heard himself screaming. Then he rolled off the throttle and straightened out the wheel.
He kept the boat at full speed, looking aft as if expecting whatever it was to come over the stern and into the cockpit.
When he had traveled perhaps five hundred yards, he throttled back and steered the boat into a wide circle around the buoy. Keeping the engine revs at fifteen hundred, which gave him a constant speed of twelve to fifteen knots, he approached to within a hundred yards of the buoy, and he stared at it. It was floating now, not bobbing, yielding to the pull of the tide.
Puckett's mind was a jumble; thoughts and images and questions ricocheted aimlessly like a ball in a pinball machine.
After a few moments, he felt a chill, then a rush of nausea.
He pushed the throttle forward and headed for home.
* * * * *
From the spot on the beach where they had emerged from the water, the couple watched the boat roar away in a cloud of exhaust.
"I wonder what's the matter with him," the girl said.
"Maybe he fouled his prop," said the boy. "I've done that. You want to get home before the shear pin breaks." He looked up and down the beach. "Hey, guess what, we're alone."
"So?"
"So what do you say we go skinny dipping?"
"You just want to cop a feel," the girl said, smiling.
"I do not."
"Yes, you do. Admit it."
The boy hesitated, then grinned and said, "Okay, I admit it."
The girl reached behind her and pulled a string, and her bra fell away. "See?" she said. "Honesty's the best policy." She pulled a knot at her hip, and the bottom of her suit dropped to the sand. She turned and bounded over the little waves and dove into the water, while the boy struggled to step out of his trunks.
* * * * *
It swam aimlessly over the sand, searching for signs of life.
Though it had no understanding of time, no knowledge that cycles of light and darkness signaled the passage of time, it sensed that the intervals between the maddening urges to kill were growing shorter.
Responding to increased activity, its metabolism, which for years had functioned at a level barely adequate to sustain primitive life, was speeding up, restoring sentience to its brain and burning calories faster and faster.
It heard little movements somewhere ahead, beyond its range of vision, and it followed the sounds until it came upon another of the wood and wire boxes. There were two small living things inside; it destroyed the box and ate them.
It started down the sand slope into deeper water, when suddenly it sensed motion above. It stopped moving, willed its gills to cease their rhythmic pulsing; it focused the sensitive receptors in the sides of its skull on the source of the pressure changes in the water.
It could not isolate the location, but it did perceive a direction, and so — opening its cavernous mouth, letting its teeth spring forward, flexing its claws — it flew silently toward the prey.
* * * * *
The boy caught up with the girl and, from behind, reached around her and cupped her breasts with his hands.
She shrieked and spun to face him, and raised a hand to slap him. He grabbed her and put it around his neck, and leaned forward and kissed her.
Clinging to each other, they sank until their heads dipped underwater, then they parted and surfaced.
"How deep is it here?" she asked, gasping for breath.
"I don't know, fifty feet, maybe more."
"It's creepy, not being able to see the bottom."
"You think something's gonna eat you?" The boy laughed.
"I want to go in."
"Okay."
"Just to where we can touch."
"So let's go." The boy took a couple of strokes toward the shore. Then he started, and said, "What was that?"
"What was what?"
"Something underneath us. Didn't you feel it?"
"Shut up," the girl said. "You're not funny."
"I'm serious. Like a little pressure wave. It's gone now."
"I hate you, Jeffrey... you're not funny."
"I tell you..." the boy began, but the girl had already passed him and was churning the water, swimming toward shore.
* * * * *
It could see them now, far above, two living things — large, weak, awkward.
It swooped upward.
Suddenly it felt itself struck from above, bumped, but not damaged. Disoriented, it whirled around, looking for the thing that had struck it.
At the limit of its vision was something huge, bigger than itself, of a dull color almost indistinguishable from the surrounding water, with fins on its back and its sides. A crescent tail propelled it in a slow circle. Its mouth was ajar; its blank eye stared.
A word for this thing occurred to the creature, a word from the dim past. The word was Hai — shark — and with the recognition came a perception of danger. The creature turned with the shark, prepared to defend itself.
The shark flicked its tail and charged head-on, opening its mouth.
The creature dodged, backing up and swerving to the side, and the shark sped by. Immediately it turned and rushed again, and the creature ducked beneath it, reaching up with its claws. The claws found flesh, and slashed it, but the flesh was hard and thick. No blood flowed.
This time the shark did not turn, but kept going, roiling the water with its tail and vanishing into the gray-green mist.
The creature let itself slip to the bottom. It oriented itself, then searched the surface for the two large living things.
They were gone. The water was undisturbed by sounds or pressure variations.
The creature turned toward deep water, to hunt again.
* * * * *
Ashore, the girl wrapped herself in her towel, gathered up her bathing suit and stalked away, leaving the boy to search for his trunks in the dune grass where she had thrown them.
23
The boat was anchored in two hundred feet
of water; the cage floated twenty feet behind it, tethered by a rope cleated on
the stern. For an hour, Chase and Tall
Man had been ladling chum overboard, and the still air in the cockpit reeked of
blood and fish oil. A slick fanned out
behind the boat, carried by the tide, its rainbow flatness easily discernible
against the calm water.
Two scuba tanks had been rigged with
harnesses and regulators, and they lay on the deck beside flippers and
masks. Amanda and Chase had pulled wet
suits on up to their waists, letting the tops hang down. Sweat glistened on their arms and shoulders;
Amanda's back was turning pink with sunburn.
She walked forward, dipped a bucket in the
clean water, returned and gently doused the sea lions, which lay together in a
heap, sleeping. "I'm going to have
to put the girls in the water pretty soon," she said. "They can't take this heat."
"The radio said it might reach a
hundred today," Tall Man said, wiping his face, "and I'll bet—"
"Shark!" Max
suddenly shouted from the flying bridge.
"I see one!"
They looked aft. Fifty yards away, a triangular dorsal fin
sliced through the slick; a tail fin followed it, thrashing back and forth.
"It's a blue," said Chase. "I knew we'd raise them."
"How can you tell from this far away?" Amanda asked.
"Short, stubby dorsal... sharp caudal
fin... dark blue."
"How big?"
"Gauging the distance between the
dorsal and the tail... I'd say ten, eleven
feet." He looked up at Max. "Good for you. Keep a sharp eye, there'll be others."
"There!" Max
said, pointing. "Behind
the... no, two! There're two
more!"
As if sensing the excitement in Max's
voice, the sea lions stirred and rose up on their flippers, sniffing the air.
"Let's get ready," Chase said to
Amanda, and he dropped the ladle into the chum bucket.
By the time Chase and Amanda had pulled up
their wet suits, put on their tanks and rinsed their masks, six blue sharks
were crisscrossing the chum slick, moving closer to the cage with each pass.
"Toss ‘em a fish or two now and
then," Chase said to Tall Man, "just to keep ‘em
interested." He opened a hatch
between his feet, reached down and pulled out two pieces of white plastic, each
about the size of a shirt cardboard, sewn together face-to-face. A piece of rope was braided into one corner.
"What's that?"
Amanda said. "A
plastic sandwich?"
"Exactly." Chase smiled. "But we world-class scientists, we call
it a gnathodynamometer."
"You're kidding."
"Nope. Simple but effective.
This is sensitized laboratory plastic.
And inside here," Chase said, prying the pieces apart, "is a
ripe mackerel. Once Tall gets the sharks
feeding, I'll hold my sandwich out through one of the camera ports; a shark'll
sniff the mackerel and bite down on the plastic. I'll let him gnaw the hell out of it, then take it away from him.
When I get the plastic back to the lab, I'll use a micrometer to see how
deep he bit, and a set of tables will tell me how much pressure he
exerted."
"Amazing," Amanda said. "The whole thing must have cost about
three dollars."
"Ten dollars,
actually. But add the cost of the cage, the boat, the
fuel and the crew, and now you're talking about a hundred thousand." Chase paused, watching the sharks circling
close to the cage, then said, "Are you sure you want to put those sea
lions in the water?"
"You watch," she said with a
smile. "They'll make fools out of
your sharks." She opened the door
in the transom, stepped down onto the swimstep, pulled a bucket of fish to her
and called each sea lion by name. One by
one, they waddled over to her, received a fish and, when she swung her arm and
thrust her hand toward the water, flopped down onto the swimstep and into the
sea.
Chase watched their brown bodies flash
between the gunmetal backs of the sharks, then dart away into the blue water.
"Ready?" Amanda
said. She reached inside the door for
her video camera.
Chase didn't answer. He kept watching the water, even after the
sea lions were out of sight. He was
excited, as he had expected to be; what he hadn't expected was the vague unease
that shadowed his excitement — not fear, nothing specific, but rather a sense
of foreboding.
"Don't worry about my sea
lions," Amanda said. "They'll
be fine."
"I'm not," Chase said. "I'm not worried about blue sharks,
either. I just can't help wondering what
the hell else is out there."
"Forget it, Simon," said Tall
Man. He took the rope tied to the cage
and pulled on it, drawing the cage up to the stern of the boat. "Nothing's gonna mess with that
cage."
Chase said, "You're right." He dropped down onto the swimstep, leaned to
the cage and opened the hatch in the top.
A blue shark nudged the cage, then whirled
away.
As Chase straightened up, put on his mask
and put in his mouthpiece, he heard Max call, "Dad..."
He looked up at the flying bridge. The boy looked small and far away.
"Be careful," Max said.
Chase shot Max a thumbs-up sign, pulled
down his mask, held the plastic sandwich to his chest and stepped through the
hatch into the cold, dark water.
Amanda followed immediately. When Tall Man saw that she was safely inside
the cage and had pulled the hatch closed, he let go of the tether; the cage
drifted back till the rope went taut. He
made sure the knot of the cleat was secure, then tossed a few mackerel overboard
and resumed chumming.
* * * * *
It took a moment for the bubbles to
dissipate and the water to clear. Chase
glanced at Amanda, saw her adjusting her video camera and gazed out into the
surrounding blue.
A mackerel plopped into the water overhead
and sank in front of the cage, yawing like a leaf. A sea lion swooped around the side of the
cage, snatched the fish in its teeth and hovered for a beat, as if posing for
Amanda's camera. Then it bit down on the
mackerel, blood puffed out from the sides of its mouth and, chewing, it swam away.
Chase looked for the sharks. He saw three, fifty or sixty feet away, at
the limit of his vision: dark shapes
cruising unhurriedly back and forth. It
won't take long, he thought, they're just being cautious; in a minute they'll
get used to us, and they'll come in to feed.
Three more mackerel fell before the cage,
one on each side, one in front. A sea
lion grabbed one; the other two continued to fall.
Two of the three sharks swung around and
swam at the cage, their movements no longer slow and sinuous but quick and
jerky; now they were not cruising, they were hunting.
A mackerel was directly in front of Chase,
no more than three feet away. Like a
fighter plane locked on to a target, one of the sharks closed in on the
mackerel. Its mouth opened; it rolled on
one side; the nictating membrane that protected its eye slid downward...
Suddenly the shark halted; its body arched. It turned in a tight circle and fled into the gloom. The mackerel continued to fall, untouched.
Chase looked at Amanda and spread his
hands: what was that all about? He knew that
while blue sharks rarely attacked human beings, they were not afraid of humans,
and yet is certainly seemed to Chase that the shark had suddenly panicked when
it had seen him and Amanda. She shrugged
and shook her head.
Chase pushed the plastic sandwich out
through the camera port, squeezed it to force fish juices into the water and
waved it tantalizingly.
A sea lion approached and sniffed it, but
Amanda saw a shark rising from below. It
had caught the scent, was seeking its source.
He held the plastic as far as possible from the cage, letting it dangle
from the rope. The shark rose, and
turned, homing.
Come on, baby, Chase murmured in his mind,
come on.
The shark opened its mouth, showing rows
of small white triangles. It was five
feet from the bait, then three...
Chase gripped the rope as tight as he
could, knowing he'd have to fight to keep the shark
from tearing the entire rig from him. As
the shark rolled on its side, he could see its eye.
The shark froze, as if it had struck a
wall. Its mouth closed, and with two
thrusts of its powerful tail it disappeared into the deep.
Chase turned to Amanda and gestured upward
with both thumbs. He kicked off the
bottom of the cage, pushed the hatch open and hauled himself out of the water
till his elbows rested on the top of the cage.
He removed his mouthpiece and raised his mask.
"What's spooking them?" Tall Man asked.
He had seen it all from the surface.
"Damned if I know."
Amanda squeezed through the hatch and
joined Chase in the opening.
"I've never seen that in my
life," said Chase. "Blue
sharks are not afraid of people."
"These sure are," Amanda
said. "Did you see the scars on
that last one?"
"No, where?"
"All down one flank. Not mating scars, either, I've seen mating
scars. These weren't random,
they were five big slashes, all pretty much parallel. And fresh."
"Five?" Chase
said. "You're sure?"
"Positive. Why?"
"About a week ago, we saw a big
dolphin with five deep cuts on its tail."
"From what?"
"That's the question." Chase looked up at Tall Man. "What d'you think?"
"Give it one more shot," Tall
Man said. He emptied a bucket of chum
into the water, and followed it with a dozen mackerel. "If that don't
bring ‘em around, nothing will."
They waited for a moment, letting the
blood and guts disperse in the water, then dropped
back into the cage.
Clouds of red billowed in the water;
bodies of fish floated down like debris.
Through the haze Chase saw two sharks, twenty or thirty feet away, but
by the time he had reached up and secured the hatch above them, they were
gone. He checked his watch, then gripped
the bars and gazed out through the camera port.
After five minutes, the blood had disappeared,
the fish had sunk to the bottom. The
only life Chase saw was the sea lions, which passed by the cage in ones and
twos, playing.
He signaled for Amanda to go up.
* * * * *
When they had boarded the boat and shucked
their tanks, Chase said to Amanda, "It doesn't make sense; something's
wrong. It's almost as if they're passing
the word: ‘Stay away, humans are bad
news.’ But that can't be... unless
there's some electromagnetic anomaly in the water that they're all sensing at
once, and it's somehow connected to humans."
"You'd think my sea lions would pick
it up first," Amanda said. "I
don't mean to insult your sharks, but my ladies are a little higher on the
chain of brains."
"Could be," Tall Man said,
"but your sea lions haven't been around here when the bad stuff's been
happening. They haven't had a lesson to
learn yet."
Chase said, "Do you want me to call
them back, bring them aboard?"
"I can, if we're moving on,"
Amanda said. "Otherwise, they'll
come back when they're ready."
"I thought we might try another spot,
just for the—"
"Dad..." Max
said from his perch on the flying bridge.
"Can I go into the cage?"
"You mean with a tank on? I don't—"
"There're no sharks around."
"Yeah, but I don't think two hundred
feet of water with a five-mile chum slick running is exactly the time to
start—"
"Please?... Hey, I'd be in a cage. With you." Max smiled, teasing his father as he
pleaded. "What're you worried
about... that we'll get struck by lightning?"
Chase looked to Tall Man for support, then
to Amanda, but neither would come to his rescue. Parenting time, he thought; these decisions
always seem to come when you least expect them.
At last, he said, "Okay."
Max didn't have a wet suit so Amanda lent
him hers. It was too big for him,
probably wouldn't keep him warm, but it would prevent him from cutting or
bruising himself in the cage. Chase
rigged a tank for him and, when they were both dressed and ready, ran through
the diving drill with him.
"The most important thing," Chase said finally, "is not ever
to—"
"I know: hold my breath. But we won't be down too deep."
"We won't be deep at all, the cage'll
be right on the surface, but you'll still be four or five feet below the
surface. You can get an embolism in two
feet." Chase paused. "Set?"
"Set."
"I'll go first; Tall'll tell you when
to come; Amanda'll give you a hand."
Chase glanced prayerfully at the sky, then
stepped through the hatch into the cage.
A moment later, Max slipped through the
hatch, landing on his feet. He cleared
his mask and purged his regulator.
Chase saw that the boy was slightly
underweighted — the buoyancy of the wet suit tended to lift him off the bottom
of the cage — so he gestured for Max to grip the bars. Max nodded and obeyed, and together they
looked out at the empty sea.
They saw no sharks, no sea lions, nothing
at all. Then Max dropped to his knees,
looked down, tugged at Chase's leg and pointed.
Far below them, barely visible, was a single small shark. A sea lion swooped around it, hassling it. Max
pressed his face to the bottom of the cage, trying to see better.
The animals were just beyond the range of
clear vision. If only they'd come up,
Chase thought, even ten feet, Max could get a good look. Then he remembered the flotation tanks, and
realized that if the animals wouldn't come up to him, he could take the cage
down closer to them. He bent down and
checked the air gauge attached to Max's regulator: two thousand pounds. Plenty. Then he reached up and opened the flood
valves on both flotation tanks.
The cage began to sink. It jerked for a moment, then
fell smoothly as Tall Man paid out slack from the rope on the boat. When the depth gauge on one of the tanks told
Chase that the top of the cage was fifteen feet below the surface, he shut the
flood valves and opened the two other valves, squirting air into the tanks
until the cage achieved neutral buoyancy.
The shark and the sea lion were clearly
visible now, two dark bodies against a canvas of blue. A few bubbles floated up as the sea lion let
air leak from its mouth.
Then, abruptly, the sea lion broke away from
the shark and shot upward. At first,
Chase thought the animal had tired of the game, or needed to breathe, but there
was something about its movements, an urgency, that told him he was wrong. The sea lion sped past the cage and rushed
toward the boat. As
Chase's eyes followed it upward, he saw the other sea lions — two together, one
alone — swimming at the boat with the same frenzied speed.
For God's sake, Chase thought, now what?
* * * * *
"I guess they've had enough,"
Tall Man said as he watched the sea lions struggle onto the swimstep. They were barking, shoving one another,
desperate to get aboard.
"No," Amanda said, alarmed. "Something's frightened them. Something's out there."
"Like what?" Tall Man looked overboard. He could barely see the cage, for as it had
sunk it had drifted into the shade of the boat.
Holding the rope, he walked from one side of the boat to the other, then returned to the stern.
"Nothing," he said.
"I can't see anything out there."
"It's there, though," Amanda said. "Something...
somewhere."
"Then whatever it is has gotta be
deep. Either that, or... shit!"
"What?
"Under the
boat." He pulled on the rope.
* * * * *
The cage shuddered as the rope tugged
it. Chase reached to turn the air
valves.
A shadow passed overhead, so huge that it
cast the entire cage in darkness. Chase
started, and looked up. A flash of
sunlight blinded him for a moment, disorienting him; by the time his eyes had
adjusted, he was unsure of the direction the shadow had been traveling. He turned.
Ten feet away, emerging from the shade of
the boat, swimming at the cage with a mighty gracefulness that Chase had once
admired but now found horrid, was the great white shark. It did not slow or hesitate. Its eyes rolled backward in their sockets;
its mouth opened; its gums rotated forward; serrated white triangles stood
erect. It bit down on the cage.
Reflexively, Chase ducked and flung
himself on top of Max. The boy turned
his head, his eyes widened in shock.
There was the sound of teeth scraping on
metal, then a crunching of metal collapsing, then a sudden his of air and an
explosion of bubbles.
The cage yawed crazily, swinging under the
boat and slamming against the keel, and Chase knew instantly what had
happened. The shark had destroyed one of
the flotation tanks.
* * * * *
"Goddamn you!"
Tall Man shouted. The sinews in
his arms and shoulders stood out like wires as he strained at the rope. He had seen the shark only a second before it
had struck, charging out from beneath the boat like a gray torpedo.
Amanda reached over, grabbed the rope and
helped him pull. "I thought sharks
never—"
"Yeah," Tall Man said. "But guess what: this one did."
"Why?"
"Christ knows."
They could hear the cage thumping against
the keel, could feel the impact through their feet.
"Can you put the rope on the winch?" Amanda asked.
"I don't dare. The bastard weighs better’n a ton; the weight
could tear the rope away from the cage."
"What do we do? We have to—"
"If he comes out from under the boat,
I'll shoot the son of a bitch," Tall Man said. "Till then, let's just pray he goes
away."
* * * * *
Chase and Max huddled in the far corner of
the cage, holding each other, holding the bars, as the cage swung wildly
beneath the boat.
The shark had locked its jaws, and it
twisted and thrashed its massive body as if trying to beat the cage to pieces.
Chase saw bubbles flowing from Max's
regulator in a continuous stream. The
boy was hyperventilating. He made Max
look at him, pointed to his own regulator, then to Max's, and gestured for Max
to slow his breathing. Terrified, Max
nodded.
Suddenly the shark released the cage, and
the cage swung downward, hanging askew.
Chase saw the sharks' wide white belly slipping slowly before his eyes
as the animal let itself fall. There
were five parallel slash marks in the flesh forward of the genital slit.
* * * * *
"Pull!" Tall
Man said. He and Amanda brought the rope
in hand-over-hand. Looking overboard,
they could see the top of the cage as it cleared the bottom of the boat. The shark was a gray form, hovering nearly
motionless beneath the cage. Tall Man
dropped down onto the swimstep and held the rope out over the stern. "Another five feet and we've got—"
"No!" Amanda
screamed, pointing.
There was a flash of a scythelike tail, a
rush of water, and the conical head of the shark broke the surface. The mouth barely opened; it struck the
swimstep, skidded, and fastened on the rope.
With a single shake of its head, the shark tore the rope from Tall Man's
hand and sheared it from the cage. Tall
Man fell backward into the stern.
The shark swam away; the cage began to
fall.
* * * * *
Chase lurched to his feet, grabbed the air
valve on the intact flotation tank and twisted it all the way on. There was a hiss of air, and the cage's
descent slowed. But it was still
falling.
Chase inflated his buoyancy vest and
Max's, hoping that removing their weight and adding buoyancy would stop the
cage, make it neutral, until Tall Man could lower a rope to them.
The cage continued to fall. Chase looked at the depth gauge on the tank: the needle passed thirty feet, then
thirty-five, forty...
He looked quickly in every direction. The shark had vanished.
Fifty feet...
Chase knew he had no choice,
they could not ride the cage to the bottom.
They would both run out of air, probably before they reached the bottom,
certainly before Tall Man could reach them.
He pulled Max to his feet and pushed open
the hatch. He put his hands on Max's
shoulders and looked into the boy's eyes, willing him to recall the lessons he
had learned, praying that the boy had listened.
He took his mouthpiece out and shouted the word, "Remember!"
Max understood.
Sixty feet...
Chase propelled Max up through the hatch
and followed immediately. He took the
boy's hand, and faced him so he could monitor Max's breathing.
They were rising too fast, faster than
their own bubbles; the air in their vests was expanding, seeking the surface,
dragging them upward. They had to slow down; if they kept rising at
this pace, they were risking a ruptured lung or an embolism or the bends.
Chase vented the vests, and they
slowed. Now their bubbles were preceding
them. Good.
Chase looked at his depth gauge: forty feet... thirty-five... He didn't look down,
he kept his eyes on Max's face. He
didn’t see the shark rising beneath them.
Twenty feet... fifteen...
Suddenly there was a splash above them,
and a roil of water, and Tall Man swam down at them,
carrying a speargun.
Now Chase did look down, and he saw,
rising like a missile through the gloom, the yawning mouth and prolapsed jaw of
the great white shark.
Tall Man pulled the trigger. There was a puff of bubbles from the
carbon-dioxide propellant, and the spear shot from the gun. It struck the shark in the roof of the mouth,
and stuck. The shark hesitated, shaking
its head to rid itself of the annoyance.
It bit down, bending the spear, crushing it.
Chase broke through the surface, pulled
Max after him and shoved him onto the swimstep.
Amanda grabbed Max and hauled him into the boat as Chase swung his legs
up, rolled onto the swimstep and reached down for Tall Man's hand.
But Tall Man stayed just beneath the
surface, watching. At last, he kicked
upward and, in a single motion, flung himself onto the swimstep.
Chase shrugged himself out of his harness,
dropped his tank on the deck and crawled forward to Max, who lay on his side as
Amanda helped him out of his tank.
"Are you okay?" Chase asked.
Max's eyes were closed. He nodded, managed a faint smile and said,
"Jeez..."
"You did great... you followed the
rules... you didn't panic. You did great!" Chase felt guilty and stupid and relieved and
proud; he wanted to express all those feelings, but he didn't know how, so he
simply took one of Max's hands in his, rubbed it and said, "What a hell of
an initiation to open-water diving."
He saw Tall Man walking forward, toward the cabin, and said, "Hey,
Tall... thanks. I wasn't looking, I
didn't see it coming."
"I know," Tall Man said. "I thought I better give the bastard
something else to chew on other than you.
That was our shark, y’know. She's
still got the tag in her."
"I've never seen behavior like that, never heard
of it. She was berserk! It's weird, like the blue sharks, only
opposite: the white was nuts with
aggression instead of fear." Chase
paused. "But whatever's causing
this behavior, it's the same creature:
there were five slashed were five slashes on that white shark's
belly."
* * * * *
They raised the anchor, turned to the
west, heading for home. Chase stood at
the wheel on the flying bridge; Max lay on a towel behind him, warming himself
in the high afternoon sun. Amanda was
feeding the sea lions. When she had
settled them in the stern, she climbed the ladder to the bridge.
The low silhouette of
"How far
away?"
"Not far, couple miles to the
east."
Amanda hesitated. She looked at her watch, at the sea lions,
then at Chase.
Chase said to Max, "How do you
feel?"
"Fine," Max replied. "I'm fine. Let's go; I've never seen whales."
Chase turned to Amanda. "It's up to you," he said. "Do you think the sea lions will
work?"
'Sure, till they're tired, then they'll
stop."
"They're not spooked?"
"No, I don't think so. If they see the white shark, they'll get out
of the water, just like before. Besides,
sharks usually stay away from pods of big, healthy whales."
"Uh-huh," Chase said. He swung the wheel to the left and headed
east. "I wasn't thinking only about
the white shark."
24
"I can't hear them," Max said.
Two hundred yards ahead, a pod of humpback
whales was moving leisurely northward.
"You might if you were
underwater," said Chase. "You
could hear them for miles."
"But if they sing..."
"It's not really singing, we call it
that because we don't know how else to describe it. They don't actually have voices. They make sounds with a mechanism inside
their heads. And they don't do it all
the time."
They stood on the flying bridge. The boat was idling in neutral, bobbing
slowly in the ocean swells.
The great gray bodies rolled through the
sea, displacing mountains of water with their huge bulbous heads, displaying
vast flat tail flukes fifteen or twenty feet wide, spouting geysers of misty
breath into the warm air. There were
adults and young, males and females, but it was impossible to count them, for
every so often one or two would slap the surface three times with their tails
and then disappear in a deep dive, to reappear long minutes later in some
unpredictable position among their fellows.
"What does their song say?" Max asked.
"For a long time, nobody knew; all
they knew was that the whales were communicating, maybe talking about where
they were going or where there might be food or if they sensed any danger. All whales communicate; I've heard that blue
whales can keep in touch with each other over a thousand miles of open ocean.
Humpbacks, though, are the only whales that sing in such a complex
series of sounds and tones. Now
scientists are pretty sure that the song of humpbacks is sexual, that the males
sing to attract the females." Chase
smiled. "I like to think they're
wrong, that the song is still a mystery."
"Why?"
"Mysteries are wonderful things. It would be boring to have all the
answers. It's like the Loch Ness
monster, I hope they never find him, either.
We need dragons to keep our imaginations alive."
"Max!" Amanda
called from the stern. "Come on
down and get Harpo ready."
Max walked aft on the flying bridge and
climbed down the ladder into the cockpit.
Three of the sea lions had been fitted
with harnesses, and secured to each harness was a video camera whose lens
pointed forward. The fourth animal
shifted nervously from side to side as if confused.
Amanda handed Max the fourth harness and
showed him how to fit it around the sea lion's shoulders, along its belly,
behind its flippers and over its back.
As Max slipped the leather straps over the
silky skin, the sea lion nuzzled him with its icy nose and tickled him with its
whiskers.
Amanda attached the camera and called up
to Chase. "All set."
Chase looked out at the ocean. Everything seemed normal, peaceful. And yet..."
"Are you sure you want to do
this?" he asked. "We have
three months."
"Yeah, but we won't get whales every
day. Let's go."
"Okay, it's your call. How close do you want me to get? I don't need to break federal laws about
harassing whales."
"Not too close. The important thing is for us to get in front
of the whales so the sea lions don't get pooped trying to catch up with
them."
Chase put the boat in gear and
accelerated, keeping well away from the whales so as not to alarm them with his
engine noise. On a day this calm, there would be no problem
keeping the whales in sight; their tail flukes and spouts would be visible for
a mile or more, so he traveled what he judged to be five hundred yards in front
of them before throttling back and letting the boat idle.
In the stern, the four sea lions were
poised behind one another like school children lined up for lunch. Amanda spoke to each one and made a series of
gestures before switching on the video camera and sweeping her arm toward the
opening in the transom. Max stood behind
her, mimicking her gestures.
One by one, the sea lions waddled to the
stern and flung themselves into the ocean.
When they had all surfaced behind the
boat, Amanda raised both arms and pointed at the approaching whales, and swept
her arms downward.
The sea lions barked, turned and vanished
beneath the surface.
"How long can they stay down?"
asked Max.
"About ten minutes on each
dive," Amanda said. "Not as
long as the whales, but they can dive over and over again, and they can go to
six or seven hundred feet."
"Deeper than a
person."
"Much. And they don't have to decompress, they don't
get bends, don't get embolisms."
From the flying bridge, Chase said,
"You want the boat to follow them?"
"No, we'll stay here. I don't want the whales to think the boat's
chasing them. You can shut the engine
down if you want. The ladies know where
we are."
"But how can you be sure the sea
lions will come back?" Max asked.
"Because they always have,"
Amanda said, and she smiled.
Chase came down from the flying bridge,
turned off the engine and took a glass from a cabinet in the galley. "Come on," he said to Max. "Let's see if we can get lucky."
"Where to?"
"These aren't breeding grounds, and
humpbacks usually sing only on their breeding grounds. But maybe, just maybe, we can hear a little
concert."
He led Max below, into the forward
cabin. He lifted a corner of the carpet
and rolled it back a few feet., then dropped to his
knees and put an ear to the cold fiberglass deck, motioning Max to do the same.
"What do you hear?"
Chase asked.
"Water," Max said, "sort of
slopping around, and... wait!" His eyes widened. "Yeah, I do! But it's really weak."
"Here," Chase said, and he
lifted Max's head and placed the bottom of a glass under his ear, the open bell
against the deck. "Better?"
Max grinned, and
Chase knew what he was hearing: the
ghostly hoots and avian chirrups, the whistles and tweets, the lovely, lilting
conversation between leviathans.
"Cool!" Max
said, beaming.
"It sure is," said Chase, and he
thought: being a father is too.
The whales passed a few hundred yards to
the east of the boat and continued on their way. Gradually their sounds faded until, at last,
even with the glass, Max could hear only faint echoes. He and Chase went topside and opened the
cooler Mrs. Bixler had packed for them.
* * * * *
The first of the sea lions returned after
half an hour.
They were sitting in the stern, eating,
when they heard a bark and looked over the stern and saw the animal ride a
little swell onto the swimstep.
"Hello, Groucho," Amanda said.
Chase shook his head. "I don't know how you can tell."
"Live with them night and day for
three years, you'd be able to tell, too."
The sea lion raised itself up onto its
long rear flipper and heaved itself through the door in the transom.
As Amanda removed the camera and harness,
the sea lion barked excitedly and swung its head from side to side.
"What's she saying?" asked Max.
"She's telling me what she saw,"
Amanda said. "You know, like, ‘Hey,
Mom, get a load of this!’"
Chase said, "And what do you think
she saw?"
Amanda held up the camera. "We'll look at the tapes on the way
in," she said. "As soon as the
others come back, we can try to catch up with the whales again." Then she said to Max, "Why don't you
give Groucho some fish while I dry this off and reload it?"
Max lifted a hatch in the afterdeck,
brought out a bucket of mullet and dangled a fish before the sea lion. It didn't snap at the fish, didn't lunge for
it, just extended its neck, accepted the fish and seemed to inhale it.
The second sea lion, Chico, returned ten
minutes later, the third, Harpo, a few minutes after that. Max fed them both, and when they had eaten,
they waddled across the deck and lay down in a heap with Groucho, and the three
of them slept in the sun.
* * * * *
Amanda checked her watch; Chase knew this
was the tenth time in the past five minutes.
Then she shaded her eyes and looked out over the flat water, straining
to see any movement on the surface.
"You said they can keep diving all
day," he said.
"They can, but they don't, especially
after a workout like they had with the sharks." She looked at her watch again. "None of them has ever stayed out for
two hours. Besides, they want to:
they get tired, hungry." She
frowned. "Particularly
Zeppo. She's the lazy one. She's late.
Very late."
"Maybe she just decided to take
off."
"Not a chance," Amanda said
flatly.
"I don't know how you can be so
certain. She's a—"
"They're my animals," she snapped.
Chase raised his hands in a gesture of
surrender, and said, "Sorry."
"Where are the binoculars?"
"There's a set up top and a set down
below."
Amanda started to climb the ladder to the
flying bridge.
"We can go look for her," Chase
said.
"No, she knows where we are. We're staying here till she comes back."
If, Chase
found himself thinking. If.
25
As it moved into deeper water, scouring
the sloping sands in search of things to kill, the membranes in its head had
sensed new sounds — unfamiliar, high-pitched, far away. It had tracked the sounds, feeling them grow
ever louder and more pronounced.
Finally, in water that had lost its
gray-green gloom and become clear blue, it had come upon the sources of the
sounds: animals larger than it had ever
seen, certainly too large to attack, dim shadows that rose and fell with ease,
showing no vulnerability, no fear.
It had been about to turn away, to resume
its hunt elsewhere, when it had noticed other things among the large
animals: smaller, quicker things, things
that might be prey. It had waited in the
distance, moving just enough to keep pace.
Once, one of the new things had wandered
close, and it had tried to catch it from behind — lunging forward with swift
kicks and sweeping strokes — but the thing had sensed its approach and had
fled, too fast to pursue.
Eventually, it had fallen behind, and soon
the living things were out of sight, leaving only a tantalizing trail of
sounds.
Now it hovered in midwater, its eyes
glowing like white-hot coals as they probed the fathomless blue.
A sudden pressure wave startled it; it
looked up, and it saw a black blur receding upward toward the light: one of the smaller living things had
returned, swooping by and continuing on its way.
Instantly alert, it willed adrenaline into
its veins and lactic acid into its musculature.
It stayed as still as possible, moving its limbs barely enough to keep
it from falling.
Another animal passed
by, slowing briefly but not stopping.
It did not give chase, sensing that any
attempt at pursuit would be futile. It
waited, feeling strength suffuse its body.
Another animal appeared, and this one came
close, circling slowly and gazing curiously.
The creature hung motionless, wanting to
appear harmless, dead.
The animal drew closer, shaking its head,
expelling a stream of tiny bubbles.
The creature waited... and waited... and
then there came an instant when the neurons in its brain formed a conclusion
that possibility had become opportunity.
It struck, lashing out with steel
claws. The claws found softness. The plunged deep into adipose flesh and
curled in upon one another, fashioning a grip.
The other arm sprang forward, and its
claws, too, found pinguid tissue.
The animal lurched backward. Its mouth opened with an explosion of
bubbles. Its appendages thrashed, its
body contorted as it struggled upward.
The creature expected the animal to retaliate,
to defend itself, but it did not. Now the creature knew that the animal was an alien here, could not
survive here, so success could be achieved simply by holding it here.
After a few moments, the animal stopped
struggling. Its head lolled, and blood
gushed from its torn flesh.
The creature began to feed. The animal was covered with a thick layer of
fat — nourishing, energizing, warming fat — and so it was positively buoyant,
it would not sink. Predator and prey
were bonded together in still suspension.
As it ate, its peripheral vision detected
other animals — larger animals, predators — attracted by the scent of blood and
oil drifting in the current.
It surrounded its food and consumed it
ravenously.
Most of the animal was edible. Bones fell away into the abyss, and were
surrounded by scavengers; bits of flesh escaped and were swarmed upon by
schools of little fish. There was a hard
inedible object, which the creature tore free and cast away. It floated upward, toward the surface.
26
"How long till dark?" Amanda asked.
She sat on the bulwarks, stroking the heads of the three sea lions.
The late-day sun cast long shadows on the
sea, and as she turned her head, Chase saw shadows on her face as well — in the
lines of grief that etched the skin beneath her eyes.
"An hour," he said, "But we
don't need light to get back. We can
stay here all night if you want."
"No," she said softly. "There's no point."
They had not talked much during the past
couple of hours; they had sat and watched until their eyes were red with strain
and fatigue. Max had tried to entertain
the three sea lions, had tried to feed them, but they seemed to sense something
was wrong, and they had refused to respond.
Chase had offered no more theories, though
he had one. Theories wouldn't help,
especially if the one he harbored was correct.
"Okay," he said finally. He stood up and looked to the west, at the
silhouette of
"It could've been the white
shark," Amanda said, as if continuing an interrupted conversation.
Chase started, for that had been his
theory, the only one that made sense.
The sea lions had escaped from the shark before, but they had been near
the refuge of the boat. Alone in the
open ocean, a sea lion — especially one tired and distracted — might well be
ambushed by a big, fast great white shark.
"Yeah," he said. "It could've." He pushed the starter button and flicked the
switch that turned on the boat's running lights. He rapped the overhead with his knuckles, to
tell Tall Man to head for home.
"Maybe the others picked up
something," Amanda said.
"Let's look at their tapes."
As Tall Man swung the boat around to the
west, Amanda took the video monitor from one of her boxes, placed it on the
table in the cabin and switched it on.
She connected a VCR to the monitor and inserted one of the tapes. When she had rewound it, she pushed the
‘play’ button, and sat on the bench seat.
Max sat across the table from her; Chase stood at the end of the table.
She fast-forwarded through a couple of
minutes of blank ocean blue, then slowed the tape as
the first image of a whale came onto the screen.
"The whale looks so small," Max
said.
"It's a wide-angle lens," said
Amanda. "It has to be, or all you
would see would be a lot of shots of blubber."
As they watched, the whale grew until it
filled the frame.
"How close is she now?" asked
Max.
"Sixty, seventy
feet. She'll close in, then
she'll stop at about thirty feet."
The image continued to grow, traveling
along the side of the whale, passing an enormous fin, then
slowing as it reached the head. When the
eye came into view, Amanda pushed the ‘pause’ button, and the image froze.
"Look at that eye," she said to
Max. "Tell me that's not an
intelligent being."
"It's different from a shark's
eye," Max said. "It's... I don't know... just different. Not as flat."
"Richer
deeper." Amanda smiled, enthusiasm for the moment
erasing her loss. "You know why? Humpbacks have a brain the size of a
basketball. They say the eye is the
mirror of the soul. Well, there's a heck
of a soul behind that eye."
She pushed the ‘play’ button, and the
image moved again.
There were shots of the whale from all
angles, as the sea lion had swooped around it, playing with it, riding in its
slipstream. The whale had ignored the
sea lion, never altering its predestined course.
Amanda fast-forwarded through ten or
fifteen minutes of tape, until through the jiggly scan lines she saw the whale begin to undulate more vigorously and plunge into a
deep dive. She slowed the tape then and
watched the image grow dimmer as the sea lion had followed the whale down into
the benthic darkness.
When the whale was no more than a dark
blob against the inky blueness, the camera angle suddenly swung upward and
rushed toward the light far above.
She broke off," Amanda said,
"I'd guess at about five hundred feet."
The tape ended, and she replaced it with
another.
The second sea lion had followed a large
female humpback, and as the image on the screen grew, Max suddenly shouted,
"Look! A
baby!"
A calf, probably twenty feet long, was
nestled under its mother's left pectoral flipper.
"They always ride there," Amanda
said.
"Why?" asked Max.
"Partly to learn. Watch, you'll
see that he does everything she does, imitates every move."
Indeed, the calf duplicated exactly his
mother's every movement. When she rose
to breathe, he breathed; when she dove, he dove; when she rolled on her side to
look up at the sea lion, he rolled with her.
"See her looking?"
Amanda said. "She's
protecting him, too. If there's a big
shark around, we'll see her snuggle him really close and get pretty
agitated. She'll probably take him down
into the deep."
But the mother didn't get upset. Evidently satisfied with her identification
of the sea lion, she rolled back onto a level plain and continued her leisurely
journey near the surface.
"Nothing," Amanda said, and she
fast-forwarded through the rest of the tape.
Two minutes into the third tape, Amanda
laughed and said, "This is Harpo's."
"How can you tell?"
Max said.
"She's a chicken. Look" — she pointed at the screen —
"she comes up behind a whale, and as soon as the tail flukes flap, she
skirts away." The image on the
screen went to empty blue, broke the surface and angled down onto another
whale. "It takes her about ten
minutes to figure out that they're not gonna eat her. She's learning,
she's just not as quick as the others.
"They've all got quirks."
"Like what?"
"Groucho likes to get too close, so
she gives me a lot of soft tape, out of focus.
It's as if she doesn't feel she's made contact unless she touches the
whale.
"What about Zeppo?"
Chase asked.
Amanda hesitated, as if abruptly yanked
back to reality. "As I said, she's
lazy. What worries me is, she's also the most curious. She'll swim right up to something, just to
see what it is."
The image on Harpo's tape zoomed from
whale to whale. There were a few good
close-ups, and one spectacular shot of a whale breaching — roaring to the
surface, exploding through to the sunlight above and crashing down again with a
cataclysmic splash — but the last few minutes of the tape were blank ocean
blue. Amanda fast-forwarded through it.
She had turned away from the screen to say
something to Chase, when Max yelled, "Hey!
Look!"
She returned to the screen. "What?"
"Go back."
Amanda scanned the tape backward, and
after a few seconds she saw something — vague and blurry, but definitely
something — on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. She passed it, pushed the ‘play’ button, and
the tape spooled forward.
Something was there, a shape, and then it
was gone, and the image shuddered and zoomed away toward the surface.
"What the hell was that?" Chase asked, leaning forward on his elbows, staring
at the monitor.
"I don't know," Amanda said,
"but whatever it was sure scared poor Harpo. Did you see how fast she took off?"
Suddenly the engine slowed, and Tall Man's
foot stomped three times on the overhead.
Chase walked aft, out into the cockpit, and called up to the flying
bridge. "See something?"
"A red blinker ahead," Tall Man
said. "Like an emergency
flasher. The light's so tough this time
of day, I can't tell."
Chase leaned over the side and looked
forward. It was almost dark, the water
was like a sheet of black steel; against it, a tiny red light was blinking at
one-second intervals. He grabbed the
boat hook, braced his knees against the bulwark and waited for Tall Man to
guide the boat to the light.
As the light slipped along the side of the
boat, Chase reached for it with the boat hook.
It was attached to something hard, about twelve inches square, and Chase
twisted the hook till he snagged it, then brought it aboard and set it on the
bulwark.
"It's a camera
housing," he called to Tall Man.
"Ours?" Tall Man
pushed the throttle forward and resumed his course for the island.
Chase heard footsteps behind him, then a
short, sharp gasp.
"That's Zeppo's," said Amanda.
They took the housing into the cabin,
dried it and set it on the table. The
housing was undamaged, but the harness straps had been shredded. Sadly, silently, Amanda removed the tape from
the camera and put it into the VCR. She
rewound it, then pushed the ‘play’ button.
The first few minutes of the tape were
indistinguishable from the others: long
shots of whales, close-ups of whales, whales cruising, whales rolling, whales
diving. Then came
an interminable shot of the surface, from just above, then from just below.
"She's basking," Amanda said,
and there was a thickness to her voice.
"I told you she was the lazy one."
The camera went underwater again and
showed two whales in the distance, moving away.
For perhaps fifteen seconds it pursued them, before turning away and
showing nothing but blue.
Amanda said, "She gave up."
"But look," Max said, pointing
at a miniscule black figure in the center of the screen. "That's one of the other sea lions. Zeppo was following her, coming home."
The image
roller-coastered up and down, as the sea lion had accelerated through the water,
trying to catch up to its fellows. Then it slowed and broke through the surface
— for a breath, presumably — and when it submerged it cruised slowly for a
moment. Then, abruptly, it veered off.
Chase said, "Something's caught her
attention."
Though there were no other animals visible
in the blue vastness, speed and direction were discernible from rays of
sunlight refracted by the surface into arrows that shot down into the darkness,
and by the countless motes of plankton that glittered as they passed the lens.
"She's circling something,"
Amanda said.
"But why can't we see it?" asked
Chase.
"Because she's above it, looking
down, and the camera's on her back."
The sea lion had gone into a long upward loop — they saw the light from the surface flash by far away — and then had dived, turned and hung upright in the water, vertical and motionless. The surface shimmered in the distance above.
Amanda said, "She's looking at it; she's not afraid of it."
"Isn't she going to take pictures of it?" asked Max.
"She doesn't think she's supposed to; the only things she's supposed to tape are—"
Suddenly the camera jolted backward, and the blue water was clouded by a black billow.
Amanda screamed.
For ten or fifteen seconds, the image swung crazily, lurching left and right, dimmed by what looked like ink and then clear and then dimmed again.
Something shiny gleamed in front of the lens.
"Stop the tape!" Chase said, but Amanda was frozen, her eyes wide, one hand over her mouth. And so he reached forward and pressed the backward-scan button.
The image was fuzzy, for the shiny thing was too close for the lens to focus. But as he advanced the tape again, frame by frame, Chase had no doubt about what he was seeing: five claws, curved, pointed, razor-sharp and made of stainless steel.
27
"Hit me again, Ray," Rusty
Puckett said to the bartender at the Crow's Nest. He slid his empty glass across the bar and
shoved a five-dollar bill after it.
"Enough's enough, Rusty," said
Ray. "Go on home."
"Hey!
I put a fuckin’ fifty down there, and said lemme know when I worked my
way through it." Puckett pointed to
the jumble of bills beside the ashtray.
"I ain't halfway there yet."
"Watch your mouth!"
Ray said. He put his hands on he bar, and leaned close to Puckett. "Happy hour's come and gone, Rusty; there's people here for dinner, they're not interested in
hearing your cock-and-bull stories. Do
us both a favor: pick up your change and
head on home."
Puckett turned around on his stool and
gazed glassily at the room. Ray was
right: the bar had filled up, and there
was a line of people waiting for tables in the dining room. When had all this happened? He looked at his watch, closing one eye to
sharpen the numbers on the dial.
Christ! He'd been here three
hours.
He noticed a few people staring at him,
and guessed they'd been listening to him while he was telling Ray about what
he'd seen. To hell with them, he didn't
care, it was true, every bit of it. He
winked at one of them, a not-bad-looking woman, and he saw her blush and turn
away. She was probably interested; maybe
he'd go have a talk with her.
Something funny popped into his head. He turned back to Ray and said, loud enough
for everyone to hear, "you don't dare shut me off, Raymond; the fuckin’ place’d go broke.
Ray didn't laugh, in fact he looked kind
of pissed off, and all of a sudden he raised the fold-back panel in the bar,
came through and grabbed Puckett by the scruff of his shirt.
Puckett felt himself lifted off the stool,
felt Ray's hand jam a wad of money into his pants pocket and found himself being frog-marched out the door.
"You can come back when you sober up
and stop hallucinating," Ray said.
"I'd worry if I was you, Rusty.
You're in the grip of the goddamn DTs."
Puckett heard the door close behind him,
and Ray's voice saying, "Sorry, folks."
He stood on the street, bewildered,
swaying slightly. A couple got out of a
car and gave him a wide berth as they made their way toward the restaurant.
He put a hand on the side of the building
to stop the swaying. Then he started
down the street, keeping his eyes on each foot as it landed in front of the
other.
What the hell did Ray mean, ‘cock-and-bull
stories’? Ray knew him well enough to
know he didn't make up fairy tales. And
he wasn't in the grip of any DTs, either.
He knew damn well what he'd seen, what had almost killed him, and he
hadn't exaggerated anything.
It sounded stupid, impossible. But it was the truth. He'd seen a fuckin’ monster.
Part Five
The Blessing
28
"Are you sure you don't want to wait
for Amanda and me?" Chase said. He held the new bow line of the Whaler while
Max started the motor and stowed his camera under the steering console. "She'll be ready in half an hour,
eleven-thirty at the latest."
"I can't," Max said. "The Blessing of the Fleet starts at
noon; if I don't go now, I'll never get a decent spot."
"You sound to me like a young man who
has a date." Chase smiled.
Max grimaced. "Dad..."
"Okay, sorry... Now: you know where the anchor's
stowed, you've got two life jackets aboard, you—"
"We've been through all that."
"Right." Chase sighed
and tossed the bow line into the boat.
"Park the boat at the club; beach it there if there're no
slips."
"Okay." Max put the boat in gear, turned the wheel
and moved slowly away from the dock.
"Remember," Chase called after
him, "no stopping on the way... for anything...
no matter what you see."
Max waved and shouted, "See
you!"
Chase stood watching as Max accelerated,
bringing the boat up onto a plane.
At first, Chase had resisted letting Max
take the Whaler; the boy had never been out in the boat alone. Though the channel into Waterboro was
well marked, there were rocks to hit if you were careless. Though the outboard motors were meticulously
maintained by Tall Man, all outboards harbored gremlins and could seize up and
stop at any moment for
no apparent reason. Though Max had shown
that he was a careful boatman and a fine swimmer, what would happen if he had
to go overboard and swim for shore?
But for the past three days, the weather
had been lousy: the wind had blown from
the northeast, a relentless fifteen to twenty knots, sometimes gusting to
forty, and a chill rain had soaked the coast from
Now that the day had arrived and the
weather had at last turned fine, Chase wanted Max to enjoy it, and so he had
relented.
He almost wished the weather had gotten
worse. The good thing about bad weather
was that it kept people out of the water, boats had stayed ashore and nobody
else had been hurt. Whatever was out
there, wherever it was, it had had nothing to prey
upon. Chase hoped that fair weather
wouldn't bring on a feeding frenzy.
The morning after the sea lion had been killed, he had taken the videotape to the police station and
shown it to Gibson. He had suggested
postponing or even canceling the Blessing until they could determine what the
animal on the tape might be.
Gibson's reply had been brusque. "Forget it, Simon," he had
said. I'm not gonna cancel the biggest
event of the summer because of two seconds of crappy videotape that doesn't
look like diddly... or on the testimony of some drunk."
"What drunk?"
"Rusty Puckett. He got himself sauced to the gills last
night, started telling everybody that he'd seen some mutant zombie from
hell. He made such a nuisance of himself, he got thrown out of the Crow's Nest and two gin
mills, that I locked him up."
"He's here? Can I talk to him?"
"Nope, not until
after the Blessing. Then you can talk to him all you want, till
you both come down with bullshit poisoning." Gibson had paused. "Have you shown this tape to anybody
else?"
"No."
"Good. I think I'll just keep it here for the next
few days. We have all the rest of the
summer to get hysterical."
"I wish I thought you were right,
Rollie," Chase had said. "But
something's out there."
"Then let it stay out there, Simon,
or let it go to hell away. Either way, I
don't imagine it's gonna come ashore and start hassling tourists."
* * * * *
When the Whaler was so far away that it
was invisible against the contours of the mainland, Chase walked up the hill
and down the slope to the sea lion tank.
He could see Amanda standing on the concrete apron, using fish to try to
lure the sea lions out of the tank. They
were shaking their heads, refusing.
"They won't do it," Amanda said
when Chase arrived. "It's like
every day since we got back from the whales:
no matter what I do, they will not leave that tank. It's as if they're receiving warning signals
from the water."
"What signals...
electromagnetic?"
"I guess so. All I know is, something
is telling them to stay out of the sea.
And they're behaving like they're scared to death."
29
Max saw her as soon as he rounded
Waterboro Point, and he felt his heart jump.
Though he still had to cross the entire
harbor — a quarter of a mile, at least — there was no mistaking her; a slender,
delicate figure standing alone at the end of the club dock, wearing blue, as
always. In the ten days he had known
her, he had never seen her wear anything but blue: blue sweaters, blue shifts, blue skirts with
blue blouses. It was as if she knew how
much blue became her, reflecting the blue in her eyes and complementing the
shining gold of her hair.
He waved, though he was sure she couldn’t
see him, not through the maze of sailboats that clogged the harbor, all
bedecked with multicolored flags and pennants and burgees in honor of the
Blessing of the Fleet. Even the fleet
vessels themselves — dark, rust-spotted behemoths laden with nets and
outriggers and radar domes and enormous winch drums — displayed rainbow
pennants as anniversary finery, as if eager on this once-a-year day to live up
to their absurdly precious names: Miss Eula, Miss Daisy, Miss Wendy.
Max wanted to ram the throttle forward and
zip between the boats, but he didn't, for he knew the marine police were on the
prowl, and the last thing he needed was a speeding ticket. He had no
So he forced himself to putter slowly down
the harbor, checking, whenever he came into an open space, to be sure Elizabeth
hadn't left, given up on him and gone off to watch the Blessing on her own.
Every time he looked, she was there,
waiting. To reading a
book or checking her watch or pacing.
Just waiting, as she had promised she would.
When Max passed the last of the big boats,
a hundred yards from the dock, and began to thread his way through the club's
small fleet of moored Bluejays, he waved again.
This time she saw him, and she raised a hand and smiled.
He was confused by the feelings rocketing
around inside him. He had known girls
all his life, had been around them daily since nursery school. He had been to parties with girls, and to
movies, though always in groups, with other boys. He had friends who were girls.
But he had never had a girlfriend. He had never suffered the awful aches of
jealousy and longing. He had never
kissed a girl, and though he had seen a lot of kissing on-screen, and had often
fantasized about doing it more and more, he wasn't sure he would know how to go
about it. Movie kissing looked easy and
fun, but then, movie kissers weren't twelve years old.
Max wasn’t even sure that what he was
feeling for
She was pretty — beautiful, even — but she
behaved as if she didn't know it... or if she did, she didn't use it as a
weapon the way some girls did. She was
smart, she had read ten times as many books as Max had, including a lot of adult
books, but she never showed off. She was
shy, but it wasn't a reclusive kind of shyness, not self-conscious or ashamed
of something; rather, it was a sweet shyness; serene and nonjudgmental, as if
she were simply happy with herself.
Maybe it had to do with being deaf —
surely, a major handicap like deafness had to be a determining factor in
someone's life — but Max didn't know enough about deafness to guess how it
could affect a personality.
She was always glad to see him, and he
found that he was feeling a kind of emptiness when he wasn't with her, which
led him to conclude that this probably was
the beginning of a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.
The prospect alarmed him because it meant that a time would come when
he'd have to kiss her — or try to — because that was what boyfriends and
girlfriends did.
It frightened him, too, because he didn't
trust his own perceptions. He was
already suffering from sensory overload:
the myths he had created about his father were being dispelled, replaced
daily by new realities — not in a bad way, for the truths about his father were
quite as fine as the fictions he had fashioned, it was just that everything was
new.
He had never doubted the stated
circumstances of his parents' divorce, but he had recently come to realize that
the fact that he had been living with his mother all these years was implicit
criticism of his father. Why had he
never lived with his father? Were money
and private schools and tennis lessons and summer homes really better for him
than peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and swimming with sea lions?
Then there was Amanda, about whom Max's
feelings were, as best he could describe them, weird. She wasn't his mother and didn't pretend to
be, and she treated him more like an adult than his mother ever had, which made
him feel closer to her than to his mother.
He didn't know what his father felt about Amanda, or Amanda about his father. They liked each other, that was for sure, they were friends.
It was all too much for Max to cope with,
and it made him question his itchy feelings toward
Maybe he was going crazy, he thought as he
motored slowly along the floating docks in search of an empty slip. Maybe everything would sort itself out when
he went back West.
On the other hand, he wasn't sure he
wanted to go back West.
He found a slip and stopped the engine and
tossed
"Hello," she said, and she
beamed.
"Hi." He reached back and raised the engine so the
propeller was out of the water, and locked it in place.
"Hello," she said again. There was a studied, deliberateness to the
word. "Hello."
Only then did it strike him: she had spoken to him, aloud, out in the open
where anyone could hear.
"Hey!" he said, smiling as he
turned to face her, speaking clearly so she could read his lips. "Good for you. That sounded real good."
When they had first met, she had not
spoken at all, though he recalled the eerie feeling that some sort of
communication had taken place. When he
had found her again, after seeing her picture in the paper, she had written
notes on a pad she kept in her pocket, with a ballpoint pen that hung on a
chain around her neck, and had taught him to read a few rudimentary hand
signs. As they had seen more and more of
each other, she had confessed that her speech embarrassed her. Since she couldn't hear it, she had no idea
what it sounded like to others, but she could tell from people's faces that it
had sounded strange.
By now, there were times when she seemed
to know what Max was thinking before he said a word. When he asked her about it, she dismissed it
as a simple skill, no big deal, that had developed
over the years since the strange fever had made her deaf. She likened it to a dog's ability to hear
sounds that humans can't, and explained that a doctor had told her that when a
person loses a primary sense like hearing, often other senses will become much
more acute. She said it didn't work all
the time, or with most people.
Max grabbed his camera and hopped up onto
the dock. "Did you find a
spot?" he asked.
"Cool,"
The high school band was assembling in the
boat-storage yard at the foot of
Masons, Elks and Rotarians gathered in
cadres behind the band. Members of the
Holy Ghost Society, decked out in colorful Portuguese costumes, admired one
another as they smoked their final cigarettes and, a few of them, shared a
paper bag containing a flagon of sustaining elixir.
The road into town had been closed to
automobile traffic, and hundreds of pedestrians swarmed over it and up toward
the Catholic church on
Max stopped
She winked at him and touched her chest — trust me, she was saying — and dragged him onward.
A little saltbox house stood on a
corner.
"Hey," he said, "I
don't—"
"Away," she replied.
"Yeah, but—"
"Okay," she said, and again she
touched her chest. "Really."
Max shrugged and cupped his hands, bracing
his elbows on his knees.
She put a foot into his cupped hands,
braced one of her hands on his head and hoisted herself up until she could
reach the top of the lintel over the door.
She felt along the shelf, then jumped down.
Smiling, she held a key up to Max's face,
and said, "Cousins."
She opened the door, let Max and herself
in, then closed the door and locked it.
She led Max to the left, through a door and to a staircase that spiraled
up the tower. They climbed for what
seemed to Max like an hour, until at last the stairs ended at a single door,
bolted top and bottom.
His breath caught, and he heard himself
say, "Wow..."
It was like being in a plane or a
helicopter, like soaring above the town without moving. They were higher than any tree or building; the
borough lay beneath them like a diorama, and beyond, Max believed, he could see
practically forever. To the east were
Little Narragansett Bay and Napatree Point and the gray-green shapes of Osprey
and Block. To the south, sailboats and
oceangoing freighters were framed against the low silhouette of
"Cool?"
"I'll
say." Max opened the lens of his
camera and looked for sights to shoot.
Far below, they heard the first ragged
bars of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," and a cheer went up from the
crowd.
Max zoomed his
lens and shot pictures of the bishop and the drum majorettes and the band; he
immortalized the Holy Ghosters and the Elks and the Rotarians.
And then suddenly the parade was by them
and heading for the point, and
As they neared the point, the noise grew
louder, and the onshore breeze was laced with the aroma of frying fat.
The town of
Along one side of the parking lot, behind
a rickety fence, lay the town's only public beach, a small strip of sand
fronting the harbor.
Though the day was fine and already warm,
the beach was practically deserted: a
baby-sitter, wearing an Indigo Girls sweatshirt, divided her attention between
a copy of People magazine and a
two-year-old who toddled along the water's edge, gathering shells. Beyond, in the harbor, sailboats hung on
moorings, bobbing gently from the wakes of launches that ferried yachtsmen to
and from the town docks.
As Max followed
He stopped before a van selling plump
sausages in doughy rolls, and he fished in his pocket for money.
Ahead of Max, threading her way among
couples and families and men discussing the downfall of the Red Sox,
She started to speak, then took her pen
from inside her blouse and her pad from her pocket, scribbled a note and passed
it to Max.
He read aloud, "Do you like eating greasy dead
things?" Then he grinned, and said
clearly, "Sure... doesn't everybody?"
30
It swam back and forth erratically...
confused, tormented, tantalized. It could see very little in the foul and
weed-clotted shallow water; its brain registered a cascade of sounds and
impulses, but none was discernible, none appeared to hold promise.
Some of the impulses were threatening, and
although it did not know fear, it had been programmed to preserve itself and
thus to defend itself, so signals of threat triggered reflexive alarms. And yet none of the threats materialized.
Its store of energy was nearly exhausted;
it had eaten nothing since the fat, sleek thing that had wandered close in the
deep.
It had searched near the shores and far
from them, over sandy bottoms and among clusters of big rocks. Living things that had once patrolled the
shallows were gone, or hidden. None of
the vulnerable things, the easy prey, had appeared above; none of the clumsy
things had entered the water from the shore.
It had noticed changes in temperature and
turbulence, but could not connect them with the lack of food.
Now, suddenly, it knew there was food
nearby, but it could not find it. The
water seemed permeated with the fragrance of flesh, but there was no flesh to
be found.
Slowly, carefully, it thrust itself upward
and let its head break through the glassy film of the surface.
Its olfactories were assaulted by aromas
that tripped a flood of gastric juices in its belly.
Its eyes, once their lenses cleared, saw
living things... not just one, but a host of living things, all gathered in a
herd, all taunting it with their smells.
Adrenaline pumped renewed energy through its veins.
But then its alarms took control, warning
it that the living things were too
many, and too far from the safety of its world.
It could not feed on them and survive.
Except for two... smaller ones, apart from
the rest, alone at the border between the worlds.
But to take even those two would require a
complex decision, a decision it had been programmed to make but never had, a decision that could end its life instead of preserving it.
Conflict tore at the creature's primitive
brain and incomplete conditioning. Survival
had two paths, which warred with each other.
And so it swam back and forth erratically,
and the urgency within its body grew into frenzy.
31
As the parade made the turn around the
point in front of the parking lot, band members ducked out of line and grabbed
cans of soda from friends among the onlookers; Elks took hits from proffered
paper bags; Holy Ghosters accepted linguisas from their awestruck
offspring. Even the youngsters in the
bishop's entourage were not immune to cajolery:
one accepted a lighted cigarette from a compatriot in the crowd — like a
relay runner taking a baton — and took a deep drag on it before tucking it
under his robe.
Max photographed it all, until, just when
he had the pirate smoker in his frame and pushed the shutter release, he heard
from within the body of his camera the whirr of rewinding film. He watched the counter click swiftly back to
zero, then said, "Damn."
"Out of film," Max said,
pointing at the counter. "D’you
know where I can buy some more?"
"But how'll I find you?" he
said. "How—"
She put her hand on her chest, then took
his hand and put it on top of hers, and she winked at him.
"Okay," he said, laughing.
She turned away and darted through the
crowd.
It took only a couple of minutes for the
final stragglers in the parade — two boys leading a gargantuan Saint Bernard
caparisoned like a clown — to round the point and head down Beach Street toward
the commercial docks.
The concessionaries were already shutting
up shop, extinguishing fires and bagging trash, hurrying to move to another
parking lot on the other side of the borough, where they would reopen for the
post-blessing feast.
Max bought a candied apple from the last
open stand, then ambled behind the Saint Bernard.
As he passed the fence surrounding the
public beach, he saw a little child with its face pressed against the wire
mesh. Its mouth and hands were filthy, s
if it had been eating dirt, and its soiled diaper sagged on one hip. Behind the child, a teenaged girl lay on her
back on the sand, a magazine held above her face.
The child's stubby fingers clutched the
wire, and its big eyes followed Max.
Max looked at the child, then,
impulsively, stepped to the fence, leaned over it and offered the candied apple. "Here y’go, buddy," he said with a
smile.
The child beamed, reached up with both
hands, grabbed the candied apple by the stick, tried to jam the entire apple
into its mouth... and fell backward. The
apple tumbled into the sand. The child
rolled over, clutched the apple and licked at it, gurgling gleefully.
Max turned away and started down the
street.
* * * * *
As soon as the last food truck had
departed, two volunteers from the Holy Ghost Society appeared on foot and began
to clean up the parking lot. The gravel
was littered with cigarette butts, paper cups, sparerib bones, half-eaten
hotdogs and sandwiches, and sausages that had burst in the cooking and been
shoved off the fire. There were
eggshells and vegetables, squid rings and octopus tentacles, chicken wings and
scattered bits of random entrails. A
sickly sweet odor of olive oil and salad dressing and grease hung like a gas
over the parking lot.
The volunteers wore gloves and carried
camp shovels, and the scooped the offal into plastic bins.
"People’re worse’n pigs,"
muttered one. "Fuckin’ place looks
like a slaughterhouse."
"And stinks like a morgue,"
agreed the other.
Fifty-gallon barrels had been placed
around the parking lot to collect trash, and the volunteers lugged a loaded bin
to the nearest barrel. It was full, as
was the second, and the third.
"Well, shit... now what’re we s’posed
to do?"
"What about that one?" The volunteer pointed at a barrel on the
beach.
His partner shrugged. "Let's try it. I'm not takin’ this crap home with me, for
sure."
Carrying the plastic bin, they opened the
gate to the beach and crossed the soft sand.
The barrel was empty. As they dumped the bin, they noticed a small
child sitting nearby, happily gnawing on something, and even over the rank
stench of garbage they could smell the child.
Ten yards away, a woman lay on her back
with a magazine covering her face.
"Hey!" one of the volunteers
called. "You this
kid's mother?"
The woman lifted the magazine, and they
saw that she was in her teens.
"That'll be the day," she said.
"Well, you know how to change a
diaper?"
"What're you," the girl said,
"the poop patrol?"
Offended, the volunteer said,
"Listen, you..." and he took a step toward the girl.
His partner stopped him with a hand on his
sleeve. "Leave it, Lenny. The kid's carrying a
load, so what? You mess with that girl,
the next thing you know you're in court for sexual harassment."
"I'd sooner harass a sheep," he
said, loud enough for the girl to hear.
"I bet you do, too," the girl
said, and she let the magazine fall over her face again.
"Leave it, Lenny. Just leave it."
The volunteers filled the plastic bin
twice more and dumped it into the barrel on the beach, shouldered their shovels
and walked home to wash their hands and have a drink.
32
It lay prone in the shallows, only its
eyes and nose out of water.
Most of the living things had gone, and
the percussive jumble that had thundered on its tympanic membranes had faded
into a distant pattering. Only two
living things remained, and they emitted no threat signals, so its alarms were
silent.
But the tantalizing odor persisted, a lush
stew of flesh scents, stronger than ever, closer than ever. And perplexing, for it did not seem to be
associated with the living things.
It inched forward, pulling itself with its
claws. Its gills opened and closed
rapidly, pumping vigorously; the oxygen content of the surface water was weak
and corrupted with impurities.
The strongest spoor of prey came from an
alien object near the living things.
Its capacity for making decisions was
poor, its sense of options undeveloped.
It craved everything, but sensed that it had to choose.
And then, as if a gate had suddenly opened
in its brain, it received a message telling it that it could have
everything. It must only decide what to
have first.
It willed its gills to close,
it rose up on its powerful arms and sprang forward.
33
The girl had fallen asleep, though she
hadn't meant to; it was the cardinal sin for a baby-sitter with a two-year-old
near the water. Her sleep was light,
barely deep enough to accommodate a fluttery dream about Princess Diana asking
her to be her roommate and help care for the two little princes. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, one of the
princes was crying — shrieking, actually.
She bolted upright, knocking the magazine
off her face, and turned to look for Jeremy.
He was there, sitting on the sand where he
had been, and she was flooded with a rush of relief.
He was howling — head thrown back, mouth
gaping, eyes closed — and she knew kids well enough to know that this wasn't a
howl of temper or anger, but one of pain or terror, as if he had burned himself
or cut himself or been bitten by a dog.
She went to him, and stood over him, and
said, "What's wrong... you hurt?"
He didn't answer, not even with one of his
dumb baby words, he just shrieked louder.
"Jeremy... don't
be a wuss... tell me where it hurts."
He opened his eyes and raised his arms,
begging to be picked up, which surprised her because he never wanted her to
pick him up, he didn't like her any more than she
liked him. Their association was based
on mutual tolerance, the tacit recognition of a bad situation that neither of
them had wanted but both had to endure.
"Forget it," she said, shaking
her head. "You think I need poop
all over my clothes?"
He howled again, even louder, and
stretched his arms up to her.
Flustered, she said, "Jesus... shut
up, will you?" She looked around to
see if anyone was watching. "What is it?" An idea occurred to her. "Asshole burn, that
what it is? Yeah, that must be it. Well, if you wouldn't poop in your pants all
the time, your asshole wouldn't hurt."
She half expected her logical conclusion
to provide consolation, but it didn't.
He still sat there like some yowling Buddha.
"Fuck!" she said, and she bent
over, put her hands under his arms and lifted him up and, holding him as far
away from herself as possible, walked toward the
water.
He squirmed and kicked and screamed, and
the closer she got to the water, the more violent he became, as if whatever it
was that had frightened him or hurt him was out there
in the water.
She fought to hold on, probably gripping
him too tightly but not caring, and when she was in the water up to her knees,
she dunked him to his waist and peeled off the adhesive strips that held the
diaper on and let the diaper float away.
The she swirled the child around, hoping the water would clean his
bottom.
After a minute or so, she hauled him out
of the water and, still holding him at arm's length, walked back up the beach
and set him down on his feet.
His crying subsided into breathless,
staccato sobs, but still he begged for her to hold him, and when she wouldn't
he grabbed her leg.
"Let go, goddamnit!" she said,
and she raised a hand to slap his arm away from her leg. But the instant she felt the impulse to
strike the child, her anger vanished, replaced suddenly by fear, fear of
herself, of her power over the little child and the damage it could do... to
him and to her.
Fear quickly transformed into
sympathy. "Hey," she said,
"hey... it's okay." She knelt
down and let him wrap his arms around her neck, and put an arm under his bottom
and lifted him up. "Let's go watch
TV, what d’you say?
As she crossed the beach back to where she
had left her towel, she noticed something awry, something missing. Then she saw tracks in the sand, as if a
heavy object had been dragged into the water, and she realized that the trash
barrel wasn't there anymore.
She looked out into the harbor and saw —
maybe twenty-five yards out, no farther than she could throw a stone — the
black neck of the empty barrel as it floated on the surface.
"D’you believe it?" she said,
soothing the child with the sound of her voice.
"Those guys fill the trash can with all that crap, and then they go
and throw it in the harbor so it can wash up on people's lawns. I tell you, Jeremy, the bottom line of life
is, people stink.
She gathered up her towel and tote bag
and, with the child settled on her hip, made her way through the gate and onto
the sidewalk... talking nonsense to keep the child quiet, and vowing to herself
that next summer, no matter what, she would find an easier way to earn five
crummy bucks an hour.
34
Enraged, it flailed through the shower of
dispersing garbage, grabbing random bits of flotsam and gnashing at them, as if
violence would somehow force them to yield nutrients they did not contain. A few pieces were nourishing, but very few,
only enough to make it yearn for more.
Most were worthless, and there was no way it could tell one from
another.
Its gills labored, clogged with alien
things that lodged in the flaps and impeded motion.
It had chosen wrong, following scent
rather than instinct.
It propelled itself slowly to the surface
and waited for its eyes to adjust their focus on the shore.
Empty.
The living things were gone.
They were there, however, somewhere, in
company with many more. It knew that.
It knew, too, that they could be brought
within reach.
But another decision
would be required, a decision for which it had been programmed, but one for which
the implementation was — or so the creature sensed — beyond its abilities.
It allowed itself to drift downward again,
and it rested on the mud bottom, lolling like a corpse among the ribbons of
kelp while it probed the recesses of its brain for long-lost keys to
long-hidden locks.
Its brain was dim but not slow, out of
condition but not disabled, and the more it demanded of the brain, the more the
brain responded.
One by one, the keys appeared.
At last, it knew what it must do, and how
to do it.
Energized by new promise, it crawled along
the bottom that sloped up into the shallows.
When its back was nearly out of the water, it crabbed sideways into the
shelter of some boulders, and it waited, scanning the shore until it was
confident it was alone. Even then, it
waited a few moments more, rehearsing the steps it
must take, reluctant to leave the safety of the world it had known — for how
long? Forever, as far
as it knew — but certain that its life depended on the course it had chosen.
It ducked down, immersing its head and
gills, and pumped water through its system, flooding its blood with oxygen like
a diver preparing for a record plunge.
It raised its head, pulled itself to its feet and began to walk. The muscles in its legs were weak — they had not borne weight for half a century — but they supported it, and with each step they gained an iota of new strength.
It needed shelter for the exercise it was programmed to perform, and it needed it soon. Because it had no sense of time, it did not know what soon was, but it knew that its blood would tell it: as oxygen was consumed, more would be demanded, and the brain would lapse into crisis.
Soon.
* * * * *
The streets were empty, doors closed and
windows curtained. Still, it felt
exposed, and so it lurched for the comfort of the shadows between two
buildings. Its ears could now — they did
not only record pressure changes — and they heard raucous sounds not far away.
It passed more closed doors, turned down
another dark street, saw more closed doors and was about to turn again when, in
a niche near the end of this street, it saw an open door. It staggered toward the door, trailing a
smear of slime, beginning to feel the first alarums from its brain, demanding
oxygen.
The door was large, and broad,
and the space inside was dark and empty.
The creature looked upward and saw what it
needed: large crossbeams supporting the
roof.
It could not leap up to the beams, and
there was no rope or ladder for it to climb; it probed one of the walls with
its claws. The wood was soft — from age
and rot and humidity — and its claws pierced it as if it were wet clay.
Its claws sank deep into the wood, and it
scaled the wall like a panther.
The effort sucked oxygen from its blood,
and by the time it reached the first crossbeam the alarums in its brain were
urgent. It swung its legs over the beam
and hung upside down, a dozen feet above the dirt floor, its arms dangling
beneath its head. Out of its mouth a
trickle of liquid oozed and dripped onto the floor.
It waited for a moment, monitoring the
metabolic change: The metamorphosis was
too slow: before its system would be
cleansed, before its motor could be stopped and restarted, the brain would have
begun to die, starved for oxygen.
And so, as it had been taught to do fifty
years before, as it had done once in practice, it balled its fists beneath its
rib cage and snapped them upward.
Green liquid gushed from its mouth like
vomit. The first spasm encouraged a
second, and a third, until a cycle of convulsions began that pumped water for
the lungs and flushed it through the trachea.
A fetid pool of green fluid formed in the
dirt below, a miniature swamp.
It took only a few seconds for the lungs
to empty and the chest cavity to contract.
When it was done, the creature hung motionless,
its eyes rolled back in its head, eggshells of perfect white. Droplets of slime made their way down its
steel teeth and fell like emeralds.
Its life as a water-breather was over.
Clinically, it was dead. Its heart had not begun to beat; the fluid in
its veins lay still.
But the brain still lived, and it
commanded itself to send one final burst of electricity across the synapses
that would restore life.
The body convulsed once more, but this
time it expelled no liquid.
This time it coughed.
35
It had taken her longer to find the roll
of film than she had expected, and she guessed that by now the parade was close
to the commercial docks. She wanted to
get the film to Max before the parade actually arrived at the docks, for the
arrival and the Blessing itself were the most photogenic parts of the ceremony.
She took a breath, and held it, and closed
her eyes, turning in the direction of the feelings she was receiving. She was right: the parade was two thirds of the way down
She dropped the film into the pocket of
her skirt and started to run.
She knew Max would be there, he wouldn’t
have gotten impatient and gone off on his own to look for film; she was sure he
trusted her as much as she trusted him, liked her as much as she liked
him. It had never occurred to her to
wonder why she liked him more than other boys she knew, for she wasn't an
analytical person, she was an accepting person.
She took every day as it came, knowing there'd be something new in it
and something old, something good and something bad.
She just liked him, that
was all, and when he went away — as he would, for nothing was forever, her
fever had taught her that — she would continue to like him. If he came back, that would be good; if he
didn't, that would be too bad. At least
she would have had someone to like a lot for a period of time, and that was
better than not having had someone to like a lot.
For the moment, all she wanted to do was
get the film to him and see his face light up when she gave it to him, and to
watch his amazement at all the carryings-on of the Blessing.
She vaulted a fence, traversed a yard,
vaulted the fence on the other side and dashed down a back street. She turned a corner, squirmed between some
garbage cans and crossed an alley. She
was only a block away from
The street she was on was narrow. Cars were parked on both sides, except in
front of an open garage. As she neared
the garage, she smelled a strange odor — salty and rotten-sweet — and saw a
trickle of green liquid seeping from the garage into the gutter.
She slowed, for the garage belonged to
friends of her parents, and if the liquid seeping into the street was something
important — fuel oil or sewage, something that might suggest an emergency — she
should find the people at the Blessing and tell them.
She bent down and sniffed the fluid. It was like nothing she had ever
smelled. As she straightened up, she
looked into the dark garage and saw a huge pool of it, and as she looked, more
drops fell. No question, something was
broken and dripping.
She stepped into the garage.
* * * * *
Hanging like a giant bat, it sucked air
into its lungs, and felt life return to its tissues.
Suddenly it smelled prey, heard it. It willed its eyes to roll forward, and
looked down.
* * * * *
She turned and ran.
* * * * *
The creature's arms twitched, the long
webbed fingers of its huge hands flexed; it straightened its legs and
somersaulted to the floor. This prey was
small and fragile... an easy catch, an easy kill.
But as it hit the floor, its legs, too
weak from bearing too little weight for too long, buckled, and the creature
tumbled onto its side. It pushed with
its arms, raising itself into a crouch, and moved awkwardly toward the light.
The prey was gone.
It roared in frustration and fury, a
guttural, mucous growl. Then, abruptly,
it sensed danger, recognized the possibility that it might be pursued. It knew it must flee. But it did not know where to seek safety.
It had no choice: it had to return to the world it knew.
It moved out of the shadows and onto the
street.
It had no recollection of how it had
gotten here or of what route to take for its return. Surrounded by buildings, it could not see the
sea, but it could smell it, and it followed its nose toward the scent of salt.
It had traveled for less than a minute
when, from close behind, it heard a sound it recognized as signaling
aggression. It wheeled to face the
threat.
A large animal covered with black hair was
crouched in a dark space between buildings.
The hair on its neck had risen, its lips were drawn back, exposing long
white teeth, and its shoulders hunched over the large muscles of its
forelegs. A rumbling noise came from its
throat.
The creature appraised the animal,
thinking less about food than about flight.
It sensed that the animal would to permit flight, that it was intent on
attacking.
So the creature took a stride toward the
animal.
The animal sprang, teeth bared, claws
extended.
The creature caught it in midleap and
drove its steel teeth deep into the animal's throat. Immediately the rumbling noise changed to a
whine, and then to silence, as the creature held the animal and let it die.
When it was dead, the creature flung it to
the pavement, knelt beside it and slit the animal's belly with its claws. It reached into the warm body and tore away
the entrails.
The it continued toward the safety of the sea.
36
"Stop worrying, Max," Chase
said. "From the sound of it, the
band's gonna turn the corner up there in about ten seconds, so relax and enjoy
the show. She'll find you."
"But not where I said I'd be,"
said Max. "I shouldn't have—"
"Hey, Max, what have you got going
here?" Chase grinned. "You wouldn't by any chance—" He stopped
when he felt Amanda dig her elbow into his ribs.
"She'll find you, Max," Amanda
said, putting an arm around his shoulders, "and she'll understand. Really."
Max had been following the parade,
trailing the Saint Bernard, when he had glanced a the
space between two shorefront houses and seen Amanda and his father cruising
slowly by in the Institute's Mako. He
had sprinted down to the rocks and waved, and Chase had nosed the boat ashore
and urged Max to jump
aboard. They had rafted the Mako to a
sport-fisherman tied up at one of the commercial docks, and stepped ashore to
await the parade.
The bishop appeared first, followed by his
entourage and the drum majorettes. As
the first of the musicians turned the corner and entered the straightaway to
the dock, the band struck up the "Colonel Bogie" march.
Max looked down at his empty camera.
"I've got one," Amanda said, and
she pulled a tiny camera from her pocket.
"I'll make copies for you."
Roland Gibson made his way through the
crowd behind Chase and stopped beside him.
The police chief's uniform was freshly pressed, his shoes shined. "Two thousand tourists, Simon," he
said, smiling. "And you wanted me
to cancel it."
"I'll grant you," said
Chase. "But it's not over yet. When are you letting Puckett out of
jail?"
"As soon as the
last visitor leaves his last dollar... around six o'clock. Then you can
hear all about Rusty's monster."
The radio on Gibson's belt crackled, and a
voice said, "Chief..."
Gibson unhooked the radio, spoke into it,
listened, then said softly, "Shit."
"What's up?" asked Chase.
"Tommy didn't say, just said there
was something I should see." Gibson
replaced the radio and stepped out onto the dock. "See you later."
All of a sudden Chase heard, behind him
and over the blare of the approaching trombones, Max's voice shouting, "
He turned and saw Max sprinting along the
edge of the crowd toward a barefoot girl in a blue dress who was running beside
the band as fast as he could.
Max and the girl met; the girl was
trembling, and Max was reaching for her, to calm her. As Chase drew near, he heard the girl try to
speak, but all that came out of her mouth were incoherent sounds. Her hands fluttered like hummingbirds before
Max's face, and Max was shaking his head and saying, "Slower, slower."
"What's she saying?"
Chase asked.
"I can't tell," Max said.
Amanda came up beside Chase, knelt down,
took
"Scared?"
"Of what?"
"Something,"
Then Chase heard his name being
called. He looked up and saw Gibson
beckoning to him from the end of the dock.
"Be right back," he said to Amanda.
Gibson's face was grim with anger. "Something just killed Corky
Thibodeaux's guard dog, Buster," he said.
"Tore out his throat and gutted him, right up on
He held out his hand, and Chase saw a
stainless steel tooth. Two of its edges
were serrated, and there were tiny barbed hooks on each end of the third,
thicker side.
Chase's breath stopped; he stared at the
tooth. Then he looked up at Gibson and
said, "It's here, Rollie. It's come
ashore."
37
It entered the water at the same place it
had emerged — it saw its own tracks in the sand — and, staying in the shelter
of the boulders, made its way slowly down the sloping mud bottom until it was
immersed up to its shoulders.
It emptied its lungs of air, ducked
underwater and, as its brain told it to do, generated motion in its gill flaps,
opened its mouth, expanded its trachea and breathed in.
It choked.
It sprang instantly to the surface,
gasping and coughing. Pain seared its
lungs and knotted the muscles in its abdomen.
Enervated and off balance, it slipped and
began to sink. Water seeped into its
gill slits, and again it choked and gagged.
It reached for an outcropping on one of the boulders, grabbed it and
clung, wheezing, until at last its lungs were clear.
Twice more it tried to submerge, following
each step of the ancient program. Twice
more it failed.
It did not know what had happened, or why,
for its brain could not ask itself such questions and
thus could provide no answers. It knew
only that it could no longer exist underwater, that survival depended on
breathing air.
But it also sensed that it could not
survive among the air-breathing things.
If it could not live underwater, still it
would have to live in water.
It drew a breath of air, clamped its gill
slits closed and ducked down. This time
it did not choke. It could see, for the
lenses surrounding its eyes were intact, and it could move. Tentatively, it swam forward.
But when it attempted to dive, it noticed
a difference: diving was no longer
simple, fluid, natural; diving had become difficult, and a pressure within drew
it up toward the air.
There was another difference; very quickly
its lungs began to ache, there was a pounding in its ears, and its brain
commanded it to find air to breathe.
It arced upward, broke through the surface
and gasped. As it breathed in and out,
its buoyancy changed, and it had to kick slowly to maintain its position.
Its simple brain was challenged. The changes required adaptations if it was to
survive.
After a few moments, it felt comfortable
enough to swim gradually away from shore.
Across the water it saw land.
Staying underwater as long as it could,
surfacing only to breathe, it swam toward the land. There, it sensed, it could find safety.
There it could hunt.
Part Six
The White
Shark
38
"Say hey, Ray," Rusty Puckett
said as he pulled out a stool and slapped a twenty-dollar bill onto the bar.
"Seven-and-Seven?" asked the
bartender.
"Make it a double; I got a terrible
thirst." Puckett glanced around;
the room was less than half full. It was
seven-thirty, the early drinkers had done in to dinner, the
late ones hadn't arrived yet.
Ray mixed the drink, put the glass in
front of Puckett and took the twenty.
Smiling when he made change, he said, "I hear you been on a
holiday, courtesy of the borough."
"Bastards," Puckett said. He drained half the glass and waited for the
warm feeling to pool in his stomach.
"They didn't even apologize.
I got half a mind to sue Rollie Gibson."
"For what, drying you out? You look pretty good to me; never hurts a man
to take a day or two off."
Puckett finished his drink and signaled
for a refill. The truth was, he did feel
good, and not only physically; he felt vindicated. Gibson and the others hadn't believed a word
he'd said, thought he was lying or hallucinating, and then all of a sudden this
afternoon they'd gotten real interested, wanting to hear his whole story from
the beginning. But he'd shown them, he'd
stonewalled Gibson and that Simon Chase, claimed he couldn’t remember. Why should he give anything away for free
when there might be money in it? Some of
those TV shows — what did they call them?
Docudramas — paid big bucks for exclusive interviews, and he was pretty
sure he was the only one who'd seen that thing, whatever it was. All he had to do was wait,
the word would get out and they'd be coming to him. He could be patient; he had all the time in the
world.
"Nate Green was in here before,"
Ray said. "Looking
for you."
"I bet he was." Puckett smiled. "What'd you tell him?"
"That I hadn't seen you."
"You still haven't, okay?" To hell with Nate Green, Puckett
thought. There were bigger fish to catch,
lots bigger, than the Waterboro Chronicle.
"Sure, Rusty," Ray said. "No skin off my nose."
Puckett finished his second drink. Now he was feeling really good. Even Ray was treating him with respect.
A man entered from the street, sat at the
far end of the bar and ordered a glass of wine.
As Ray poured it for him, the man said, "Do you know a man named
Puckett, a Mr. Rusty Puckett?"
Puckett froze and pretended to read the
menu on the blackboard over the bar.
"Uh-huh," Ray said, without
glancing Puckett's way. He returned the
wine bottle to the cooler and resumed slicing limes.
"Have you seen him?"
Puckett heard an accent in the man's
voice, not American, foreign, like from somewhere in
"Might have," Ray said. "You got business with him?"
"Possibly."
Puckett chewed on an ice cube and
reflexively scrolled through his brain for potential trouble. He didn't own anybody any money; he hadn't
poached anybody's lobsters recently; he hadn't cut away any buoys, hit any other
boats or struck anybody with his truck... as far as he knew. Then he searched for potential good
news. Maybe the guy was from a big
magazine or one of the docudrama shows, and wanted to make a deal.
When he had sorted through all the
possibilities, he felt safe enough to turn to the man and say, "I'm
Puckett. Who wants to know?"
"Ah," the man said. He smiled and rose from his stool, carrying
his glass of wine, and as he passed the bartender, said, "Very discreet of
you."
Puckett watched the man approach. He was tall, a couple of inches over six
feet, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, a guy who took care of himself,
probably worked out. Puckett guessed he
was in his late forties: hair that had
once been blond was light gray, and swept straight back from his forehead. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark
tie. His skin was pale... not sickly,
just pale from never seeing the sun.
Puckett decided he looked like an undertaker.
"May I join you?" the man asked.
Puckett gestured at the stool beside him
and thought: European, no question. Join
came out choin. German, maybe, or Dutch, or
one of those pissant countries that kept breaking apart over there.
The man said, "There is a gentleman
outside who would like to meet you."
"Why?"
"He has heard of you... of things you
have said."
Puckett paused, then
said, "Okay, so bring him in."
"I'm afraid that's not
possible."
"Why?" Puckett
laughed. "Too big
to get through the door?"
"Something like
that."
Somesing ... somesing like
that. German. Had to be. "Hey, Ray," Puckett said, "you
got no rule against fat guys, do you?"
Ray didn't laugh.
"Would you please come outside?"
the man said. "I think it would be
worth your while."
"Worth my while
how?"
"Financially."
"Well, hell, why didn't you say
so?" Puckett stood up. "Keep my seat warm, Ray. If I'm not back in ten minutes, call
nine-one-one."
A van was parked across the street. It was black, its windows were tinted so no
one could see inside, and Puckett noticed that its license plates were
"Fuck is this?" he said. "An ambulance?"
The man slid open one of the side panels
and gestured for Puckett to climb in.
Puckett leaned over and glanced
inside. It was dark and, as far as he
could see, empty. For no good reason, he
felt a chill. "No way," he
said.
"Mr. Puckett—"
"Look, Hans, I don't know who's in
there, I don't know you, I don't know nothing. All I know is, I'm
not gettin’ in there. Tell him to come
out."
"I told ou—"
"Forget it. You want to do business,
we do it in the sunlight. End of
story."
The man sighed. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Yeah, well..."
Puckett never saw the man's hands move,
but suddenly he was spun around, his feet were off the ground and he felt
himself flying into the darkness of the van.
He hit the carpeted floor and lay there, dazed, listening to the side
panel slam and the engine start, and feeling the van begin to move.
39
Chase pulled the last page of the fax form
from his machine, read it quickly.
"Another oid," he
said disgustedly.
"Which one this time?" asked Tall
Man.
"Elasmobranchoid: manifesting the characteristics of the
cartilaginous fishes." He tossed
the paper onto his desk. "Some of
these guys must take advanced degrees in covering their asses. They're geniuses at stringing together
sentences that sound great and say nothing."
For the past forty-eight hours, Chase had
faxed every marine scientist he had ever met, sent photocopies of Polaroids of
steel teeth and claw marks on dead animals, described every incident that had
happened since the discovery of the Bellamy brothers and pleaded for opinions —
guesses, speculations, anything; he had
promised to keep them confidential — about what kind of creature they might be
dealing with.
The few scientists who had deigned to
reply had been vague and guarded, none venturing to identify a specific animal,
all hedging their bets by attaching the suffix oid, which told Chase nothing he didn't already know.
"So now," he said, "we've
got carcharhinoid — it could be a
class of sharks; ichthyoid — it could be a fish; pantheroid — it could be a seagoing lion or tiger; and elasmobranchoid." He stared for a moment at the pile of faxes,
then thumbed through them and selected one.
"You know the only one that makes any sense to me? This one, from the
cryptozoologists."
"The sea-monster people?" said
Tall Man. "But they're—"
"Fringe. I know. Pseudoscientific, nobody takes them
seriously. But they're the only ones
with the guts to use the oid I
like: humanoid.
"Come on, Simon." Tall Man shook his head. "You know the stats better than I
do. The thing that killed the sea lion
was at least two hundred feet underwater; there were no bubbles on the tape, so
it wasn't wearing scuba gear. And nobody
free-dives two hundred feet, not long enough to kill and eat a sea lion."
"I didn't say it is a human, I said it may be humanoid... a kind of human... humanlike. Hell, I don't know."
"You're beginning to sound like Puckett. Has anybody found him yet?"
"Nope, he's gone, disappeared, nobody's—"
The phone rang; Chase picked it up. He sighed, covered the mouthpiece with his
hand, said, "Gibson," then closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair
and listened to the litany: the chief's
budget was out of control; he was running police boats twenty-four hours a day,
keeping his officers on double shifts; the press was hounding him; Nate Green's
story in the Chronicle, headlined MONSTER EATS DOG, in which he had alluded to the unsolved deaths of
the Bellamys and Bobby Tobin, had drawn reporters from every news service in
the land; a producer wanted to do a TV movie called The Fiend From the Deep; real-estate brokers, restaurateurs and the
town's burgesses were keeping the police station's phone lines lit up like
Christmas trees.
As always, Gibson's litany ended with the accusatory
question: Chase was supposed to be the
big honcho scientist around here; what was he going to do about it?
"What d’you expect me to do, Rollie?" Chase said when Gibson had finished. "Run around the great big ocean in my
little tiny boat? I don't even know what
I'm supposed to be looking for. Did the
lab boys come up with an analysis of the slime on the floor of the
garage?"
"Yes and no," Gibson said. "I think they've got their heads
tucked. I told ‘em I wouldn’t' give ‘em
the time of day till they get the final DNA results."
"Why? What
do they think?"
"They say it comes from a kind of mammal."
"What kind?"
"They think..." Gibson hesitated, as if embarrassed to utter
the words. "They say it looks like
it could be from a human being.
Chrissakes, Simon..."
Chase hung up, stood and said to Tall Man,
"Where's our resident mammal expert?"
"Where she always is, down with the kids and the
sea lions."
* * * * *
As Chase and Tall Man started down the hill, they
could see Max and Elizabeth in the pool, playing with the three sea lions, and
Amanda, watching from the concrete apron.
The sea lions had grown increasingly fearful; Amanda
said they seemed clinically neurotic.
They were avoiding water, all water — not just seawater. For two days they had adamantly refused
Amanda's command to enter their pool.
In desperation, Amanda had called a colleague in
When the animals would no longer obey Amanda directly,
they would permit
Amanda had been so excited by the success of the
experiment that she was relaying more and more instructions through
When she heard Chase and Tall Man behind her, Amanda
pointed at the children and the sea lions and said, "This is
fabulous."
"I need to talk to you for a couple
minutes," Chase said. "It's
about Gibson's lab tests."
"I've been meaning to come up and see you, too,
but it didn't seem important enough to stop this. I figured there was nothing we could do about
it."
"About what?"
"I just got a call on the radio in the shed from
the pilot of the spotter plane."
"I thought you'd paid him off and let him
go," Chase said, "since the sea lions wouldn't work anymore."
"I guess he got interested in what we're doing
here. Anyway, he was out spotting swordfish
for the commercial boats, and he saw a sportfisherman this side of Block,
setting out a humongous chum slick. He
said he thought we'd like to know. He
said it looks like the guy's baiting up white sharks."
"The guy must be certifiable. With all the publicity about the trouble
around here, why would anybody go out on the water and spread a chum
slick?" Chase frowned. "Anyway, there's nothing I can do about
it, there's no law against chum
slicks."
"No," Amanda said, "but there's a
federal law against using juvenile bottlenose dolphins for bait. And that's what the pilot says he saw."
"Dolphins!" Chase
said. "He's sure?"
"Positive.
But I thought by the time we called the Coast Guard or the EPA or
whoever—"
"Did he recognize the boat?"
"Yes, he said it's from Waterboro... the Brigadier."
"Can't be...
He's gotta be wrong."
"Why?"
"It just can't." Chase started for the shed.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" Amanda called after him.
"In a minute," Chase replied.
Tall Man followed Chase into the shed. "Sammy?" he said. "I can't believe it." They had known Sammy Medina for fifteen
years; he was a successful, responsible charter-boatman who had led a recent
campaign to restrict fish catches by commercial and sport fishermen.
"That is, if it is the Brigadier,"
Chase said. "Hard
to tell from a plane. But we'll
find out soon enough. Cindy'll be
straight with me." There was a
phone on the wall of the shed, and Chase picked it up, dialed a number, spoke
for a moment or two, hung up and said to Tall Man, "I'm a son of a
bitch."
"That was Sammy?"
"Himself." Chase
nodded. "At
home... taking the day off, tying flies.
He says he got an offer, bare-boat charter, not including him or his
crew, just rent the boat, no questions asked... for ten thousand dollars a
day!"
Tall Man whistled.
"What kind of fishing's worth ten grand a day?"
"That's what I wanted to know." Chase paused.
"Guess who rented the boat from him."
"Donald Trump?"
"No. Rusty
Puckett."
"Puckett?! Puckett
doesn't have that kind of dough, nobody around here does. Besides, what does Puckett want with—"
"He's not fishing for great whites, Tall," Chase said.
"Sammy says the stupid bastard thinks he's found a monster... or at
least he's convinced some big-hitting sucker that he has. Or can."
40
It lay in a clump of bushes, listening to the sound of
its own breathing, and to the sounds of life in the surrounding woods. It received the sounds and separated them,
storing them for later identification.
It was tuning its senses.
Ever since it had emerged from the water, changes had
been taking place within the creature, changes it could feel but not
understand. The longer its vascular
system, its heart and its brain were infused and nourished with the blend of
oxygen and nitrogen that was air, instead of hydrogen-dominated water, the more
it seemed to comprehend and remember, and the greater were its abilities to
innovate.
As its chemistry altered, so did its life.
It knew, for example, what it had once been. Its mind could put names to various objects
and animals, though its voice could not yet articulate them. Words of all kinds caromed around in its
brain, words that generated memories of emotions as diverse as anger, hatred,
pride and elation.
It sensed the magnitude of its own strength, and
recalled — however dimly — the pleasure it had derived from using that
strength. It recalled other pleasures,
too, from wielding power, inflicting pain and causing death.
It had build itself a shelter
by digging a shallow trench and covering it with leaves and branches. So far, it had remained undetected, except by
a curious dog, which it had killed and eaten.
It had learned that it could not pursue and catch most
of the animals with which it shared the wild, but it was beginning to teach
itself how to trap them. Still, it was
not able to feed itself enough to satisfy its enormous, and growing, need for
energy. As its strength grew, so did its
demands: the more energy it expended,
the more it needed; the more it needed, the more it had to expend to fill the
need.
It had become acutely actively, not reflexively,
cautious, knowing what to avoid and what to confront, what was harmless and
what dangerous.
Though past and future remained fog-bound landscapes,
patches of the fog had begun to lift, and it now had a goal: to fulfill its
mission of annihilation.
It rested now, hearing the calls of birds and
squirrels, footfalls of foxes and deer, the rustle of wind through the trees,
the slur of little waves on the nearby gravel strand.
Suddenly, new sounds:
clumsy treads, heavy and careless, through the underbrush. And voices.
It rolled to its knees, then onto the balls of its
feet, and looked through the bushes toward the sounds.
* * * * *
"Hells bells!" shouted a young man named
"Then look where you're walkin’" said his
friend Toby.
"I still don't see why we hadda come alla way out
here."
"Like I told you: it's where the critters are."
"It's private property, too."
"I been here a million times, they don't give a
shit."
"Yeah, then why's all them ‘No hunting, get your
ass outta here’ signs?"
"Insurance," said Toby, who had already
turned seventeen and thus possessed two months more wisdom than
"Well, they sic the cops on us, it's you stole
that friggin’ thing, not me... don't
think I won't tell ‘em."
"You helped."
"I watched."
"Same difference."
"Anyhow,"
"It said on the box: accurate to fifty yards. ‘Sides, maybe we'll see a deer instead."
"Oh, no, you don't. You shoot a deer, it's
outta season and I'm outta here."
"Don't be an asshole."
They walked on for a few more yards, until they came to
a big tree growing amid a tangle of thick foliage.
"Perfect," Toby said, and he stepped into
the foliage and made his way around to the far side of the tree.
"That's poison ivy," said
"You got long pants on."
"What's perfect about it?"
"Chestnut tree. They'll come
right to it, they love chestnuts."
"What does?"
"Critters... all kinds."
"A lot you know."
"Shut up."
They knelt behind the tree. From a quiver at his waist Toby took a
steel-pointed graphite bolt, eighteen inches long. He set the butt of the crossbow on the
ground, pulled back the drawstring, cocked it and fitted the bolt into its
slot.
"How's that thing fly true with no
feathers?" asked
"The slot here makes it spin like it's
rifled."
"The tip's not even barbed."
"Neither's a bullet, shithead. A thing's got
enough force behind it, it'd prob’ly kill a rhino."
"Or a jogger. That'd be a
fine one to explain to the—"
"Shut up,
I tell ya!"
"Whadda hunters always do? We wait."
* * * * *
There were two of them, one fatter than the other,
both slow and vulnerable.... but apparently armed, though with what it did not
know. it
watched, waiting to see what they would do.
They did nothing, only squatted in the bushes.
The bird noises had stopped, and the squirrel sounds.
It moved slowly to its left, until it had a clear path
toward them. It would take them easily,
first one then the other, and drag them back to its den.
The fat one first.
* * * * *
"What was that?"
"What was what?"
"A noise, back of us."
Toby turned and looked, but saw only bushes. "Forget it," he said. "We're the hunters here, you think something's gonna sneak up on us?"
"I hate woods,"
* * * * *
The fat one had seen it, was looking at it, pointing at it, making a noise.
It sprang from the underbrush, took two swift strides
and was upon the fat one. It dug one set
of claws deep into the fat one's chest, the other into his scalp and eyes, bent
his head back and, with its teeth, ripped at its throat.
The fat one died quickly.
It turned to the other.
* * * * *
"Oh God... oh Jesus... oh God... oh
Jesus..."
Toby staggered backward. Something had
Toby's back struck the trunk of the tree.
Now the thing was turning toward him. It had yellowish hair and steel teeth and
eyes as white as cue balls, and it was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Toby jerked the crossbow up and held it in front of
him, and he tried to say something but no words came out. He pulled the trigger.
The crossbow bucked as the graphite bolt flew from its
slot. He saw the bolt hit the thing and
sink in, and there was a little squirt of what looked like blood.
But the thing kept coming.
Moaning in terror, Toby dropped the crossbow, wheeled
around the tree trunk and ran.
* * * * *
It felt a burning sensation in its side, below its
ribs, and it looked down and saw something protruding from its flesh. It wrapped a hand around the thing, pulled it
from its flesh and cast it away.
It was not badly wounded, none of its vital functions
were impaired, but the pain slowed and distracted it. It stopped and watched the human blunder away
through the bushes. It returned to the
fat one, intent on dragging him back to its den.
Then, for the first time, it experienced
foresight: the other human might come
back, return to hunt it. With others. It was
in danger, it would have to make a plan.
It sat down against the big tree, willing its brain to
work, to project, to sort, to innovate.
Its main priorities were clear: to staunch the flow of blood, to
survive. From the floor of the forest it
gathered leaves, and moss from the trunk of the tree, and it crushed them and
packed them into the wound.
To nourish itself, it used its claws to cut strips of
flesh from the fat one; it consumed them.
It ate as much as it felt it needed, then
forced itself to eat more, until it sensed that another bite would trigger
regurgitation.
Now, it knew, it must escape, and find a different,
safer place.
It arose and walked to where the trees ended at the
shoreline. It stood in the shelter of
the trees, to be sure it was alone, then it entered
the water.
It could not submerge, but it could swim; it could not
feed in the sea any longer, but it could survive until it reached different
land.
As it had become aware of its past, now it was
beginning to fathom a future.
41
The sea was flat, there wasn't enough breeze even to raise ripples, so the Mako rose quickly to a
plane and cut through the glassy surface at forty miles an hour.
"I wonder who came up with the ten grand,"
Tall Man shouted over the scream of the outboard motor.
"Some TV producer, probably," Chase answered
from the helm.
"Well, they better hope to hell they don't raise
that critter."
A single boat was anchored in the deep channel
southwest of
The sun was behind them, lowering in the western
sky. Tall Man shaded his eyes and
squinted. "They got two ass-kicker
marlin rigs off the stern," he said.
"Wire lines. Only a couple
guys in the cockpit."
"Is one of them Puckett?"
"Yeah." Tall Man
paused, looking. "The other's a big
dude, big as me. Looks
like he's cradling an AK-47."
"Cradling," Chase said, "not
aiming."
"Not yet."
Chase kept a hundred yards from the bigger boat as he
passed it. He saw no other crewmen, no
cameras, no sound gear. "They're
not making a movie," he said.
"They're hunting." He
swung the Mako around, took it out of gear and let it drift up alongside the
fishing boat.
Puckett leaned over the side and shouted, "Beat
it, Chase! Every time I get a break, you
find a way to fuck it up. A man's got a
right to earn a living."
"Not by slaughtering dolphins, he doesn't,"
Chase said. "You're looking to
spend a lot of years in a little room all by your lonesome."
"You don't know shit." Puckett reached into his pocket, brought out
a paper and waved it. "These
dolphins died of a virus, them and a dozen others. We bought ‘em from a lab in Mystic."
Chase hesitated.
What Puckett said was possible, it even made sense. Over the past few years, hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of dolphins of several species had washed up on shores of the
eastern seaboard, dead from viruses whose origins remained a mystery. Pollution was presumed to be the catalyst,
but what kind of pollution — sewage, agricultural runoff, oil or chemical waste
— no one seemed to know.
"So what're you doing, then, you and
Rambo?" Chase gestured at the huge
man holding the assault rifle across his chest.
Before Puckett could answer, Chase felt Tall Man nudge him and look up,
and he saw a video camera mounted on the lip of the fishing boat's flying
bridge. It was moving, tracking them as
they slid by in the Mako.
"Fishing for great whites, what else?" said
Puckett. "A good white-shark jaw
can fetch five grand, easy."
'Don't bullshit me, Rusty, I know what—"
The man with the rifle said, "We have broken no
law. That is all that need concern
you."
"No, what concerns me is, I know what you think
you're looking for, but you don't have the faintest idea what—"
Suddenly, from a loudspeaker mounted somewhere above
the cockpit came a disembodied voice, gravelly, unnatural — almost mechanical
sounding — heavily accented and shouting, "Rudi! Get in here!"
The man passed the rifle to Puckett, turned and
entered the cabin.
Chase's Mako had drifted past the anchored boat, and
Chase reversed the motor and backed up until the two boats were once again side
by side.
Puckett held the rifle at his waist, pointed at them.
"Put the gun away, Rusty," Tall Man
said. "You're up to your eyeballs in
shit already."
"Stuff a cork in it, Geronimo," said
Puckett.
The man returned from the cabin. "Throw me a line," he said. "Come aboard."
"Why?" said Chase.
The loudspeaker boomed, "You!"
Chase looked up at the video camera and pointed to
himself.
"Yes, you. You say you
know what we are doing?"
"I'm afraid so," said Chase.
"Come inside... please... you and your
friend. I think we need each other, you
and I."
42
The cabin was dark; the glass in the doors was tinted,
and curtains had been pulled across the windows. It was chilly, too, air-conditioned and
dehumidified.
As their pupils adjusted to the dark, Chase and Tall
Man saw that all the furniture had been removed from the cabin and replaced
with what looked like a portable intensive-care unit. In the center of the room was a motorized
wheelchair, and in it sat a man. A
rubber tube led from a digital monitor through a hanging bottle and into the
veins in the crook of one of the man's elbows.
His other hand held the end of a hose attached to a tank of oxygen. Behind him were more machines, including an
electrocardiograph and a sphygmomanometer, and on the overhead in front of him
was a television monitor showing a color image of the stern of the boat.
The man was old, certainly, but how old was impossible
to tell, for his head was shaved and he wore sunglasses. The breadth of his shoulders suggested that
he had once been large but had shriveled; a blanket covered him from knees to
chest.
The man raised the hand holding the oxygen hose,
nudged aside the folds of a yellow ascot and pressed the hose to his
throat. His chest expanded as he filled
his lungs.
Then he spoke, and Chase was startled to hear the
words come not from him but from a box behind him, an amplifier of some kind.
"Where is he?"
"He," Chase thought, what ‘he?’ "I don't know," he said. "Now you
tell me: what
is... it?"
Again the man touched the hose to his throat, and
again he spoke. Once he was a man. He became a great experiment. By now, there is no way to know. A mutant, perhaps. A predator, definitely. He will not stop killing; that is what he was
made to do."
"By who? And what makes
you think you—"
"I know what he needs. If I can deceive him into..." The man slumped, he had run out of breath; he
waited, as if to regain the strength to breathe.
"What d’you mean he was an experiment?" Tall Man said.
"What kind of experiment?"
The man took a breath.
"Sit down," he said, and he gestured at the open deck by the
door.
Chase glanced up at the television monitor and saw
Puckett ladling fish guts and blood into the sea. The other man, Rudi, was sitting on the stern
with the rifle in his lap.
The old man said, "If he comes, Rudi will shoot
him."
"You can kill it, then," said Chase. "That's a relief."
"No, it is a question." There was a slight change in the tone of the
man's words, almost as if he were smiling.
"A good question: can you
kill what is not really alive?"
Chase and Tall Man sat while the man gathered
strength, and after a moment's silence, began to speak. At first, the words came in short bursts, but
gradually he developed a rhythm of inhaling and exhaling that allowed him to
express complete thoughts.
Chase closed his eyes — it was distracting to see the
tube touch the throat and withdraw, to watch the chest expand and contract —
and let the words wash over him and become pictures.
"My name is Jacob Franks," the man
said. "I was born in
"I last saw my parents and my two sisters as they
were led away from a cattle car on a siding near a town no one had ever heard
of.
"I was kept alive — I was young and strong and
healthy — and put to work as a laborer.
I could not know that what I was building were crematoria... essentially
I was digging my own grave. My health
began to fail, of course, from malnutrition, and in hindsight it is clear that
I was only a few weeks or months away from being rendered into ashes, when one
day a new doctor arrived at the camp.
Because my papers indicated that I had some experience in pharmacology,
I was sent to work for him.
"His name was Ernst Kruger, and he was a protégé,
a friend, and later, a rival of Josef Mengele." He paused.
"You know who Mengele was, I assume."
"Sure," Chase said. "Who doesn't?"
"I
don't," said Tall Man.
"They called Mengele the Angel of Death,"
Franks said. "He was a doctor at
"They never caught him?" Tall
Man asked.
"No. He
drowned, or so they say, a few years ago off a beach in
"And your doctor," Chase said, "this
Kruger... was he like Mengele?"
"He was vicious like Mengele," said Franks,
"and as brutal. But Kruger was
smarter, and he had a stronger vision, warped as it was."
"Which was?"
"To usurp the power of God. He truly
wanted to create a new species."
Tall Man said, "What the hell for?"
"To some extent, to see if it
could be done. But then, as he did more and more work and
the impossible began to seem possible, as success followed success, word
reached high into the Nazi hierarchy.
Money, encouragement flowed back down to him. Kruger's vision became true megalomania: he decided to try to create a race of
amphibious warriors."
Tall Man began to say something, but Franks cut him
off.
"This was the nineteen-forties, remember. There were no nuclear submarines with
infinite bottom time, scuba diving had barely been invented, man
was still a stranger to the sea. Imagine
a creature with the intelligence, the knowledge, the training and the brutality
of man, but combined with the capacities of an apex marine predator."
"Jesus," Chase said, "Nazi killer
whales."
"Not quite.
More versatile, even," said Franks.
"Whales must breathe; Kruger's creatures would not. They would stay underwater indefinitely, dive
to a thousand feet, set explosives, spy on shipping. His dream was for them to have the potential
for unlimited mayhem."
"Meaning he was nuts," Tall Man said.
"Not necessarily," Chase put in. "I remember reading about a professor
from Duke who tried the same thing during the sixties. He started with mice,
got them to breathe liquids without drowning and found that liquid-breathing
eliminates the possibility of getting the bends. One time he decompressed a mouse from thirty
atmospheres to surface pressure in three seconds, which would be like a diver
going from a thousand feet to the surface at seven hundred miles an hour. The mouse survived. He saw no reason the same thing couldn’t work
for humans. He only stopped
experimenting because of a lack of need:
robots came on the scene, ROVs, submersibles; they could do a better job
in deep water, with no risk to people.
But he was convinced he could have created an amphibious human."
Franks nodded and said, "In theory, creating a
water-breathing human being should not be very difficult. We come from water-breathers, after all;
fetuses survive on liquid, and in various stages of development they show
evidence of flippers and even gills. And
we are all liquid-breathers already, in the sense that our lungs contain fluids
without which they couldn’t function."
"So you're saying Kruger succeeded?" Chase said.
"Almost," said Franks. "If the war had gone on longer, he might
actually have done it. What held him
back was the quality of his subjects; they were weak, sick, malnourished —
slaves. Many developed infections from
the initial tracheotomy surgery, and because there were no antibiotics then,
they died. Some failed to survive the
flooding of their lungs with saline solution and fluorocarbons. But Kruger had an inexhaustible supply of
patients, so he pressed on."
"And then, from somewhere high in the chain of
command, perhaps Hitler himself, came a gift: a perfect subject. Heinrich Guenther was the Aryan physical
ideal, six and a half feet tall, muscled like a Greek statue. He had won medals in the nineteen-thirty-six
Olympics in the shot put, the javelin and the hammer throw, and he became
something of a national hero. He joined
the SS, secured a commission and, when the war came, seemed destined for a brilliant
future. He was fearless and ruthless. He was utterly without conscience. He was a killer."
"He was also not quite sane, though that wasn't
evident at the time. A solitary man, he
lived alone, and apparently he had been murdering people — prostitutes,
lowlifes for the most part — for years.
That only came out after he went berserk in a beer hall one night and
killed three people. Today I suppose he
would be diagnosed as a sexual psychopath or a paranoid schizophrenic; in
nineteen forty-four he was labeled a homicidal maniac. He was sentenced to be shot, and was about to
be, when someone decided that he could perform one last service for the
Reich. They sent him down to us."
"You worked for the guy?" Chase
asked.
"Worked on him. With Kruger. For months. He was treated like a tiger. He was caged between surgeries, fed raw meat
and vitamin injections, anesthetized and programmed in ways that are
sophisticated even for today:
biofeedback, subliminal conditioning.
He was almost finished, Kruger had only one
last step to go, when the Allies closed in on the camp. But Kruger was obsessed; he refused to
abandon the experiment. He took Guenther
with him when he fled... like most of the Nazis who knew they would be branded
war criminals, Kruger had been given an escape route to South America."
"So we flooded Guenther one final time, packed
him in a bronze box full of concentrated fluorocarbons and enriched saline
solution and loaded him onto a truck.
Kruger left on foot, he headed north toward the
sea. I never saw either of them again."
What about you?" Chase
asked. "What happened when the
Allies arrived?"
"They freed me... they freed all of us."
"And that was that?"
"Why should it not be?"
"Because you hadn’t just survived," Chase
said. "You'd worked side by side
with that monster while he killed people."
"Well..." said Franks, again with what
sounded like a weary smile, "...perhaps they thought I had suffered
enough."
He leaned forward in his wheelchair, and the glow from
the television monitor fell on his face.
He removed the sunglasses. One of
his eyes was normal, but the other was a deep, egg-yolk yellow. The he touched the tube to his throat, but
this time after he had inhaled he used his fingertips to pluck away the ascot
around his neck.
There were three diagonal slashes on either side of
Frank's neck, healed decades ago into ridged purple scars, and in the center of
his throat was a black and ragged hole that led down into his gullet.
"My God..." Chase
said. "Are they... you've got... gills?"
"I was an early experiment... and a
failure," Franks said. He replaced
the sunglasses. "And I am the only
survivor. My lungs were too weak to
absorb the fluorocarbons; over and over again, I drowned... to the brink of
death. Kruger could have let me die, but
he didn't; he would raise me upside down on a chain hoist and let gravity drain
me, then restart my lungs with what passed in those
days for CPR. He kept bringing me back
to life because, he said, he needed me."
Franks leaned back, out of the light.
"I never recovered fully, I never will. But I don't want to meet God without one last
act of penance. I want to kill this...
this ultimate abomination."
"If that's what it is," said Tall Man.
"It is, I'm certain of
it. We know that Kruger never reached
"How do you know he got on a U-boat?"
"There are records. The Nazis were fanatics about keeping
records. Kruger's work had a code name,
and it was mentioned in the archives as having been loaded aboard U-165. The boat sank, or was sunk, I assume
somewhere in the mid-Atlantic."
"How could the thing travel across a couple
thousand miles of ocean bottom," Tall Man asked, "and survive all
this time?"
"Kruger had slowed Guenther's metabolism to the
edge of clinical death, a state way beyond hibernation. The chemicals in his box could sustain such
basic life as there was, and his need for food would be nil, at least for a
very long time. Eventually, like a bear
woken by hunger in the spring, his body would have demanded food, and I guess
he found something to eat."
Franks paused; Chase and Tall Man stared at each
other.
"The answers are there," Franks said,
"if you know what to look for. I
stopped searching for Kruger long ago.
All the evidence pointed to his having died. An uncle had brought me to
"But I never forgot. A part of my mind was always looking for
clues, hints that Kruger or Guenther had survived. And then I saw a newspaper item about a National Geographic photographer
disappearing from a research vessel near
"We heard about that," Chase said.
"The story said that a bronze box the size of a
big casket had fallen overboard and disappeared... a box the researchers had
brought up from the wreck of a submarine in the Kristof Trench... a German
U-boat."
"You said Guenther's programming hadn't been
finished, there was one step to go. What
was that?"
"Kruger's ambition was to create a truly
amphibious killer," Franks said.
"A half-human weapon that could survive equally well in air or
water, could go back and forth between the two.
He conditioned Guenther to breathe water, then
taught him how to drain his lungs and breathe air. What he had not had time to teach him was how
to reverse the process when he wanted to return to the water. Once on land, Guenther would become what is
called an obligate air-breather. He
would be trapped there. So, you see, it
is very urgent that we destroy him before—"
"Christ!" Chase
said suddenly, and stood up.
"Puckett didn't tell you?
The thing's already been ashore! It killed a dog in Waterboro." He turned to Tall Man and said, "Get on
the horn to Rollie Gibson, he keeps the radio in his office tuned to
sixteen. Tell him what the thing is, and
it may be loose in town, or maybe in the woods."
Tall Man climbed the steps to the wheelhouse while
Chase opened the door and went out onto the stern. He ordered Rudi to cut away the baits and
Puckett to start the engine, then he returned to the
cabin.
"This thing is partly human," he said to
Franks, "or used to be. So it
should be able to be killed like a human being, right?"
"I wish I knew for certain," Franks
said. "Kruger altered the central
nervous system, so he — it — lives on a very primitive level. I would say he would be as hard to kill as a
big shark... which reminds me, Mr. Chase, I never told you his code name. The Nazis referred to it as Der Weisse Hai... ‘The
White Shark’."
Tall Man returned from the wheelhouse. "I couldn’t get through on the
radio," he said, "But it doesn't matter, Rollie'll be on the case by
now... we're too late."
"What d’you mean?" Chase
said.
"The radio's like a friggin’ Chinese fire drill,
everybody yakking. Some kid was killed
over on Winter Point. His buddy swears
the kid was killed by a yeti."
"A yeti?" Franks
said.
"The Abominable Snowman," Chase turned to Tall Man. "Let's go." He started for the door. "The Mako can get us to town in—"
"Simon... the thing may not be in town."
"What d’you mean?" Chase
said.
"The kid, the survivor, said he saw it dive into
the water and start swimming eastward."
"Eastward?
What's to the east of Winter Point?
There's no land out there except... oh my God." The only land to the east of Winter Point was
"I tried," Tall Man said. "There was no answer."
43
"Cool," said
"Awesome," said Max.
The children stood on the rocks seaward of the sea
lion pool, watching Mrs. Bixler's vintage speedboat zoon out of its cove and
approach in a high-speed turn. As the
boat banked, the late-day sun glittered on the polished mahogany hull and the
stainless-steel fittings; it looked like a fantasy spaceship.
Max loved the boat, had begged Mrs. Bixler to let him
drive it. "Not till you get to be
my age," she had said with a smile.
"Only an old fool like me drives an old boat like this one."
Amanda stood behind them; behind her, the sea lions
rocked back and forth on their flippers, barking for their supper.
In the shed ten yards beyond the pool, a voice came
over the speaker of the VHF radio.
"Osprey Base, Osprey Base, Osprey Base... Osprey
Mako calling Osprey Base... come in, Osprey Base."
The voice echoed off the cement walls, unheard.
Mrs. Bixler was wearing an orange life jacket,
sunglasses and a baseball cap turned backward so the bill would shelter her
hairdo from the wind. She slowed the
boat as she neared the rocks, and the roar of the big GM V-8 engine lowered to
a growl. She picked up an ancient
megaphone from the seat beside her and called through it, "I'm going to
town for Bingo; probably spend the night with Sarah. I'll get hold of the police when I get to
shore, make sure Simon reported in. They
probably already sent a backup boat. I'll
call you if there's any news."
Amanda and the children waved. Mrs. Bixler pushed the throttle forward, and,
like a racehorse suddenly given its head, the boat leaped forward, banked
around the point and headed west toward the mainland.
In the shed, the voice said again, "Osprey Base,
Osprey Base... come in, Osprey Base..."
"Time to feed the girls," Amanda said, and
she stepped back toward the pool.
"Then we'll go up to the house and I'll fix us some
supper." She took
Max stayed out on the rocks, looking out to sea. "I wonder where Dad is," he
said. "It's getting late."
"On his way home." Amanda hoped
her voice carried more conviction than she felt. "We'll set places for him and
Tall."
They fed the sea lions, returned the leftover fish to
the refrigerator and stowed the plastic balls, rings, triangles and other
training tools in the shed. As she
pulled the door closed behind her, she felt a faint vibration in the air,
similar to that of a voice. She looked
around, but couldn't locate the source, so she shut the door.
The sound was muffled now, nearly inaudible: " Osprey Base, this is Osprey Mako... come in, Osprey Base..."
When they reached the top of the hill, Max looked down
and saw the heron standing in its tidal pool.
"I should go feed Chief Joseph," he said.
"Tall will do it," Amanda said.
"But he may not get in till late. I can—"
"No," she said curtly, and she realized she
was nervous... not afraid, for there was nothing to be afraid of, but
apprehensive, anxious... but about what?
She didn't know. She smiled at
Max and softened her voice. "Tall
likes to do it, it's his ritual."
They continued on toward the little house where Amanda
lived.
* * * * *
Mrs. Bixler was perched on the back of the front seat
of the boat, steering with her bare feet.
The sea was oil calm, and the planing boat left a blade-straight wake in
the flat water. She felt young and free
and happy. This was her favorite
pastime, her favorite time of day, cruising into the setting sun. Already the water tower and white houses of
the borough were turning pink; soon they would turn blue-gray; by the time she
reached shore, they would be the flat gray that was the harbinger of night.
Something in the water ahead caught her eye. She dropped her feet from the wheel, stood in
the seat and held the wheel with one hand.
A dorsal fin, tall and perfectly triangular zigzagged
through the water; behind it, a scythelike tail slashed back and forth.
A shark? What was a
shark doing around here this late in the day?
A big shark, too, probably fifteen feet long.
She turned the boat and followed the fin. The shark seemed to be behaving
erratically. Though she was hardly an
expert, she knew enough from listening to know that this shark wasn't just
traveling; it was feeding, or about to.
It was hunting.
As she drew near, she saw a glint of metal behind the
dorsal fin: a tag. One of the Institute's
tags. This was Simon's great
white shark.
At the approach of the boat, the shark submerged and
disappeared. Mrs. Bixler waited for a
moment, but the shark did not surface again, and so she turned back toward
shore.
She couldn't wait to tell Simon; he be
fascinated — excited, even thrilled — to know that his shark had shown up
again. Now that he had recovered the
sensor head, he could locate the shark and...
Something else in the water, dead
ahead. A man. Swimming. At least, it looked like a man, though it was
bigger than any man she had ever seen, and it was swimming like a porpoise,
arching his broad back out of water and kicking with his feet together.
The damn fool, she thought. Swimming out here, at
twilight.
She realized that the man was what the shark was
hunting.
She accelerated toward the man, praying she could
reach him before the shark did, praying she'd be strong enough to haul him
aboard, praying...
Suddenly he was gone, too. Submerged, just like the shark. She stopped the boat and looked around,
waiting for him to come up. He'd have to
surface, he'd have to. He'd have to
breathe.
Unless the shark had already gotten
him. Or he had already drowned. What could she do then?
The man didn't reappear, and fear seized Mrs.
Bixler. It was a vague but profound
terror of something she couldn't identify.
She put the boat in gear, jammed the throttle forward
and aimed the bow of the boat toward the mainland.
44
It filled its lungs and dived. When the motor noise had receded, it turned
and searched the darkness for the shark.
The cells of its brain were recovering like explosions
of sparks, and with each explosion it knew more and more about itself.
And so it was not afraid; it was galvanized. It felt not threatened, but challenged. This was what it had been created for,
programmed for — to fight, and to kill.
It knew its limits and its strengths. In the water, it was vulnerable only on the
surface. Underwater, it had no equal.
It felt the shark first, a surge of pressure in the
water. Then it saw the gray shape, the
conical head, the gaping mouth.
Still, it was not afraid, for it knew it had an
advantage; it had a brain that could innovate.
As the shark charged, relentless but unthinking, the
creature ducked away and blew air from its lungs. Confused by the blast of bubbles, the shark
hesitated; it rose up, exposing its white belly.
The creature flexed its fingers and lunged forward,
driving its claws deep into the soft flesh, pulling downward. The flesh separated. The claws pushed deeper, and now blood
billowed from the ten slashes in the belly.
The body of the shark twisted, contorted, and each
movement tore more of its flesh. Viscera
swelled and oozed through the wounds.
The claws withdrew.
The shark hovered for a moment, then began to
sink away.
A searing ache suffused the creature's lungs, but it
forced itself to watch until the shark was consumed by darkness.
Then it surfaced, drew a deep and nourishing breath
and savored its triumph. It felt
fatigue, but fatigue relieved by elation.
It was back, whole again. It was Der Weisse Hai.
Now it must seek land, where it could hide and
hunt. Using its webbed hands, it turned
in a slow circle, until it located its goal:
a single light on a lone island, not far away.
45
It was nearly dark when Chase and Tall Man reached the
island; a sliver of pink still lit the western horizon, but the sky overhead
was a blanket of blue-black, broken by the golden dots of the evening's first
stars. The only lights on the island
were in the windows of Amanda's little house.
The tide was high, so Chase could drive the boat close
to shore without fear of hitting submerged rocks. Tall Man stood in the bow and shone a
powerful flashlight on the passing land.
Everything seemed normal, undisturbed. The flashlight's beam fell on a raccoon
feeding on a fish on a flat rock, and the animal froze, its eyes glowing
red. A fox fled the light, scampering
away into the underbrush. Only the sea
lions seemed agitated, huddled together by the mouth of their den, rocking back
and forth.
"Maybe it turned north," Tall Man said. "Napatree would've been closer for it
than here."
"I hope," said Chase. "I still want to get Amanda and the kids
into town... just in case."
"She won't want to leave her sea lions."
"I don't plan to give her a choice." Chase had made up his mind on the way back
from Block: if there was a chance, even
a remote possibility, of that thing coming to Osprey, he would evacuate the
island. They could return tomorrow, in
daylight, with the police and as much heavy weaponry as they could muster, and
scour the island from end to end.
When he had circled the island and seen nothing out of
the ordinary, no dead animal or fresh trail, Chase returned to the dock and
swung the Mako into its slip. He turned
off the motor, and stepped onto the dock.
"Stay here," he said, looping the bow line over a cleat. "I'll go get them." He started up the path.
Tall Man stood on the dock, listening to the sounds of
the night: crickets, birdcalls, the lap of lazy waves on the shore. Suddenly he sensed that something was out of
place, or missing; it took him a moment to realize what it was. The heron. Where was Chief Joseph? Normally, by now the bird would be standing
in the water by the dock, demanding food with its irascible glare. He looked over the side of the dock, but the
cove was completely dark, he couldn't see anything, so he returned to the boat,
fetched the flashlight and shone it on the tidal pool.
The bird wasn't there.
Where had it gone? He swung the
beam up to the boulders, then to the shore.
Amid a tangle of brush he saw a feather: long, blue-gray. He walked up the path, stepped into the
brush, parted it with his hands. The brush felt sticky, and when he shone the
light on his fingers, he saw blood.
He yanked a clump of brush out by its roots, clearing
a space. There, in the dirt, was the
heron's head. It had been torn from its
neck, and its eyes were gone.
A rush of panic flooded Tall Man's chest. He turned and ran toward the house.
46
"Because there aren't any guns," Chase said to Amanda. "I don't like them,
I've never kept any around."
They were in the kitchen. Max and Elizabeth sat on the floor; they had
been playing War with two decks of cards.
"I can't leave the sea lions, Simon," Amanda
said. "They're like my
children. I couldn't do it."
"You have
to. We can't defend ourselves here. If that thing comes ashore here—"
"I won't go.
You take the kids to town, leave Tall Man here
with me. We can bring the big boat to
the dock, I'll try to get the girls aboard, and—"
The kitchen door flew open. "It's here!" Tall
Man said, stepping inside and locking the door behind him.
Max started, and repeated Tall Man's words for
"Where?" asked Chase.
"I don't know, but it killed Chief Joseph. It's here, Simon. Somewhere."
Chase looked at the children. "We can't leave, then."
"Why not?"
"We don't dare take the chance. It could be anywhere. Suppose it's in the bushes by the dock."
"It would've jumped me," Tall Man said.
"Maybe not, maybe you're too big, but it'd sure
as hell go after one of the kids."
Amanda started for the door.
"Where are you going?" Chase
said.
"To get the girls, bring them up here."
"Are you nuts?"
"They'll follow me. I'll be quick about it."
"I don't care.
It's pitch black out there. Three hundred yards each
way. You'll never make it."
"I have to."
Amanda unlocked the door.
"I'll stay out in the open, I'll be able
to see it coming."
"They're animals, Amanda!"
Chase said.
"Not to me."
Amanda gestured at Max and Elizabeth.
"Not to them."
"I won't let you."
"You can't stop me."
"Yes, I can." Chase took a step toward her. "If I have to, I'll tie you down."
"Stop it, Simon," Amanda said, and she
opened the door and darted out into the night.
Chase ran to the door and looked out, but Amanda was
already rounding the corner of the house and running down the lawn.
"Well, shit," Tall Man said. He picked up a butcher knife from a rack over
the sink, slipped it into his belt and took the flashlight from the counter
where he had put it.
"What do you think you're doing?" Chase said.
"Maybe you were right, Simon, maybe it won't go
after six foot of redskin Terminator."
Tall Man stepped through the door and was gone.
When Chase had locked the door, he looked at Max and
Elizabeth. They had stopped playing
cards and were sitting side by side, ashen, holding hands. He knelt beside them, put a hand on theirs
and said, "This'll be okay. It's
probably hiding somewhere. We'll get the
police here at first light, and—"
"But Dad..." Max
said. "What if..." He let the rest of the thought go unspoken.
Chase didn't answer, for he had no answer. Instead, he forced a smile and said,
"Hell, Max, can you imagine anything
getting the better of Tall Man?"
His mind raced, flitting between possibilities like a mosquito in a
crowd of people, trying to decide where to land. If the thing found Tall Man, or Amanda, if Tall
Man didn't kill it, what could they do?
They couldn't shoot it, couldn’t stab it, couldn't
flee from it.
There were no answers, and yet Chase knew one thing
for certain: he would do anything,
including sacrifice himself, but Max and Elizabeth were going to survive.
He stood up and turned, and as he glanced through the
door into the living room, his eyes fell upon the steel cylinder bolted to the
floor.
Max saw him looking a the
cylinder and said, "What about the decompression chamber... you called it
Dr. Frankenstein?"
"What about it?"
"We could get inside and lock it. The thing could never get in."
"It doesn't lock from the inside," Chase
said. "The only way—" He stopped,
for an idea suddenly appeared in his mind, inchoate, like a cloud. He didn't rush it, but let it slowly take
shape until it became a possible answer.
47
Tall Man caught up with Amanda halfway down the
hill. He had shouted to her, told her he
was coming, and why, and she had stopped running. As they walked, he swung the flashlight from
side to side.
They heard a bark, then several more — quick,
high-pitched, frantic.
"No!" Amanda
yelled, and she started to run. Tall Man
reached for her, to stop her, but she was lighter than he, and quicker, and on
the downward slope the best he could do was maintain a distance between them of
ten feet.
She reached the pool area first; he stopped beside
her. They could hear the sea lions
barking, a cacophony of shrieks, but they couldn't see them. Tall Man shone the light toward the sounds.
Two of the sea lions were huddled against the side of
the equipment shed, rocking on their flippers, their heads bobbing as they
barked hysterically. He swung the light
to the right.
Something was crouching by the rocks on the far side
of the pool, something huge and grayish white.
They could see only its massive back, for its head was bent out of
sight. But as the light fell on it, it
rose and turned.
Amanda screamed.
Tall Man felt his heart jump and adrenaline surge through his arms and
shoulders.
It was as large as an ape and as gray as ash. Through the blood that covered its face they
saw the glitter of steel teeth, and through the gore that dripped from its
hands, long steel claws. Its body was
hairless; the sinews in its arms and legs stood out like whips; where once had
been genitals, now there was but a crudely stitched patch of mottled hide. Its eyes, as the light struck them, gleamed
like reflectors.
Behind the thing lay the partly eaten carcass of a sea
lion.
The thing opened its mouth, uttered a glottal roar and
took a step forward.
"Go!" Tall Man said
to Amanda.
"I... but... " She stood frozen.
"Go! For
crissakes, go warn them! Go!"
Amanda took a step backward, turned and ran.
Tall Man didn't move.
He glanced up toward high ground.
Behind the thing lay nothing but water, and he wasn't about to tangle
with this thing in water. Not after what
he'd heard about it.
He took his knife from his belt, bent his knees and
held the knife before him, waving it slowly back and forth.
The thing hunched its shoulders, rolled forward onto
the balls of its feet, raised its arms and spread its webbed fingers, baring
claws as long and sharp as scalpels.
If man made you, Tall Man thought as he moved in a
slow circle, man can unmake you.
48
Chase removed the last of the screws from the long
mirror, pulled it away from the back of the bathroom door and set it on the
floor. He measured the mirror against
himself, and guessed that it was five feet tall and two feet wide. He carried it to the living room, and set it
beside the open hatch of the decompression chamber.
"It should fit," he said. "Just."
Amanda slumped in a chair beside the far wall, still
shaking, her color pasty. "You're wasting your time," she
said. "That'll never work."
"I've gotta do something. You have a better
idea?"
"What do you use to put animals down?"
"Anesthesia."
"Well?"
"You think you can get close enough to that thing
to give it a shot? Christ, Amanda, for all I know, it
just..." He stopped, for he saw the
children standing by the living room window, trying to see down the hill, and
he didn't want to frighten them. But his
mind couldn't shake the image that had clouded it ever since Amanda had burst
through the door, an image of Tall Man sprawled dead
among the rocks. "Give me a hand,
will you?" He turned to Max. "See anything?"
"Not yet," Max said.
Amanda rose from the chair. Chase bent down, stepped into the chamber and
turned to take the mirror from Amanda as she slid it through the hatch. He carried it to the far end of the chamber
and stood it upright against the steel wall.
Then he backed away, checking his reflection; he crouched just inside
the hatch, beside the opening. "What do you see?" he asked
Amanda. "Remember, the light'll be
dim."
"It's okay," she said. "But, Lord, Simon, a six-year-old child
could—"
"It isn’t a child; it's a thing."
"Dad!" Max
shouted. "Dad, it's Tall!"
Chase crawled out of the chamber and stood. Max was pointing out the window.
Chase expelled a huge breath of relief. "About time," he said. "He walked toward the window.
"Thank God," said Amanda.
Far down the lawn, by the crest of the hill before the
sea lion pool, Chase saw a figure moving toward the house. The movement was erratic, yawing.
"Tall looks like he's hurt," he said. He was about to turn away, to got to the
kitchen and out the door and down the lawn, when how suddenly saw color in the
figure, a hue of lightness against the dark trees.
"Jesus Christ," he said. "That's not Tall."
49
It had been wounded, it could tell from the burning
sensations in the flesh of its face, from the fact that one of its legs was
responding slowly to signals from its brain, and from a
numbness in one of its hands. It
looked at the hand and saw that a finger was hanging by strands of sinew. It tugged at the finger until the sinews
snapped, then it cast the finger away and scooped up mud, which it packed
around the bleeding stump.
It did not feel weakened by the wounds, it felt
strengthened, invigorated by an elation born of triumph. It had met an enemy worthy of it — not merely
prey but an adversary — and had conquered it.
Its wounds were nothing; it would survive and recover.
It no longer perceived the need for defense, no longer
felt caution, for from somewhere deep within itself had come a conviction that
it was now invincible.
It saw a light in the distance, at the end of this
sloping ground. Light meant shelter, and
perhaps more opportunities to destroy more enemies.
Leaning into the hill, it dragged its sluggish leg up
the slope — moving slowly, veering this way and that, not concerned with
time. Time meant nothing to it; it was
immortal.
50
"Why can't we just run?" asked Max. He was
pale and fidgety, and he seemed about to cry.
"It can't catch all of us, not if we spread out."
"No, Max," Chase said, putting one arm
around his son, the other around Elizabeth, who trembled slightly but seemed
impassive, as if prepared to accept whatever could happen. "I don't want it to catch any of us, especially not you two."
He went to the window, shaded his eyes and peered out
into the darkness. He could see the
thing more clearly now, a ghostly shape against the black. How much time did they have? Chase couldn't tell, for the thing was moving
slowly, veering left and right, almost aimlessly... almost, but not quite, for
with every brief tack it advanced a few feet closer to the house.
"Let's do it," he said. He turned to Amanda. "Are you sure you've got the sequence
down?"
"Positive.
But I still—"
"Good."
Chase took the children's hands and led them to a small closet behind
the decompression chamber. "It'll
be dark," he said, "but you can handle that, right? Amanda'll be with you."
Tentatively, the children nodded, and stepped into the
closet.
Chase held out his hand to Amanda, moved close to her
and whispered, "If anything goes wrong — anything — take the kids and head
for the Mako. You should have plenty of
time; the least I can do is stall the goddamn thing."
"Simon..."
Impulsively, Chase kissed her. "In you go," he said, and he
ushered her into the closet and closed the door.
He went to the control panel on the wall, pushed the
master button that activated the decompression chamber. There was a hum as the machinery engaged, and
a hiss as the pressure tanks buried in the walls began to fill. He turned the lights out in the room, all
except the pressure-shielded pink bulb inside the chamber.
The he climbed through the hatch and crouched down,
waiting.
51
It was closer now, it could
see movement in the house, dark figures against the light that shone through
the windows. It was neither wary nor
alarmed, but challenged. They might see
it, they might not, but they could not stop it.
Then the light was gone, vanished as if sucked up by
the night.
It halted, to assess the change, to reassure itself
that the failure was not in itself.
No, it could see forms — the dark lump of the house
against the black slate of the sky. As
its eyes adjusted to the darkness, it even saw a pink glow from somewhere
inside the house.
It resumed its march, and soon it was by the side of
the building. It circled slowly,
deliberately, seeking entry.
It found a door, a thin thing of wood and glass, and
drew back an arm to destroy it.
52
Over the hum of the machinery, Chase heard glass
breaking and wood splintering, then a low, guttural sound.
* * * * *
It crossed the threshold into the large room, focusing
on the faint pink glow.
It heard machine sounds, and saw a big rigid object in
the center of the room. The glow came
from inside it. It shuffled over to the
object, moved to the end where a round door hung open and bent down.
In the dim light, it saw at the far end of the object
a human, like the one it had recently vanquished, but slighter, weaker,
frightened.
Prey. Easy prey.
It stepped inside.
* * * * *
Chase smelled sourness and salt and rot, heard a
footfall on the steel.
He didn't dare look down, didn't dare make any
movement that would alter his reflection in the mirror.
The thing passed him, and now he could see the
hairless ivory flesh of its legs and buttocks, the webbing between its toes,
the curved steel claws clotted with blood.
Chase's legs began to cramp. He willed himself not to move, and begged the
thing to keep going. Two more steps, he
thought, just two more, then he could... the thing stopped.
* * * * *
It was confused, something was wrong. The human was there and then not there, and
it saw something else, something it did not recognize.
Suddenly it knew.
It was seeing itself.
With a roar of rage, it turned.
53
Chase heaved himself off the floor of the chamber and
dove through the open hatch. He landed
on his knees, turned and reached for the chamber door. It was heavy, heavier than he remembered.
The creature took a step toward him, and lunged.
Chase swung the door and leaned against it. He saw a hand reaching for him, growing
larger and larger.
The door slammed with a resonant clang.
"Now!" Chase
shouted. "Now!" He spun the dogging wheel, and a red light
blinked on, signaling that the seal was complete. He felt a thumping against the steel door.
He heard the closet door open, and Amanda's footsteps
as she hurried to the control panel. He
had preset the dials; all she had to do was push the buttons.
There was the sound of compressed air rushing into the
chamber through a dozen vents. Cold and
dry, when it collided with the warm air already in the chamber, it became fog.
"Take it down," Chase said to Amanda,
"as far and as fast as you can."
He moved around to the side of the chamber and looked through the
porthole.
* * * * *
It had abandoned the unyielding steel door, sensing
that it had been trapped, searching for an escape. It saw a hole covered with glass, and drew
back a fist to smash the glass.
Pain suddenly assaulted its head, pain such as it had
never known, like fire, as if its brain were being crushed into a molten mass.
It pressed its hands to the sides of its head and
shrieked.
* * * * *
Though they could see little through the fog swirling
in the chamber, they heard the sound... a piercing yowl of an animal in agony.
"Its ears are going," Chase said.
"No wonder," said Amanda. "I've pressurized the chamber to two
hundred feet in five seconds; its ears can't equalize fast enough. It's gotta be hurting something fierce."
The shrieking stopped.
"Its eardrums must have busted," said Chase.
"Which means the pain's gone;
it's deaf but it's equalized."
Amanda looked at the gauge on the control panel.
Something slammed against the porthole. Tiny spiderweb cracks appeared in the glass.
"Hurry," Chase said. "Christ... it wants to break that
porthole, and if it does, the chamber'll go off like a bomb." He turned to Max and Elizabeth, who stood
beside Amanda. "Go outside,"
he said. "Fast."
"But..."
Max seemed perplexed. "Go
where?"
"Anywhere... just go!"
The children ran toward the kitchen door.
"It's at three hundred feet," Amanda said.
* * * * *
As quickly as it had come, the pain had vanished, and
now the creature perceived only a dullness in its
head.
Though it could not know what was happening to it, it
could identify the cause of its pain:
the human staring at it through the glass. Its focus changed; no longer concerned with
survival, now it sought vengeance.
One of its feet struck something hard. It bend down, picked
up the thing, hefted it and lunged at the glass circle.
* * * * *
It's got a wrench!" Chase
shouted, recoiling as the heavy head of the steel tool
crashed into the porthole. New cracks
appeared in the glass.
"Six hundred feet," Amanda said. "Six-fifty."
"We've gotta do it, we've gotta do it now."
"But we don't know—"
"It'll work," Chase said. "It's got to." He pressed his face to the porthole and
strained to see through the fog. He saw
the creature crouched, its arm cocked, the wrench held in its hand like a
club. "Do it!" he shouted.
"Coming up," Amanda said, and she pushed a
series of buttons. There was a deafening
rushing noise, and the fog in the chamber swirled violently and began to
dissipate.
Chase saw the creature tense, saw through the gray fog
the white of its eyes and the silver gleam of its teeth.
It sprang at the porthole.
54
The creature seemed to stop in midair, as if struck by
a bolt of lightning. Its body contorted,
its eyes popped wide, it collapsed to the floor of the chamber and clawed at
its own flesh.
"Five hundred feet..." Amanda
said. "Four-fifty..."
"It's working," said Chase. He couldn't take his eyes from the
porthole. "My God..."
With the chamber pressurized to six hundred and fifty
feet, the squeeze on the creature — on its sinuses and lungs, on its stomach
cavity and every other pocket in its body that contained air — had been nearly
three hundred pounds per square inch.
Now, as Amanda brought the chamber back to surface pressure, the air
within the creature was escaping with the speed and violence of a balloon
bursting.
* * * * *
It could not see, it could not hear, it could not
breathe. Every joint and sinew felt
aflame. Its stomach seemed to want to
invade its chest, its chest to swell into its head, its head to fly to pieces.
It had no conception of what was happening, could not
know that the air inside it was decompressing at a rate far faster than its
body could accommodate, that bubbles of nitrogen were scattering through its
tissues, lodging everywhere and growing inexorably, tearing the tissues apart.
Desperately it clutched itself, as if to force its
misshapen body back into form.
* * * * *
Chase watched, fascinated, as the creature caromed
from one side of the chamber to the other.
Blood leaked from its mouth and ears; its eyes bulged, straining at
their sockets, and it raised a hand as if to contain them. But before the hand could reach the face, one
of the eyes launched itself from its socket — like a grape squeezed from its
skin — and dangled grotesquely by red strands of muscle fiber.
The image was surreal — a writhing, pulsing, swelling
figure that might have been created by a lunatic sculptor and controlled by a
mad puppeteer..
"Two-fifty," Amanda said. "Two hundred... what's happening?"
"Its' on its knees," said Chase. "It's... holy shit!"
The creature exploded.
A thick crimson mist filled the chamber; globules of
blood and pieces of flesh struck the porthole, and stuck.
55
Chase stood in the hospital lobby, waiting for an
elevator, and looked at his watch. He
was more than an hour late.
He had wanted to be there by two, but he had gotten
stuck on the phone with Rollie Gibson and Nate Green, and had had to fulfill
his promise to give Nate a detailed, exclusive story for the paper about what
had happened on the island.
Then, when he had arrived ashore, Rudi Franks had been
waiting for him, alone and bearing a gift:
an old, cracked black-and-white photograph of Ernst Kruger and Jacob
Franks operating on Heinrich Guenther.
Finally, there had been the confusion at the
bank. He had stopped to cash a check,
and one of the bank's officers had wanted to see him about something that made
no sense whatever to Chase, something that had to be a mistake.
The elevator arrived; Chase got out on the fourth
floor and walked to the nurses' station.
"You took your sweet time," said Ellie
Bindloss, a short, chunky woman with whom Chase had gone to school. "We're not equipped to handle
eight-hundred-pound gorillas around here, y’know."
"Sorry," Chase said. "Where is he?"
She pointed down the hall. "Can't miss him," she said. "You'll hear him before you see
him."
As Chase approached an open door at the end of the
hall, he heard Tall Man's voice shouting, "Sorry! What d’you mean, sorry? You just shafted me,
and you did it on purpose.
Then Max's voice, laughing and
saying, "Tough, chief. Move your man."
Chase paused outside the door, not sure what to
expect, then stepped inside the room.
"Hi," he said.
"Don't ‘Hi’ me," said Tall Man . "This
vicious kid of yours has beat my butt four games in a
row. We oughtta feed him to the
fishes." He laughed, then grimaced
and clutched the bandages that surrounded his chest and bound one arm to his
side. "Christ," he said,
"laughing's no fun. But it's better
than coughing."
Max sat on the foot of the bed; between him and Tall
Man was a board game littered with plastic cards and colored pieces. Amanda sat in a chair beside the bed, a newspaper
in her lap.
Chase hadn't seen Tall Man for two and a half days,
not since he had ridden with him to the intensive-care unit in
Chase still wasn't sure what had happened to Tall
Man. He had started to search for him in
darkness, but hadn't found him until early dawn, stuck between two boulders on
the shore, unconscious. Tall Man claimed
not to recall much, only that he had cut the creature several times, and then
had felt himself stabbed in the right side and shoulder, lifted off his feet
and thrown onto the rocks in the sea.
There was a purple lump on Tall Man's forehead, and a
line of stitches extending from his left eyebrow across his temple.
"You don't look too bad," Chase said,
stepping toward the bed. "Considering."
"Yes, I do, I look like a mile of bad road,"
said Tall Man. "And don't you even think about touching me; I feel like a
train wreck."
Chase smiled. "Ready to go?"
"Damn right.
If I stay here long enough, they'll starve me to death or stick me to
death... or both." Tall Man leaned
forward, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, leaning on the wall
for support. Chase helped him on with
his trousers and draped his shirt over his shoulders.
Ellie Bindloss appeared, pushing a wheelchair. "Sit down," she said.
"Never," said Tall Man. "I can walk—"
"Sit down before I knock you down."
Tall Man smiled, then laughed, then coughed. "You're a hard woman, Ellie
Bindloss," he said, and he flopped into the wheelchair.
Max pushed the wheelchair down the hall, Ellie walked
beside it and Chase and Amanda followed behind.
Chase told her about the photograph Rudi had given
him, then said, "We've got to stop at the bank on the way back; I want to
clear something up."
Amanda hesitated before saying, "Clear up
what?"
"I don't know, the
damndest thing. One of the officers told
me the bank isn't holding my paper on the island anymore. He said they sold it."
"Really?"
"To a partnership. I thought for
a minute they'd screwed me, sold it to Finnegan or somebody else who'd want to
take over the island. But then the guy
said I was one of the partners."
Amanda didn't say anything,
she just kept on walking, looking ahead.
"It must be new," she said.
"What kind of name is that, the Pinniped
Group? You know what pinnipeds
are?"
"Sure."
"They're..."
Chase stopped, and as the sense of what he was about to say hit him, the
thought occurred to him that he had never felt so stupid in his life. "Sea lions. A pinniped is a sea lion."
Amanda smiled and took his arm. "We'll talk about the details
later," she said. "We'll have
plenty of time."
— THE END —